There's No Place Like Home Read online

  God, I’m dizzy just thinking about it.

  How do I find my husband?

  I’m so angry with you, Christian.

  But I love you. I miss you. I need you.

  I’m in so far over my head. I’m lost. I don’t know what to do. All I know is, I have to find you, Christian.

  2

  [Conakry, Guinea, Africa; date unknown]

  I spend a lot of time pondering the nature of Time.

  There is very little to do around here, but sit, and think, and try to remember. James, the doctor, brought me a book, in English. A gift. Ulysses by James Joyce. As I read, parts of it feel familiar. Mostly the beginning. It is a thick book—thick, in terms of sheer size, but also thick in terms of…feel. It is dense. Impenetrable. I read a little every day, usually just a few pages, but it often makes very little sense to me, and I skip over sections. It is a gift from the only person who seems to know me or care about me, so I keep it, and I attempt to read it.

  I don’t think I like it very much.

  When I grow tired of reading, and trying to remember, and writing, I sit, and I think and it often feels as if Time is a ribbon, but a stretchy one. The sun beats hot on my head and face and shoulders. A fly will buzz around my head for hours. A beetle, black and bulbous and iridescent, will crawl through the dust at my feet for many hours more. Time is stretched out thin like a rubber band stretched near to snapping, so thin it’s almost translucent.

  And mere minutes will have passed.

  I know this, because as I sit on the screened-in porch, I can twist in my chair and see a clock. It is old. A grandfather clock, the kind that used to sit in my own grandfather’s house. In his foyer, near the front door. This clock, in this place, is very much like the one in my grandfather’s house. It ticks slowly with the same dull, endless tock…tock…tock…tock, as if it has been endlessly keeping time, as if nothing could stop that tarnished brass disc from swinging side to side, side to side.

  I would sit, as a child, on the floor of my grandfather’s foyer, watching the clock. Hours and hours I would spend, just sitting there, watching the clock. I don’t remember why, though. Was I waiting? Was I fascinated by the clock? I don’t remember.

  All I remember is sitting cross-legged on a threadbare rug, the front door to my right, sunlight shining through the window at the top in a brilliant golden river of light, illuminating dust motes like particulates of heaven. The clock would stand in front of me, up against a wallpapered wall. White wallpaper, with blue flowers in vertical lines, roses climbing a trellis, in repeating patterns. To my left would be a long hallway, ending in an oil painting of Jesus, blond hair and blue eyes, serene and somewhat sad, making that weird sign with the fingers of his right hand, staring vaguely Heavenward. Beneath the painting, a small table. On it, a thick white candle. A cut-glass dish full of butterscotch candies, which I was allowed to have, but which always sounded more appealing than they ended up tasting.

  I remember this vividly. Sitting there, on the floor, staring at the clock. Waiting. For what? I don’t know that. I can’t remember. Why do I remember this? Is it an important memory? Did I do this frequently? Does this memory hold some significance? I don’t know.

  But the clock, here in the hospital, it tocks, tocks, tocks, and sometimes, as I think, I can count the individual seconds as they pass:

  * * *

  Tock…

  * * *

  Tock…

  * * *

  Tock…

  * * *

  Each moment separate, disparate. My thoughts fill those taffy-stretched moments like water rushing into an empty cistern—

  whoamI?WhycantIrememberanything?Whoisshe?Whereisshe?Whereishome?WhyamIhere?WHYCANTIREMEMBER?—

  All those thoughts are jumbled, twisted, gnarled, tangled. Too fast. Rushing through me, too fast to catch, thoughts too dense and painful to think about. If I could catch those thoughts, it would feel like gripping one of those spiny, spiky balls dropped in your yard by the trees. Like squeezing a burr plucked off a dog’s coat.

  Then, sometimes, especially when I’m writing, scribbling in my notebooks, I won’t be aware of anything except the scritch of my pen across the white paper, blue ink smudged on my hand, blue ink leaving trails of thoughts and half-memories and fictitious, desperate wishful memories across the page. I’m writing, and I’m writing. The pen moves of its own accord. The words flow like a river. Endless. A flood. And then, suddenly, the grandfather clock behind me tolls balefully—DONG…DONG…DONG—and hours have passed.

  I have filled four notebooks with my scribblings.

  Some are just stories I am telling to myself, to pass the time. These are easy and light and meaningless. The harder, sharper, darker, more difficult and painful stories are the ones possessed of some element of truth, or history.

  More painful yet is my constant need to write to and of this woman, this Ava. She is in my thoughts constantly, but I can’t remember more than fragments of her. She must have been my wife, or my lover. It is maddening, to know I have loved someone as much as I must have loved this Ava, to have her in my memory so fiercely, so indelibly, when all else seems lost, even my own name.

  I write to her. As if she could hear me, as if she might ever read the mad scribblings in these pages. I write to her as if she is with me, as if she is real, as if I will see her again. None of this is a surety. I gain fragments of memory, but they are few and obscure and vague and small.

  So, because it helps alleviate the boredom, and because I simply must, I write to Ava; I pour myself out to her.

  Sometimes, the line between story and letter becomes blurred, even to me.

  Dr. James visits often, to check on me, to talk, to listen.

  Today, he manages all three at once. He probes my head wound—which caused my memory loss—a wound sustained in what I’ve been told was a shipwreck, though I don’t as yet remember the event itself. I was shipwrecked, lost at sea, and found through sheer luck by local fishermen, and brought to this hospital in Africa—outside the city of Conakry, in Guinea, to be more accurate, which I’m dimly aware is a country on the western coast of the African continent. I only know that much because Dr. James has told me as much—it’s certainly hot enough to feel like Africa, and the other nurses and orderlies do not speak English, only various dialects and languages native to this country and this part of this country, and a little French, which I know a few words of, somehow. So, Dr. James is my only source of real conversation, as he’s the only person I see regularly who speaks English.

  Today, he looks over the casts on my arm and leg, probes my head, and probes conversationally.

  “You have been writing today?” he asks, glancing at the notebook on my lap.

  He is older, in his fifties or sixties. Dark black skin, portly, with graying hair trimmed close. He dresses in slacks and short sleeve button-downs, his belly straining against the buttons, no belt. He wears glasses, which he puts on as needed and takes off again, stuffing them in his shirt pocket.

  I nod. “Yes.”

  “Did you remember anything from the writing?”

  When I first arrived, I could remember nothing, nothing at all. And then Dr. James told me I’d been saying a name—Ava—and that name prompted a flood of memories and images, none of which inform me about myself. I have temporary amnesia, Dr. James insists, and claims I will eventually remember. And in the meantime, to prompt the return of memory, he provided a stack of spiral-bound notebooks and a handful of pens, and suggested I write whatever ideas or images or memories occur to me. It may help jog loose memories, he claims.

  So far, he’s right. I remember—I remember Ava.

  Not everything, but enough to know she’s someone vitally important to who I am. Enough to know I want to remember more.

  And so I write:

  [From a handwritten notebook; date unknown]

  We broke up, once. Do you remember that, Ava? It wasn’t for very long, and it was when we first began l
iving together.

  We broke up over, of all things, peanut butter. Peanut butter. You see, I prefer creamy peanut butter, and you prefer the crunchy, organic kind which requires a cement mixer and power tools to mix properly, and which always leaves a smear of oil on everything the jar touches. You went shopping for groceries, a chore I know you dislike. I offered to go for you, with a list made by you, but you only laughed, somewhat caustically, and asked me if I remembered the last time you sent me shopping. I confessed I did, but insisted I’d learned my lesson. You only laughed all the harder, and left, list in hand; the last time I’d gone shopping for you, I’d come back without half the items on the list, and the ones I did come back with were, in some way or another wrong—the wrong brand, or kind, or variety. Scented bathroom wipes as opposed to unscented; Palmolive dish soap versus Dawn; off-brand 1% cow milk as opposed to the CORRECT brand of vanilla almond milk; creamy peanut butter versus a particular brand of organic crunchy. We’d had a quarrel about that trip, wherein you lambasted me for not knowing what foods we eat and what brands we buy, and I’d tried to insist that it really didn’t matter all that much, did it? Apparently, it did.

  So, yes, I understood why you laughed, and why you went anyway, that day. I didn’t want to grocery shop—I hate it more than you do—but I loved you and just wanted to at least make the overture of offering to do it.

  You came back with all your particular brands and varieties, and all seemed well. Until the next morning, when I went to make breakfast. Scrambled eggs with jalapeños and cheese, half a package of bacon between us, and toast with peanut butter. There wasn’t any peanut butter. Or, rather, it wasn’t my peanut butter, it was the impossible to stir organic bullshit kind, impossible to spread, always separating, hard to eat, sticky, thicker than clay. So I asked you if you’d gotten me my peanut butter. I asked nicely. Just wondering if perhaps it had gotten put away somewhere I wasn’t looking. You’d stared at me for a moment over the top of your laptop and remarked, somewhat snidely, that you’d gotten real peanut butter, not the nasty, sugary, fake shit.

  Which led to what was at first a civil and tongue-in-cheek discussion about the merits of the different kinds of peanut butter. When it became heated, I tried to diffuse it. I asked you—reasonably, in my eyes—to please buy both kinds next time. A good compromise, right? I thought so. We both get the kind we like, and since I always made breakfast, I’d be the one responsible for making sure you got yours and I got mine.

  But no.

  You insisted the organic was the only real kind of peanut butter, and the other stuff—and here, you spat the brand name as if it were a swear word—was sugary, awful death, and is to real peanut butter what Sunny Delight is to real orange juice. You wouldn’t buy it, you said.

  Again, my attempt to defuse the situation, which was quickly becoming a rather ridiculously heated argument, fell on deaf ears. I like a certain kind of peanut butter, I said, and there were very few things about which I had a particular opinion in terms of groceries. I didn’t even care which brand, just that it was creamy rather than crunchy. Didn’t seem to be too much to ask, I thought.

  Maybe you were stressed about something else—an exam, perhaps. This was at the very beginning of our relationship becoming serious—we’d been together for two years, had just moved in together, and we both had a few months left to finish our degrees. So maybe you were stressed about an exam, or a paper. Maybe you hadn’t slept well. Maybe peanut butter really was that important to you. I don’t know.

  I just know that you refused to give an inch. No, no, no, no. Until the discussion passed from being a merely heated discussion to being an argument, and then you said something like “I won’t have that shit in my house” and I, unwisely, took the bait—I allowed myself to be drawn in. Your house? What about OUR house? Didn’t I get a choice?

  Aha, no. I didn’t.

  I admit, freely: I could have simply stopped letting myself be involved it in. I could have given in. Accepted that I just wouldn’t have the peanut butter I preferred. But, god, that seemed so emasculating. To be overruled in my own home, by my girlfriend, about PEANUT BUTTER? How stupid.

  It’s just peanut butter, it doesn’t matter.

  Which cuts both ways, I realize. I knew it then, but sometimes, as people, I think we get into a fight with a loved one and we just can’t seem to make ourselves relent; once we’ve got it in our teeth and our blood is up, we just can’t let it go.

  We couldn’t release it. Neither of us was prepared to lose. Is it really about winning? I don’t know. In some ways, yes. Sometimes it’s just about the principle of the matter.

  Soon, our kitchen echoed with shouts. You trotted out every single wrong I’d ever committed, and I did the same, and we got in each other’s faces, and we slung words we had no business slinging, insults, vehemence neither of us was used to feeling.

  I think, perhaps, in shouting matches like that, a small, deep, dark part of us enjoys it. We enjoy letting go of our anger, letting ourselves scream and shout. We know it’s wrong, but it feels good, in that deep, dark, secret part of us, to give in, to give vent to that simmering inferno.

  I think after a while, we’d forgotten what we were arguing about. At that point, it was the argument itself that mattered. Too many words had been slung, too much nastiness had been thrown about. It was our first real fight. Oh, we’d quarreled before, obviously. Many times. But it was usually about minor things, quickly solved and even more quickly forgotten. Nothing like this. Nothing real, nothing that spawned such anger.

  Which is what was weird about this argument: it was over something so stupid, so unimportant, so not worth fighting over. But with most fights, I think, the spark that sets off an inferno is very rarely the real, deep down catalyst. The spark just touches off the tinder, which has already been piled up, dry, hungry for that spark. When you cohabit with someone, day to day, life tends to slowly and subtly build up that pile of tinder and, sometimes, all it takes is a tiny little spark to ignite a blazing fire.

  We fought, Ava. Oh, we fought. How long did that quarrel rage? An hour? Two? Until we were both exhausted from the intensity of it. I don’t remember what we said, only the feelings of anger and the vision of you pointing at me angrily, jabbing a finger at me, cursing at me, eyes blazing, hair flying.

  I think you said it just to end the fight— “Fuck you, I’m done. I’m leaving.” That’s the only thing I distinctly remember you saying. It stunned me silent. Which, again, was the real purpose of it. To get me to shut up, to end the fight decisively. Well, you accomplished it. You were out the door, purse on your shoulder, keys in hand, before I could gather my wits, before I could fathom what you’d said, or what to do about it. You were in your car—that old Civic, you remember it? Black, but always so dirty it was almost brown, with the rip in the cloth of the back seat and the broken windshield wiper, smelling forever of cigarettes from the previous owner. You were gone by the time my brain kicked into gear and reminded me that my girlfriend had just walked out on me. Broken up with me, possibly.

  That moment, when I watched your car pull out of the driveway of our apartment complex and make that left turn, was when I realized, really, truly, and deeply, that I loved you. How deeply, how fiercely? Watching you drive away, and not knowing if you’d be coming back, drove it home for me. Hammered into my heart the reality—that you were mine, and I was yours, and that we belonged together.

  And that I was terrified of losing you. That, most of all.

  I lived in utter terror for several hours. I tried to reason with myself, tried to convince myself you’d be back, you just needed to cool off. Go shopping with a girlfriend or two, maybe get drunk and call a cab home in the wee hours. I made it six hours before I gave in and texted you—the cowardly approach first—because I was too afraid of your anger and your final, parting words to risk a phone call.

  So I texted you, asking you where you were.

  It went unread. Unanswered. Another hour.
>
  I sent a second text, begging you to just tell me you were safe.

  Another hour without a response. It was after four in the afternoon by this time, and you’d been gone since shortly after nine in the morning. I’d gotten no work done, couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t focus, could barely even watch TV. Fear and worry and even a little anger at you for vanishing like that ran through me. Ruled me. Owned me. Those emotions rotated, twisted, took turns ravaging me.

  I called you, and called you, and called you. No answer.

  Finally, I had to go look for you. I went to your old dorm, where a lot of your friends still lived, but they hadn’t seen you. I went to the mall, another of your favorite places, and searched all your favorite stores, questioned cashiers and security guards. Nothing. I went to your three favorite hangouts, but two had only just opened and the other hadn’t seen you. Where could you be? I roamed the beaches and back alleys, even called hospitals. I searched everywhere I could think of.

  Finally, after ten p.m., I headed home.

  It was a complete accident—fate, or fortune, I don’t know which. But I happened to glance to my left as I sat at a left-turn light, the one right before our complex, and there, in the parking lot of a run-down cantina, was your car, less than a mile from our apartment. I knew it was your car at one glance—I knew the dent in the back left fender because I’d put it there with my truck eight months before, and I knew the exact, off-center, slightly sideways placement of your University of Miami bumper sticker in the rear windshield, on the right side, down low. I pulled a slightly reckless U-turn through the red light and into the parking lot. Parked across two spots like an asshole, and jogged over to the bar.