USSA

DAVID

In unfamiliar rooms, time passes in vignettes of awakened states.

That morning, Anita was first to rise. She is never first to rise. I woke to catch her figure vanishing in the soft dark and closed my eyes. She was showered, dressed, and standing by the door when I reopened them. Polygons of dawn light angled through the blinds. I asked her where she was going.

“Out,” she said.

“Are you ok?”

“I’ll be ok.” 

A moment passed before she stepped out that I thought she might say more. This is how we communicated when communication took effort. A clipped Q&A, extended pauses—our nothing language.  

We were days into a cross-continental journey. Urban sprawl tessellated into prehistoric ocean basins and spinal mountain ranges. Our small car passing on ribbons of road unbent for miles. Only a few sites along the way had prompted us to stop—a man-made sculpture set into the land; a village on the brink of population death. Mostly, I wandered about photographing the scene. Anita preferred to explore on her own. When she was ready to leave, I would find her standing beside the car, smoking. 

The shower water was tepid and the perfumed towels irritated my skin. There were two messages waiting for me after I’d dressed. One from Anita who was waiting outside. The other was from a friend. I pocketed the phone, grabbed my duffel, then left the room forever.

Anita was drinking her coffee and taking in the view. Before her, beyond the limits of its namesake city, the morning sun needled the briny pink of the Great Salt Lake.

“I bought you a coffee, she said. “Black. It’s in the car.”

“Nice of you,” I said. The car engine was purring. The passenger side opened with a magnet stuck. I lowered myself into the passenger seat. Anita strapped in beside me and pulled into the street. 

“A friend of mine invited us to lunch,” I said as Anita navigated us toward the highway. “Out near Cheyenne, which is on our route.” 

“Which friend is this?”

“Carolie.”

“Do I know Carolie? Have you mentioned her?”

“In passing, I think. Just an old friend I don’t see often. She knows about you.” 

“Does she know you and I are—”

“No, but if the opportunity came up to talk…”

She missed a prompt from the GPS to turn.

“You should go then.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll keep driving,” she said. “There must be flights you can take from Salt Lake City to Cheyenne.”

 “I’m just asking for a slight alteration to our itinerary. It’s still the same trip.”

“This trip was your hare-brained idea, David.”

“And you agreed to it,” I said. Which was true. 

“I didn’t agree to seeing people. I’m barely present.”

Which was also true.

ANITA

Everyone is capable of being an asshole. Push me and I become recalcitrant. David doesn’t push, he prosecutes. I hold my ground as he works to slip me from it and convince me of his point of view. His attempts to salvage this relationship were playing out the same way.

But I wasn’t doing this against my will. The road beckoned with the spirit of renewal, even if there was no firm agreement on what that meant. David had his own philosophy, that people were chameleons of their environments. The purpose of this trip for him was to neutralize the camouflage and rediscover our fundamental selves. But I disagreed. To me there was no fundamental self, only evolving states of being. 

Arriving in Salt Lake, we checked into a cheap motel run by a surly concierge watching crime dramas. David went out in search of food. I didn’t wait up for him. When he returned, he lay beside me, the aroma of whiskey passing his lips. He walked his fingers along my shoulder, down to my unreceptive breasts, and to my relief kept going until he found and clasped my hand and turned on his back. We stayed that way, like two paper dolls, until I could hear his lungs oaring breath through his chest. 

When I went out for coffee, I returned with a resolve: to progress eastward on my own. I was circling around downtown Salt Lake, deciding whether to tell him now or hold off. Our little spat decided it. I spotted an empty parking space and took it, bringing the car to a jerky stop.  

“What are you doing?”

“What are we doing? We are talking.”

Holding the keys I stepped from the car into a park centered around a Mormon temple as mystical as a Disney palace and as impenetrable as the Kremlin. David pulled out his phone to take a picture, and that’s when I told him I wanted to continue alone. Then began the actual combat, the accusations of my jealousy, the demands for his attention. A churchgoer trafficking through tried to mitigate, telling me that a good wife serves the husband. David told him to shut up. Then he turned to me and said the decision to part ways was mine. He’d hop a cab right over to Brigham Young International right then and there if it came down to it.

I said I knew that. But parting ways now seemed dramatic. I conceded to the lunch. 

DAVID

Anita wanted to know about Carolie. 

We were college friends, incredibly close, but never romantic. I laid this out calmly and without filter to Anita as she steered us over the dramatic crescendo of the Rockies into the diminuendo of the Great Plains. I kept pointing out distinctive features, pencil-headed peaks and livers of water as she moved in the automotive gestures of lane-changes and gripped steering. I couldn’t tell if she cared. 

As the foothills flatlined into plains, a site came into view, something unbelievable that resembled a Mayan temple. It was slate gray with a wide white circle under its flat crown. 

“Pull over,” I told Anita. “I want a better look.”

“Your friend is expecting us, David.”

I took out my phone and attempted to capture the site as we whizzed by, snapping a dozen at a clip. “Blurred,” I said, examining the shots. “Every single one.”

The cabin was not far, maybe twenty minutes past the site, and a kilometer or so down a dirt path off the main road. It was tiny, minimal in design, like something you’d build from a kit. A dog of unknown breed barked from the porch. Next to it, pillowed within an oversized bomber jacket, was Carolie, who lifted a lithe hand from her crossed arms to wave. She walked down a pebbled path and greeted us in her distinctive whisperspeak, her words emerging like birds from a fog. I found my voice gentling to meet hers as it always did, an affection coded in the tone. She turned to Anita. 

“Carolie,” she said and offered Anita a hand. I was relieved to see her take it. 

A wooden table with log chairs had already been set for three. Nearby was a beggarly garden surrounded by chicken wire. “The animals find a way,” said Carolie, “and I keep trying.” Even her dwelling, a study in micro-living, seemed onerous. Tucked below a lofted bed was the shower, kitchen, and parlor. Behind a sliding-door were the toilet and closet with a thin window for ventilation. I couldn’t help but think of a cell. Materials gathered in her limited free space—art tools, assorted literature, a tiny desk with a laptop—were assuring signs of life.

I kept drawing her attention back to myself with questions, jocularity, and praise. Anita had begun prowling the pages of a book retrieved from the floor. 

“Have you read it?” Carolie asked.

“I haven’t,” said Anita. And put it down.

“David gave me that copy,” she said. “The summer we graduated.” 

ANITA

Lunch was leek soup and white wine diluted with seltzer. David complimented the food, the hermit cottage. Carolie says it was built by her mother. She was born and raised in Cheyenne and would have stayed if she had not met Carolie’s father, a military man stationed on a base adjacent to town. As a child, her family became transient, as families do in that line of work. But for a month every year, her mother would return here. This part of their marital arrangement, the “rest periods,” her mother called them, puzzled Carolie until she started coming here herself and then she understood. She understood the need to retreat to whatever place felt like home.

“That’s what it feels like driving to New York.” said David. “Like a drive home.”

“I’ll be back next month,” replied Carolie. “Will you two still be there?”

“He’ll be back in California by then,” I said, then addressed David. “Or have you forgotten?”

A laugh escaped David who wide-eyed me. 

“He’s just along to tour the sites.” I said. “Like that temple down the road.”  

“The old anti-Soviet missile silo,” said Carolie. “Weird place, but public. Go see it on your way out.”

David excused himself to use the bathroom and brought the dishes with him.

“Mind if I smoke?” I asked.

She ticked her head. I took a long drag and stared off into the wilderness. 

“That book you leafed through earlier,” she said, drawing me out of my head, “The one that you picked up from my floor.”

“What about it?”

“You said you hadn’t read it, yet you flipped through with familiarity. You were searching for a particular passage.”

“Are you offended?”

“It was curious,” said Carolie. “You knew that book. I’m confused why you would say otherwise, but I think I figured it out.”

“Try me.”

“You don’t want to know me.”

I took a drag and thought about it. She wasn’t wrong.

“Alright, yes, I have read the book. David also gifted me a copy.”

“He loves that book.”

“I didn’t so much,” I said. “But I noticed in your copy that he left notes in the margins, things he wanted you to notice. He’d done the same in mine.” 

Carolie looked at her hands. She gave her dog a bite of bread.

“How did you know we’d be passing through?” I asked.

“David reached out last night. First I’d heard from him in a while.”

DAVID

After lunch, Anita went for a walk leaving me and Carolie to catch-up. Our discussion, familiar and intimate, put me in a wistful mood. It remained with me back on the road, a racket of thought drowning out the hum of the engine, the occasional whip of prairie wind. I knobbed on the radio. Anita shut it off. 

“Not interested?”

“No, but may I ask a question?”

“Ask a question.”

“You gifted me and Carolie the same book with the same marginalia.” 

“Yes,” he said after a moment, “I did do that.”

“Why?”

“When I meet someone I really like, I buy a fresh copy of the book. I reread it and mark up the copy. I know the book so well, it’s like a part of me. But every read is different, and so are the notes. It’s what makes the copy I give to each person unique. I can’t tell you why I do this, but I do.”

“Maybe you’re trying to stay connected with your fundamental self.” 

“I’m not that clever, though maybe I should’ve flipped through Carolie’s copy. I would have liked to spend more time with her.”

“The two of you.”

“You said you wanted to continue on your own. Carolie’s would have been the place to leave me.”

“That doesn’t make you anxious?”

“What would I be anxious about?”

“Our future.”

“I feel agnostic about our future.”

“In what sense?” I asked. “That you don’t believe in it?”

“I believe in a future I don’t know. Hasn’t it been the same for you?”

*

The missiles were fired from the temple head and from six squat launch towers surrounding it. Between them now was a large flower garden. Even odder was its official name: The United States and Soviet Alliance Monument. In the thaw of the Cold War, Soviet and American artists came together to repurpose this site into a garden, seeding it with flora endemic to the two nations—at least according to the information plaque they read. Along its perimeter were candles, tokens, and other objects of homage to an ill-fated relationship. David stood at a distance, photographing the site with his phone. Anita remained smoking by the car, watching him.