the habit of being

Lately, what I really want to do is go to Antarctica. I keep saying this: when are we going to Antarctica? But I’m not sure if it’s really Antarctica I want so much as the idea of Antarctica. It doesn’t even really need to be that far away, just as long as there are hardly any people. Antarctica could be just about anywhere, except New York City, because just about everywhere feels deserted compared to here. But it’s also the idea of all that white snow and ice. To tell you the truth, after I made the switch, I never went back to liking the hot soaking tub at Osaka as much as the cold.

The other night, Saturday I think, I went to see the film adaptation of this book Into the Wild, which is based on a true story of a guy who dropped out of his regular life after college and hitchhiked all over the country, before going to Alaska and freezing to death. When I was eighteen I did something similar, minus the freezing to death, and I read this book while I was on the road. So I went to see the movie, and, in it, the guy carries the same book of edible plants my boyfriend and I had with us during our travels and used to make a few very unsatisfying grass salads. For some reason, I felt compelled to email my ex and tell him this. He read the book too, and I think he identified with the protagonist more than I did. After we split up, he went on to travel alone, thruhiking the Appalachian Trail, which was probably what he needed in the first place, and then he got married.

To make a long story short, our relationship was a big traumatic mess that haunted me for a long time afterward, and we didn’t communicate for years, until this past April, when I was in Portland, just at the beginning of waking up. I emailed him, and we wound up having sushi, me and him and his wife. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened at this meeting, but afterwards it seemed like I’d laid down an incredible burden. We pretty much hadn’t talked since then, until the other day, when I emailed him again, about this movie and the plant book. He replied, saying he still had the plant book, and rather nonchalantly added that he’d just been at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s place when he just happened to be flipping through the friend’s back issues of a certain magazine when he found a story I wrote. The story was something I published under a pseudonym, and it dealt in part with some of the traumatic happenings of our relationship.

All of this is a little strange: the issue of the magazine in question is now about a year and a half old; I just happened to see this film and email him right after his discovery of it; and, to top it all off, apparently he and his wife have been planning to name their first son the same name I gave to “his” character in the story.

I distinctly remember being so incredibly panicked over the prospect of any of the real people in the story, which I wrote in early 2005, finding and reading it that I considered not publishing the piece at all. I finally convinced myself that that was incredibly unlikely to happen, at least not for a very long time… maybe in the very distant future, if I wound up getting famous, someone would make the connection. After all, it wasn’t that big of a magazine. Anyway, now that the dreaded event has occurred, I am much less mortified over it than amazed at how the universe must have had to conspire to allow it to happen. Things like this happen to me all the time!

I had this realization, while I was in the shower, about a week ago. The gist of it was this: I was in the shower, standing there under the water, and I was thinking about a phone conversation I had had a few minutes earlier. I was in the middle of thinking about this conversation when I noticed that I was actually in the shower. I paused in the middle of the thought and said to myself, wait a minute, I’m in the shower now.

In this split-second pause, it was clear to me that while I was thinking about that phone conversation a moment earlier, I wasn’t just in the shower, I was actually still having the conversation, right then. The conversation wasn’t some event that was stuck in the past, over and done with and frozen and unmodifiable. The conversation, as I thought about it, was just as much in the present as the shower was, and in fact no longer existed in any other moment but the one I was currently in. The conversation wasn’t sitting back there behind me somewhere in a perfected form I could only partly access, it was right there before me, happening, even though I was doing something else. It wasn’t just a static thing I was remembering, but something that was still active and changing as I thought about it.

Thinking about all this a little more, it becomes obvious that not only is that phone conversation going on right now as I bring it into mind again, but everything is.. my entire history is in each moment. And every moment, my history is changing. Just as there are many possible futures, there are many possible pasts. There isn’t just this one immutable life story I can plug into or out of at different points in time. It sounds silly, but it is literally true that every breath is a brand new life: a new past, present, and future all in one. And this is why we cannot be forever doomed by the mistakes we’ve made and the traumas we’ve suffered. It isn’t possible, because those mistakes aren’t really the stable anchors we think they are. Or, to put it another way, they are only stable in as much as we think they are. All you really have to do is let go of the belief in this false stability, and you’re free.

I take it back. New York City can be Antarctica too.

I had been up all night playing Mah Jongg solitaire, which Air France was calling Shanghai, keeping my eyes peeled in the darkened cabin for a certain stewardess with a black bow barrette clipped over her dark brown chignon. When we arrived in Paris on the 19th, I was unsure what the absolute time was, only that we were only minutes away from missing our connection to Russia, but as it turned out 40 other people were missing it too, so they waited, and D ran to get us cafe au lait and croissants while I held our place in the security line. On the flight to St-Petersburg, we got out our phrasebook and learned how to say yes, no, please, thank you, I’m sorry, hi, good day, goodbye, and vegetarian in Russian, and, along with theatre box office, that list nearly sufficed for a whole week in a largely non-English-speaking city.

We were immediately immersed in the cultural phenomenon of the Long Russian Line. Going through customs, registering at the Hotel St-Petersburg, and, we’d soon learn, everywhere else, all queues in St-Petersburg move at approximately one fourth of our accustomed American speed. Our earliest impression of the city was that it was much more American than European, and that it seemed to be stuck in the 70’s. This was partly a consequence of our first meal, dinner in the hotel restaurant called the Mirror Room. This was a large wooden room in the basement of the gargantuan building, and it was decorated like a high school prom. There was shiny blue fabric on the tables, ruffled up instead of pulled taut, and there was a red lamp with tassels on every table. The napkins sat on the plates in the shape of cones. A few branches of foliage were stapled to the walls. There were two vegetarian options on the menu, and neither was an entree. Half asleep, I discovered Russian elevator music and the local beer Nevskoe, which we’d be drinking a lot more of.

The hotel itself was right on the Neva, and had a gigantic SAMSUNG sign on the roof. My room wasn’t air-conditioned. It was very small and had both thick orange and blue mesh curtains. The bed was a thin palate on a wooden frame, but that first night I slept 14 hours. It would be the only night in Russia that I slept more than 5 or 6 hours, and the only night I wasn’t bitten by mosquitoes, because I hadn’t yet discovered that the windows opened. We joked about the rooms being like something from a James Bond movie.

We had a whole day before the conference started, so we the next morning we headed for the Hermitage, and went straight for the 19th and 20th century collections on the top floor. If you’ve spent a lot of time at New York museums, the presentation style at the Hermitage is a bit shocking: the rooms on the top floor are very plain, the paint is cracking, the windows are open, spilling so much light onto the paintings that you can’t make out some of the glass-covered ones because of the reflection. But there are beautiful Matisses, and you feel like you’re seeing them in someone’s house, rather than a sterile museum space, and the rooms are airy and small, and, because there are only a small number of paintings in each room, you never feel overwhelmed. Until you go downstairs, which is a very different story. The rooms are grand, ornately decorated, and much larger. The older collections housed here are more spectacular for their quantity than their quality. For instance, there is an entire hall full of nothing but Dutch (I think?) paintings of hunts and food.

That night, Sunday, August 20th, at the opening reception for the conference, there was a military band and hundreds of tiny glasses of vodka. A big group of us went out in search of a Lebanese restaurant from the Lonely Planet guidebook, and after walking for about an hour, finally found the place, only to discover it had gone out of business. We wound up eating bad Chinese with the help of a tourist from the UK. None of the staff spoke English. By the end of the night, I’d had champagne, vodka, beer, and wine, and really thought I was doing surprisingly well…

Unable to get to bed at night (St. Pete is 8 hours ahead), I slept through a lot of the conference during the first few days. We saw Le Corsaire at the Mariinsky Theatre Monday night. The story is all about pirates and slave girls, and unlike most ballet I’ve seen, it was fun and funny, not at all pretentious or high-artsy. The famous Kirov company was on tour, so we got a travelling Russian company with a tall prima ballerina in a hot pink tutu. Every drag queen’s fantasy, she came out for no less than five curtain calls at the end, when a dedicated group of men and women simply would not stop clapping. Afterwards we ate in a fantastic restaurant called the Backstage, which was decorated with ballet paraphernalia and whose walls were covered with dancers’ signatures.

Tuesday night we ate in a Georgian restaurant. Wednesday we blew off the conference altogether and went on a day trip to Peterhof, the “Russian Versailles,” on a hydrofoil. Wednesday night was the conference banquet, and I was feeling sick to my stomach, presumably due to having not been warned against drinking the water for a couple days after arriving.

Thursday morning I gave my talk, on our three-process model of reading rate, and, as usual, after who knows how many weeks of panic and anxiety, as soon as I was actually doing it, it was fine. That night we rode the Metro for the first time, and it really does have even taller, scarier, escalators than the Washington, DC, system, but otherwise is very nice. With a group of four friends, I saw a Russian production of Cabaret, which seemed much grittier and more authentic than the Broadway production I saw in 2001. Being in the front row, as we also were for Le Corsaire (and later for Giselle), didn’t hurt. Then we wondered around the main drag, Nevskiy Prospect, looking for a place to eat, and finally found a great Georgian place called Kafka. I should mention that in nearly all these restaurants I was eating aubergine. I had no idea Russians were into eggplant, but it would seem that they are, and that they do it very well.

We returned to the Hermitage for a second round on Friday, but it was dreary out and somehow it just wasn’t nearly as pleasant as the first time with all the open windows. With a lot of pushing from me, still wanting to see a “serious” ballet, we snagged tickets for the next night’s production of Giselle at the Hermitage Theatre, and had one of the slowest meals ever at another restaurant on Nevskiy Prospect.

Before coming to Russia, we’d concocted this brilliant plan to take the overnight “Red Arrow” sleeper train from St. Petersburg to Moscow (where we’d catch our flight back to the States) on our last night. Despite the large number of websites that claim to be capable of booking Russian train tickets, I had no success purchasing them in advance, and despite resolving to take care of getting tickets early after arriving, we waited until the day before we were leaving (Saturday) to walk over to the Finlandia Terminal (which was nearest to our hotel) to get tickets. This proved to be the most stressful part of the entire trip. No one working at the station had much English, so we were reduced to trying to write notes (28 August 23:55? 1st class?) and holding them up to the window. Our train was sold out. There was no other train Sunday night. We could get tickets that night, but we’d miss Giselle. Furthermore, I needed my passport to buy a train ticket, and it was back at the hotel. After I went back to get it, we discovered that there were, in fact, second class tickets on a different train Sunday night. It wasn’t a sleeper, and the arrival time was very tight, but it was a better option than missing Giselle and having to find a hotel in Moscow.

From the train station, we went on to the Russian Museum, where a woman in a large hat impressed upon us that she had two degrees and could give us a tour in English for 300 rubles (about $12) per person per hour. D talked her into a half hour tour and she took us through the icons and asked if we were Christian (oh right, you’re scientists! she said when Denis shook his head) and then told us stories about Catherine the Great’s love life. Afterwards we explored the rest of the museum alone (the icons were definitely the high point, along with a portrait of Anna Akmatova), and then walked over to the Church on Spilled Blood and the souvenir fair, where there are more matryoshka dolls than you’ve ever seen in your life. I bought a silver bracelet that says something on the order of God Bless and Protect Me in Cyrillic. Then we headed back to the Hermitage Theatre to see Giselle, which is about ghost maidens who’ve died on their wedding night.. totally goth. And then we went back to the Backstage Restaurant, which we’d enjoyed so much the first time.

On our final day, we managed to cram in the Zoological Museum (15,000,000 specimens!), a canal tour of the city (it was originally based on Amsterdam), the Dostoevsky Museum (I insisted… it’s in the actual apartment where he wrote The Brothers Karamazov), and a 3-hour Russian play (based on Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave.. I felt like I missed a lot due to only knowing about seven words, but it was clearly good, serious theatre), before running off to Moscovsky Station to catch our midnight train.

We decided it was worth another shot at getting a better ticket, but were having even worse luck trying to communicate with the station agents, when a Russian man who spoke excellent English came up to us claiming he could get us 1st class seats on the Red Arrow (#1) for 5000 rubles. This wasn’t too much more than the asking price. He called someone up on a cell phone and gave them our names and passport numbers, and several minutes later a military guy showed up with the tickets, which were actually for the #3 train, not the #1. And then we sprung it on us that the 5000 rubles didn’t actually include the price of the ticket, so it was all seeming very sketchy and expensive when he guided us to the beautiful red train with a final: One question, George Bush: good man or bad man?

Bad man, said D, and they were in fact valid first class tickets on a sleeper train. We had our own little room with a flower, sparkling water, and two boxed meals including foie-gras, salami, and caviar. I managed to sleep a few hours and suddenly we were in Moscow at 8 in the morning. Our cab driver kindly took us by Red Square on the way to the airport, but it turned out to be closed on Mondays.

At the free breakfast in the hotel one morning near the end of the conference, people were asking one other what their strongest impression of St. Petersburg was. One man talked of almost getting robbed on the metro, others of various tourist sites, and when it was my turn I said it was the Neva. The city is huge, but because of the canals, you never feel like you’re very far from the river. One night on the way back to the hotel, which was right on the Neva, we saw these huge crowds of people lined up along the sidewalk. When we asked the cab driver what was going on, he said they were waiting to see the bridges go up. The various bridges go up on a schedule late every night, to let larger ships pass through, but the idea that people who lived there would wait around to see it amazed us. In New York, we have rivers, one of which I can even see from my window, but they really aren’t “important” to the city at all, apart from their role in giving it its island-ness. Apparently almost all the great European cities are built around rivers in the way that St. Petersburg is, and that’s why no one other than myself (the only person there who had never been to Europe) thought this whole “river thing” was such a big deal.

I guess that’s the short version of What I Did On My Trip To Russia. In conclusion, when it comes to visiting faraway places, a picture’s worth a thousand words. And, also, I can’t wait to get another stamp in my passport. Prague, anyone?

“Vous êtes trés jolie, mademoiselle,” says the old man walking past me on St-Denis. Somehow this is not nearly as creepy as the English equivalent. Somehow it isn’t creepy at all. I smile at him. I’d never do that in New York.

I’m sitting on a bench eating sushi. I made it through a whole sentence in French before the woman at the register switched to English on me. I’m slightly proud.. this is a step up from my first day in Montréal, during which I didn’t venture further than a “bonjour!” or a “oui!”

The hostel is made of indoor treehouses. The outdoor ones are still being constructed day by day. Men use electric saws in the courtyard, and we all get up early, make coffee, smear jelly on croissants and bagels. I’ve met people from Switzerland, China, Germany, France, Manitoba, North Carolina, England, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, and Italy so far. I’m better at remembering the countries than the names.

Compared to New York, Old Montréal seems deserted. Everyone here is a tourist; none of us can give each other directions.

Carmen and Diane are from Winnipeg, working secretarial jobs in the same place they were born. They’ve been friends for a decade, and they are the loudest people I’ve met. Eric, from Australia, said he though it would be the Americans who would be loud, but that we are some of the quietest people here. Everyone I tell that I’m from the States asks me what I think of Bush, and I feel like it’s necessary to explain that We’re Not All Like That. Carmen and Diane went off to Québec City with Ryan from North Carolina in a rented car. I think Diane and Ryan are sleeping together.

Some people here have been travelling for months. 17 countries in 30 days, et cetera. Desert islands, yellow fever vaccinations, beautiful motel rooms for $4 US, entire years off work. They smile about my hitch-hiking trip, but none of them have done that, exactly. None of them have begged or slept in the street.

There are only two other girls travelling alone. One is a teacher from Germany on her summer break, seeing all the big cities in Canada. One is a bartender from Fire Island. Her name is Laura, she’s 19, and she is a former ballet dancer, always doing tricks and showing off. Every photo op prompts a split or a cardwheel or a handstand. Somehow it is common knowledge in the hostel that she is a virgin because the man she fell in love with said no, and that he said no beause didn’t love her back. It is also known that she takes Effexor.

Laura and I walked around the Montréal casino, and saw an old lady win $500 on her first quarter in the slot machine. We congratulated her, and she started putting her winnings back through the slot by the handful. Laura wouldn’t shut up about how she’d wanted the woman to save it, about how depressing it all was. A sleazy-looking man at the roulette table asked her what her number was, and she didn’t understand, so he shouted in English, and said he’d give her $25 if it came up. She said 29, and then he asked me and I said 15. They didn’t come up, and then her necklace broke and my shirt came untied and she kept saying the man was Satan. That night was her last night, and she hooked up with a guy who spoke broken English, got vomiting drunk, and lost one of her Chinese slippers.

The next day, Laura’s boy tapped me on the head with a travel guide, and came up behind me while I was reading a borrowed copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and tapped my shoulder and made me jump. I ignored it. The boy who let me borrow the book also cooked me pasta and washed my dishes two nights in a row. He wants me to show him around the Bronx when he’s in New York, even though I keep explaining that I don’t know anything about the Bronx.

I got the Biosphere and the Biodôme confused, and made a group of five people cough up money to see a “water museum” by promising penguins that weren’t there. I saw the penguins myself the next day.

(a rewrite of some entries from my hitch-hiking journal, 2002)

Here, in New Mexico, there are plateaus.

Back home, where the ground was flat, I learned what the outside world was supposed to look like from a diagram that crammed every possible geological feature into one neatly-labeled color-coded box. Mountain, hill, plain, valley, delta, fill-in-the-blank. The hardest vocabulary word was plateau, and judging from the awkward illustration, I thought they might’ve been made up, just to give public school children something to memorize in Social Studies class.

Though they’re advertised on license plates, billboards, and in roadside souvenir shops, I overlooked my first three New Mexico sunsets. Last night, my boyfriend kissed me under the fourth one. I think the kiss might’ve been staged so I’ll have something nice to say to my grandchildren about the time I dropped out of school and hitchhiked across the country. New Mexico sunsets are pretty, and there are plateaus here.

It’s early morning on sleepy I-25 South, surely one of the most seldom-used stretches of highway in the country. The cars don’t come and, when they do come, they don’t stop. For hours we sit by the side of the road, waiting. Far away there are mountains, covered all over with trees, no tree line. There’s a manicured RV park on the other side of the freeway, before the rusting piles of construction junk further on down. There are green Interstate signs, always, and the same well-known logos float in the sky: Texaco, McDonalds.

The light is relentless, and a broken-limbed black umbrella serves as my parasol. I’m the sitting girl, impossibly still, in my dirty, sweaty clothes. My patchwork sketch-palate jeans are ripped at the knees. A faded yellow head-scarf to hides my greasy, unwashed hair. A dog barks. The bark crosses the freeway from the RV park and settles on my shade umbrella. I try to see myself from a driver’s eyes, a speck in the distance, slowly coming into focus as this skinny, raggedy, overgrown child, rained on by the New Mexico sun. Surely I make for a queer, enchanting sight. Why doesn’t anyone pull over? Perhaps I pass as a mirage.

A few feet away, my boyfriend reads from our tattered, rained-on, duct-taped copy of War and Peace. In his other hand, he holds the sign: SOUTH TO ALBUQUERQUE. His long, matted hair drips over a black tee-shirt, where a gray wolf howls up toward a yellow moon near his left shoulder. On the bottom, the shirt says says “Texas.” It’s from a truck stop - 3 for $10.

He sees me staring and looks up from the book, which was attacked by a pack of dogs after I finished it and before he started, and asks, “When was the last time you remember having fun?” This is an accusation. Our trip was supposed to be a great adventure. We were supposed to be seeing the country. He sighs a lot. I feel like I shouldn’t be expected to be happy.

“Fun?” I reply, “I like playing checkers.”

Occasionally, we play pennies against nickels on a hand-drawn board. We do this in air-conditioned fast food restaurants, filling up the brightly-colored booths with our hiking packs, sleeping bags, water bottles. We sit and play checkers with our change until some stranger offers to buy us a pair of Value Meals. One such stranger complimented my boyfriend on my beauty. Another waited until he went to the bathroom to offer me $50 for a blowjob.

Checkers was a weak answer. I should have said, “When was the last time we had sex?” This is an accusation. We ran away for love.

Not only is he no longer able to view our sex life as a form of escapism, he avoids it specifically to make it easier for him to escape once this is over.

“It must be hard for you, doing this now,” he offers.

I want to say, “You have no idea;” I want to tell him all about it, how I cannot experience anything outside my own skin anymore. How every place we go is the same. I cannot. Instead, I complain. I complain constantly. I say that I am tired, I am dizzy, I am sick, I am hungry, I am afraid. I say these things even though they are obvious. We were supposed to be in love. We’ve been on the road for five months now, and we’ve finally passed the point where things could not possibly get worse.

Today is the last day I could’ve gotten the pill.

We have $65; we need at least $300. The signage blitz isn’t working. TRAVELING AND HUNGRY, ANYTHING HELPS. It was for food, once. We were even happy, in the beginning. We flashed peace signs at the SUV’s waiting at busy intersections on their lunch breaks. We believed the stories we told the strangers who picked us up. But the charm wore off, even before we found ourselves worse off than broke. We fake it now, and maybe the intersection strangers know they’re being duped. Not that there are any intersections to try here. We’re in the middle of nowhere, trying to get to Albuquerque, running around in circles.

“Do you have a better idea?” he asks. “Do you want to try something else? Do you want to call your parents?”

No. My parents haven’t heard from me in months. I ran away for love.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she dreamt she gave birth to a kitten instead of a girl, and after bringing it home from the hospital, she accidentally left it in a dresser drawer, where it died. I haven’t dreamt of children or of cats, only of becoming huge. I am scared I will just wait and wait, until I’ll have no choice.

I want to rest. I want to sleep in. I want to eat something that isn’t from the 99-cent menu, that isn’t peanut butter sandwiches or oatmeal. I want to get away from the sun. I want to wipe out the red, the orange, the yellow. These New Mexico colors are everywhere: on the ground, in the sky. My skin is splattered with this paint. I am tan and I am fire and I am burning and I feel like I’m going to vomit up a sun-baked baby.

I’m sitting on a rolled up sleeping bag. He’s sitting on his pack. A Jeep just passed us by, with talk radio spilling out its windows. If I stood up, I would fall down. One of the floating signs says there’s a Holiday Inn at the next exit. I want. Our water is tinted with Hawaiian Punch, from the soda fountain where we filled up our dented plastic bottles last. It tastes bad and I don’t want to drink it, but I’m so thirsty and my yellow piss says I’m not drinking enough.

I take down the umbrella to write in my diary. The sun squints my eyes and muddles my thoughts. My nose is stinging. My arms are stinging. Sweat drips slowly down my neck, leaving trackmarks in the dirt. Next to me on the concrete shoulder are a small pelt and a smear that used to be an animal. On the entrance ramp, I saw a mummified dog, a grotesque version of the sheepskins that sleep on the parlor floors of the rich, with their heads still on. If I never moved from this spot, this highway’s next rug could be me, frozen in time, melted, the remains of a girl who ran away for love, climbed her first plateau, and died trying to see the country.