History

You said the world is ending and I put my head in my hands.  Too many meetings that went nowhere today, I told you, and I've had no time to write.  We spoke to each other about history, the history of the entire world.  As usual, it made both our points.

Tuna, tomato sauce, black beans, white beans, pinto beans, olives. Lined up like soldiers in the back of our cupboards. Cases of water wait beneath old blankets in the garage. I've been in two hurricanes, three car wrecks and a ski crash.  I have fallen down the stairs. My house was burned to the ground by an arsonist with a fetish for churches, children and stolen underwear. I get that shit can happen.  Not really, you shake your head.  Not nearly enough.

On my birthday we watched images of the tsunami pummeling Fukushima and heard our island named as its next stop, waves on their way at more than five hundred miles an hour, tall as buildings.  Taller.  What made us turn on the TV that night, dark in its corner all week?

I told your daughter we'd call her back.  She reminded me of the hurricane on our honeymoon. We laughed nervously remembering the three sunken fishing boats, the dozens of frogs dead at the bottom of the swimming pool, the blasted out windows and toppled over street lamps, iron posts bent as if by a pair of giant hands - how you and I had somehow slept through it all.

You took the rental car while I stood in the center of the room and listened, listened with my toenails and the ends of my hair.  Outside it was pitch black, the air a languid caress.

Long lines, snarled traffic and spontaneous fistfights met you at the store. Empty-handed you returned and found other things to take.  I watched you grab bedspreads and silverware, dishwashing liquid and lighter fluid. You filled every empty bottle we had pilled up for recycling from the kitchen tap.  Move! you yelled and I did.  I must have.  The car was crammed full and we were driving, away from the endless line of headlights crawling toward the airport, up toward the canyons, to the place we had gone hiking on the first day.

The radio knew nothing but we kept it on anyway. More than once the announcers invited us to like them on Facebook. I watched your profile, your eyes scanning the sides of the road. Higher, you decided aloud and we kept climbing.

Shapes started to emerge in front of our headlights.  A truck with a horse trailer.  A station wagon with two dogs in the back. An El Camino stacked high with surfboards.  Here.  You turned the car so the nose was pointing downhill and pulled parallel between two others, killed the engine, opened a beer.

You offered me things and I shook my head yes or no.  Accepted the blanket, waved away the beer.  You went outside and talked to a man with crates full of live chickens stacked in the back of his flatbed.  Perhaps you gave him the bottle I'd refused.  He leaned his head in my window reeking of pot and said, this goes like they think you'll be stuck up here for weeks.  We all will.  His eyes scanned the backseat, took in the towels and pillows and pots and pans.

Later you told me you were prepared to trade.  The chicken man was amenable.  You told me things about the people in the other cars, what part of the island they lived on, the ages of their dogs, who had kids.  You knew all their names.  You handed me a round pillow and the shape brought to mind a pair of stuffed mice with music boxes in their bellies that slowly plinked Three Blind Mice.  My mother had brought them home to my sister and me when we had the measles.  Always two of everything, two of the exact same thing, to show us the world was fair.

I would never say that you enjoyed it, but it was clear you did not hate it.  There was an essentialness to the situation that set your shoulders back in a way I had not seen.

After it was over we put everything away, poured out the tap water and left the bottles out for recycling, placed the lighter fluid next to the bar-be-que, tried to go back to being on vacation. We drank cocktails and hiked, planned dinners out, drove around the island in a slow semi-circle searching for the perfect place to kayak.  I dreamt of walls of water that trembled with a terrifying sound.  You slept deeply and woke starved. Neither of us was sad to board our flight.

Tonight you want to talk about it, the world ending, and I decidedly do not.  Every morning at our second-hand dining room table you read my grandmother's Bible while I study the yoga sutras on the couch.  They have more in common than not.   A thought that leaves me both frightened and relieved.

If you stack your cans neatly while I chant and breathe, perhaps we'll come out of this alright.