My Dearest Jonah Read online

  “How you wanna pay, lady?” asked the man on reception. “We do hourly, nightly, or by the week.”

  “By the week should suffice,” I said in my haughtiest tones.

  I had, in my blind panic, managed to secure a change of clothes, yet still the grubby marks of the desert and the not-quite-cleaned traces of blood clung to my flesh. The thought of my scent is enough to make me hide my face in shame even now; three showers and nigh on twenty hours of sleep later. The only reason for choosing this particular establishment was that other than requiring a safe and distant place to recuperate, my appearance would have caused little stir. Even as I checked in (false name, indoor shades) a recently married couple began touching what I can only describe as third base on the waxy sofa beneath the neon vacancy sign as their young child shot a pellet gun at the wall.

  “Sign here, here, and here Miss Neave and you’ll be in room 147. Pool view.”

  “Perfect.”

  I used to adore these hotels as a girl. Real life plays out like cabaret in hotels like these up and down the country. The sort of life you don’t hear about, and the sort of life you do. We were next door but one from the beauty queen and the talk show host the night before the story hit the papers, and I got my first period in our en suite at the Coconut Grove Nebraska. I lost my virginity to a janitor in the laundry room of The Flamingo Park Lodge Wyoming. Those single-serving packets of fabric softener still send a shiver down my spine.

  What else is there?

  I have the bare essentials. A bed, a desk at either side, two lamps, one of which works, the other provides a mild electric shock and so not worth the effort for the flickering illumination it emits. The heating kicks in at regular intervals which I can neither control nor tolerate, and so am left to pace the room in just my underwear as having to hand-wash my clothes is proving particularly arduous and increasingly risky (there has been no indication as to a repeat delivery of tiny soap discs). Everything is here, I suppose. I daresay I could live the rest of my life in this tiny room, so functional and sterile. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the lives most other people live. Only the square footage would mark it out as in any way eccentric.

  However, there are downsides.

  The strip lamp above the bathroom mirror acts as a cruel reminder of the fallibility of the human form. Each time I step out of the shower the floor-length stretch of reflective surface seems to capture me at my least attractive, my many imperfections unavoidable. I look both huge and tiny all at once in that mirror with that light on, and as such have taken to showering in the dark.

  The less said about the room service breakfast the better.

  The bed itself is not entirely unsatisfactory, though the unmistakable human stench - the faint top-notes of sweat and sex that are replaced in classier establishments by chemical neutrality - seems to seep through each and every fabric. It crawls from the dewy walls and up from the carpet so worn as to be almost redundant.

  Worse still is that all I have been gifted are the twin atrocities of daytime television and a pocket bible to occupy myself with. Someone has stolen the New Testament. Ripped it clean out like a coupon. Did I mention that? Whether an act of calculated rebellion or simply wanton destruction I do not know. All I can say is that having been forced to spend forty-eight hours and counting with nothing but myself for company, it feels like a personal attempt on my sanity to deny me of such stimulus. I find myself loathing the perpetrator regardless of his or her intentions and ache only for the thrill of Lazarus’ rise.

  And so all I have is you. Your letters (another essential I was able to secure) and the thought that somewhere, something good exists in my life. For now that seems enough to get by on.

  The sun was at its fiercest when I began my trek. Sand blistered my feet and I swear that each time I’d reach a landmark I had set myself - pass a stone I’d had my eye upon, or a winking shard of glass - the expanse would stretch once more before my eyes like a cartoon corridor. Overhead two vultures swooped in and out of one another with an ugly wisdom. Even when so weak I could taste death on my tongue like vinegar, the beauty of the desert was not lost on me. That enormity gets inside of you. Sizes and shapes stop mattering when you have nothing to compare them to. When it is just you and the world. The scrape of my foot against a clump of rock became deafening, yet the pain that had wrapped around me seemed to stop mattering. It was as if my feet said, ‘we’re getting out of here, with or without you.’ And so I became almost dead, led by the same strength that must enable most women to give birth. Attempting to make tangible the hideousness of the situation - to even think it could be quantified via such lowly mediums as tears or tantrums - seemed as ridiculous as it no doubt was.

  So I walked.

  And I walked.

  My footprints disappeared behind me. The car resigned itself to volatile vaults of memory. The severed hand already on its slow return to nothingness, like the opposite of birth.

  God I was thirsty.

  It grew dark and then light and then dark again. The speed at which the cold arrived like a net cast out to sea seemed almost rude. But I didn’t stop.

  On the second morning the landscape became more varied. Mounds appeared where before there had only been flat, and with each step the terrain became increasingly rugged, like the drawings of a heartbeat under attack. A tyre lay decomposing, buried in the sand. I touched it and it felt precious. In the distance I saw two dogs. They were either fighting or mating, though I was unable to tell which. As I drew closer a small cluster of buildings began to take shape: a gas station, a convenience store. I heard a wind chime jangle to the sweet soul of an invisible conductor. A makeshift bar. Two old men - toothless and gaunt - sat silently on a porch. Outlines began to rise like steam from a city grate. I heard the rhythm of my breath change and felt myself become fuller as their shapes began to calcify.

  Just one more step.

  The following events are blurry and those that remain clear I would disregard if given the chance. Suffice to say that I do not care to see in print what I had to do in order to secure a ride into the next functioning town (though I daresay that had I not offered it then it would have been taken nonetheless). It seemed a small price to pay at the time, though in hindsight I think the five dollars I later found stuffed in my bra may well have been adequate. I suppose we’ll never know.

  My trailer looked interfered with even from the outside. Nothing was particularly different, though were it to be granted the luxury of expression it would have held one of sheer indignation. As I walked towards the door, two boys wearing only their underwear played on the grass with cutlasses and swords. The smallest boy, Dylan, a redhead, eased the fervour of his attack as he saw me and raised his eye-patch.

  “The bad men been in there, miss,” he said with a mild stutter born of genetics as opposed to fear, a fact I had deduced from his mother some time ago.

  I mostly kept myself to myself within the park. Though in the early days, before night time became such profitable currency, I would sit out on the porch during those balmy evenings and - on the rare occasion I had forgotten to take a prop-novel to avoid such instances - talk to Deloris next door as she allowed her broiling legs to soak in a bucket of cool water.

  Her husband had invented a safety mechanism now used in every plug socket in America. Only in his excitement he had copyrighted the snappy name and not the technology, and so his prosperity was over before it had begun. He did not hold his misfortune with dignity, in much the same way some men can’t hold their liquor (incidentally another flaw of his, despite almost nightly attempts on the contrary). When I arrived in this particular park just two years ago, on the exact date of my first letter to you Jonah, Deloris was a svelte young mother with a swing to her step that would make a grown man change religion. Now, just a few hundred days later, she looks like she belongs to the legs under which the cartoon cat and mouse forever wage war.

  She was fast and easy with the truth, the way the formerly pretty
and otherwise vacant tend to be. And so her life story was mine for the taking. I was so bored sometimes I’d stop listening. Sometimes I think she knew, and I honestly don’t think she cared. When it came to my turn I’d feed in the tiniest inaccuracies - an unlikely embellishment here, a contradiction there - to see if she’d pick up. Either due to politeness, stupidity, or simply the fact that I was but an inconvenience to her stream of spoken thought I do not know. But she never did, Jonah. Not once.

  Inside, each item that could have been broken by hand or bat was. My glorious television - black and white, bought for fifty dollars by the smoothest talking beggar I ever had the pleasure of meeting - was smashed in half, the empty screen lay in fragments across the carpet like glitter, its insides kicked in such a manner that the volume knob had embedded itself in my Rita Hayworth poster. My clothes wrapped around one another on the floor like lovers or victims of some terrible ordeal; a trouser leg penetrated the waistline of my most expensive pantyhose; the arms of a crisp shirt, torn, wrapped defiantly around a vest like a lioness protecting her cubs. My underwear ripped to shreds. The flimsy work surfaces were scuffed and doused in liquids and the walls were kicked through with holes, causing the light to streak through me like celestial arrows. My bed had been fully upturned and my make-up shattered into an iridescent pool on the carpet. But, most devastatingly, a single blow had split in half my most prized possessions atop the ornate coffee table I had bought for that sole purpose.

  What they destroyed was you. Or rather they had tried.

  I had collected you in the furthest corner of my bedroom. You’re two short hairs plucked from the deepest recess of an envelope and now taped to a laminated card. You’re a hurriedly cut out advert from the Morning Echo advertising the scheme on which I was first introduced to you, and a rejected visiting order which I submitted in secret only two weeks later; the arrival of which felt like the biggest betrayal of my life. You’re a penny from a wishing well artlessly scooped up the day I posted said request in the vain hope some of its luck would bring us closer together. You’re a bottle of cologne, whose name required a two day round trip to a perfumer in the city who, when presented with the sealed envelope and its mummified odour, proclaimed it to be the ghostly trails of the kind of aftershave bought by middle aged men from dime stores across the land. You’re dozens and dozens of ink stained sheets whose very scent makes me feel grounded in a way that reality never quite has. Your words, your precious words, scattered across my bedroom floor like confetti the day after a wedding.

  I wept when I saw what they’d done to you.

  But you get no points for moping in this life, Jonah. So I changed tack. I fortified and solidified as if to save face. I scooped you up and threw you carelessly into an overnight bag, along with a few bare essentials and - after a brief scrabble on all fours like some feral child - secured my car keys before driving far and fast to the borders of the next town. My pockets heavy with memories - trinkets and ornaments of a past that I was able to discard so thoughtlessly in one brisk and tearful car journey - I arrived at what, to most in this godless settlement, must feel like the end of the world.

  Oh, one minor detail. Having hurled you and me - or whatever was left of us - into the back of the car, and checking to make sure the children next door were safely inside, I returned to the apartment and lit a small rag atop the gas hob. Kicking over the tracks. Burning my bridges. Always moving forward. If you’ve taught me one thing so far Jonah it’s that the past is seldom worth visiting. So I severed it at the root. Full stop. End of the line for that particular story, thank you very much. There were pragmatics involved, of course. How I would hate for them to discover a missed scrap containing your address, or for that matter something that could lead to my current whereabouts. But mostly the fire was a symbolic offering. The end and the beginning of myself.

  Another land’s dusk began drifting over me as I pulled away. The sky flickered a threatening red that grew and shrank around itself like embers. Only after driving for the duration of the rock and roll track that blared from the broken radio did I allow myself one final glance in the dirty mirror. Behind me all stood still. The children were inside, the lights shone constant through the plastic windows of the trailers. And in the middle of it all a tiny orange flame blew smoke rings to the heavens.

  You see I’ve gotten into some terrible trouble. And I fear the effort that went into frightening me so wholly was more preview than main event. So now I am here Jonah, and how I wish you were with me. But you are not, and for reasons known only to you are not willing to be. I neither understand nor take pleasure in the situation but respect it nonetheless. But here’s to honesty, and here’s to change, and here’s once more to the endless stream of one-glass bottles of whisky that have just about gotten me through this letter. I will tell you, of course, how I came to be in this place, but later.

  For now I must sleep.

  Love,

  Always,

  Verity

  Dearest Verity,

  Rejoice! I write to you freshly bathed and uncommonly exhausted.

  Today was my first day at work. And it feels divine.

  The gentlemen that I work with are a predictably clichéd group. Max, our foreman, barely opens his mouth when speaking. Occasional vowels prevail, but on the whole instructions are to be deduced from the direction in which he nods. And so I can only assume at this stage in proceedings that I am following orders as diligently as would appear. The two young boys in greased vests speak little, but often enough as to not appear rude. And the crane operators seem to have a hierarchy of their own; attention to which prevents cross-departmental communications entirely. Everyone is marred with dirt as though camouflaged; their sturdy fabrics worn and exhausted. One boy’s jeans are so threadbare that the freckles on the back of his thighs could be counted with relative accuracy when the sun is at its peak.

  Rolls and rolls of empty piping lie dormant at the lip of each rut. Tarpaulin sheets have a tendency to buck from their tethers and float up on invisible winds where they hover above hollow ground. The general mood is that we are in some small way acting out a theatrical version of a building sight. No-one seems to know precisely what he is doing, whether at this stage demolition or construction is our primary goal. But the unspoken agreement is that so long as we keep doing it then everything will eventually come together.

  Emmet will on occasion loom large from the makeshift cabin from which he operates the administrative duties, and the length of time he spends in said cabin implies that the admin of dirt is a deep and involved process. He seems pleasant enough, and in all honesty I am still too overwhelmed with gratitude to be able to form any objective character reference. For now all I know is that he is the man who changed me. And for now it feels as though it has been for the better.

  I took a walk out, as intended, to the edge of town, scraps of paper carefully written and folded inside each pocket. My clothes cleaned and pressed for the occasion. I passed the busy banks and the empty shops, past the broken water fountain and Maxwell, staunch and present as always, spouting his prophesy. He wore a white suit, as he had the previous day, and as he no doubt would tomorrow, and the day after that and the day after that, and bellowed through a cackling loudspeaker.

  “... now I aint descended from no monkey, I didn’t explode out of no black hole, so I asked myself ladies and gentleman, what am I? And then one day the answer came – I am but a thought in the mind of God almighty... ”

  I took the common response and ignored his urgency, passing by with a dipped head until he became little more than indistinguishable background noise.

  I walked straight past the dozing labourers to the Formica office at the southernmost point of the construction. Dark grooves, hollowed in the middle from tentative digging, had marked out the proposed outline of the structure, containing an area so large I daresay it would require an aerial perspective to truly comprehend.

  I knocked three times and, allowing what I fel
t to be a polite enough period, entered when no answer was forthcoming.

  Emmet did not look up. He sat in his straight-backed chair, bulging and creased. A suit made in fabric so cheap it appeared reflective was topped - I kid you not - with a cowboy hat. You would have thought that anyone in charge of such a venture, least of all this one, would be eager to appear less like a cartoon Texan baron (or, indeed, less like the flighty Virginian, now rich from this very town’s misplaced faith). But such is life.

  There truly is nothing quite as strange as folk.

  “How can I be of assistance, sir?” he said without looking at me, engrossed in the blueprints beneath his ham fists. On his desk there was a bound stack of twenty-dollar bills; crisp, as though freshly ironed.

  Within an hour I was changed and digging with the others, on a salary I had haggled up by fifty cents an hour.

  It’s odd how accustomed you can get to constructing an existence around sheer frivolities, and odder still how uptight you begin to feel when real life infiltrates said routine. Today is a Wednesday. My day would have once begun with a lengthy stroll, followed by a breakfast of precisely one hour during which I would scan the free papers and process the day’s news, conversing, if lucky, with a likeminded diner or waitress on various points of interest. Following this, the route back to my house would more than likely lead me to the convenience store, where I would buy non-essentials - when, in this lifetime, will I need a Swiss army knife? or, for that matter, three different brands of coffee? - before returning home and taking a light nap. After the nap - which always manages to spread out of its allocated boundaries like a child’s attempt at colouring - I would locate my library books and return them, taking out no more than four tomes to last me the duration of the week. I would arrive home once more, still full from breakfast, and begin to feast on my words well into the night until the ink and paper became inseparable and I entered that filthy void between sleep and wake.