Ellen
All the while Ellen had been walking around San Francisco, the day had been fine: the sky clear with only an occasional breeze wiping through her clothes to make her bundle up; but since she had decided to go see Sausalito for the first time - because she had always been meaning to but had never actually made it and why not now? Now was as good a time as any to go see Sausalito for the first time – and had made it some distance across the Golden Gate Bridge, she saw the fog rolling in like a pipeline: first enshrouding the end and all the rocks and trails where they once had gone wandering because he was like that: taking her places she had never been like it was nothing to him, just the kinds of things he did, day after day; then surprisingly quickly, curling in to her until she literally couldn’t see two feet in front of her (not ever her own two feet) so she had to stop walking and she had to start waiting for the fog to roll on by like it always eventually did (she knew this because she had always had a view of it from her apartment window and one of her favorite things to do was to sit by the window, watching and contemplating the fog). There was nowhere for her to go, so she stood stock still.
And where was he now? God could only say, or rather, only God could say, she thought, somewhat literarily, or the abstraction that we call God but which is little more than the conglomeration of all of our deep-seated ideological views of what is and what is not, but we call them God anyway because it’s easier to have a single name, a single label, a unified image of all of those things, than trying to hold them all up at once, keep track of them at once, just like you wouldn’t define your own way of talking and the sentences that define your world by listing off a whole list of every word you say, no you wouldn’t, no instead you would just sum it up with the phrase, ‘My Language.’ In the same way ‘God.’ Right? What would he think of that? He would be proud of me because those are the kinds of things he used to talk about a lot, or probably he would secretly be proud of me but because of his nature, he would tell me I was wrong or maybe ‘what if I thought about this,’ which would totally contradict all the things I know he actually believed, or at least all the things he thought about (God knows what he actually believed), but he would do it anyway just to contradict me and by the end he would have me convinced that the other way was right and I just didn’t understand it enough to see how short sighted I was for trying to say it like he would usually say it, and then he would laugh so much because he’d proved me wrong – or is it ‘he’d proven me wrong’? – by proving himself wrong and I never knew exactly how he felt or what was really important to him, but when he wasn’t laughing those suddenly really explosive laughs, he was always brooding: brooding brooding brooding and he would only talk – to me at least – if he wanted to pose me a question, but he never really asked to hear my answer, only to hear himself asking the question and maybe to demonstrate how deeply he was thinking about things like that. But that’s not really how he was either, at least not all the time; I mean, that’s how I remember him the clearest, but sometimes I saw him talking to other girls and he wasn’t brooding at all and he seemed so much fun, so electric, so I knew that he had that in him, at least, but when they weren’t there anymore and it was just us two again, he would get all dark and quiet so I would always tell myself that he was just putting on a show for them but he was his Real self when he was alone with me and that’s why I knew him best.
I knew him best.
She looked around her. The fog was pouring forward steady with no change in visibility. A damp wet began to snake up her back and she wrapped her sweater tighter around her chest, a little shiver rattling her teeth. She tried to look forward but there was no sign that any world had ever existed, or ever could exist in front of her, so she decided maybe it would be best to put off Sausalito for another day and maybe go back to the city, but when she turned to look back to where she had come from, the fog was equally socked in that direction. She could no more easily see a foot or a hand behind her than she could in front of her.
She held up her own hand a foot from her face and could only see it ghosted in intermittent flashes and she thought of his hand and how it felt. He had rarely ever used it to touch her and she had to focus through her hand into the memories of her past like skimming through an old encyclopedia, searching for even just one memory of his touch, which was odd because it was common knowledge among the people she knew who had known him too that he did a lot of touching, a whole lot actually, way too much if you ask me, but why then can’t I remember what he felt like when he touched me? And why then can I remember so distinctly the color of his skin, like a chameleon according to his mood: bright red all full of blood when he was passionate about something and yellow – honest to God, yellow! just like the clichés from cartoons – when he was sick and I swear he could shift from bright and golden when he was being good and helping people and talking about happy things, life-affirming things like dedicating his life to healing other people or bringing clean water to those who didn’t have any; to a dark sweaty pallor, like he had been sitting out all day in the slums of some Mexican village when he was talking about how nothing’s worth anything and its all vanity and greed anyway...but I can’t remember what he felt like?
And if she couldn’t remember that, then what did she have to hold on to now that he was gone? She remembered so many words he said, so many expressions that seemed to just burst out of him, completely in discord to what he was talking about or what was going on around us, like their sources came from somewhere so different, so detached from that moment, or else they were nothing but that moment and at first glance, you couldn’t see anything of his self in the reaction at all, like he was just water reflecting a prism of light or letting the image of the world on the other side pass through without disturbing it or distorting it in the least. And that world - that one he could reflect - that world was still here, still surrounding her! But without him, without his touch...then what did she have any longer? She thought for a moment. She still had her mother and her best friends and the stories they would tell each other and the ongoing struggles like when Sara and Emily would go out together and Emily would like a boy and Sara would see that and she would flirt with him because she could see that Emily wanted him, and for her, boys were always so easy, it was so easy for her to get them to ask for her number and she could see it in their eyes that they were aching for it and maybe she would give it to them, but sometimes she wouldn’t, but sometimes she would just go home with them and call Ellen and Emily in the morning and maybe apologize for leaving early but mostly just suggest in her tone of voice that she wasn’t sorry at all and come on, would you really expect her to act any differently? But the rest of the time, I mean when boys were not involved, she’s so sweet and so cute, getting all flustered about her dress or animals passing by and she’s so fiercely loyal to her friends and no matter what I’ll always be there for her and Emily; and she had her essays, which the head of the department, her advisor’s supervisor, had read and said were really very good and if she kept it up she would have a strong career in academia some day, and how her analysis of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse through an Irigarayan lens was really so spot on, and he always used to make fun of her for liking Irigaray, calling her a mindless reactive who wrote the most pornographic theories she was capable of, not because there was even a shred of insight in them, but only because most of critical theory is made up of rubberneckers, but seriously, could he even once have been supportive of what she was doing? His criticisms always left such a tinny, metallic taste in her mouth and why was he always cutting at her or getting defensive when she tried to offer even the slightest hint of criticism about how he treated her or anyone else and he always had such a reasonable answer – at least cognitively reasonable - but even when he won and there was nothing she felt she could say in response, she still felt like he was wrong because his words just didn’t sit right with her heart. But now she felt that she was being unfair to him because he was really actually so good when he wanted to be and she knew that no matter how long it had been since they had seen each other, he would always surprise her on her birthday and if she called him he would call her right back or the next day with an entirely understandable explanation for why it had taken him a day to get back to her...but what did it matter now? He would never be calling her again, even if she lived to have 200 birthdays.
Ellen heard through the fog, the sound of a chain, rolling, clanging towards her. It sounded like a bicycle, but who could possibly see well enough to ride a bicycle through all of this fog? A body could, as easy as nothing, lean a little too far right and careen straight off the bridge into the bay below. But the sound kept coming, closer and closer. Suddenly she was terrified. What if the biker couldn’t see her and slammed straight into her? What if he or she – it must be a he: only a man would ride a bike so recklessly through fog like this – ran her over or broke her bones and she couldn’t get back? What if nobody came to help her and she was left worthless, broken and lost, unable to ever get off the bridge, to die out here where the wind sweeps from the ocean and comes alive, takes on substance and wraps everything: people, trees, cars, buildings, even mountains, in its awful embrace like death, and swallows everything whole without remorse or a single human feeling?
A biker flew by her, giving her about two feet of leeway, cutting the fog as if it were not even there. She knew he was male for she could hear his deep panting breath - the deep breath of a man with a low voice - as he passed, but she couldn’t see him: even two feet was enough to keep him completely concealed in the fog. She imagined it was him. She imagined his ghost, or even his body itself – she couldn’t imagine him as a ghost, he’d always had too much substance to ever be reduced to something as subtle as a ghost – passing by without a helmet on, laughing as he went, burning forward across the bridge, into the future: to some place he wouldn’t tell her about, he wouldn’t invite her to, he would only describe, years later, in a story that sounded like paragraphs of it had been lifted from the 1001 Arabian Nights, or else from ancient didactic fairy tales in which each character is actually a metaphor for some deeper human condition, and she wouldn’t believe him – it was impossible to believe him because he was always saying how he didn’t think any story in the history of the world was remotely true, or else how everything, no matter how absurd, and the absurd were always his favorites, was more than true because only real life could inspire somebody to say anything, anything at all – but she couldn’t not believe him either, so she just listened and dreamed and thought about all the possibilities there are in the world and she loved him because he either lived some of those possibilities, or he didn’t live them, but knew enough about them to talk about them and to bring them to life through storytelling, and if she wasn’t going to be with him while he was out doing all that living, then listening to him telling stories had to be the next best thing, the closest thing she was ever going to get, unless...
The sound of the bike faded off across the north side of the bridge, towards Sausalito. Ellen still stood still, unable to try for either end. She thought briefly of feeling her way to the railing and following it back to land, but she couldn’t. She was getting terribly cold and she was scared, too scared to even feel her way along. So she stayed put. So she stayed exactly where she was.
Maybe the fog would clear. Maybe? Of course the fog would clear; it was just a matter of how long it would take before the fog would clear.
What would she do in the meantime?
Wait?
Touch her body.
Touch her body, for it was the only thing reliable at the moment, and the only thing that made it reliable was the sensation it gave her as she felt the touch of her own fingers caressing over her clothes and then under her clothes along the bare skin of her chest and stomach: some confirmation mixed with a muted pleasure, like a quietly religious joy coming at the recognition that she was of the flesh, that she could touch her flesh, that her flesh could be touched, that she could be touched, that she was concrete and on the surface of the Earth and that she could be touched, and while being touched, she could feel it. She felt her touch. She felt it.
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