#78 – TUNNELS

I drove, and I was there and I as not there. I drove as if I had the answers to these pressing questions – why Bruce Bacon had leaped off a high bridge just now when he was to join us in Vermont – why Cousin Margaret has just died on a respirator, her skin red and black, her head the size of a basketball, after announcing she wanted to die because of what they had done to her sexually and otherwise, why Cousin Deirdre chose this time to announce having been raped by her sadistic, gun-toting brother, my cousin Paul, and wasn’t Paul’s death probably suicide? These connections to the betrayal that was coming to light. Betrayal.

All this almost easy to put out of mind at moments while driving, looking staight ahead and to left and right at the soft nature around me.

I drove with the sure knowledge of what had happened even if I could not access the specifics. Why would I have cried, not able to stop, in front of Jocelyn when we were in bed watching the Truffaut, movie Small Change in which it comes to light the despised schoolboy in Lyon lives in a a nightmare home where he is battered. Then removed from the home. The part bringing tears being where the smart and caring schoolmaster explains it to the other children.

Light being shown on what had happened, and it was not so bad as the not-knowing could be. The not knowing and the not wanting to know. There was no light there. That was how it was with all these blood relations of mine whom I had never quite trusted anyway, even way back when it had seemed safest to be part of a family. Even back then when I did not tell even myself about my lack of trust.

As I drove now I found myself back in a zone I had been in these past months – as if I had stepped through an unseen curtain and everything was different on the other side. Dark. Black and dark colors. A world that existed in tunnels and other underground passageways. Mazes of dark places.

It was as if up here in the soft green mountains and their foothills I was an emissary from the steel trap world I had entered when the point came where I had know or I would die too – an emissary from that world which I had entered like entering a new dimension when I was at those meetings, or creating verbal pictures of the visual images in my head, or looking at certain works of art, or at familiar places. Or attempting love, or fantasizing an attempt, with some vaguely familiar woman.

That was how it had felt. These soft dark passages, very dark reds and greens and dirty yellows and heartless blues.

The dark underground world was all around me even as I listened to music. Even when tucked away under that train of light there were these dark tunnels.

And over them this train of light when I was listening to Haydn or Handel, or looking at Deibenkorn or Constable, or being one of this group I had been in for nine months, with people who could fit my life at any time, some of them rejects I was tempted to reject too.

In the group, sometimes it was like I was I visitor to another planet. And then I was a Martian too. A Martian driving now in Vermont.

And something else new in these past months – a calm coming over me.