Hejira
I dream of vast horizons: exact, flawless, straighter than any natural thing. I dream of seamless skies, luminous clouds, shimmering fields, and distances that retreat into infinity.
I listen for sounds so faint they have traveled inches, miles, light years to reach my ears. Sounds as familiar as the wind rubbing leaves together on autumn trees, the dry bark of a dog, the prolonged twang of a cicada. Sounds foreign to me now.
My dreams carry me into landscapes bereft of people and machines, populated only by silence and the blank, immediate awareness of animals.
The door swings open, I pass through, it sighs shut behind me. The babble outside — people’s voices, cars idling, planes accelerating for take-off — is silenced. Within the glass walls of the airport all is cool, all is muted.
On the slick marble floor my shoes go click, click, click, sharp sounds of punctuation and purpose. In my left hand is a suitcase, a bag hangs from my right shoulder. In it I carry notebooks, pencils, a diary, maps. In my imagination I am already across the ocean, anticipating the crush of descent, the trip completed.
Past the porters, the money changers, I stride through the building which is as large as a stadium, as grandiose as a museum.
Further along, the walls converge and the path in front of me narrows. I glance at my watch: 5:43 p.m.; my plane leaves at 8.
I feel light, buoyant as I move through the terminal. Glancing around at the vacu-formed plastic chairs and the gleaming chrome tables it seems to me the place is nearly empty. Straight on I walk, towards the white rectangular booth where a man sits, slightly elevated, so that when he says, “Passport, please,” to the person ahead of me, his eyes flick down in a manner that seems dismissive.
A curt nod and it’s my turn. My hand moves to the breast pocket of my suit. Reaching for passport and papers, it closes on … nothing. Identification, wallet, visa — all gone. The man in the booth shakes his head, his face grim and humourless. Possessed of the heavy neutrality of civil servants, weighed down by memos, rules, regulations, more difficult to shift than belief, he is immoveable.
I make phone calls, send messages, but as the hours stretch into days, the calls go unanswered, the messages aren’t acknowledged. Perhaps, it occurs to me, the messages are intercepted, the phone calls cut off.
Time gapes. I sit, suitcase on the floor between my feet, and think backwards instant by instant. Did someone brush against me in the airport, pick my pocket? No, there wasn’t time. Did I leave my passport and wallet in the taxi? As I climbed out of the taxi I remember glancing back and in my mind’s eye I see the taxi’s scarred red vinyl seat staring back at me, empty. Maybe the hotel room? But I went over it before I checked out; anything left in that generic space would have caught my eye.
Panic thickens my blood, twists my stomach. How can I get out of here? Weeks stretch in front of me. What will I do? Where will I sleep, what will I eat?
In time my suitcase becomes a makeshift pillow. I doze in fits and starts. Inevitably I wake up, still here, in this place delimited by seamless walls, weightless ceilings, this place of concrete and steel. I start to forget I have lived anywhere else — amnesia induced by vending machines, plastic-wrapped food, muzak. It seems as though I have always lived among these aisles of chairs, these acres of waiting areas. Listened, waking and sleeping, to the droning, carefully modulated, muffled, incomprehensible voices that float anonymously through the air.
I forget that the desiccated tomato, sliced and wedged between two pieces of slightly stale white bread, ever swelled and blushed in the sun. I forget the tomato stems are tough and fibrous as hemp, how the leaves prick your skin when you reach in to pick one. I grab firmly and tug until it snaps free. When I pull it from the tangle of leaves and shadows it is plump, soft and red. I offer my prize for inspection; her hair falls in a shimmering curtain.
The end of summer, heat weighs the day down, pulling it towards sunset. In the corner of the yard a birch tree bends under the burden of the heat, its leaves still. A sprinkler coughs in the next yard and drops of water, as round, silver, and singular as drops of mercury, shoot through the air. People inhabit shadows, their voices distant murmurs. The smells of burning charcoal and cut grass hang in the air. My daughter, her yellow hair a shining echo of the sun, digs tunnels and riverbeds in the mud of the backyard and sends nasturtium leaves sailing away on the water.
But this memory, which may be an illusion, is certainly a luxury here, where people come and go endlessly. Time is a formality that has been dispensed with. There is no lull, no period set aside for eating or sleeping. There is only the constant stream of people; the sounds of their steps is a supplication, a prayer for a better life. They believe that the last place can be shucked off, left behind like an old skin, that a finer, newer place waits for them at the end of the trajectory they’re traveling.
I hear some of their stories, tales of displacement and destruction. I hear them again and again, until where I am — this location of dislocation — seems more certain and permanent than anywhere else in the world.
“On the third day the pirates threw my father and brother into the sea,” a girl tells me. Slender as grass, she has skin the colour of weak tea. Her long black hair is impassive as still water. “The sharks ate them.”
“My son disappeared.” The girl is gone, in her place sits an old woman, her skin webbed with lines and cracked as earth in a dry riverbed. Her voice is the wind that sighs through the Andes. “When the village priest began to ask questions, he, too, disappeared.”
There are so many people here, so many stories that sometimes I think I’m dreaming them. I dream the people moving along corridors carrying their baggage — their bundles, pouches, furoshiki — and heavier than their possessions, their stories. They have escaped from where they were, hoping to leave behind pain and danger. But after they have worn out the shirts and pants they wear now, their saris and sarongs, they will still be carrying their stories and memories, longer and more complex.
During the times I dream these people I can’t conjure up my daughter. In this place she is as unlikely as sunlight at midnight, or hope in the midst of despair.
Things change, things disappear. I realize I haven’t seen my suitcase for days. I don’t know when it vanished. I can’t remember the last time I set my weight against it to heft it from a chair.
I recall some of the clothes that were in it. I would open it surreptitiously sometimes and pass my hands over the fine cotton shirts, the cashmere sweaters.
But those clothes are gone. Now I wear left-overs and cast-offs, jeans, a t-shirt, a sweatshirt. You might see me on many streets in towns and cities around world. I have been absorbed by the ubiquitous, the democracy of dress has made me invisible.
Maybe some of the people who pass through here have taken my suitcase and clothes. Once that idea would have bothered me.
My former life dissolves, floats away from me in pieces as the contents of my suitcase are borne away from me on the river that flows through here, carrying these people past me. The shirts I once owned, the pants, bob on the water, colourful shapes shrinking as they retreat into the distance.
Occasionally I receive letters from my family. Passing strangers hand me envelopes with my name scrawled on the front. The envelopes, when they arrive, are grey and creased from having passed through many hands.
It happens suddenly, when I’m least expecting it. Intent on a meal or a conversation, I will be surprised to find a person standing in front of me, someone I’ve never met, with an envelope in their hands. Some of these people meet my eyes, smile, and hand me the envelope. Others avert their glance, avoid meeting mine, and push the envelope at me as if they are angry or frightened.
They wear many different kinds of clothing. One woman was wrapped in a kimono, one man wore tattered jeans and a t-shirt that had save the whales printed on it. Some are adults, some are children. They speak to me in light, chattering languages, or heavy guttural ones. A few laugh as they hand me the envelope.
I don’t know how they get the envelope. This has never been explained to me.
I don’t open the letter immediately when I get it. Instead, I imagine what is inside, a page of lined paper folded three times, scrawled over with loopy writing.
My daughter bends over a pad of paper, her blonde hair falls down, shielding her face. She turns once in a while to talk to someone out of sight. Then there is a hand on her shoulder, a head of dark hair beside hers. They both read what she has written, a finger points here, follows a line and taps on the page there.
When I read the letter what I want to know isn’t in it. I want to know how they look in the morning, asleep. But who can tell me that? I remember my daughter sleeping, pink cheeks, her hair tumbling in an indecipherable script around her head. And the other — my mind pulls away. It is too painful. To consider how things might be I am forced to admit what they are not. Loss does not exist until absence is acknowledged.
Instead, I am told about matters of importance, so out-of-the-ordinary that I can’t put them in context, they mean so little to me. Or I am offered pallid reassurances: “We miss you, we think about you all the time.”
This isn’t what I want to read. I want to know what the first thing was they saw when they woke up in the morning, what the weather was like, the colour of the sunlight that morning, the sounds of their voices. How can they describe what the house smells like? But that is just what I want to know. When I breathe those mingled smells of coffee, toast, and them I know exactly where on the planet I am. Like a salmon, I could find my way home by sense of smell.
Tell me inconsequentials I want to demand. But I don’t write back because I suspect that if I did the letters would be confiscated; read by strangers who have enough information about me already — dates, amounts, conversations. I don’t want to reveal anything more.
There are days I become convinced that the letters I receive are fabrications, that a man sits in a wood-panelled room and writes them. The rest of the time I accept them for what they seem to be — bulletins from a distant place, a world I used to inhabit.
Sex rears its head. Where? In washrooms, behind heavy doors marked “Employees Only,” beneath deserted counters. The episodes are quick and fleeting, an intensity of sensation. I think of nothing.
So many variations: the smells of skin, of sweat; the sounds of pleasure, pain, perhaps of loss; the flavour of lips, tongues, hair; the textures soft or rough, resistant or yielding. They all melt into one experience: hunger, then cessation. It’s as if, when I haven’t been touched for weeks, I begin to dissolve. A gust of wind could whip through these aisles, upsetting papers, kidnapping conversations, and carry me away.
I search for someone who, touching me, will confirm my existence, re-invent my skin. Contained, I take form. I discover myself at the ends of others’ fingertips, or wrapped in their arms. Their flesh, their breath, their wounds affirm my own.
A can of soda being opened — a sudden pop and then the hiss of escaping air.
For a year I have lived here, stranded in an airport, audience to the passing world.
At one time I spent my days listening for the pop that would signal my release, that would indicate my words had reached the right ear. I imagined the grim man in the white booth nodding at me, saying, “You are free to go.”
For months I spent each day waiting in an excess of patience. At night I dreamed of empty spaces, but no more.
Now I watch the people — the people who were invisible to me when I first arrived here. I watch those who walk with the sharp intensity of purpose, and those who drift along hoping to travel through unnoticed. There are those who stagger under their burdens, and those who are cautious and wary.
I begin to recognize the people I couldn’t see before. I hear their words in my mouth, words strung into stories that flow through me to other people. Stories offered in comfort or to reassure. I see them wearing my clothes. I wrap myself in their serapes.
Their memories melt into mine. I disappear into the people who were invisible to me in the past.
And at night silence opens around me, no longer the voice of emptiness. Now I dream of the passage of swallows, black silhouettes as they swerve and loop through the singing sky. Their flight describes what is denied me, and in it I read my deliverance.
Melanie Dugan
1992