Interlude: Un-Mappable
Previously: Jeannie, Mark & Paco end day 1 of the investigation. A meeting is planned to gather the students for interviews in the morning.
I’ve always loved maps. I had a huge map of the city on my wall and I’d mark it with places I’d been to, with little notes of things I’d seen and liked. I loved the shape the streets made where the grid was discarded - the little old streets that fucked up the whole plan and confused everything.
I liked seeing how close or far things were in relation to each other. I loved finding our block on Park Avenue and thinking how unfairly small it was on paper as opposed to the view out the window. I loved that view. I loved the way the median changed with the seasons; I’d wait for the tulips to emerge every spring and relish their colors, just as I loved the Christmas trees lit up in perfect lines every winter.
This new city is so much smaller, but everything feels further apart. Is it the hills? It’s like all of us - all put so close together but far apart. I bought a map of this city and felt confused; we’d only been in such a small part of a small part. Patches of green among pale lines and water everywhere. Seeing the scale made everything feel dinky and unimportant, although everything was SO important. All these months later and I still can’t find my way around. But he did, and without a map. He knew every one-way-the-wrong-way street, every twist, every postcard view. He could find anywhere, like a London taxi.
I thought he’d find me here the way he did before. Maybe he will.
No. No he won’t. He won’t. I know he won’t. I’m on my own.
I think of his blue eyes and how they matched the color of the cold blue water — his calm, quiet way of guiding me home. Spellbound. Without a map. Through the un-mappable water.
He mapped me. My entire body with his eyes, his fingers, his mouth. Every afternoon, tracing all of my routes. He directed me, oriented me, righted the way I was tilting like one of those little streets. He paced my breathing like the lap clock I’d swim against. We’d sink into each other. I’d hold my breath and relish being swallowed. Swallowing.
I was always good at breathing, especially under water. I loved the silence of it. The silence and how it held me. The buoyancy. How I didn’t need direction inside of it’s cold comfort, I could leave my maps and my lungs and my body would find the surface every time. Oh how I loved sinking into a pool of silent water.
Silent, like the morning he found me and led me back to shore. The blue of his eyes matching the color of the cold blue water — and then the sun coming up and the way they were streaked with sparkling liquid gold in the cold blue. He looked at me with those blue-gold eyes and warmed my fear. It was blinding. I was charmed, enchanted. I sank inside his fatal smile. I will never forget it.
Nor the way the blue melted away completely in the hot autumn sunset that first time he kissed me. I didn’t even need to teach him how. Kissing him was as easy as breathing underwater.
Unlike the other one who suffocated me with his tongue, choking me. I’ve only ever felt like drowning the times he put his face near mine, expecting. I didn’t know how to give him what he expected. What did he want? Submission? Enjoyment? Praise? He seemed to think that immersion into his drooling mouth was the height of romance. Even a gentle suggestion otherwise was met with further asphyxiation. Like, if I’d just get used to it, if I’d just learn to breathe this way, I’d surely appreciate it and be grateful, as I should have been from the beginning.
Grateful and compliant is what he wanted, not much more than that. Definitely not intellect or conversation. He could be fun though. I loved looking at him in the beginning, before he kept insisting that I should reward him for his notice. How could I reward him? “You know how.” He kept telling me. And they kept telling me he was the best thing I could hope for.
I learned the hard way that any suggestion of displeasure would be met with a full betrayal.
I was hurt at first, but quickly realized this was my chance for never again. To never have to get into his car again or feel his hand holding me down, cutting off my air. I realized I’d come out of it far better than some. Is it weird to be betrayed and feel nothing but relief?
I didn’t run away, but the departure was convenient.
And then.
Summer romance of the briefest, most efficient variety. Warm, pink sky nights next to the Atlantic, bonfires, lobster boils. The ocean rolling aqua green to purple. A boy I’ve always liked but wasn’t ever interested in. A rainy afternoon when everyone else went to the movies.
That was it.
I remembered Jean Seberg’s character Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse — how she wanted to “move the way she moves in the morning.” I knew I wanted that for myself.
If I moved differently no one noticed.
I was pleased, but maybe not pleasured. I was relieved more than anything. Somehow I felt invincible, inviolable, powerful. The other one wouldn’t bother trying now, not that he’d be given another chance to demand a reward. I’d outwitted him. You can’t conquer the conquered.
And then.
Returning weeks later and instead of that one there was the blue-eyed one. Kind. Quiet. Beautiful. Inscrutable. I never told him that I saw him in the pool that day too. I definitely saw him. The pool bright turquoise with flashes of sunlight from the windows above, and his body cutting through the sunbeams. It was like they knew how to light him up just to dazzle me. To blind me. Again.
I realized how much I wanted him and it scared me. I tried to tire myself by going fast and then faster, beating the clock. I was breathing hard at the end of the lane and couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.
When I went to leave, he was waiting for me. Those eyes. He said he’d take me home. Again.
I don’t know when the water changed, when I became unable to breathe inside of its silence. I don’t know when the water went from blue to whatever color this is that won’t show me it’s depths.
I do know he won’t find me here. I know it in the way that I knew that seeing the Christmas trees lit up on the median of Park Avenue last year would be the last time I’d see them. I knew it. And I know this: he won’t find me because I’m not to be found.
It’s not like before. He’ll look but he won’t find.
I wish he would though - I’d love to feel his eyes on me again; his hands, his breath, his body - the two of us making overlapping maps, noting all the places to know and like.
He’ll look, of course he will. He has such a strong sense of justice — wanting to make everything right whenever he can. He can’t often, but he wants to. He wants to rectify it all; rectify himself. Rectify the charming disorder he causes to everything around him just by being himself. It’s how he makes sense of things: order, form, discipline, considered attention. He is the grid imposing control. Of himself more than anything.
This will test him in a way I’m not sure he’s ready for. It will test his faith.
This he cannot control. He cannot bargain or persuade or charm this. And who is there to bargain, persuade, or charm? The Gods?
Now I will always be a mystery to him, something he can’t make sense of. A set of little streets fucking up the grid. Something confused and uncontrolled. Uncontrollable. An un-mappable place in and un-mappable place. Something that cannot be charmed. I don’t want to haunt him, but I will.
I wish I could tell him that there’s nothing. Nothing breathes in this water. I never had a chance.
Not nothing. There is comfort. There is knowing. My mother. My mother from when I have no memory of her: young, healthy, beautiful, smiling, sassy. There are memories. Like his blue eyes and the blue lake and the blinding liquid gold sunrise. There is regret.
I should have told him that I loved him. I don’t know if that’s true, but it feels like it might be. And I did love every moment I spent with him.
That is my regret.
This is going to be difficult for him. For all of them. Not that I care about them — they can wallow in their guilt. These well-ordered streets disguised a snake pit. But he will feel the most guilt and he is the least guilty.
Who is guilty? Who will regret?
They’re already getting it wrong.
Chills and tingles…❤️
Wow!