An Unfortunate Woman. Richard Brautigan
of traveling since he had known her in the later 60s. The last time he had seen her, accidentally meeting, she was living in San Francisco.
Perhaps she was still there.
He decided to call her up from a telephone booth right across the street from the fire. It seemed like a logical thing to do for a passenger whose bus had gone off without him.
What are old former fire-groupie lovers for?
The passenger dialed information and sure enough, she still lived in town. He called her and when she answered, she immediately identified the passenger’s voice, though he had only said, “Hello,” and she said hello back using his given name, which of course was not Passenger.
Though it would have been slightly amusing if she had said, “Hello, Passenger.”
That would have startled and given the passenger cause to think.
But no such thing happened, thank God, and the passenger returned her greeting by saying, “I was just thinking about you.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m watching a building burn down, and I thought I’d give you a call.”
She laughed.
“I’m right across the street from it,” he said.
She laughed again and said, “I just heard about it on the radio. They say the smoke is eight stories high.”
“Yeah,” the passenger said. “And there are three firemen standing at the end of ladders pouring water down onto the roof, but you probably know more about this than I do.”
Again: laughter.
“Well,” the passenger said. “That’s about it. The next time I see something burning down, I’ll give you a call.”
“You do that,” she said.
They both pleasantly hung up.
In the past there had been many exchanges between them that were not nearly as pleasant. The passenger thought about their past together: of first meeting, then becoming lovers, and days and nights together, crossing from one decade into another and then events crumbling away into blank years and the silence of emotional ruins.
The passenger thought about the telephone call that he had just made to her. Somehow it seemed perfect in its bizarre logic.
He never would have made that telephone call if the bus had not driven off without him, stranding him at the site of the fire, which he decided to investigate, having nothing better to do, and being on the calendar map that February Sunday morning of his strange wanderings, which started out innocently enough when he left Montana in late September.
I guess that’s what a passenger’s supposed to do, pass from one place to another, but it doesn’t make it any simpler. About all you can do is wish him luck, and hope that he has some slight understanding of what uncontrollably is happening to him.
Why am I suddenly back in Alaska being driven down a road by somebody who is insisting on taking me somewhere to look at fake totem poles? I guess this is just the way it happens if you have lost control of days, weeks, months, and years.
I’ve seen real ones in the museum of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, but I humor the man who wants to take me to see fake totem poles in Ketchikan, Alaska, because he is a nice man and wants to be a good host, guide, and some fake totem poles are part of his itinerary for me.
As we drive toward the fake totem poles, he tells me about his love life, which in no way did I encourage him to get started on. He has a very complicated love life and I think he wants some good useful advice from me to maybe help sort out and make sense of it.
But I just feel uncomfortable driving along toward some fake totem poles in Alaska. After that night when people asked me what I did that afternoon and I told them, they all said, “Why did he take you out there? Those are fake totem poles,” and I have no answer for them as I had none for the man’s love life.
I could not afford the luxury of a complicated love life. I had a simple love life and often when I have a simple love life, I don’t have any love life at all. I sort of miss it, but the complications all return soon enough, and I find myself occupying sleepless nights, wondering how I lost control of the heart’s basic events again.
We had to walk through some woods to get to the fake totem poles.
The man didn’t talk about his love life in the woods. Instead he gave the local names of the vegetation that we walked through to get to the fake totem poles. As we walked along, it was as if he were reading from a living list, which I would forget as fast as he would check it off.
After a while I wished that he would go back to talking about his love life. At least then I wouldn’t feel guilty if I should forget something.
I’ve never really been very interested in remembering things that did not immediately catch my attention. I think this is a character weakness, but it’s a little late to do anything about it now.
I’ve just turned 47 and I can’t go back into the past and realign my priorities in such a way as to create another personality out of them. I’m just going to have to make do with the almost five decades sum of me.
It may not add up to the total I had envisioned for myself when I was younger and not as warped as I am now, but I just can’t copy a list of plants down that I saw briefly in my mind on the way to some fake totem poles.
The totem poles were very, very fake.
When we drove back to Ketchikan, it started raining. A cold bleak December rain fell out of the sky, and the man went back to talking about his love life, and I felt as if I were slowly shrinking in the car, getting smaller, almost childlike.
The windshield wipers kept even with the rain, but the man’s endless and complicated love life was a losing battle for me. As we drove back into Ketchikan, my feet were no longer touching the floor and my clothes hung about me like a tent.
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