Carla Harryman
A Sentimental Journey
1. Notes
Re: timing in getting out of seat on a clacking train—lurch braced. Waves of temporal chop-chop. Neither numeric strictly. Or otherwise chronological. But disarray will not entirely avoid sequence, or reliance on start-ups, or the power in numbers. Events of realism. Plunging to below radar. A wig on the floor, smashed. Broken clock as meditation object. Where does one have to be? The rocks of thought = anecdotal phantasm. Don’t forget the pigeon hole, or stepping into the man’s shoes, worn down from long isolated treks. (His feet were on the small size, but they don’t fit of course—is this something I will need to remember?) Autonomy and its shadow. A plane lands subject to drone strikes. Throwing a dog a blanket.
2. The lone, the singular
Imagining the solo ride, but resisting its narratable habits whenever she recalls that tired figure of literature, male in outline. He has abandoned authority over something in the process of reflecting on his human fallibility. In a landscape story often featuring mountains. Travel is the trope in her anti-triste, that will yet not abstain from fabulated romance. Potential film images: toe-heel strips of wire. Then successions of sunflower fields, donkey carts, common fencing, village walls, cows, barricades, and back to base: camera shoot as there is a story behind the camera too. A plate of salmon and fennel. They had crossed over a few national borders by the time she had seen that where I had been was documented. Not just surveilled tracked recorded.
3. Travelling to beat the snow
At the checkpoint lodge she takes a moment to write I overheard the officer saying to a subordinate that he had been detained. No one else was to be held overnight. Spanish was the dominate language. Of course there was a round head in a gray helmet who needed that document. Or else you will stand for a while. Goodbye. Your shoes please, and then here are another’s. A list gurgled on the lips. A gutter mouth, back there in the time left open. On the train. The train. The plane. The train. The plane. The train, clacking and then in highspeed superscript leaving English alone. She is and you are but not necessarily at the same time in Europe. With an uneventful detour to North Africa. Or in Detroit. Which runs through this written thing. A river and its evaporation.
4. Warning voice
Which betrays her interest in pausing to see what’s going on at a Budapest train station. Would these solo flights train her toward some novel insight? She is dragging luggage, those books, making grating sounds on worn flooring and trembling in forearm as fatigued muscles fight orders. While national policy harasses several dozen Roma camped out in an open cement space, wielding power over open food containers, strewn clothing. This is where a friend chimes in, warning her to keep going, don’t look. But the friend is not there. She travels with the gift of such warnings, a dog, but is stalled in not knowing where I am. There’s a ramp, a stair, a woman in a red shawl, their eyes not meeting, hers tracking police who pay no heed as they intimidate the shawled woman and others into leaving the station, city, country. This is not the first time she has debarked at the wrong stop. This kind of error has its familiar, even friendly side, a yes, we’ve met before.
5. Before one thing but after another
Having gotten on the wrong flight, landing in Cairo was less complicated than expected under the circumstances. Arriving later at her true, almost anonymous destination, anonymous in the sense that she hadn’t told many people she was going there, she was too buzzed to look at posters, search out weeklies, ask about the hotel’s restaurant menu. In the elevator, a wavy blond wig slouched in the far-right corner. It attracted and mildly disgusted her, but she didn’t touch it or act like it was there as someone beefed up, ruddy neck entered the elevator on the next floor. Is the custom here that people talk on elevators or look down? At another pair of sneakers.
6. She slept well enough
Dreaming of her mountain entanglement. The solo male on his proverbial self-reflective journey. How would she represent this romance to her scattered friends? That she wished to say something about pines raked up the side of slopes caused her to imagine she’d run low on friendship. She jots will I go back to my country by choice, not because this is a novel thought but because she wants a record of this particular instance of having thought it. She realizes that whatever its veiled meanings, her bringing up the mountain lover to a stranger on a train may relieve this person in the seat next to her of an anxiety about her being without some defining object. The dog doesn’t count. Or whether or not she is a godparent. Banishing such thoughts at the outbreak of war. But there was also the incident with border patrol not believing in her passport and the stranger stationing himself where the patrol could see him watch. Later she tolerated his trading seats, trying to hold her hand. Then something relaxed the scripted scenario when the dog yipped in the carrier nestled between her legs and seat.
7. Transported elsewhere
Now she is laughing with the stranger in their shared space as they note their having exchanged secrets about their family life, their projected futures, the hopes of joining an architectural firm in Austria, not spending money on restaurants, books with enough (mostly inferential) sex to keep them interested in a narrator’s messed up head—while around them people on cell phones work out deals, fight with their parents, charge their lovers with neglect and betrayal, make up. By the time she gets to her station, the train car is almost empty. An abandoned book by the poet RC on the stranger’s vacated seat joins books in a satchel now slung over her shoulder as she descends the train, on her way to the plane.
8. Late arrival
She apologized to the person on the nightshift. I got on the wrong plane. You took the wrong one? The nightshift asks, mumbling into the book they are reading to while away the frozen hours. Fortunately, I made it without complication. The nightshift turns their book, The Fury Archives, face down on the spine, looking straight up at her in a pretense of not being puzzled. Was this person mistaking them for someone else? Someone who needed to know about delay? She asks, “Will there be Russians in the hotel?” The nightshift doubted that they had understood the question, but they replied anyway. Everywhere you look, you know the war is not very popular. I have to charge you extra for the pet.
9. Sketch
Down the street a gong resonated at her window. The welcome window. Opened to languages she didn’t know. However, this next conference held in lingua franca would have more angles, more disciplines than the last. Though her ambition in gathering knowledge begins in wishing to form a general impression, she would be drawn to texture and detail. Whimsy tempered with gravitas scrawled on an index card: philosophy licked by Fluxus, Suzanne Césaire’s missing plays, demotic touchdown, fake citations. At the afterglow, a touring luminary poet declaimed that if one were to use similes they should be outrageous. Her hangover was like false understandings regions propagate in order to sustain viability. Or being homesick.
10. Social flop
Out in the foyer with the bewildering high ceilings that seem to have missing chandeliers, the philosopher, a statuesque woman with a firm look advises her to not worry too much about what she had lost. Though she thought they had been discussing what had been left behind. Are there holes in my beanie? She explained again. The just-previous conference site with a view of the Mediterranean had swept her sensorily onto the wrong plane. Over her voice the philosopher was saying it happens and it’s going to happen, speaking to someone behind her. Was it a reference to that goon on the TV screen, losing his toupee? She was in earshot but talking to no one as she remarked there is a closeness shared not signaled in the divisive news. Then, to avoid the appearance of droning on, she took the elevator to the third floor.
11. Maybe basketball
Out in the hall she noticed a woman gripping a large orange ball as she looked for room 321. It was too late to catch up to her—someone she thought she had met once—at a party in Berry Gordy’s mansion. Introduced as the last of the sisters to have reached the moon. In any case, it made sense that she was abroad.
12. Cannot move backward or forward
In this early morning, stalls. For time before descending to breakfast. Retrieves from a phrase her satchel. Thick paperback, faded cover, pleasing type. The gong again. Halo of communicative tones. Resonance in something less. Settled. Peaceful.
13. Amalgam
As I lay me down for morning nap, Esperanto and on the other hand languages that belong only to a few children through thin walls. Just before she went under, a phrase. They snow. Can’t rush through snow. Clouding thoughts. Then a reverie of night sky: back in the cold country against a backdrop of clattering heating units. Orion’s Belt appeared as the clouds evaporated.
14. Ambient address
This is an instance in which a song eats a cover. An offering, not last year or last week’s catastrophe or today’s bombing broadcasts swiftly replaced with some more palatable local accident. It had not yet started to snow and the clouds had stretched, separated. There were Orion’s three belt holes, yes. The Pleiades, too. It was when she tilted her head back with chest raised and the clouds untidy, separating, that she had felt lightheaded. Something that never happens. And sang to her mother who was no longer alive to call her back to ground. A certain freedom in movement tips seven sisters. Then the song recurs with new lyrics. Greetings from serious. I mean cirrus. Seriously. Desk of clouds. Is its first verse.
15. Back in the lobby
A desk clerk asked her if she had overheard the conversation. Or if she were part of it, communicating that you deal with me and I’ll respect your privacy. She had thought she was to have asked the questions. A spy trips up detective work. It doesn’t matter. When a fury cannibalizes Orpheus’s melodic trek, she bets on her dignity with nonsense: chatbot is pestering me, and I am getting ahead of things. Erasures open up pictures tipped into faint replies. The dog requests a walk. The desk clerk tells her the border is blocked.
16. The book with pleasing type
Placed on the slick desk, next to the stack of index cards, two ballpoint pens and a heap of clothes and toiletries freed from a small overstuffed bag. This was the book of the other philosopher, from the blah first conference, the one who mistook her for a literary agent. When she said she was consulting on an exhibition, he thought she meant a book display. They were on career tracks he needed to define subjectively. A shoe got stuck in the track as she tried to retrieve their conversation from the pages of the book. Move and leave the shoe. Why did this effort seem tinged with excess stigma instead of it being just hilariously stupid? A game seeking its rules. Hand and eye played their role in missing what he had tried to convey. And leaping. Coordination of past principles was—what? Something less mysterious than one made it out to be. Here, here. Look. At the messy desk. Symptomatic of writing fetish. The dog-lump under the blanket.
17. Notes
Even when they are being beaten to death by cops, the Pentagon protects the ground they are kicked on. Isadora Duncan’s Dance of Furies. Renunciation of citizenship forms. Temptations along these lines. The quote, “An old western drove me out of town.” Unpersuasive explanations for one’s actions that seemed necessary at the moment. S for sustained inquiry into the myth of Orpheus. Heading down, out, in. Now. The old problem of the shoes, one left behind and the other—not yet trashed. Willingly. In Detroit, mounding, stationing, strewing retrieved shoes among the once-abandoned Heidelberg Street lots, now refashioned as reparative art.
18. Weight
The body springs into action with alacrity, a sense of promise or arrival. Which differs from the clunky shifting of weight after having been seated for some hours and then trying to balance on the clattering old train. Not tripping on the untied shoelace. Not stepping on the sleeping dog. Then exhaust of binary pronouns at departure gate. Fatigues blocking some gates but not others. Patches of unnerving head trips. Mind fucks. Tests of belonging. In two places. In two pieces, we think.
19. The day before departure
Experienced on the fringe of civic consciousness. It’s unclear who belonged on the walkway of the D. museum, where the concept (of museum) used to range around random handshakes and nods. “But what do you think of the piece?” “You mean the structure, its impact on nothing-space?” “An old western drives the figure out of town.” “Nobody watches them anymore.” “Metaphor’s disregard of creaturely existences…” The ceaselessly iterative piece, “Everything is Going to be Alright” flattened in neon lettering on the institutional façade facing the main boulevard. Wedged between churches, misread as “Everything is Going to be Airtight.”
20. To be liminal
A mind of winter. Or water. Or the winter or water of late capitalism. Which is closer to eternity? Will a poem survive capitalism’s winter waters? A question splashing out of an artifact from another era. Now nuclear option loose ends a white truck passing. A figure shouting from the barrel void it, the debris. One entity and her double are engendered in a slice of waiting. So she turns her attention to the hallway, the room number 321, the keycard clasped in her pocket as if it were a can of mace. She silences her ringing cell. Her hands are cold and the hallway, old. Bach wafting toward her in a trail of illicit smoke. Then someone in room 322 turns up the hip-hop. The heat goes on as she enters the room, the one to which she has access with her keycard.
21. Back in the D. again and again
Making note of an event at addressed “to me”: you drive the smoothed lava of Lodge. Moderne sound barriers give way to Wyoming exit. Snaking up to it, stopped traffic going North. You lucky you, it’s going North. Then everything Southward stops. A twenty-two year old woman at the wheel, weaving in and out of traffic at high speed slams into the noise barrier. A teen and older woman in back seat. You follow those exiting, making unwieldy J-turn up a hill on the edge of the freeway, flowing in the opposite direction as stalled traffic, then turning sharply, sound of broken faded road mass, going slow, slow through weedy neighborhoods. In a car with lucid dials and numbers. Stained satellite dishes perched on fringe of house, here and there. Others boarded up, shredding away.
22. Unmoored
Space between nobody home. No cars. A bent bike. Sunlight bounces off grit clouds sink into, swarm out of. It is impossible to say what this city is, you stripping nature’s pushback with through-lines. Its built world dust and knee-high weeds its tired or marvelous mayhem. Which music behind doors, shut? Its worn and glossed aspects, some jolting, on the way to the university. As buildings get dense and kept up, you turn a familiar corner where cars line one side of a street and a black Mercedes turns out of an alley almost hitting your not-as-impressive vehicle. You pass the Alright neon on the way to a memorial celebration. Then inside. We are too many for the table so we made it into kindling. Chop-chop humor. Fires up the common. Place.
23. The account includes
The beginning of a narrative she said she had gotten on the wrong flight. Then the spy clerk at the next reception desk logs into her laptop as she makes an overseas phone call, fumbles with country codes. People in view of her phone call shake hands. Please don’t be a stranger. When she returns for her computer, hammering herself for having forgotten it my idiotic distracting diving, the clerk hands her a wiggling plastic worm. What’s this? “Kids like these,” says the spy. “I left my computer here, on the desk.” “Is this it?” asks the spy retrieving it from a shelf under the clerk desk. “I recommend you change the password. I cleaned off the finger and pawprints.” The threat quivers in small bursts of something close to but not exactly chatbots. She tried to channel a warning-voice across the Atlantic though she doesn’t know how to represent the romance to her scattered friends. The account includes a dog whiling away the time half-sleeping in room 321, waiting for a walk.
24. It is the best place to stay
To avoid a chill. Chill as in surrounding fog and mood and death. Nerves on edge, as in I’m chill in order to get someone to stop focusing on you. The picture on the postcard she left on the desk is of a hotel, in washed-out colors. Welcome to dim blue affordable lifestyle if you have a job that pays. The message on the back of the card is written in pale red ballpoint ink. The writing lurches back and forth across the card. The small letter a is tiny and the lowercase l is outsized, loopy. “Almost time to meet up,” it says. Following the a and l the u is tiny and the p has a long flouncy stem. Then. “Time has a tacky tongue.” It lifts that thing off the cardstock and swallows it up. Later, the back of the card is used to give the philosopher who mistook her for an agent an address. He emails every year from the capital with a request she has blocked.