Bhanu Kapil

1 But I was thinking today about our conversation earlier in the summer. Exhausted, you lay your head on the kitchen table and said: “But what’s the difference between a monster and a cyborg? I need something to eat. Do you have any chocolate?” Opening the fridge, I said quietly and perhaps too seriously, trying to impress you: “The monster is that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances.” Her fate. Her body. Great Britain. You said: “So, is Laloo English or British?” I said: “She’s from London.” But the more I said London, the more it sounded like a joke. LondonLondonLondon. 2 I was thinking today about what happens when you keep going in a car. This is something you can only do here. Wish for something. Did you ever do it? Wish you weren’t there? I want that go on, go even though it is unclear to me what happens when you get to the Panama Canal or Idaho. Hitchhiking in Idaho as a veritable child, I was taken in by a farming couple, Fatty and Daddy, a hundred miles or so outside of Boise. Fatty was rail thin, about seventy-five, and Daddy was a big man who had a reclining chair in each room and looked younger than his wife. They picked me up in their truck—I was sitting by the side of the road brushing the knots out of my hair with my fingers—and I stayed with them for five days. They said it was not the right thing for me to be in the open like that, and they took me to eat every day at a restaurant called Country Buffet. In my innocence, I had been walking on a road that led to the country compound of a KKK leader/operative, Charles Reynold. What is an operative? It is someone who is always planning a way in, like the hen-house fox with his beautifully red, bushy tail. Daddy, Fatty, and I hunkered down until Daddy’s nephew, Robert, stopped by on his way through nowhere and gave me a ride to Boise proper, where there was a bus station. I waited until Robert had gone and then I walked out to the main drag to get a cup of coffee and interview murderers. “I can take you as far as the state line.” “That would be lovely.” Obsessed, far from home with its gooseberry patches and grim professions based upon openings at Heathrow Airport or Nestle, the main employers in the dingy part of northwest London that constituted my origins, I said yes. Soft yes to the color green, which is going. 3 That is a tree (going) but also an ocean: a way of being saturated with color that only happens here in your country for me; for you it might happen in another place. Mine. Like Laloo, I lived for many years on an island with congested traffic flows. Thus, a juniper tree flying by the window, intensely blue, or the Atlantic Ocean, to the left, if the car has a destination to the south, such as to The Keys, is magical to me. Improbable in light of my origins. Hers. The girl in the car. I don’t know. I am writing to you, in your special writing dress made from scraps of lace as if it (the dress, the morning of writing ahead of you) is a café; as if, writing, you are hypnotizing not only the biologies of strangers and friends but also yourself. For this reason, when I think of you reading, I think of you as writing blindly. You read but you are also writing. As if my own eyes were closed, I see your white books floating in the sky above my painting of the red girl. These books are separate from my own work, here in the salt-water notebook, but they communicate with it in a nonlocal sense. Like birds. 4 This is pre but the notebook is after. Soaked already at the edge and foamy. Past future. Writing on the warp when dry. Pages. Entries by hand. That is the morning I woke up and walked to the Pacific Ocean, after a night in a motel in Florence, Oregon, complete with a dodgy door and the reality of pillows. The woman at the front desk was wearing a very pretty apron with purple and yellow flowers on it. An expatriate, she said exaggeratedly, oblivious to our common origin: “About four miles. You’re not going to walk, are you? Do you have an umbrella? You can’t go out like that, ducky.” 5 I walked towards the sound of something roaring in a day, the kind of day that is like darkness but lit up, on its forested, proximal verge by gorse, which is a bright yellow flower. Citron-yellow and a kind of tin or silver roofing with holes in it. The day. Like walking in a dreamed landscape drenched with the wrong rain. Monsoon. What kind of rain is this? I recognized the immensity but not the temperature. This was monstrous: the inability to assimilate, on the level of the senses, an ordinary experience of weather. Here is the tongue, for example, constantly darting out to feel the air: what is it? Is it summer? Is it a different season? It’s a different day. That’s okay. Damaged from her travels, in some sense unsettled, enormously anxious, a girl does it anway: gets up and goes. It’s as if the day has a memory of her and not the other way around.

Sex is always monstrous. Blood appears in the air next to the body but nobody asks a question about the body. “Please touch me there. More. Oh god.” For a hitchhiker, the problem of the boudoir is transferred to a makeshift, itchy, unsafe space on the verge of a New Mexico highway. It is often the sex of another era, in which the socks and dress shirt/blouse are not necessarily removed. I hitchhiked in the beginning because it seemed glamorous to me, ultra-American, like a Christian with an entrenched migraine who resorts to brand-name anti-inflammatories when prayer does not do the trick. At first, my encounters on the thoroughfares of your country were quotidian; after all, it is not really hitchhiking to buy a Greyhound ticket three weeks in advance then have a going-away party in a dorm with a banner and balloons. Again, this is an example of departure in another time. As a foreign student on scholarship, it was an ordinary matter to file for an extension for the completion of a thesis on Salman Rushdie’s early works. Nevertheless: “How can we keep tabs on these JI visa holders, who come over here and . . . the university, as an institution, really needs to be more accountable. We need a database and we need a system of checks and balances to make sure any change of address is verified by at least two pieces of information. They need to do their course work and then they need to go home.” I didn’t want to go home. This is a boring sentence. Perhaps for you Oregon is a calming word, evoking images of blackberry pie, ocean vistas, and the capture of suspected felons. I had never heard the word Oregon before. Like the distance of Scotland from London, it seemed impossibly far. A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going. How can I put this? In England, nobody ever, ever, ever did this. I, who once drove straight to Glasgow with a thermos of instant coffee mixed with milk and sugar, in a dinged-up Datsun Cherry, was considered an anomaly. “Are you demented? Why do you want to drive in a car to bloody Scotland? It’s seven hours on the M1, man!” Though, outwardly, I was wan and somewhat reticent, I . . . no, I was. My sexual experience consisted of lying under an elm tree in Hyde Park at the age of seventeen and being told by an undergraduate student of the London School of Economics that my breasts in that position, from that angle, resembled two fried eggs. We were meeting in a park as per the era. I am sure contemporary Punjabi-British teenagers are fearless individuals, undaunted by the prospect of community censure. Back then we met by the iron-wrought gate on a park bench, on a path built for seventeenth-century promenades. It is always a century. In my century, sex was a field of restraint and intensity unsurpassed by anything except drinking coffee in a foreign country like Scotland or Wales and borrowing my father’s car forever. “Are you out of your bleeding head? Your dad’s going to skin you alive!” In some sense, this (driving) is the opposite of hitchhiking, in which the interior of the car is always unfamiliar. The day was real in a different way back then, in the way that it sensitized me to risk, a kind of twin to permisson. Two black swans: that day and this one, history and fiction, what I went for and what I really wanted, which I didn’t know until I got there by which time it was impossible to consider the long journey home as either practical or sensible, considering the trouble I was already in and the rain, which had started to come down in a series of reddish sheets; the streetlamps were pink. On Prince Street, in Glasgow, I saw the sign for American style pizza and went down the steps to the basement café. The tables were coated with green plastic. There was hot tea, which the waitress slung down my gullet with a funnel as I focused my eye on a laminated print of a white, blocky rose with a pink dot at its center. “Charles Rennie Mackintosh,” the waitress, pronouncing “osh” so that it rhymed with horse. “Are you from India?” “Would you like some jam with that scone? I bet they don’t have scones in India, do they?” “More tea? I heard you have a lot of tea, over there, isn’t that right?” Plan b: The extension of my throat. The euphoria of theft. Other countries with their sayings and beliefs. The original plan, formulated by my father during his morning communte across London: marrying a British-born Hindu Brahmin dentist with brown skin, but not too brown, and rosy cheeks. Note on the mantelpiece, tucked behind the marble figurine of Shiva: what is forthcoming under the original plan? Extraction? What kind of sex is possible on the dentist’s chair late at night for that girl, your girl, who nervously asks for a blanket? She has her socks on. She’s shivering. It is sometimes sex when you touch yourself beneath the proffered blanket clearly not washed between patients, but in this scene the limbs of the dentist’s young Asian bride are rigid and smell faintly of wintergreen-scented nail polish or mouthwash. Dad, “please don’t swallow.” Rinse then spit. Spit then swallow. I could not go home and so, after a brief visit to the Hill House—Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s art deco home on the Firth of Clyde, where he painted geometric rosebuds forever in a kind of frenzy, as it seemed from the décor—I turned left and kept driving. I drove my car into the Atlantic and kept driving, my chest very tight beneath the surface. It was difficult to feel anything or really to see, and so I can only say that I went into a damaging ocean. This is going. Damaged, washed up on the mythical shores of New Jersey a few days later, my car failed to start. This is later, when the car stopped, and, looking up from my hands, white-knuckled on the steering wheel, I realized that I was okay. Now I am here, in the future of color. I’m sorry I do not have more to say about the period of submergence that preceded my arrival. I am not interested in it. I do not recall it. I . . . It was only when my car stopped that I realized what I had to do, on my own terms, with my own two legs: get going. Is that how you say it? Get up and go. The destiny of my body as separate from my childhood: I came here to hitchhike. I came here to complete a thing I began in another place. Removing wet pages from my rucksack, I lay them on the shore, securing them with beautiful shells and pebbles. When they dried, I folded them into squares and put them in my pocket, next to my body. Misshapen, exhilarated, I said get. I said go. Get up now and go. “Are you okay?” “Do you need a ride somewhere?” “Let me look in the trunk. I might have something in there. Here you go. You’re shivering! Do you need to go to the hospital? At least let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

1 Reverse the book in duration. What does that mean? I am writing to you. These notes now when it’s too late. 2 If the cyborg you read about in bookstores is an immigrant from Mexico crossing into the U.S. beneath a floodlit court, then mine is a Punjabi-British hitchhiker on a JI visa. This is tunneling as seen from a satellite—sort of concave warp in the dirt of the line. 3 She lives in a house with others, including animals, creating individual spaces of companionship and ardor. What happens when this domestic life grows suspect? When the grass reverts in its granular drag to the subject of architecture: the failure of a house to believe in its occupants? 4 Mate with surfaces. Okay. Hitchhike. Okay. Make a cup of Darjeeling tea and start walking down a sidewalk in America. I saw this in a film starring George Clooney; no, Natalie Wood. The last scene is her, the gamine self, kicking off her shoes as the house explodes behind her. Perpetrating, she doesn’t flinch. Sips tea. Keeps walking. I wanted to write that. Continuance. As it related to loss. The secret pleasure of refusing to live like a normal person in a dress/with a sex drive and fingers/dreamy yet stabilized in the café of languages. 5 I want to have sex with what I want to become. This is a statement related to women arriving in a country it would be regressive to leave. Then, writing, I was filled with a longing for—for what? George-in-the-flesh? George Clooney in Idaho, pretending to pick up hitchhikers as research for his next movie in which he plays a mild-mannered serial killer? No. A different series of acts. Tricky. For example, I’m embarrassed by this book. It makes my blood roar to think of you reading it. So intimate. A text. Then it is a document related to shame flooding the body to make it red. Who doesn’t want to heal a human body? Who doesn’t want a perfect human body? The body of my hitchhiker is, thus, inevitably female or Punjabi, fused to the production of secrets. There are no e-mails home from the e-mail café. Nothing. Phone calls, bullshitting. Sickening. I mean, what is this girl/my girl doing, there in a foreign heartland like a dog with a thumb? My Laloo, about to do it. Don’t do it, little one. Red dress. Don’t get into the car. 6 But then, lit up, a red wife, kind of, not really, she sets out to see things as they are. Describes a virtual countryside. Jumps a box car. Drinks domestic beer. Okay. She does it and I write it down: a damaged eye with votive filaments. (I am writing to you.) “No point in writing home.” Then what?