American Purgatorio by John Haskell Page A

connected to.
    â€œDo what you need to do,” she said, briefly opening her arms.
    And as I watched her arms open and then dangle there against her hips, I thought, Why couldn’t that door also be here? Why did I have to go somewhere? Why couldn’t I somehow see in these things here, or be connected through these things, this other thing I was looking for?
    â€œI can’t tell,” she said. “Are you kidding?”
    Behind her were green trees and behind them was actual sky with clouds. A car drove down the street and then the street was quiet. On a lawn nearby the grass was overgrown.
    â€œAre you coming or not?” she said.
    â€œI probably should be going,” I said.
    â€œOkay,” she said, and she turned and started walking up the sidewalk. As I watched her walk I told myself, This is what I have to do, meaning, This is what I feel, meaning, This is who I think I have to be.

7.
    As I drove around the town of Lexington, it was just me now, just my eyes and my ears and my own intuition, and to facilitate the appearance of that intuition I drove very slowly, unsure where that intuition would be coming from but trusting what I felt, and hoping I would come up with something.
    Anne liked horse racing so I drove to a racetrack on the outskirts of town. I watched the horses practicing on the track, their breath steaming in the cool morning air, and then, because I felt like eating, I drove to a bar and grill. I parked the car on the street and went inside, but the grill part was closed. This was just a bar, low-ceilinged and not that glamorous, a long room, three steps down from the street, and half of its tables had chairs stacked on top of them. It smelled like dead beer, and the floor was sticky. It reminded me of a Polish tavern.
    As casually as possible I sidled up to the bar and ordered—after seeing a man with a Budweiser bottle—the same thing, taking it to an empty table carved with hieroglyphs. The souvenirs on the walls were dusty. I could hear a buzzing, a high-pitched buzzing from somewhere. No one paid attention as I drank, which on the one hand was a relief and on the other was a disappointment. I might as well have not been there. Which, I said to myself, is fine. I drank my beer, glancing at the television perched at the end of the bar. In it, people were doing things and saying things, and they were all in some relationship with each other.
    But not to me.
    Light was coming from the street outside, through the diamond-shaped window in the door, and I walked to the door. It was locked. But it was a very simple thing to just turn the little knob of the lock and push the door open, which I did, and it opened. The morning was almost over, I could tell by the light. There was no one on the street, no cars, and since I felt like walking, I did.
    I found a coffee shop and went inside. Although I’d said thank god for anger, I was saying now, Thank god it was gone. I was glad to be done with it, glad to be sitting at a counter eating a bowl of chicken-vegetable soup. It was cold enough outside so that the windows had fogged up, and I didn’t notice when the man came in, but when the man sat down on the stool next to me I noticed his smell. I looked up and the man had pulled a tea bag out of his coat and was dipping it into a cup. He held it over the cup, watching it drip, and when it stopped dripping he put the used bag into a pocket of one of his coats. It wasn’t that cold but he was wearing two separate coats. He must have sensed me watching him because he turned to me and looked at me and it looked as if he tried to smile. He showed me his brown teeth, several of which were missing, and kept the same expression frozen on his face. His lower lip stuck out like a shelf, as if it was cut, but it hadn’t quite fallen off.
    Then I noticed his stomach, which was swollen, but not from overeating. He wasn’t fat. It was distended, as if something was inside