Silas Jones

The Weekend Trip

• In Connecticut, Sally made an offhand reference to the fact of her mother’s passing. Actually, what she said was, “she died,” and they were barely even in Connecticut. They had just passed the sign that said, WELCOME TO CONNECTICUT. Daniel studied the backside of the sign, which said nothing, and as it shrank away in the rearview, he tried to understand why, over the course of their how-many-years-long—what, relationship? Yes, he guessed that was what you would have to call it—relationship, Sally had chosen the present moment to share with him this needful fact. Sally signaled left, then merged left. Daniel tried to recall something he’d once heard someone say about the inability of men—natal men, presumably—to sit with sadness. He couldn’t remember who’d said it, only that it had been a girl, short haired, and that she’d been smoking a cigarette, one of Sally’s. “That’s really sad, Sally,” he said, finally. “Well,” said Sally, “I mean, you know, it happened a long time ago.”

  Had Daniel ever behaved ungratefully towards his mother, in front of Sally? He wondered that. Had he ever complained to Sally about his mother or—and this was worse somehow, although he couldn’t explain exactly why—complained about his mother to someone else, within Sally’s earshot? It seemed very likely that the answer, to every question, was yes, often, a number of times. Because Sally had, after all, met Daniel’s mother, just once, in passing. Although in fairness, every interaction with Daniel’s mother seemed to occur in passing because whenever she visited him in the City, all she wanted to do was rush around, pointing out places where old things used to be and new things that hadn’t been there before. Every block they walked down she recognized at first and then, on second glance, didn’t. Her reasoning—the quality of light, an incorrect orientation to the river—struck Daniel as impressionistic at best and yet he believed her when she said those three little words, “not far now…” Daniel’s mother repeated them like a name or a line of poetry she hoped to remember. They hung momentarily in the air ahead, then fell and skittered away down the sidewalk, like a dollar bill on a fishing line. Past a ludicrous number of her former apartments and her former boyfriend’s former apartments, Daniel followed his mother closely, for she was liable to step into traffic if she spied on its far side a familiar facade or one of the street corners where she’d had once—in some cases, twice—been mugged. “But I never, ever let go of my purse!” She’d say, slapping one hand flat against some wall she’d long ago been thrown up against. (“Or was it that one?”) In this way, crossing and recrossing streets, they zigzagged their way into affluent neighborhoods that had been, at one time, hip, and before that, outerborough. 

  And Larry would be there too, walking always a few steps behind, speaking only when spoken to and sometimes not even then. Occasionally, he would stop to tap one knuckle against the pale cold flank of some government building. “Tuckahoe Marble,” he might say, “Portland Granite. To the untrained eye, this might look like Italian Travertine, but it is, in fact, of Turkish origin.” Daniel found Larry particularly difficult to tolerate in urban environments. 

  He, Daniel, did consider himself an angry person—anger was characteristic of natal men—but it was anger he felt when Sally, who’d spotted them downtown from a block away and run to catch up, introduced herself with exceptional gusto, first to Daniel’s mother and then to Larry, whom she mistook for Daniel’s dad. Asking questions, acting fascinated, Sally had walked with them while Daniel lagged behind, winded and petulant, as far as the library’s central branch. There, in the early nineteen nineties, Daniel’s mother claimed to have been relieved of her wallet on two occasions. At the center of the library’s wide limestone steps, she told both stories twice while Larry, some distance away, inspected the slab beneath Sally’s feet for evidence of fossilized life. 

  In Connecticut, the trees were almost leafless now. A succession of fenced-in backyards click-flickered past the passenger window, like segments of a train racing the interstate north. Sally pressed an unlit button on the dash, which remained unlit. The lights on the dashboard only worked when the Camry’s radio was on, and the Carmy’s radio had recently been stolen, pried out one night when someone—Sally, Daniel hoped—had forgotten to lock the door. Now, it was impossible to tell whether any of the car’s features were functional unless their material effects were immediately apparent. You wouldn’t know, for example, if the heat or the AC was on until you felt the hot or cold air on your face. More than once, Daniel had borrowed the Camry and driven at length—after dark, no headlights—without realizing his mistake. 

  Had he known about Sally’s mother and simply forgotten? Daniel wondered that. He was, afterall, prone to forgetting—but then again, so was Sally. It occurred to him that forgetfulness might be a common side effect of the unique experience that he and Sally were, sort of, sharing. The precise extent to which they did or did not—share it, that is—was, he suspected, the whole “point” although Daniel felt squeamish about reducing either thing—their relationship, their experience—to such simple terms, even if only in his own mind. Certainly, he couldn’t imagine saying such a thing out loud, and certainly not in front of Sally, whose passion for nuance was almost hedonistic. Affection for her materialized then and swelled in front of him like a landmark approached at speed. Daniel allowed it to recede again before he glanced at her. She was staring dead ahead. Hot air began to blow her long, yellow hair around the front seat. Daniel resolved, not for the first time, to remain silent until she said something first. 

  Whether it was a natural gift or one acquired through practice, Sally’s talent for not speaking—to Daniel, specifically—was indomitable. In the past, she’d said so little to him for so long that one or both of them had, in the interim, fallen in love with someone else. Several years earlier, Sally had allowed things to become uncharacteristically serious with a man—interminably natal—named Justin. In addition to being Justin’s girlfriend, she’d been his muse and the star of his short film, a “queer retelling” of the scary story about a decapitated woman whose boyfriend can’t resist picking at the green ribbon tied around her neck. During this period, Daniel and Sally rarely interacted with the exception of one platonic, conciliatory drink, over which Sally had posed the film’s central question in a tone Daniel could neither characterize as entirely serious nor wholly dismissive. “How much was it necessary to actually know about someone in order to understand them?” When shooting began, Justin and Sally moved in together. Before the rough cut was finished, they’d broken up, by which point Daniel, for unrelated reasons, had moved to the same neighborhood. (Albeit several blocks farther from the park.) When circumstances—usually a new therapist or a new friend—necessitated Daniel describe his and Sally’s relationship—yes, that was right after all, he decided, relationship—he did so in terms of “Before Justin” and “After Justin.”

  Sally pressed the button again, the air stopped, and her hair drifted down around her shoulders. They drove across a bridge. They drove through a town. They drove across another bridge, slung low over an indifferent harbor. New England! Daniel thought, serenely. All the suburbs were called Hamlets and all the freeway exits had Revolutionary War names. The Battle of Turnedpike! For several seconds, they sped parallel to a tanker truck. Daniel opened his mouth to ask Sally what she thought was inside then said nothing. The Camry’s reflection slipped down the truck’s silver flank as they pulled alongside it, drew ahead, merged in front. Cutting it—Daniel thought but didn’t say—a little close. Shaggy walls of black rock shrugged themselves into existence on either side of the road. On the median, one eroded rib rose up. If Larry were here, Daniel knew, they would have pulled over by now. Larry was always pulling over, or insisting Daniel’s mom pull over, to look at things like columnar basalt in the runaway truck ramp. Swift deposition exposed by construction. Telltale signs of something called an abysmal plane. Abyssal. Larry’s passion for geology seemed intimately related to his appreciation of being correct. He was forever glowering around in search of any outcrop. Finding none, he scanned the ground for pebbles. Geology of any scale, Daniel knew, would be sufficient for Larry’s purposes. Basalt, shale, schist, chert. That Daniel neither knew nor cared to learn about these things—“Literally, the ground beneath our feet!”—was evidence enough of his self-absorption, his alienation from the materiality of “real life.” It was implied that this condition must have something to do with the uniqueness of Daniel’s experience, or else with his inability to think about anything else. “Just imagine,” Larry liked to say, “all this was once a vast, mineral sea, teeming with life.” 

  “I have to pee,” Sally said before exiting suddenly toward the Connecticut Memorial Leisure Plaza. And how awful it looked, the Leisure Plaza, like a war machine or a dead spider, with great, gray concrete legs curled up under itself, and a Dunkin’ Donuts. Two teenagers were playing a flirtatious game of tag on the lawn outside. The girl, breathing hard, paused to consider Sally and Daniel as they passed. Daniel felt her attention flicker over their heads like the shadow of a migrating bird, at once significant and yet predictable. “That kid was staring at us,” Sally said when they were alone again inside the sterile gap between the twin sets of automatic doors. The interior doors dinged open in front of a man—natal—in a mechanized wheelchair and then Sally and Daniel were inside the crowded plaza too, and without another word, they parted ways. 

  To Daniel, it seemed obvious that the MEN’S and WOMEN’S bathrooms were moving farther apart. Like, semiotically. In the past, he remembered them always being always side by side. MEN’S, WOMEN’s, and if the line for the WOMEN’S was long, and if his mom wasn’t there to object, then Daniel’s father would lead him by the hand into the MEN’S, which never had more than one stall, which very rarely had a door. Daniel asked Sally once if she ever went into the WOMEN’S with her mom, and Sally had said, “Yeah, obviously, but you know that’s not a trans thing, right? That’s just how it is to be a kid.”

  It’s depressing, really, when the only means by which most people seem able to relate your experience is, literally, bathrooms. “Trite,” Sally would say. But, seriously. Who else was having this problem? Who else was being made to condense their unique experience into excreta alone? Maybe—girls in the developing world, for whom lack of access to sanitary products posed a significant barrier to education? Sally would say, “Don’t say that out loud and definitely don’t write it down anywhere.” Daniel caught sight of her across the plaza, waiting outside the door that said WOMEN’S. She stared at her phone then turned to speak with the woman who’d appeared in line behind her. Sally and the other woman laughed, then switched places, and Daniel saw that the woman was very pregnant. 

  For a brief period (After Justin) Sally and Daniel had both dated the same guy, separately. This guy had been in the midst of a dissertation on the nineteenth circus sideshow, turn-of-the-century—the “pinhead,” the “hermaphrodite,” and “how culture operates.” He had one prosthetic testicle and one real one. Once, he dared Daniel to guess which one was which then failed to conceal his frustration when Daniel did, correctly and without hesitation. It was from this man—natal, obviously—that Daniel first learned about “the signifier” and “the signified.” These words came to him now as he approached the door that said MEN’S. Daniel looked over one shoulder as the door closed behind him and saw that its interior side said MEN’S, also. 

  In the MEN’s room, nobody ever looks at you. Not so the WOMEN’s, which Daniel had continued to use for much longer than he probably should have, either out of habit or misplaced solidarity or something else for which Sally had given him endless shit and which he, as usual, deserved. Otherwise, Sally and Daniel didn’t discuss bathrooms. “Trite,” Sally would say. In the MEN’s room, Daniel could almost hear her saying it—saying it the same way she had that morning, when the barista’s back was turned. The barista wore their pronouns on a colorful enamel pin. When they rang Daniel up, he saw with a sinking feeling that their plastic clackety earrings spelled words also—QUEER on the left, and on the right, AF!!!! “Nice earrings,” said Sally blithely. Outside the cafe, a light rain was falling and the Camry was double-parked. Sally hadn’t waited for the door to shut behind Daniel before she started to laugh. “Seriously,” Sally said, eyes screwed up against the rain, “How dumb do you have to be, to want people to know every little thing about you?” The Camry’s hazards didn’t work, or they weren’t working at that exact moment, and the cop refused to make an exception although he seemed, for a moment, to consider it while he creased the ticket back and forth, back and forth, along its perforated edge. When he did speak, it was to interrupt Sally. “No,” he said, holding up a thick pink finger that bent slightly to the left. “No, I’d seriously like to know, what makes you think you’re so special.”

  The single stall in the MEN’S room had a door, but the door was locked. Daniel had forgotten, he realized, what differentiated “the signifier” from “the signified,” and also which one was which. Sally, he knew, would know. He found her searching for the Camry on the wrong side of the parking lot. Walking up behind her, he wrapped his arms around her waist. Connecticut, spread out before them, seemed suddenly like the best place he’d ever been, both super real and totally ideal. There were big rocks protruding from a hillside and swooping power lines adorned with red mellonish orbs. A yellow strand of Sally’s hair blew into Daniel’s mouth. Strangers—women, natal—were forever approaching Sally in public and explaining, in low, altruistic voices, what toner was and how it worked. When Sally brushed her hair from his lips, he tasted generic soap on her fingers. “Let me drive,” he said, but they were somehow already halfway across the parking lot, and Sally was opening the driver’s side door. When the Camry accelerated, everything outside it buzzed like a bug trapped beneath an overturned glass. Daniel reached automatically for the radio dial before realizing that it wasn’t there. 

  They reached the outskirts of some city. They passed beneath a complicated interchange with an overpass, an underpass, and a special ramp for traffic headed west. Sally executed a complicated left-right maneuver. They drove through a suburb, a “hamlet.” They drove past a corporate tower with the word XEROX written in forbidding red letters on one side. Soon, they were coasting behind the same tanker truck as before—and isn’t that what driving anywhere is always like? Passing obstacles, stopping, rushing forward, realizing that the obstacle has yet again passed you—when they hit a patch of rough road and it became suddenly obvious to Daniel that although he had spent time in the MEN’S room, he hadn’t used it. “I have to pee,” said Daniel. “Is it an emergency?” Sally asked, and even as he shook his head “no” Daniel felt the car speed up around and above and in front of them, like a building toppling over or a rockslide occuring. Just before the next exit, they overtook the truck again, and again Daniel wondered what was inside. 

  Old Saybrook was old indeed. Elegant houses slid past, one after another. Colonial Revival, Colonial Revival, American Foursquare, Classic Cape. Daniel spotted a single cobwebbed wreck and felt momentarily satisfied that here, too, there was chaos and then they got closer and he saw the giant inflatable tombstone, the tasteful, rotting gourd, the back half of a stockinged witch protruding from a ou de boeuf. “This is fine,” he said, “Anywhere along here is fine.” Sally pulled up beside some tennis courts. (Were these, Daniel wondered, the kind made from clay? Why did it matter? How would one tell?) Beside a picnic table, there was a tree with silver bark. Daniel walked towards it, disturbing a bird that flapped desperately towards the lowest branch. Daniel had, for several months (Before Justin) dated a gender-indeterminate person who raised doves in a makeshift coop in a garden behind a school. Periodically, this person would insist on driving Daniel upstate, to the woods somewhere, and Daniel would watch while they released them—the doves—from a plastic cat carrier. No matter how fast they drove back to the city, the doves were always waiting for them there, in a smug line on the shit-stained cornice.

  Daniel squatted beneath the tree with his jeans scrunched behind his knees. With his nose that much closer to the earth, he could smell it. The wet red leaves in the grass looked like spots of blood. Sally stood there beside the Camry with her hands on her hips, staring not at Daniel but at the tree, or maybe the bird. Sally, standing there, looking different—maybe, but then again, perhaps not—felt as disorienting as it did familiar, like being dosed with a drug you’ve done before. “Hurry up,” Sally said. The bird had flown away. She was looking right at Daniel. He imagined the sound of running water. Of water running, over millions of years, percolating through layers of sediment and dribbling through porous rock. Some rocks allow water to pass through and others don’t; this is called impermeability. Certain types of North American shale are both porous and impermeable. Daniel had overheard Sally asking Larry on the library steps to explain how that really worked—“I mean, in the ‘real world,’” she’d said, using her fingers to make quotation marks in the air—but Daniel hadn’t listened to Larry’s answer, or else he had forgotten what it was. 

  After Daniel drip dried, Sally threw him the keys and he caught them hard against his chest. The interstate was narrower now than it had been before. Connecticut seemed to be coming to an end. The trees had become smaller, their tops smoothed down like unruly hair, and there was a low stone wall, and a marsh, and a wet, crimson field. “Cranberries,” Sally said, seeing Daniel look. Daniel glanced at Sally. Behind her, he thought he could see the ocean. Trees and bushes and weeds and wind and water, foam appearing and disappearing, the crash of one very impressive wave. But it was not the ocean, he realized, just a brackish pond and a boat with a wake. Salt or ice rose from the muddy bank in glittering yellow blisters. Daniel looked at the road, then back out Sally’s window. In it, her face was reflected, superimposed across his own. How much was it necessary to actually know about someone in order to understand them? Again, Daniel looked at the road then back at Sally, not at her reflection but the actual back of her yellow head. He was not thinking about the precious green ribbon. He was not thinking about Sally’s mother—he had forgotten her—he was thinking, despite himself, about the fossil in the step, and something Larry once said about a cliff somewhere where the young rock, faulted and tilted, lay directly atop the ancient crust, black and metastasized—no, metamorphosed—with nothing but a velvety green strip of oxidation to show where a billion years of sediment had eroded away in between. 

  “Daniel!” Daniel breaked, hard, and the car faltered, then stopped. Rows of traffic stretched ahead of them like still furrows in a dry winter field. Furrows that appeared only from a certain angle as you passed, so you could see all the way down for an instant before everything resolved itself again into disorder. This is how it will be, Daniel thought, when the world really begins to end. The sense that one might be better off on foot, perhaps alone. “Look,” Sally said, withdrawing her hand from the door handle and pointing. There, just coming into view through the gaps between cars, was the silver tanker truck, lying crumpled on its side like a sharp range of new mountains. Traffic progressed via the single, unobstructed lane, towards the next exit. Sally could have, if she’d wanted to, rolled down the window and touched the cop’s beckoning hand as they slipped within an inch of him, but the button that controlled the passenger side window was broken, or had never worked at all. They crept past the wreck and through the shallow pool spreading around it, their tires unspooling wet tracks on the freeway behind them as they exited and Daniel, knowing they had not yet reached their final destination, resisted the pleasant sensation he associated with arrival.

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  Silas Jones is a writer originally from Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in The Drift, Joyland, the Columbia Journal and elsewhere. He is Hertog Fellow in fiction at Hunter College in New York City.