Versions of Miriam
The cell phone lot was two, three miles from the airport, but at night and under heavy rain it seemed farther. Four lanes to cross at an intersection, chainlink fence around a mid-sized lot scattered with parked or idling cars. No streetlights. Lights of planes passing overhead. Here Miriam and The Nighttalker parked and sat, interior lights off, music off, listening to the rain patter on the windshield and roof and hood. The Nighttalker wasn’t riding shotgun, Miriam had driven and parked alone, he was a faint companion in her mind, telling her currently: There are people gifted with an ability to see past themselves, and Daphne’s one of them. If she were here, where you are, she wouldn’t be impatient with the rain or bored, she’d be stitching together lives in the abstract, shaping little histories to lower herself down into and explore. An accomplished admonisher, The Nighttalker. By day he was nearly inaudible, the way a full moon is barely visible, a watery wafter in the blue of the sky by daylight. Daphne. What did the Nighttalker know about Daphne? That she was Miriam’s elder sister. That in the family she was “the favored one”. No, that last assertion, that wasn’t a fact, it was a feeling. This was the Nighttalker’s forte: presenting the latter as the former, then bludgeoning Miriam with false incontrovertible truths. The real truth was it was ten o’clock within the rain where she had parked, a time of evening made excruciatingly eternal because she’d switched off her hive of electronics to take the non-silence of the car and the night and rain straight. It was unsettling; it was peaceful.
Look around, look there, the Nighttalker said. Already she was turning her head eight o’clock to look out the driver’s side window. A sedan idling in a spot facing the opposite direction, interior light on, silhouette of person holding a phone with one hand, tapping screen with another. Through water streaming down glass she observed an apparition made visible within its own private aquarium, a stranger also in a state of waiting. Someone else in the sky, arriving on the same flight as Daphne, why not, sit and let the variables connect and develop and soon you have one among many thousand, hundred-thousand possibilities. Why they’re sitting in a car in the same lot, doing that with their life, cold outside and rain. Headlights. Flare of them through the rear window, flash of them through the rearview mirror. Then swinging with the sharp left turn of the car to splash across the asphalt to the far southwest corner of the lot, red rear lights flicking off as the driver turned key, removed it from ignition, released pressure of foot from brakes. A new idler had joined them. Who? the Nighttalker asked. Miriam yawned: the voice was more annoying than a conscience, and often doubled in volubility when she was sleepy.
The plane would land soon. Her sister would be brought closer back to reality. Not a thought, nor a memory; a real sister standing by the curb next to luggage, in Nashville International Airport’s arrival bay. Neither of them lived here; it was just a place where they agreed to meet, so they could continue traveling together to New Orleans. Daphne could have flown direct. Though she may not have been able to avoid night or rain, Miriam certainly could’ve avoided Nashville. But the sisters had both expressed nostalgia for the old times when they drove and talked for hours between one city and another, back when they were younger and less strictly bound by obligations and logistics. Usually travel brought along husbands or children, and the sisters they were became less accessible, less at hand to be shared. The wives and mothers they were came first, always in ascendancy at family gatherings. Sisters re-emerged, it seemed, almost as an afterthought, after their dispersal. Texts and phone calls, emails. A sister from a far distance is half-real, the Nighttalker once told her, and noticing the wince this evinced from Miriam, hit her with a reiteration of the point regularly, to savor the reaction. She didn’t want it to be true. But she couldn’t argue with it, because she felt it. Catching a resulting turn toward one of her patent low moods, the Nighttalker would continue along the way with all sorts of fatalistic speculations. How many hours do you have left together as sisters? What percentage of your future is mere small talk?
Craning and ducking, angling her head to sweep a three-sixty view of the lot, she counted seven. Seven vehicles, two SUVs among them. This meant seven people at least somewhere in the sky, traveling from some far place, abstract and carried by miracles of engineering at killing speeds at unnatural heights. No one could survive a fall, should the plane surrounding them choose to vanish. But people in cars, Miriam was told, Nighttalker rambling on in monotone mock-rationality, aren’t they abstract too to the travelers they are waiting for, vague and beyond solid confirmation until a car pulls to a stop and hazard lights begin blinking, driver’s door opening to reveal finally a person they recognize, waving and offering help with luggage?
It can happen that quickly, someone steps into view and becomes real. Usually a hug or handshake enough to confirm the person before them solidly in-the-flesh, no longer imaginary. Daphne, effusive, unhesitatingly affectionate, would kiss Miriam on the cheek. Softness and warmth of cheek would affirm it was a sister in her arms. Nostalgia incarnate, the scent of her. The talking would begin then and wouldn’t end until they’d checked into the hotel in New Orleans, separate rooms so they would become separate women again, to text their families. Driving south through dark and hours then she’d experience relief from herself, Nighttalker bereft of an audience. Another voice suddenly closer to her, outside her head, Daphne’s. Firsthand news from the unimaginable.
A skin of water, molten. Watch it smooth down the windshield, her night-mind told her. Already her eyes were following the downward ripples of it. She joined her eyes to explicitly inhabit their rhythms, water pushing over water. There were shadows on her hands. Hands still holding either side of the steering wheel. Phantom patterns of water molting from water down the windshield. Came from elsewhere and you’d be the last to know. Imagine. Reverse their destruction against steel and glass. Out of constant thin flow drops reform like wet phoenixes, leap through miles of free-fall, gaining speed as they rise. Drops drawn back into an unseen haze of clouds far above. Suspended. Levitating in mist, blended with billions upon billions. Damp recedes from the floating raindrop until it thins down to a breeze-blown particle of nothing, a grain of molecule impregnating some cloud-womb. High-up coasting world it travels within and is slowly formed by, days and miles from this very spot, over the Midwest or the Rockies. Irrelevancies are also rendered epic by their pre-histories, and yes, this is the very sort of thing Daphne never forgets. Fitting too, because she’s somewhere up where this storm is continually hatching. A grain for this mind of yours to form around. Hands slid off steering wheel. Rested on thighs. Left reached to un-click the seatbelt. Quite the dreamer, her Nighttalker. Could always rely on him taking her unoccupied attention for a walk.
No streetlights for blocks every direction. Very little traffic either. The interstate pulled her down and off a series of exits until she joined heavy traffic in the airport’s arrival-departure loop. Damn awful. Tried posting up in the rightmost lane but security workers waved all parkers out of the bay. Four tedious circuits around the loop, waved along, she searched for the cell phone lot on GPS then followed directions further and further away from the melee, eight lanes for traffic but no one else driving where the GPS lady was taking her. Engine off, the airport was a horizon glow at three o’clock. The rest was darkness, she supposed, so as not to confuse incoming planes on their descent paths. A certain family resemblance between this GPS lady and the Nighttalker, she noted. Ever forthcoming with the directives. They talk, she listens. Miss a turn along a thought or road, they’ll bark at her until the mistake’s corrected. One she could silence with sustained pressure from a finger against the on-off button on her iPhone. Did that very thing minutes ago. Brief answers to texts from her husband Rob and her eldest, Preeta. Updates. In Nashville now, plane arriving soon. No delay. Soon pick up Daphne then continue south far as they can for the night. Maybe get a hotel somewhere between here and New Orleans. Will text when settled.
Finished with all that, phone rested on the passenger’s seat, face down, dormant. Much as motherhood and wifehood were still active within circuitry, the power had answered to her finger and was off. By way of invisible tendrils, though, the phone was communicating with satellites far beyond cloud cover, orbit-grazing the edges of the atmosphere. Faster than planes, than pulses within wires. An atheist’s concession to the spirit world, messages coursing through the air to reach their receivers, as a voicemail or typed half-sentence. She should save these. Again, thinking of it, she was reminded. Her daughters and her husband and her mother and sister, friends taken from the daily round of confirmable reality and transplanted in hypotheticals called cities, which she promised to one day visit. Save the keepers. Don’t delete. One day their people would disappear and themselves would transmigrate one-way never to return from the hypothetical. My sister. My daughter. The Nighttalker, thusly moved, was roused to comment. Texts from people no longer living, deleted. Not beyond the realm of the possible, they’re retrievable. Saved as data in a network. Imagine.
Car off, phone dark, she was left then to judge the passage of time by feel. She’d take a rest from time-as-numbers to sit and listen to the rain. Seven parkers and idlers around her, spaced at an even distance from one another out of courtesy for one another’s privacy. Had any looked her way, as she had theirs? If so, how’d she appear? A silhouette in the driver’s seat, motionless except for this dropping of hands from the steering wheel. From the angle of the head they might sense the person in the car was watching them or searching past the lot to the sky, where every few minutes a plane either descended and vanished or rose to do the same. She was a stranger to them. Guesswork wouldn’t be enough to render her less vague.
What would it be like to spend an entire night here, not waiting for anyone? The thought edged plausibility. If she was lonely and looking for a place to drive and feel unbothered, this would be the place. If you were lonely, The Nighttalker began, then trailed off, leaving the phrase incomplete. She wasn’t though. She was calm, alone. Resting in suspended animation at the height of a quiet world, one turn of a key in the ignition away from joining her various selves again, leave the lot, turn right on the road, then left at the second light to circle the loop towards the arrival bay again. There was news in her phone. The history of the world could be found there, parceled into data-points, flush with information. There were names and numbers under her contacts. Inert as it may appear lying face-down on the passenger’s seat, it was very much the point where all things meet. But she was tired of all that, omniscience as a kind of prosthesis. Such potentiality in boredom, something she experienced daily as a girl raised on the edges of a small town. Instead of a television she had an elder sister. Such potentiality but nearly lost from her being out of practice, busy as she often was, working at the office while at home inhabiting various selves of wife and friend and mother. The Nighttalker had it wrong on this point, if that was indeed what it was implying. Never was she lonely but often she was despairing for a few minutes alone. Minutes when even a clock wasn’t watching.
A Toyota Corolla to her diagonal left switched on its interior lights. It had been sitting there when she’d arrived, no movement within it until just now. Her angle of view was awkward and didn’t afford clear sight of who was inside. There appeared to be maybe two people, a driver and passenger. The passenger’s window rolled down slightly, a quarter down, confirming the latter. A few seconds later a puff of smoke blew from the gap and shivered and dissipated in the downpour. A smoker. What brand of cigarette? How many years smoking? There were feelings and opinions she might have usually entertained, at the sight of someone smoking, having quit herself twenty years before and for very sound reasons, but those were inaccessible now, since she’d severed her ties to her other selves for a quiet break from having to be anyone but an observer sitting alone in a car. It was nice to be beyond people’s reach. It was pleasant to wait. She wasn’t her parent’s favorite but look, she could certainly wait. Daphne was far from patient but of course the impatience was a feature of her charm. A wild and goofy and voluminous talker, Daphne would populate the rest of the drive through Mississippi and Louisiana with proliferating root-systems of conjecture and gossip. The loud one, lively. The louder daughter. There were times Miriam wondered whether Daphne might also have a talker in her own mind, as Miriam did, but ruled this out, concluding that if she did her voice-in-mind wouldn’t hope to get a word in edgewise. Since Miriam was soft-spoken, less wordy by nature, there was more room for commentary to arise spontaneously from within her. Long ago and over a subtle course of time this outgoingness of Daphne’s had taught her to be less guarded, less afraid of people, though not quite less observant of them. It was more comfortable to mix with them from a slight distance, as she was here, parked several spaces from the nearest neighbor.
If she were to open the door, step from the car, walk to the Corolla’s passenger’s side door, how many steps would it take? Too many from the required number, which was zero. She could imagine how alarming that would be, a stranger walking from their car to her own. What would have been moments before, a split second before the door opened and stranger stepped out, a pleasant stretch of quiet waiting alone, would sharpen to fear or defensive aggression. Roll up window. Turn on car. Drive away before footsteps bring a stranger to the window. These too the kinds of people who might sit in a darkened car in a lot miles from an airport, watching others much like them arrive and sit a while and leave upon receiving a text notice. Rare were the occasions when Miriam would pick a spot and relax, freed of that last remaining self she’d been assigned since birth, female. She could feel her femaleness often most potently through a stranger’s eyes and by turns, depending on the gazer, the effect was either welcoming or unnerving. Too many examples of the latter to recount and describe. But there were times she was left to believe she had these sorts of eyes to thank for the maleness of her own Nighttalker, not a cruel voice particularly, or a condescending one. More akin to an articulate and inveterately curious podcaster. Even the negative estimations of herself he reported seemed handed to him as scripts written by her own unconscious, to read from.
Close your eyes, her night-mind advised. Maybe it’s not dark enough. There. Good. Breathe, relax. Listen. Watery sounds and high-pitched and grumbling low sounds of engines descending and rising. Enjoy what’s not here except when you call it up from within you. No Rob or Preeta or Jacey or Daphne and her kids and your brother-in-law. No projected images of hugs and hellos with Nina and the groom at the rehearsal dinner or wedding, old friends from college and yesteryear before collective and individual youths were immolated. No coworkers or manager, nor scrolls of faces populated by rashly typed hot-takes or snarky rejoinders on a comment stream, in one of any three social media platforms waiting for your return within the inextinguishable smartlight of your iPhone. What’s left? What’s here except what’s within reach and within view? And now you’ve closed your eyes, to switch emphasis to your ears. What reaches you?
Numberless and clockless, a brief stay from having to be anyone. Blissful. No thoughts pecking at her brain. Lately she’d been making failing efforts to meditate, her husband Rob had encouraged it. Ironic and of course a very Miriam thing, that it would happen nearly by accident from following a Nighttalker’s instructions. Where’d he gone the past few breaths? How much time had really flowed along without him? From then, when he’d concluded his disquisition on potential benefits of intentionally clearing her mind, until now, when she felt him return along with her own self-conscious noticing of his absence, not talking yet but listening, taking measure of her amateur meditator’s disappointment before interrupting to assess where maybe she’d failed, where had her nag and perpetual analyst gone, exactly? Within this awareness of rain-sounds and tires-on-wet-asphalt sounds once a woman, the woman once a wife and mother, currently in transit even while parked in a lot annoyingly distant from its sole reason for being, a sister minutes from landing. Dispersed into undifferentiated stillness and unhurried to return again. She didn’t miss him. She merely wished to remain where he went. If she could find it, she’d crawl inside and push him out, no room for the both of them. Off he’d go, dispossessed of the head that second by second, minute by minute nurtured him. Left to wander towards one of seven cars, sniffing along the edges of windows. Waiting for one of them to open to a crack so he might flow in, sneak into the head of one of these fellow strangers, by mouth, nostril, ear-hole. Let someone else endure his florid, exploratory babble a while. What would that be like? She’d like to know.
Her own thoughts came back to her bearing faces, predictive fantasies of her standing at the edge of a room filled with tables and people, a white three-tiered cake in the far corner, a dance floor. A wedding in a city she’s never visited. Friends she and Daphne had shared while in college, faces here blooming from feelings bound up with thought, she could name them: Felice and Semika and Lennon and Magdalena and Sondra. This would be her New Orleans. Phone would be busy in her hand, feeding from the evening and her surroundings. Photos and ten second videos. Documenting progressive stages of drunkenness among the wedding party. Her toes would be killing her and even fleeting consideration of this inevitability sent waves of phantom-ache through her toes this very moment, though they had yet to suffer a torturous strapping into high heels. The rest would clatter about without losing balance, dance on the thinnest heels without a stumble. She’d find a seat and smile solemnly. Let the phone in her hand provide cover for keeping off her feet: recording the nuptial hijinks around her.
One car came alive, headlights and brake lights. A snap of fingers, another took to life also. One of the SUVs, gleaming black as if freshly birthed from rain, lit up like a little city. A plane must have landed, texts arriving from people still buckled in their seats, not yet settled at their concourse, permission to unbuckle, rise, wrestle carry-ons from catches above. Her Nighttalker was mumbling but she brushed past the first of many points he was making to reach for her phone. Thumb had to press and hold, uncomfortably firm, the on-off button to join her back to the larger world. The screen brightened, shocked her eyes, rapid pupillary constriction. Swipe, tap in six-digit passcode. Messages arriving, ping ping ping, stacked bars denoting name of sender. Thumb swipe floated bars off screen, messages unopened, Rob, Preeta, a fleet of group texts from Semika and company. Last and most recent, received a minute ago, one from Daphne: “Just landed!” The keys were in her hands before she’d thought to fish them from the cupholder where she’d laid them. The SUV was backing out, music thudding, muffled, a bar fight crammed into the confines of its interior. A hatchback and minivan were exiting the lot at the end opposite of where she’d entered. Her companions were leaving, rain less active on her hood. Keys slipped into ignition, turned clockwise. Clockwise of course, midnight to five o’clock, the engine turning. All manner of lights reanimating around her. Intricate multicolored dashboard, blasts of stereoscopic brightnesses beyond the grill and front bumper. Links in the fence glistening and beyond them grass on an incline, incline leveling to the road that would lead back to the intersection where a wide-looping left would carry her to the airport loop and once on the loop, return her to the arrival bay. She had texts to respond to, versions of Miriam to inhabit. For a supposedly less favored daughter she was quite popular, fodder for thought if not yet for feeling. For the return drive should she summon the GPS lady for play-by-play guidance? Follow the cars, the voice of instinct told her. Work it from memory. The voice was her own, not yet estranged from closer ranges of normal consideration.
As she drove, music off, focused on the road and intersection lights green, red, or yellow, the voice would leave her and wander, pass an unmarked limit beyond the edges of mind, then return changed and less personal. It would no longer sound like her own, but a man stranded in her consciousness. A script for him to read aloud from, written in real-time as she steered the car from one lane to another, weaving traffic, arrival bay widening as she neared it, to bask her in faux-daylight. There she is, picture her. Standing among a crowd freshly arrived from Boston, waiting ache-legged in baggage claim for luggage to appear on the conveyor belt. The whole set-up looks like a little hill. Suitcases emerge from a hole in the top, then slide down an incline to thud and settle on the belt. There they drift like souls waiting to be recognized. There are people gifted with an ability to see past themselves, and these are ones most skilled at spotting luggage. She will be among the first to grab hers. Through double glass sliding doors she will walk, from nowhere in the abstract into damp Nashville electrically lit air. You will be the one waiting though. You will have eyes prepared to see her. For the nearest doors will be marked a sign denoting the airline that brought her here, your sister your equal, no favorite when in transit years from home. Of the two of you, you’ll be the first to see the other and stand and wave the other over. For you will have been the one who has earned new eyes and patience from waiting, where the other had been hurried along by travel. Arms out, both will meet. Both will hold a sister. One gifting the other her portion of waiting, the other a future accelerating beyond standstill. Together they’ll drive through the night towards a shared past recreated in a place yet to be visited. Both will be free, bound as they are by others and each other. Neither will be favored, or both will. Their talking will quiet most troubles. Their talking will quiet most troubles. The voice that is telling you this is hopeful.