Page 56 - Vol V. #8

Shake Me Up, Judy (continued from preceding page)
Here is what is true. The little Ryanair-approved around damp? And thinking about laundry sum- carry-on you acquired, in order to avert their mons another earmark of travel:
drastic fines for outsized luggage, was pleas- ant—at first—to pull along like a wobbly pet. But it holds so little (a grocery bag’s volume) that, desperate for the pathetic few things you feel you must have, you pack it too full. It begins to split open.
Waiting.
Like belongings, the body (first and last luggage) starts to show wear that—puzzlingly—you can’t remember inflicting. Fingernails break. Feet grow callouses. Elbows sprout patches of rough, scaly skin. Bruises and cuts you’ve no memory of receiving. Unprecedented rashes. Stomach prob- lems, intestinal problems, viral visits. A patch of lower gum turns meat-red with inflammation. Why now? For what cause? You’ll never know. Needless to say, it’s twice as miserable being sick on the road as it is being sick at home. (Souvenir snapshot: Paris’s enchanting Pont des Arts on a fall afternoon, the city around us glinting in the sun, my husband standing aside irked and help- less while I’m bent double in coughing fits.)
We know, of course, that time is precious. Time’s waning. We should by rights relish slowing time. Why then does waiting feel like prison? And what can so much waiting finally mean? Are we secret- ly waiting for the whole trip to end? Or for the reward—the flash of joy or enlightenment, like the elusive green flash when the setting sun dips into the sea—that all this fuss hoped to spark?
In fact most of travel’s torment proves crushingly physical. Sleep’s elusive. Stress is amped. De- mands don’t slacken just because you’re un- derslept: quite the contrary. Most days you’re obliged first thing to jump up, make decisions, run around. You lose control over food and exercise. Eating out, however carefully, means high-fat and heavy starch (paradoxically, never filling enough). Your body begins to soften and expand. Midsec- tion and thighs start to feel like wet cotton bat- ting. You can’t fasten the top button of your jeans. This makes the fly slide open and they bag down.
Why, on foot, do people thicken around you, blocking your path or clipping you as they speed past, as if choreographed to trip you up? (In London we actually stumbled over a woman’s lost, single shoe at a mobbed streetcorner.) This makes you surly. Instead of (as hoped) becoming more sensitive and porous to human plights you morph into a hulking, scowling, forward-pushing shrew with an attitude: angry survivalism. The shift happens animalistically; a primal, pre-emp- tive guard. Nerves on red alert have little margin for empathy. Worse, people around you seem to want one of two things: that you get out of their way or give them money. Often I have felt like a football player running toward the goal (what- ever it was) with one hand out to fend off inter- ference.
“Your jeans are bagging down,” your husband points out.
I, who carry spiders safely out the door rather than kill them.
Doing laundry in another country is like trying to do it on another planet, or else as a last resort, bribing someone on that planet to do it for you (uncertain you may ever see your clothes again). Unsurprisingly, dryers in distant lands—if they exist—are weak. Do people there just walk
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As noted, I’m not proud of any of this—or of the implication rattling within: what kind of savage am I? Does it take so little to scratch off the hu- manitarian veneer? What wouldn’t I do, finally, to get what I want? Whom would I betray?
Fathomless amounts. Blood-draining eternities. Pointlessness is its punishment.
Are we waiting for life to resume?
Or are we waiting for the safe, known life to re- sume?