Love at the Speed of Email (19 page)

“I knew I should not expect to be able to talk him out of
his delusions, but knowing the theory is one thing. Seeing it in a client is
one thing. Seeing it in someone you know well – that’s another thing entirely.
But I'm supposed to be a psychologist, for crying out loud. How could I not
have seen this coming? However you look at it, if anyone should be able to get
in the way of this and break his fall, it should be me and I’m failing. I am
failing in this. I know that may be an impossible task, and it isn’t really my
(quote) responsibility (unquote) to save him anyway. But to some extent it is,
you know.
Because you don't get much closer a neighbor to
love than your
flatmate
.”

But as I sat in my room that night writing to Mike about the
whole mess, I knew that I was effectively about to abandon Travis to his
battle. With the sound of pouring wine had come the realization that I was
starting to doubt my own judgment.
That I was losing my grip
on this situation, if I had ever had one to begin with.
That I needed to move out as soon as possible.

Port
Moresby, Papua New Guinea

In Papua New Guinea, meanwhile, Mike was trying to wrap up
his work before taking time off and mourning being robbed for the third time in
a month.

When he’d been in the Solomon Islands four weeks earlier,
his favorite pair of shoes had been stolen off the porch of someone’s house
while he was inside having dinner. As he only owned about three pairs of shoes,
this was no small loss, and he’d immediately ordered another pair and had them
shipped to me so that I could bring them to Australia and hand them off. I
still had no idea how tall Mike was, but after his new shoes arrived, I did
know that he had size thirteen feet.

After the shoe incident, however, the thefts became more
serious.

During the Christmas party that Mike threw at his house, two
people were robbed of their bags, wallets, and keys, and one person was knifed
while trying to retrieve them. Mike described it this way in a letter:

“Bobby was able to find the boys. He got the keys back, at
least. They knifed him. I brought him into my kitchen and washed out his knife
wound and got my first-aid kit,
then
I called for
Laurence because he’s a doctor and I’m not. Laurence said it’s a long wound,
but shallow. Bobby will be okay. We washed it out and bandaged him up. I gave
him another beer. At 1 a.m. after everyone leaves I’m still buzzing and unable
to sleep. I take a Valium.”

“Well, you know what they
say,
” I
wrote back the next day, “A Christmas party isn't a Christmas party if it
doesn't involve a stabbing and end with Valium.”

On January 1st Mike was in Port Moresby and it was
his
turn to have a bag stolen – a bag
containing his laptop, cash, his passport, immunization records, a GPS, an
iPod, a digital camera, sunglasses, backup documents, and a copy of
Salman
Rushdie’s
Midnight’s
Children
.

After a day spent driving around settlements and negotiating
with the local hoodlums, known as
raskols
, four hundred dollars in “assistance fees” retrieved
the computer, camera, GPS, flash drive, and sunglasses.

No passport. No iPod. No cash. No
Salman
Rushdie.

From our point of view, the most serious of these losses was
the passport, since (as I learned the hard way several years before) you can’t
travel internationally without a valid one. Mike tried telling the gangs that
the passport had an embedded computer chip in it and that the U.S. military
could track down the people who’d stolen it.

“They can. They won’t.” Mike wrote to me. “I wonder if the
raskols
read my
bluff?
”

Figuring they probably had, Mike had immediately lodged a
request for a new passport with the U.S. embassy in Port Moresby. He was
promised it would arrive within two weeks. We crossed our fingers.

But six days before he was supposed to leave for Australia,
Mike was still in Port Moresby and still without a passport, and when he rang
his home base in
Madang
about a work matter, he
learned he was now also without many of his remaining worldly possessions.
Thieves had broken into his house again and looted it.

“I wonder what exactly they chose to take: what they deemed
worthy of their dirty thieving paws,” he wrote to me.
“My
books?
My external
hardrive
that has the backup of all my files and all my pictures from the past four
years?
My yoga mat?
My hiking
shoes?
My clothes?
I left behind one pair of
underwear in my top drawer so that I’d have a clean pair when I returned to
Madang
in February. I sure hope they didn’t take that. I’m
not so happy with PNG at the moment. It’s only stuff. Stuff’s not important.
But it’s annoying,
dammit
. See you in a week,
hopefully. Hopefully I’ll also make it through the next six days without losing
too much more stuff.”

“Shocker,” I wrote. “I’m sorry. Is there anyone who could
send you an inventory of what's still there so you at least know (particularly
about the hard drive, oh, and the clean underwear – I would imagine those two
are top of your priority list)? Maybe the next year is going to be the year of
embracing solidarity with the poor in whole new ways for you. If the first
twelve days of the year are anything to go by, trend analysis suggests that you
will be robbed approximately 86 more times this year, in 86 different cities.
Could be an exciting year.”

Los
Angeles, USA

When I wasn’t at work, I spent most of the week before I
left for Australia looking for a new place to live. I loved the apartment that
Travis and I shared, and I’d now lived there longer than I’d lived anywhere
else in my life, but I’d eventually learned that when you don’t feel entirely
safe, it’s hard to feel at home, regardless of how you define it. Now I was
just eager to get out.

I knew without the shadow of a doubt that the Travis who had
moved in with me would never hurt me, but the Travis I was now living with was
not the Travis who’d moved in with me. I could no longer completely trust that
either logic or reality were grounding his mind or guiding his actions. He was
six inches taller than me and stronger, and I couldn’t even lock my bedroom door.
I didn’t want to be, but I was scared – scared in a way I’d rarely been
overseas. The sort of jumpy scared that comes from living with extended
uncertainty.
  

My heart sank every time I drove into the garage and saw his
car in its space. Inside the apartment the floor was littered with those
proverbial eggshells. When we weren’t talking about his delusions, the mundane
exchanges we did have about writing projects, daily activities and weekend
plans
seemed
relatively normal, but
they were shadowed by mutual suspicion. I could not draw a deep breath.

I didn’t go into or out of our place without my cell phone
in one pocket and my keys in the other, and when we were at home at the same
time, I watched.
Probably the same wary, intent watching that
everyone else who’d heard the TV-show story was employing.
In one sense
it was no wonder that he thought we were all in on something without him.

We were.
 

Sanity.

Three days before I was supposed to leave for Australia I
found a new place to live. It was a bit more than I’d wanted to pay, but I knew
the minute I walked into the quiet one-bedroom apartment that it was perfect,
and by the time I flew out I’d signed a lease and picked up the keys so that I
could move in as soon as I got back – that very day, if need be. What I
hadn’t
done was tell Travis that I was
moving out.

I desperately wanted to sit down with him and lay it all out
on the table, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. No matter how I
worried the puzzle in my head, I couldn’t seem to make the different pieces fit
into the same equation: to love Travis with transparent honesty and to make
sure that I stayed safe when he seemed so volatile.

In the end I didn’t tell him. Instead, I packed up my
valuable possessions piecemeal and smuggled them out of the house, stowing them
in the garage of my friend, Grace.

After my last trip to Grace’s garage, the night before my
flight, I went into the house to say a weary farewell to Grace and her two
dogs. In bewilderingly short order, the new dog (half pit bull) decided that
the old dog (half Great Dane) was getting more than his fair share of attention
and attacked him.

By the time the dogs paused to take stock and Grace and I
were able to grab one collar each, a truly remarkable amount of blood was
sprayed across the walls, the carpet, and our clothes in spotty red arcs. The
back seat of Grace’s car didn’t fare any better after we finally were able to
manhandle the most grievously injured party (the new dog) into the vehicle to
rush her to the animal hospital.

We had plenty of time to discuss the whole event during the
three hours we sat in the emergency room holding a towel to the dog’s neck.

“You told me,” Grace said without any blame in her tone,
“that
Barnabus
would be happier and less lonely if I
got another dog.”

“I meant a
puppy
,
Grace,” I said. “Not a ten-year-old half-pit-bull stray from the animal
shelter.” I glared down at the new dog that Grace had named Naomi. Despite the
fact that blood was still dripping from her neck, Naomi looked perfectly content
now that she had Grace’s undivided attention.

“This is the third fight she’s started in three weeks,” I
said. “You have to take her back.”

“I know,” Grace said and sighed deeply. “You know, you’ve
been there for two of those fights…” She left the rest of the sentence hanging
suggestively.

I maintained that I was merely an innocent bystander and
that this altercation was not my fault. Grace, who was fully versed in the
current events of my life, was not convinced. She posited, rather, that I was a
drama-carrier – that I bred it wherever I went and that my mere presence had
set the dogs off.

I wanted to be able to firmly refute this allegation.
 

I couldn’t.

Mike,
Papua New Guinea

“Good morning, Lisa,” Mike greeted me by email the morning
he was to fly to Australia.

“Monday morning,” he wrote. “Yippee. Bags packed. Report
mostly finished. Brand new passport safely tucked away in pocket. Just half a
day left in the office and then I’m off to Port Moresby Airport. Hopefully I’ll
be able to make it to the airport without getting robbed. Yippee.

“Last night I had dinner alone.
Me, my
journal, thoughts, and doubts.
Oh my word, am I really doing this? Am I
really about to get on a plane and meet a special friend on the other end and
then spend two weeks at her house? Gulp. I mean, it seemed so natural a few
months ago. There was no hesitation at all then, no doubts. She emails saying
that she’ll be home in January. I really want to meet this interesting person
who’s begun to capture my heart. I ask whether it would be okay for me to
come
visit. … It was all so natural. No inhibitions, no
fears.

“And last night … yikes.
Doubt.
Fear.
Gulp.

“But now it’s Monday morning.
Adventure.
I’m getting on a plane! I’m going to Australia! I’m going to meet Lisa!
Whoo
hooo
!
Adventure.

“So see you later today.
 
If you’re at all fearful that you might miss spotting me at the airport,
just look for the guy who has clammy hands and sweat marks under his arms.”

Lisa,
Australia

At the same time that Mike was drafting the email above, I
was writing one of my own to him.

“By now,” I wrote, “I assume you're finished with the report
– or very nearly – and starting to transition into holiday mode, and thinking
about a couple of weeks off work, and the prospect of crashing at the home of
someone you haven't met yet, and of three months of emails becoming flesh (most
likely with less perfect results than were achieved the first time – or at
least the most famous time – that word became flesh).

“And I’m starting to think about picking you up at the
airport late this afternoon and hoping I recognize you, because I’m awful with
faces (really, I am, it’s almost clinical) and wondering what we are going to
talk about for two and a half hours in the car on the way home.

“This, I realize, is quite a ridiculous thing to worry
about. I suspect neither of us is particularly socially awkward most of the
time, and I don't feel we lack for common ground. But there’s something
slightly jarring, although exciting, about switching gears from text to talk.
I, for one, suspect that I’m more confident and more uninhibited in text land,
but I suspect and hope that once we get past the initial weird zone we’ll be
fine.

“I expect the weird zone to last approximately 43 minutes,
by the way.
 

“I just this minute got your email from this morning and
laughed to see I’m not the only one wondering what we’re doing and whether we
are a little out of our minds.

“I am reminding myself that life is risk and that the worst
thing that’s going to happen is that you get a good holiday out of this and we
cement a new friendship. That's not a bad worst. It's a risk worth taking,
methinks.

“So I’ll be there to pick you up this afternoon unless I get
lost ... which is a distinct possibility. So if I’m not there, hang tight and I
should get there eventually.

“See you this afternoon. I’m glad you’re coming.

“P.S. I want it to be noted that I should not be held
responsible for anything I might say or do in the weird zone, and I think we
should postpone all first impressions until tomorrow.”

Brisbane,
Australia

I arrived at Brisbane airport to pick Mike up more than an
hour early. His plane hadn’t even landed yet.

I’d brought a book with me but was totally unable to
concentrate on it. In the end I left it open in my lap while I worked on a
coffee one careful sip at a time and tried to think of something other than how
nervous I was feeling.

The only things coming to mind, however, were
other
times I’d felt excruciatingly,
tight-of-chest, short-of-breath nervous.

As a little girl, waiting to play the organ at a recital in
the middle of a shopping mall.

The first time (and most times since then, really) I had to
get up in front of a group and lead a workshop.

Other times I’d waited in airports, hopeful and scared, to
greet strangers.
 

The first time I’d given a book reading.

Before the interview in Vancouver.

This train of thought was not helping. Neither was the
caffeine in the coffee. I thought about what I’d written to Mike just that
morning. Somewhere at the back of my mind I knew that all that stuff about
risks worth taking was still true. But
right then most of my
mind (and all 2,037 of the acrobatic butterflies in my stomach) were
running wild and free in the “are we both out of our minds?” territory.

I glanced up at the arrivals board again.

Beside
the listing for Mike’s
flight, the status had just been updated from “On Schedule” to “Landed.”

I stood up, tucking my book away and throwing the rest of my
coffee into the trash. I knew it would probably be at least another thirty
minutes before Mike cleared customs, but I couldn’t sit still any longer. I
found a spot across from the door that he would walk out of, leaned against a
pillar, and started to scan every Caucasian male emerging from customs who
looked somewhere between twenty and fifty.

Either men look at me far more than I usually notice or
there was something strange about the intensity of my own scrutiny that day,
because in the forty-five more minutes it took for Mike to walk out those
doors, more than a handful of men caught my gaze and returned it with a direct
and purposeful intensity of their own that I found very confusing.

“Is that him???” I would wonder, my heart rocketing up into
my throat, as another man caught my eye and took a couple of steps in my
direction. “No, wait, it can’t … maybe it is. … No, I think Mike’s hair is
lighter than that. … Why is he walking toward me? … Okay, turning away. It’s
not him. Not him. Not him. Breathe.”

By the time Mike actually appeared, I’d nearly hugged two
strangers and I was pretty sure I was breaking out in hives.

* * *

I did recognize him. Or, more accurately, I recognized his
smile. I saw that first, almost in isolation. Wide and open, it was
reassuringly reminiscent of the tone of his letters.

He walked out of immigration smiling, wearing a red and
white shirt and carrying a beat-up duffel bag and two duty-free bottles of
wine.

We hugged hello and the top of my head slotted under his
chin. He was tall, at least six feet. There were no sweat marks on his shirt.
His hands weren’t clammy. Mine were.

I can’t remember our first words. I probably asked him how
his flight was. I may not have been speaking in full sentences. The first words
I actually remember us exchanging in person, about ninety seconds after we met,
are these:

Mike: (grinning) “Weird zone’s over.”
 

Me: “You can’t just unilaterally declare weird zone over.
It’s not over. I still have 41 minutes left.”

Mike: “No, it’s over. Can you hold the wine for a minute? I
have to go to the bathroom.”

* * *

Either Mike was better at acting or he was genuinely less
nervous than I was, because the only time I saw him a little startled that day
was when I handed him the keys to the car as we reached the parking lot and
asked if he would drive back to
Ballina
.

“You want me to drive your parents’ car?”

“I haven’t driven much on this side of the road lately,” I
said. “You have.”

“Okay.” He took the keys and nodded, and I didn’t have to
tell him the other reasons I wanted him to drive: that I was worried I was too
unfocused to be totally safe and that I wanted the chance to watch him.

So Mike drove and I sneaked glances, and in the dark cocoon
of the car I slowly but surely started to calm down. There were no Disney fireworks
or choirs of angels singing the Hallelujah Chorus or electric frissons of
immediate sexual tension. What there
was
was
ease.

We talked about the recent robbery of Mike’s house.

“Any more information on what’s missing?” I asked.

“No,” Mike said. “But my boss has decided that that house is
too unsafe for staff, so they’re moving me out while I’m away.”

We talked about first impressions and whether you can
postpone them.

“Yes,” Mike said. “I don’t pay any attention to first
impressions.”

“It’s impossible not to give first impressions any weight,”
I said. “We form them very quickly and almost unconsciously.”
 

“They’re unreliable,” Mike said.

“Are they?” I asked. “I think they can be, but do you
really
think they are generally
unreliable?”

We did
not
at that
point talk about any first impressions we may have had earlier that afternoon.
Instead we talked about Mike’s new passport and how he was going to replace his
work visa and my own recent work-visa interview at the U.S. consulate in Sydney
and Travis.

“I moved my jewelry, my journals, and some of my clothes out
of the house,” I said. “I really don’t think he would trash my stuff or
anything like that, but I just can’t be sure.”

“How are you going to tell him?” Mike asked.

“I wrote to him yesterday and told him I’d be moving out
shortly after I got back,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything from him yet,
though.”

Mike and I found all sorts of things to talk about without
any trouble at all during that ride home. So many things, in fact, that we
didn’t get around to talking about my family – the family that he would shortly
be meeting – until we were almost there.
  

“Is there anything in particular that I should know about
your parents?” Mike asked as we pulled into the driveway of their house.

“Uh, no,” I said, kicking myself for not having thought of
this earlier. “Just be yourself.”

Ballina
, Australia

As we unloaded Mike’s bags from the car and started toward
the house, I was suddenly flooded with a new wave of nervousness. There were
two main thoughts vying for airplay in my mind:

(1) There were lights on in that house. Mike was going to
look at me.

(2) My parents and my little sister were in there waiting,
no doubt dying to look him over. They’d done an excellent job of pretending
casual and low-key all week, but I knew they were fiercely curious.

With regard to this second point, I couldn’t figure out if I
was more wary of something
they
might
do or say, something
Mike
might do or
say, or something
I
might do or say.
I was just sure that there was definite wacky potential in the moment.

I was right. Within ten minutes of our arrival, the
conversation had somehow led my mother to scamper off and retrieve her favorite
speaking prop: the screaming rubber chicken.

A word about this chicken.

My mother is a talented public speaker. She can have a
roomful of adults laughing within minutes of ascending the stage, and in the
process she can get away with saying and doing the corniest and most ridiculous
things without sacrificing any dignity.

Several years ago she stumbled across the screaming rubber
chicken in a game store. It is the ugliest chicken you can imagine. Its squishy
rubber body looks plucked and scrawny and has been unceremoniously dipped in
bright yellow paint. When you squeeze it and let go it emits a horrible
high-pitched shrieking – as if an insane cat is suffering a prolonged death.
The harder you
squeeze,
the longer and more
frantically the chicken wails.

My mother loves this chicken. She loves it so much that she
went out shortly after she acquired hers and bought one for me to use when I
present stress-management workshops.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” I had asked when she
first presented me with my very own screaming rubber chicken.

Being faced with this query in response to a gift would dent
most people. Not my mother.

“You can use it like this,” Mum said, grinning. “When you’re
introducing the workshop you can say something like, ‘Ever had a day when you
feel like
this
?’” She gave the
chicken a gentle squeeze and it moaned piteously. “Or what
about
a day
when you feel like
this?
”
She clutched the chicken slightly harder this time and the chicken complained
more loudly. “Or what
about a day
when you feel like
this?” She squeezed all the air out of the chicken’s floppy latex belly and let
go. The chicken screeched as if a tribe of small, wicked children had tied
firecrackers to its tail feathers.