Gabe stands out on the freeway, hitchhiking. Inches from speeding cars he juggles three day-glo orange balls and sings choruses from old Woody Guthrie songs while I stand nearby in the shade of the overpass holding up a sign that says OZ. Gabe is a walking side show.
I met him almost a year ago among the redwoods and giant clovers outside Mendocino and suspected him then of being a lunatic. He joined me one evening at my camp and just stayed. I watched him that night across the fire and saw a tired leprechaun huddled against a strange vision of time. He believed he had fallen into a time warp -- time slowly and monotonously repeating itself. Not a progression, not a changing of seasons or development of events or lives but rather a kind of grim nakedness which he was somehow forced to witness.
"Imagine knowing that from now on you will forever be conscious. It is," he said sheepishly, "sometimes exquisite, however. I can't pretend it isn't. The moments, the moments. Hmm, extremes of one or the other I'm afraid. The trick is how to prolong that exquisite state. It never lasts though. And following hard is something of an abyss which, for the condition of present, no matter how short the actual period, seems an eternity and without hope and well ... there is no concept of change. This naked experiencing always looming up, always. And pressed against it, the sense that it is going to go on forever.
"It is as though I woke up every morning to the same day. Over and over never progressing forward, never going on to the next day the next event the next experience. You may think I'm a jester, a fool with all my antics. They are temporary distractions. Life for me now, how I hate the word, is a series of distractions. Games and stories and adventures. Yet every morning, early before the sun has risen, in the first grey shadowy moments, I wake with cold dread knowing it is again the same, the same, the same. The surroundings may be different but I know nothing has changed. Nothing can ever be accomplished, nothing built, no creative effort ever lasts through the night to be continued and built on the next day because there is always a return each morning to the bare beginning. The idea of confidence, of ambition, of even desire exhausts itself and dies in this condition. A future requires a past that will remain intact in order to build upon it. Can you understand that? I have neither."
The vision alternately horrified and intrigued me. He had learned to live with it by evoking the personage of the leprechaun or the jester or the mime or simply by talking non-stop. He was without a doubt driven, or rather chased. He told me he had hit upon the answer one night during the composition of a long treatise on eternity. The answer he said - follow the laughter.
We stayed up all night and by morning he was convinced I was his angel. My long blond curls and waifish blue eyes reminded him of a picture from his childhood. He said it was a vision of his future and indicated a certain eventual release from the time warp. I said it was probably a post card from his past. Either way, he said, it showed progress so he stayed.
I don't sleep with Gabe. I have this aversion to his body, it has to do with genes and offspring -- motherhood. While some perhaps are pulled toward their destinies through longing and visions of family and motherhood I seem to be directed through aversions.
We've been at this underpass for two days. These people passing us by - families from San Bernardino out for a weekend trip to the desert or suited and tied men with clothing racks across the back seat - mostly ignore us. Gabe says we'd have better luck in this town if he hid and I stood out on the freeway alone but I say it's not reaching the destination that matters but the journey. So we continue on like this until late nightfall. Finally Gabe insists, says he can't stand another noisy night under this bridge so I turn the sign over, write Mecca.
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"Mecca?"
"It's near Joshua Tree," I say.
A canary yellow Buddha-van pulls over within minutes. It's a traveling yellow shrine with yellow carpeting on the floor, yellow walls and ceiling and yellow shelves lined with golden Buddhas and candles, flowers and bruised fruit. Gabe and I sit in back on the yellow cushions. The driver and his companion, a middle-class Zen monk in a yellow robe, burn incense the whole time and talk about holy things. They are going out to the desert to meditate they say. Gabe and I try to join in the conversation but candles and idols keep falling off the shelves. They invite us to dinner so we drive with them a short way down a dirt road to a small outcropping of rocks where the monk spreads out a picnic blanket with bread and wine and cheese and the driver places the Buddha above us on a rock with the candles and flowers. After we eat I make up some excuse why I have to get back to the road and abruptly leave, unable to resist the urge to run all the way.
"That was rude, you know." Gabe says when he finally catches up.
"But it was all so. . . . Didn't it strike you? All that stuff packed into their van. And the way it kept falling, like it was all falling apart, like they were falling apart and trying so hard to hold it together with all the stuff but the stuff was what made it all seem so pitiful."
It's quiet on the highway now, no cars, no trucks, no movement of any kind. The moon gives just enough light to see down the long, yellow line so we walk. We walk and Gabe talks.
I have always wondered about the desert and the mystery of solitude hidden here, so after we set out our sleeping bags by the road I head out alone to find it. Lying on my back I try to be still, allow the desert's influence to wash over me but the Buddha-van stays with me. Then looking up into the milky way, my first ever view of the milky way, I vow never to wear yellow but know even as I vow that yellow has nothing to do with it and never did. Nevertheless the vow stands. I take a small stone figure out of my leather pouch, a gift from my grandmother just before her death. It is a finely carved image of a woman. She carries a young child on her back and is bowed down by the weight. I gently rub it between my fingers.
Back at the sleeping bags I listen for a while to the gentle buzz of distant crickets until a strange swooshing noise catches my attention. It takes a minute but I finally realize the sound is coming from Gabe - he has this thing about grains underhand. Grains of salt on the table, grains of sugar, it comes over him when we sit down to eat. First he starts at his place methodically sweeping his hand over the table, then gradually he moves on to my place. It is our ritual really. We sit down. He sweeps away the grains. Mesmerized, I watch. He has great hands, long slender fingers, artist's hands. My fingers look old and wrinkled, I hate to think what kind of hands mine are. Usually there is comfort in this gentle, rhythmic sweeping but the vastness of the desert worries me.
"Gabe, we're in the desert for God's sake!" I finally yell in exasperation.
"I just need to clear this spot away," he says in monotone.
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Morning is bright and hot. There aren't any cars on the road at all. Around noon a camper with a little Oriental lady and a bald-headed man stop. We think they're stopping for us and run up with all our stuff but they just ask if the dirt road leads to a campground. Actually the man rolls his window down a crack, twists his face up sideways and speaks, leaking out cool air from the cab. I think he's more interested in the spectacle of our marooning than in the dirt road. Gabe explains our predicament, that we have no water and need a ride to the next town. Then he explains his predicament, that he is carrying his wife through the desert and for all he knows we are murderers. I can see his point. He rolls up his window and drives off.
I watch it disappear down the highway. Then Gabe starts in on how that wasn't our ride and that it doesn't matter how many or how few cars pass us because when our ride comes it will stop, not a moment sooner, not a moment later. So we return to our bags and sit.
It isn't that we're lazy, it's just part of this problem with time that Gabe has. He says we could walk for three hours or sit here and in three hours get a ride and pass ourselves on the road thirty minutes later. Gabe says the road is endless and no matter how far you go you'll always pass yourself eventually. So we sit and wait.
That night I wonder if we could be experiencing an aberrant twitch that has somehow allowed our ride to cancel its plans back in San Bernardino. Gabe doesn't think so. I think we should at least walk tomorrow. At least then we might reach a gas station or diner. But Gabe says we've got to stick to our principles, if we can't live by our principles then we're not worth the time and space we occupy. I can't remember any principles that would compel me to sit around and die rather than walk to a diner. Maybe it falls under Karma. I always suspected there was something insidious about Karma.
Saturday's cars aren't stopping either. We stand out in the middle of the highway like in the movies but the cars just drive around us, kids' faces squashed up against the window, staring. Finally the yellow Buddha-van reappears from out the side road. The monk offers us water while the driver goes around back to replace what has fallen from the shelves. They ask if we want a ride back to San Bernardino but neither Gabe nor I can stomach the thought.
Around noon another van pulls over and stops for us. It's a new camper van with a refrigerator, shag carpets and plush seats that Gabe and I immediately sink into. John and Alan are very nice and very clean which makes me very suspicious. But they offer us water and juice and soda and oranges and some kind of energy snack bar. They play religious study tapes and sugary gospel music as we speed off into the desert. Gabe is silent, unwilling to offer these two the inevitable opportunity to proselytize. I am torn between my desire to reach a town and my aversion to these clean men. Gabe and I quietly place bets on the religious affiliation, from here it could be anything. The white shirts say Mormons on a Mission.
We stop to watch the sunset and eat dinner. Gabe finally warms up to them, sharing stories of freight rides across the mountains in blinding snow storms and long humid days miming in drag in New Orleans. I'm still uncomfortable with their clean attractiveness. They say they're going to park here for the night and if we would like to continue on with them in the morning they'll wake us. They disappear into the back of their camper while Gabe and I walk a little ways off and set up our bags.
"Let’s get out of here Gabe, I can't sleep. I don't trust those guys."
We watch their movement through the drawn curtains for a while then I sneak up and listen. The windows are open and I hear talk about the missions and the opportunity to speak to us in the morning after a big breakfast. Then, concerned, they discuss our "sad, wasted lives". Then, lowering their voices they snicker about the "old man" with the "little girl" and how disgusting. But they aren't too disgusted to go on and on about what they suspect goes on between us in private.
I return to Gabe. "Gabe, wake up. Let's go on ahead I feel like walking."
"Anna, go to sleep."
"No. I don't want to ride with them in the morning, I don't like them. Cone on Gabe, this is important to me."
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He sits up and looks at me for a long time, finally he gets up and rolls his bag. "What did they say?"
"They said they were clean and we were dirty, they said they were Right and we were Wrong, they imagined upon us their own wickedness. And I am defenseless here. So are you."
Somehow their clean, white threat settled under my skin that night. We must have walked for miles without speaking, disappearing like phantoms into the desert. Gabe and I. It was then I understood Gabe's time warp. It wasn't some funny sci-fi notion of possible futuristic complications. It was much worse. It was a view into the depths of despair with no shield at all. That's where his sense of nakedness came from.
I wondered for a long time what shape the men behind the curtains would assume if they were ever forced to view what Gabe had been viewing for so long. I guessed it would be easier to believe in fairy tales.
