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26 May 2007, 1:23
They separated under uncertain terms. She untied herself from the stove, took their child, set fire to their trailer home and fled. When he awoke, after dreaming of a nameless, roadless place, his arms were on fire and their bed was disintegrating under blue flames. He bolted up and, finding no one there, ran. Nearly five years later, a stranger finds him dumb and dehydrated in Terlingua.
In new clothes and level again, he decides to search for her. As he finds her that November, she's working in a kind of peep-show telebrothel on the outskirts of Houston. The arrangement involves dark, private booths, each equipped with a chair, a desk ledge, a lamp and a phone, a one-way mirror, and a little fantasy room on the other side of the glass where the girl sits and talks, facing her reflection. They communicate through a little box and the phone.
The first they spoke after nearly five silent years was in the Hotel booth. She couldn't see him and she didn't recognize his voice. But he was reticent and unsure, so to help him loosen up for conversation she offered to take off her sweater. "No, no, no! Don't!" he yelled. He unhinged. He brought out old knives. To her face, he accused her of proper whoring after business hours: "I mean, you can go home with them, if you want to, all these places say that. How much extra money do you make? How much, huh? How much money do you make on the side?" Astonished, but maintaining her professional poise, she stands. "I'm sorry, sir, but I think maybe you wanted to talk to one of the other girls."
The next day, having decided that Hunter should be with his mama but not knowing how to or uncertain even that he could explain his decision to him face to face the way he wants to, Travis records all he wants to say and leaves the tape with Hunter, in room 1520 of the Meridian Hotel, in the clouds, downtown, while he returns to reconcile his dessicated past with hers and to resolve where that leaves them and the realities of their present.
This time, though, he doesn't face her. He turns around, toward the door of the dark and private booth, and talks to her through the phone as he would to anybody else. She could have been in Los Angeles or Terlingua or Paris, France—anywhere out of sight. And he didn't identify himself. Not directly, anyway, and not before she saw him through his words. He told her their story, as he knew it, and, sitting there staring at the one-way mirror separating them, she saw herself and him and the way they worked in it as she couldn't while they were enacting it.
On his suggestion she turns the lights off on her side of the booth, reversing the window/mirror effect.
"Can you see me?"
"Yes."
"Do you recognize me?"
Her voice is equal parts sigh and language. "Oh, Travis."
When it's her turn to explain where the last five years have left her, she turns from him to face the door to her side of the booth. "I... I used to make long speeches to you after you left. I used to talk to you all the time, even though I was alone. I walked around for months talking to you. Now I don't know what to say. It was easier when I just imagined you."
There's something in a person's presence that constrains the channels, making the right words harder to find, or at least harder to express. It's easier to say whatever you will when you don't have to say it to their face. That's not ok.
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