Greenwich is the Center of the World

“You know what I realized?” he says. I can’t see his face, but I can feel his mouth moving where it rests against my breast. “Zero longitude is completely arbitrary.” I laugh. His cheek bristles.

Since before he first kissed me, I have wanted to lie like this, his sweet head tucked into the crook of my neck, my lips conveniently resting on its smooth top. I cradle it. We have just finished making love, and there is a thin sheen of sweat I taste again and again. “No,” he says, “really, did you know that zero longitude is in Greenwich?” Greenwich, he tells me, is not even an interesting place. It has some museums. “But if you didn’t know you would just think you’re on the shitty outskirts of London.”

My lover is a small man, compact, born in Germany. His accent is like coffee ice cream: silky and a little sharp. His torso is perfectly white, with neat flares of chest hair around the nipples.  We talk about things like this in bed: glacial relics, the ocean floor, latitudes. My leg slung atop his in the peach light.

 “Why didn’t they just pick London?”

 “Well, there’s a bunch of observatories in Greenwich,” he says. “That’s where the explorers were launching from back then. Then someone just decided.” I can picture the mariners: pale men bending over maps, checking the ships at dock, crossing cool green fields, ducking into dark pubs to get out of the rain. It is the opposite of the desert heat that bristles outside my window now, eight a.m. and lurching toward a hundred degrees, the sky clear of clouds. My lover and I lie in the sheets with the cooler running, our bodies slicked hot. Outside the window the yard is gravel and cacti and everything looks crisped, burnt brown-orange.

“It’s just so arbitrary,” he says, pushing his body into mine, closer despite the heat. “I mean—I guess anywhere else in the world would be just as arbitrary,” and he is right, I am wracking my brain, is there anywhere that would be less arbitrary? Is there anywhere that would make sense?

Latitude, of course, is not so arbitrary: zero degrees runs the equator, each measure from there sixty-nine miles apart; the lines are parallel, equadistant, reading north or south in degrees between zero and ninety. It makes sense. Longitudinal measurements, on the other hand, converge at the poles. They are widest at the equator—sixty-nine miles apart.

And here is the trouble: Greenwich is the center of the world, Greenwich is zero degrees, the rest of the world is measured from there, up to 180 degrees east or west (east and west converging, of course, somewhere out in the dark ocean, along the International Date Line). The question is always: how far are we from Greenwich?

It was a foolish thing to do, this sex beneath the covers. It is very hot now, as I run my foot over his, as we scheme out loud—but so delicious, how could we not? Nairobi could be the center of the world, we decide, or an Eskimo village. We pick places those pale men wouldn’t have cared for, choose the most arbitrary places we can think of. Corners of jungles. Grey, post-Soviet cities. We care for these places, in a strange way, or maybe we just feel misrepresented about the center of the world, about the concept of the center of the world. If Greenwich, site of the British Royal Observatory, is the center of the world, it just as easily could have been here. Arizona. The low desert. Important things have happened here, too, between my soft, sweat-soaked sheets. We both need a long drink of water.

His phone alarm went off a long time ago, electronic bird chirps, and now he sighs, shifts off me, kisses me firmly. “Can I shower here?” he says. “Do you have a razor?” “Of course,” I say, pleased. He disappears into the bathroom and I am left in the sheets, latitude 32.2470519, longitude -110.956087, one mile from the university where we work, two weeks and one day into this thing, whatever it is. I will get up and make coffee in a minute, I know; I will pull out the sugar so he can make it the way he likes it. But for now I press my forehead into the bed, warm, arbitrary, oriented.

Why I write about sex.

I write about sex because everyone wants to read about it. I write about sex because everyone has it. I write about sex because I am always wondering who is laying that stylist with the pencilled-in lips. I write about sex because I get paid to. I write about sex because it is always changing. I write about sex because it scares people. I write about sex because it’s hilarious. I write about sex because it is an issue of social justice. I write about sex because it connects me to being animal. I write about sex because the words are a pleasure. I write about sex because I feared it in high school. I write about sex because my politics demand it. I write about sex because I was raped.  I write about sex because so were both my sisters. I write about sex because it is a part of loving well. I write about sex because I miss it when I am not having it. I write about sex because bodies have a dance. I write about sex because if you know a character’s sex life, everything else follows. I write about sex because I want to be Rumi. I write about sex because things like elevators become much more interesting. I write about sex to say it’s okay. I write about sex to bully my peers into using condoms. I write about sex as an act of love. I write about sex because I’m stubborn and self-effacing. I write about sex because I’m proud of the story I inhabit. I write about sex because there are a lot of terrible books to make up for. I write about sex because it’s good with wine and chocolate. I write about sex to keep my rights. I write about sex to open conversation. I write about sex because pubic lice are funny. I write about sex because I’ve had great lovers. I write about sex to cultivate compassion. I write about sex because no one is saying what it feels like to have your genital warts burned off. I write about sex because it is a way of holding my own hand. I write about sex as an apology to anyone I’ve judged. I write about sex in honor of every kid who’s asking if they’re normal. I write about sex because there’s no such thing as normal. I write about sex because it reminds me of the power of intuition. I write about sex because I retain the correct proportion of awe. I write about sex because I can say penis without blushing. I write about sex as a deep breath in my loneliness. I write about sex to cry. I write about sex because I ache to put my words behind something that matters. I write about sex because it’s difficult. I write about sex because I am never, ever tired of it.  I write about sex because so much happens in that place beyond words.

On Facebook and Love.

On the first date, we met at the West End Tavern and drank black beer and bourbon.  It was drafty upstairs and the band was too loud. We sat in the poorly-lit corner by the shuffleboard.  I pulled my shirt down to let him feel my scar; he slid his off to show me the tattoo—a  monkey wrench, red and blue, on his shoulder. We laughed endlessly. His leg, hard with muscle, pressed against mine.

We went back to my place and fucked, in honor of Ed Abbey.  He held my short hair in his hands as he kissed me.

“You better call, mister,” I said.

“You better pick up,” he said.

On the second date he brought his dog over to my tiny second-floor apartment and I made him yellow curry. The place was the kind of clean that only happens on second dates. He was less funny. I liked him anyway.  I turned petting the dog into petting him. Afterward, he lay in bed, squinting happily at my bookshelf.

That night, we became friends on Facebook.

I’ve got a walk-in closet of reasons I love Facebook. They’re hedgy, of course. They exist only in defense. Activism, community poetry, networking—and to know what my friends from seventh grade church camp are doing on a daily basis. There’s a delicious vengeance in watching the cutest cheerleaders from high school get fat on beer and drop out of community college. But the real, true joy of Facebook, if you strip it all down, is exactly what it looks like: legal stalking, in the comfort of your own home.

What I’m making clear, here, is that by the third date I had absolutely for-sure established the existence of the ex. Not just any ex, but a pictures-were-tagged-just-a-month-ago ex. A traveled-together-by-plane ex. A visted-family ex. A blonde, Naropa-poetry-slam-reading, tight-assed-doing-yoga-atop-Fourtneers ex.

I bristled.

On the third date we met at my favorite coffeeshop. It was late afternoon and the sun twisted through the glass windows onto the table. Outside snow softened on the curbs. He wore a maroon Carhartt jacket that made me want to eat him and I was nervous. Something was different. Maybe he thought poorly of my 1,000 Facebook Friends. Or the 1,500 pictures tagged of me at all stages of fat, hippie, dying, and making out with my ex.

We drank chai. He wanted to talk about her. I wasn’t surprised but my heart yammered against my underwire. It was only a month ago. (I know.)  She was the only person he knew in this town. (Oh shit.) She was his next-door neighbor (his fucking next-door neighbor?!). 

“I wondered,” I said, the paragon of calm. “I saw her in your Great Sand Dunes album. Those pictures were beautiful.”

He assessed me, smiling a little, brown eyes, brown freckles, slightly gapped smile. (MBA from Cornell!, I kept thinking, Sustainability Consultant! Camps naked!) 

“Are you, like, one of those creepy Facebook stalkers?” he asked.

Pause.

“No way,” I said, “I just look when I friend someone for the first time. You know, out of curiosity. But… not much after.”

I went home and looked her up. She was a writer too. She even spelled her name with a fucking i at the end like mine. We had a friend in common, someone pretentious and image-based (read: smart and beautiful and terribly nice) whom I’d gone to college with. Oh fuck you, I thought, flipping through as many of her pictures as Facebook would let me see and wishing I had an ass like that.

On the fourth date, I packed my MSR stove and a box of mac ’n’ cheese and a few beers into the cooler and drove to the San Luis Valley. I was nervous as hell. He’d gone camping alone and I was coming to meet him. I’d pictured sleeping in the back of his truck on that old mattress, the way she had; winter sex, the tangle of sleeping bags, his brown lab smooshed in there somewhere too.  I’d pictured a fire, the two of us sipping Jameson and reading nature writers. Or kissing in the hot springs. Disappearing into the steam. Maybe falling in love.

Instead he took me on a walk up to the old mine and shot a roll of film in the dying light. Beautiful photos, not an ounce of me in any of them. He told me every word of mine was out of her blonde mouth, that we were just exactly alike, that it was a little too much.  “Stop it,” he said, when I told him I loved trains, “this is getting really weird.” 

I held myself tight against the cold. Was I? Was I exactly someone else?

We cooked two separate dinners at two separate picnic tables.  After, when I leaned toward him at the fire, he paled, jolted.  “Am I allowed to kiss you?” I said.

“I’m not ready,” he said weakly, “I’m not ready, I’m sorry, you’re wonderful, you’re so beautiful, I’m sorry.”

I drove home in the middle of the night rather than pitch my own tent. It was blizzarding on the pass.

At home, delirious, I stared at their pictures on Facebook and cried.  The man had been miserable, sitting there by the fire, lonely and lost. He was already in love. He probably let the dog out into a shared yard each morning, searching the windows for a glimpse of her hair. He’d gone home with a stranger because she fit so precisely into the shadow of his heart.

Sometime after dawn he unfriended me, and it all disappeared.

On being a westerner.

It’s midnight, and I’m writing in the back of the car—hatchback open, moon blazing full across the big mountains. The silence is a hum that builds inside your ribcage.  This is Steven’s Gulch: a long Forest Service Road that starts where Grand Avenue hits the highway, taking you from pavement to spitting gravel, past mining equipment and private drives. Eventually it reaches a reservoir; I stop at the pullout. 

Up here you can see low clouds winding through the trees, how the mountains tilt a million different angles.  Up here, I’m alone.

When I first moved west eight years ago, I was hungry for everything. I loved mountains. I’d backpacked the spines of long, overgrown ranges and driven into the desert to rock climb. But I didn’t know how to build a life.  I landed in Kelly, Wyoming, three days after my high school graduation. My hair was long, my skin soft with humidity. In a platform tent with a white canvas cover, I waited out the early June blizzards.

What I needed to learn, I found out quickly, was practical:  how to drive a truck over rutted road. How fast to take turns on a pass.  How to anticipate weather.  My practice runs were all Trails Wilderness School vehicles, boasting over 200,000 miles, with spidery windshields. Then I borrowed Johnny, my co-leader’s old white GMC, and took him on jaunts to Idaho for a vanilla milkshake. I sat on Johnny’s hood on the bison flats to watch birds, writing postcards home.  I was learning.

The next summer I took a car west with me, and in many ways this is when I began to be the person I am now:  I didn’t just run alone or drink tea alone anymore; I went on trips alone. I slept beside Abraxas in aspen groves and in desert washes. I slept inside his hatchback on the street in San Juan Bautista, with sea air flooding in the cracked windows. I spent a night on the Nevada salt flats watching lights glint half a mile away, convinced a murderer was going to axe through the ceiling of my car. And over time I developed my rules: the vehicle is most easily organized in plastic bins. Always carry extra water. Check the oil at each gas station. Watch for deer eyes at the edges. Don’t plan to be anywhere on time. Do not apply cream cheese to stale bagels while driving.

On the way, I also learned about public lands. I bought big red Gazetteers—Colorado, Wyoming, Utah—to identify free BLM and Forest Service terrain. (“You should never have to pay for camping in the west,” I liked to say.)  I learned about ranching, then oil and gas.  I left coordinates in the windshield when backpacking. I learned you can wash your hair in public bathrooms or in rivers; I learned how to hold my whiskey, how to talk to roughnecks, and how to sniff out the best cup of coffee in town.  Driving led to hiking, hiking to wandering.  And over the years, as the dry air got in my skin, my daily way of living quieted. I learned to chop wood. I built fires in the dark of winter morning. I watched the river steam beside snowdrifts.

At a recent staff training, I was asked to write down seven of my identities.  I could hear murmurings, all around me, of what others chose for their lists: Wife. Daughter. Athlete. Nurse.  Then we were asked to discard our identities, one by one—to choose the most important.

I am a writer first. I also an advocate for social justice, a teacher, a body.  And, fiercely, I am a westerner. 

My roots are in the swamps and strip malls of middle America, but by now, the west is home. Frost-heaved roads. Glacial tarns. Forest fires. Fiddles. Squatting in the gravel to piss without a single light on the horizon. Most of the time I take it for granted. But once in a while I load up the car, heading off somewhere new, and feel that wiggle of joy deep in my belly. I roll down the window, take a deep breath. I holler into the big open space of the west.

I began with a love of a place I did not know. It is such a privilege to slowly speak the language.

Sierra Leone: An Overview.

On the ferry from Lungi:

The sun goes down between islands, a sober orange. Tin shacks. Fishermen in long boats. The group clusters at the rail to talk. As the dark settles in, I grab Les’ arm. Lights! The coming hillside is dotted with white and yellow.  (Remember the dam? Les says, Up-country? They finally got it running.) Freetown is no longer the city that approaches silently.

On the roosters:

In the morning, Rachel rolls over. Do you think we can have chicken for dinner? she says. I only want male.

On meeting random men:

Sahid leads me down the white beach. He is trying not to get his nice shoes wet. I am barefoot, stepping over lines of trash the tide washed up.  You wanted to hear about the war? he says suddenly. Because I was a Lost Boy. (Behind us, the rest of the team chases a soccer ball. I let out my breath.) Yes please, I say.

On traveling:

We sit with backpacks beneath our feet and pineapples rolling around. The van is like a clown car: it takes ten minutes to load and unload at each stop. Mismatched shoulders, dribbling sweat, held bladders. If we drive fast enough, a stiff wind makes things bearable. We put hats on to keep our hair from dreading. There is the promise of the ride home: it will be better, we know, once we have given away all our stuff.

On digger ants:

Like a vein punctured in a rutted path: Careful, they say, Digger ants have pinchers and can eat a chicken. I have seen nothing like it. Thick ropes of ants spill from the ground. Once I saw an oil slick in the road, says Marissa, only it was ants.

On Kabala:

Many things are being built. The burnt houses are crowded with vines and people hang their laundry there. Others grow corn, seven feet high, up the middle of the bedrooms. War recedes.

On the heat:

My brain is cooking. I have a short attention span. As we walk, my pants go damp with the sweat. It is hard to want to write. I keep it short.

On sensitive mimosa:

Tap the plant with your foot and it shrivels in, like a butterfly disappearing itself. Then slowly, under the glow of the sun, it makes itself new.

On the food:

Groundnut stew. Rounds of pineapple. Raw coconut chunks. Too-early mango, perfect avocadoes, long soft baguettes with Laughing Cow spread. Hot pepper. A substance generically referred to as “meat.” Rice, rice, rice. (Rice is so important here, Hope says, that if you serve a man spaghetti he will say he has not eaten.)

On eating:

We eat in secret at regular hours. God does not forgive those who eat in front of the starving.

Thanks, Jesse.

It took me two days to report my rape and three more to get to Victim Services. In the office, Michelle bustled around, looking up business cards. “It’s your legal right,” she said, “to get reimbursed from this fund for any bills. Counseling, to a certain point. Work missed because of effects of the assault.”  While she was away at the filing cabinet, I leaned over her desk to peer at my file. Jesse Young, it said. So they had been to his house. It was the first time he had a last name for me.

Next to his name, the box had already been checked: prosecution denied.

I reported on a Saturday night. I was supposed to go straight from work to a wedding. Instead, I waited in the empty police station until a young officer escorted me across the street into the court building. There, we stared at each other in a too-big room.  He didn’t know what to make of me. I had every detail down.

“I have never taken testimony from someone with such a specific memory,” he said.

I nearly laughed out loud.

In the tub, pressed against the edge until my neck bled, I’d ascended above myself for a split second. Watched myself, the girl in the pool. Then some part of me hissed, “Get the fuck back in there.”

You will remember everything, I told myself. You must remember everything. It will be all you have.

And did. I told the cop evenly, carefully, without hope. Watched him blink at points at the language I had to use telling it.

At the end, he put his notebook down quietly. “Why did you report this?” he said. “Two days after. You’ve showered. There’s going to be little we can do.”

“So you will go to his house,” I said. “I know nothing will happen. I knew that before. But I want him to open his door to the police. I want him to be fucking scared.”  The cop nodded.  “He deserves a policeman at his door.”

“Okay,” the officer said. He looked at me evenly, with something like respect. “That’s all.”

He gave me the brochure for Victim Services. The next week, I found Michelle, in the office with yellow walls, sarcastic and sad as she recommended therapists specializing in “this sort of thing.” She was the first person to tell me what I needed to do.  The Community Safety Network. Western Wyoming Family Planning.  A plan: relief. Then she gave me more than that.

“It’s a shit, isn’t it?” she said, all of a sudden. “Wyoming law. It’s archaic.”

“I’d have been better off on my college campus,” I admitted.

“Yes, you would have,” she said. She slipped a rubber band around the brochures. “And when you take your six-month HIV test, you know what you can say? Thanks, Jesse. When you can’t sleep at night. When you’re trying to explain this to your next lover. Thanks, Jesse.” She was grinning. There was an edge to her that was almost hysterical.

“When I have to see his friend at work,” I said.

“Thanks, Jesse!” she shouted, grinning giant and fake. “You should make a fucking shirt,” she said, and then we were laughing, holding the desks.

“Coca-cola lettering, that’s what I’m picturing,” I said, through tears, grinning, crying. “Thanks, Jesse.”

“Yeah. Big fucking thanks for this,” Michelle said. Then, “C’mere, hon,” and her hug was giant and warm, and the last one I’d feel for a long time.

I meant to go back there. She was such a comfort to me. But I never did. At Western Wyoming Family Planning, I tried to tell them what I needed and burst into tears. The receptionist, unsure of herself, guided me into the back room. I peed in a cup, took deep breaths. When I came out, she told me the tests would be free, and gave me a big box of Trojans. They sat in the car that whole year; as though if I were raped again, I could at least get them to use a condom.

“Thanks, Jesse,” I said quietly, in my car.

Alice Sebold wrote something like, “Rape is that which ruins everything.” Since I heard it, I’ve never been able to find the quote. There are days when I am less lenient with myself. When I tell myself, you could have fought harder. You could have climbed that fence. You could have kicked him in the goddamn junk. Then, out of nowhere, I taste what is ruined. Last week, the man I sleep with leaned over me without a condom. I asserted myself once, then twice. On the third time, I burst into tears, and he lay back aghast, apologizing profusely.

It’s not you, I tried to say.

I thought it was hot when you asserted yourself, he said.

Even aware of my history, there’s no way he could have known. There’s no way I could have known.

The body carries stories sewn into its skin, pulped into the organs, traced onto the lines of its limbs.  Rape is that which ruins everything, secretly, in sudden ways. Out of nowhere, the feeling rushes in: you asshole. How could you doubt. You were raped.

It’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I’ve been silent, thinking of what to say. The month slowly ticked by. 1 in 4 of us—if not goddamn more—do not want to think about it. But it lives in our bodies. We give thanks, from time to time. We lift up our hands. We live the giant Fuck You.

Chiricahua.

Before me, long red and green cliffs stagger out of the dusty mountains.  Beside me, emerald hummingbirds zag under greening trees. In my hand, a cold Hefeweizen homebrew.

I am in heaven: Portal, Arizona.

The last time I was in Arizona, I was nineteen, studying the border with a class. We went down in a big white van to the migrant centers in Agua Prieta and Nogales. We interviewed the Border Patrol, slept in the slums.  I drank a lot of cheap, sugary coffee out of styrofoam cups and fumbled through in Spanish.

On the last day, we drove the stretch of desert where so many die, thinking of the men we’d met.  As we stepped into showers in Tucson, they were creeping north of Sasabe. They were hiding from Border Patrol in the brush. They were sipping Coke bottles filled with water, trying to make them last. And they were hoping they could keep their children from starving.  NAFTA had razed the economies of southern Mexico; in many villages, they told us, the only option was to leave.

The men I met were lawyers, psychologists. They would take work picking stawberries or digging trenches. Maybe they would be deported. Or maybe they would die before they got there.

This time—six years later—I am walking around the loveliest garden, waiting for a wedding. There will be local Arizona wine and a sandwich bar. There will be women in floral dresses laughing and fixing each other’s hair. Around me, trees bend with fresh spring leaves. In ways, it seems impossible that I’m so close to that border.

But I am.

I got into Tucson late last night, past ten-thirty, and drove the rental car blindly east.   I played games with myself to see how far I could make it before pulling over to sleep. “After I’m off the interstate,” I said aloud.  I dreamed of a pullout with a flat patch of ground, where I could throw down a tarp and sleeping pad and crawl into my bag.  But once I turned south onto 80, a slow uneasiness grew in me: I knew what this landscape held. Once, twice, then a third time, I passed the parked cars of Border Patrol. The place was crawling with them. Saw a flashlight in a field. Watched a van idling on a side road—loading or unloading?

All this time, the fear in me grew. I thought of coyotes, those brutal human smugglers. I thought of the drug cartels sending runners through this passage. It was two in the morning, and for the first time in my life I didn’t want to sleep in the desert.

So I went all the way. I took the hooking righthand road toward Portal and watched the cliffs of the Chiricahua rising out of the darkness. The moonlight was strong. Hares darted across the road: conejos, I remembered. I scanned the radio and found some bad country. Turned it way up.

When I got to the Forest Service entrance—Cave Creek—the sign, brown and in all caps, read: “TRAVEL CAUTION: SMUGGLING AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY BE ENCOUNTERED HERE.”

And I laughed maniacally. “Okay. Fine.” There was no way around it.

It was Easter weekend. There wasn’t a camping spot left. At three a.m. I circled every campground twice, then finally parked my car beside an occupied site and bedded down in the back seat. All night I jerked awake, worrying about tickets from the Forest Service, or (!?!) a coyote putting a gun to the window and demanding the car keys.

Needless to say, I was fine.

Here on the porch, it’s hard to feel anything but peace. Cave Creek Ranch is tucked down into the grasses, a circle of stone cottages protected by juniper and cottonwood. Skinny, ruffled-looking deer totter across the lawn.  The front yard is set with linened tables and wedding flowers. I cannot imagine people walking through at night while we sleep.

But when I ask my Arizona friends, they shrug. “It’s a real possibility around here,” they say.  They know that, regardless of what we see, we are in the borderlands. 

I take a walk down the road. Dust kicks up behind me, and the light is golden on the long cliffs. I find myself hating my wild fear. What moves through this desert is not only shadow but people too. They are people who love, who make love, who wipe their childrens’ brows in fever. They have passions, talents. They work hard. They are people fighting to live. I have spoken to them before.

I stop in the sun. Hands out. Heat collects in my palms. I hold the contradiction as it twists and moves through me: Coyote. Smuggler. Immigrant. And This gentle land. Nourishment. Oasis.  I am cradled by desert heat. By secret streams. I become quieter and quieter.

Then I know that the fear I feel is only my inability to understand all things at once.