Flannery’s Traveller
After my long return to Ellabelle, I exited Route 204, my anticipation peaking when I could see the phosphorescent glow of the Thunderbird Motel. Inside our room, the plumes of smoke that escape the cigarette draping from my lips, obscure the darkness that conceals her. As the smog dissipates, I see her leaning into the walls of a corner of the room. I watch for a moment while her dress waves in a breeze of the warm, Georgia air. I am entranced. In her coy smile, I feel myself sinking forward into the abyssal, sapphire blue of her eyes. Those eyes. Within them I see the glimmer grow brighter with each piece of her that I find. Tonight she stands on her own. She will never wait for me again. For months, we’ve lived here while I’ve roamed, collecting the scattered pieces of my love. I began searching two years ago, when I first realized she had been hidden from me.
Since I returned from France, in the summer of ’46, I’ve travelled the country as a door-to-door salesman. In every city, I changed my name, affected a different accent, and invented a different story about my past. With so many versions of myself, I had lost track of where I started. I couldn’t even remember my own name. But no matter how far I ran, or how much whiskey I drank, the tyranny of the deathless memory persisted. Alone, I lied in the darkness of motel rooms, watching my mind projected the haunting cinema onto those white stucco ceilings. It was always the same. Always the day I first saw her, when I caught her watching me from that field of lavender. There she was, but she was lost to me. Then one day, in Louisiana, I found her.
For months, I had been travelling through the South. Sometimes I sold electric can openers, sometimes Bibles. It was all the same. I only needed enough cash for bourbon and women. I’d give anything to believe that, if only for a moment, I was someone else; that I was somewhere else. In my pursuit, I visited a white, palatial, Victorian home outside of New Orleans. On that day I sold can openers, and part of my pitch was to demonstrate the machine on a can of tomatoes. Succumbed to my charm, the old widower asked me to stay for supper, using the tomatoes to make etouffee. I obliged. I was lured by something warm and familiar, and at the end of our meal I saw what it was. It had been there, watching me, over the plate of pecan pie and glasses of whiskey. In front of me, in this woman’s eye socket, was a piece of my beloved. In the gaze of that glass bead I saw the keys to my deliverance. Her graces washed over me like a hot bath in the dead of winter. I could remember. I relearned my name. Later that night, I seduced the widow, and claimed the eye while she slept.
After several months, my large, black suitcase had carried over a dozen pieces of her that I found hidden in others. There were eyes, hands, legs, hair, and several portions of tin masks. With the leg I bring to her tonight, again, she will be whole. We will never have to part. I take another drink as I watch her come alive in the darkness of the room. I can see the reflection of firelight dancing across her face; the delicate, red curls of hair following behind her as she runs; I can hear my voice overlaid with the lilting of her laughter; And permeating through everything is the cloying perfume of the day I found her amongst the undulating waves of a Provencal sea of lavender. After that July day, along with her body, I discovered that my dreams had been replaced by frozen, bleak nothingness. I am a corpse, watching the world through a glass coffin, a claustrophobic marionette played by the shadows of a love, long since dead. When I finally succumb to the lullaby of bourbon, I always return to the same places. And there, she will always, and never, be with me.
