Trip Diary - Two: Tomorrow Is A Four-Letter Word

“My head was spinning a million miles an hour, the chance I was taking I get anxious around her. She put her head on my shoulder, I started to hold her…”

The first person I meet in this brave new world is a short, middle-aged Asian guy with a wolfish smile, a pencil-thin moustache, and a gun. He looks me up and down, his eyes paying special attention to my T-shirt, which carries a spoof Coca-Cola slogan that reads Enjoy Ketamine. Beneath this, the words young, dumb, wanna be numb. Amongst my many worries about the trip and the contents of my bags, I hadn’t once considered the idea that my clothes might draw attention to me. Now I pull my coat together and offer a tight smile he seems to accept.

“Over there,” he says, pointing towards a row of cubicles where newly arrived passengers are being processed.

I join the queue and wait my turn, trying in vain to clear my head and wake myself up. I feel groggy, vaguely nauseous. It had been okay when I’d been moving, but now I'm stuck, all I want is to drop where I stand. This isn’t helped by the fact that the queue keeps changing configuration and direction. They let the cabin crew through first, then the first class passengers, then those with children or disabilities. As more of the cubicles become free, we’re split into smaller lines by the little Asian guy, who seems to be genuinely enjoying himself. I am not. For some reason, every time the queue gets broken up, I end up further away from being processed.

To pass the time, I let paranoia occupy my mind, carefully watching the people they pull out of the line and away into a sinister-looking office. Surprisingly, most of them are Americans. Most of them, so far as I can tell, are simply going to fill out required forms they’ve somehow missed out on. I start to relax. I have my passport and my visa waiver form and my customs declaration. I know what they’re going to ask me and how I’m going to answer. I’m fairly sure I won’t be jerked out of the line, not unless it’s for the damn T-shirt.

Finally, I find myself confronting an overweight, sleepy-eyed officer who reminds me so much of Al from Die Hard that I find myself expecting him to pull a doughnut or a twinkie from beneath his desk. I smile and say hello. His facial expression remains deadly serious. I hand him my passport and he looks at it for a long time, glancing first at the photo and then at me. I have a goatee in my passport picture, but it’s not as if it looks nothing like the boy standing in front of him.

“How long are you over for, Michael?” he asks.

“Sorry? Oh…just a week.”

Did he just call me Michael? Why the familiarity?

“Is it a business visit?”

“Uh…no, I’m on holiday.”

He nods. He does a little stamping and folding with my papers, takes prints from the index fingers of both of my hands, then takes a picture of me. I smile. If I don’t, I’ll look like a criminal.

“Enjoy your stay, Michael,” he says, handing me my passport.

“I’ll try.”

I’m a little freaked out as I go to reclaim my baggage. I don’t think I’ve ever been called by my first name in that kind of situation before. It’s always Sir or Mr. O’Mahony or – occasionally - The Defendant. I think on it while I wait for my bag and then forget about it until later in the week, when Jennifer and I get to talking about the pronunciation of my surname and I realise that she can’t actually say it without putting on an English accent. It’s one of those strange phonetic quirks you come across every now and again. My name is pronounced Oh-Mah-Nee, and maybe two people have ever nailed that pronunciation first time out. I’ve been called Oh-Ma-Hoe-Nee, Oh-Ma-Hun-Ee, Oh-Ma-Hog-A-Nee, Oh-Mah-Lee, and even Ar-Mah-Nee. I have one of those names people generally look at and see whatever it is they want to see, whether the appropriate letters are there or not. I think poor Al was looking at my passport and trying to figure it out. When he decided the silence had gone on a little bit too long, he just took the next name along. Or at least, that’s my theory.

I only get stopped once more on my way to freedom, and that’s when I present my customs declaration to the really rather angry woman standing at the door.

“Who’s in Fullerton?” she asks, looking for all the world like she’ll simply blow my head off if she doesn’t like the answer she gets.

“None of your fucking business,” I don’t say.

“Why, who’s waiting for you at home?” I also don’t say.

“Osama Bin Laden,” I definitely don’t say.

“A friend,” I say, and she waves me on before turning her anger on whoever’s behind me.

I walk up the ramp and out into what I’m expecting to be a massive terminal. It’s actually a very small terminal. From customs to the street is a walk of about twenty feet. A lot of the passengers have already gone, and the crowd waiting for friends, relatives, and clients is pretty thin. Most of them are away to my right. Right ahead of me, though, leaning against a pillar and looking away, is Jennifer.

At first, I don’t think anything. I just stop. It’s a total mental shutdown. All the words and fantasies and songs and oddities that usually whirl around inside my head simply bail out. In that moment, maybe two or three seconds, I feel utterly and completely blank.

When my brain re-engages, if only to stop me from falling over, if only to make me walk towards her, my thoughts come in a rush, suddenly frantic to reach their destination. I thought my insomnia and irregular schedule would prepare me for the time change and the jetlag, but it really hasn’t. When you go eight hours back in time, it fucks with your body. When you try to make sense of it, it fucks with your head. I’m in the same room as Jennifer and it’s six o’clock in the evening. It’s also two o’clock in the morning of tomorrow. At my six o’clock, I’d been sleeping on the plane. I’d also been between time zones, which means that even then, it was more like two o’clock. But at two o’clock, we’d just been taking off. And so on. Travelling through time zones is like leaving pieces of yourself behind. Or ahead. It’s like existing in several places at once. I don’t know what the time is or whether I should be asleep or awake. I have a sense that things just aren’t where they’re supposed to be. I have gained time, and I feel as though those hours are inside me, trying to push me forward, or back, to the place I came from.

Frustrating, nonsensical thoughts. Everything feels wrong. At the same time, everything feels right. I’m realising a dream and dreaming a reality. I’m getting closer and closer to the girl I came here to meet. I’m memorising her eyes, her mouth, her hair, her dress, her legs. She hasn’t seen me. It’s all happening in slow motion and I still can’t analyse it quickly enough to know what I’m supposed to say or do next.

Eye contact and she smiles. Jennifer smiles. I’m here. I smile back, hear myself saying hi. She hugs me and it’s awkward because I’m holding two bags and have restricted movement and only one free arm. Don’t really feel that first hug, not the way I’d imagined. The details that imprint themselves on my brain are the smell of her hair and the way my hand slides down her back when she steps away, how my fingertips scream at the pattern of her spine and the outward curve of one hip, how all the words in the world won’t ever describe an incidental touch that races up into my brain like the first hit of a future addiction.

Jennifer is taller than I expected, somehow bigger. Her eyes hit me hard but her smile hits me harder. She has great legs. The first thing I notice about her body language is that she’s sort of clumsy, like me. On her, it’s natural and real and beautiful.

Then we’re out into the cold street, and a man with foul breath and an untidy beard is in my face, shaking a bucket and muttering something about Christian children. Jennifer says something I don’t hear because I’m sort of horrified by the man’s wide, bloodshot eyes and the way he’s stepping right into my space. My first instinct is to shove him away, and I have to force it down.

“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”

Really, that’s the last thing I remember for a while. Every minute that passes seems to leave me more exhausted. I joke with Jennifer when she can’t remember where she parked her car. When we finally do find it, there is a charged moment where the pair of us just stand there. I only realise the potential that was in that moment afterwards, when we’re driving out of the car park and I’m lighting a cigarette. The traffic on the freeway is pretty bad. We’re listening to the radio and talking, just shooting the breeze. I see signs for Crenshaw Boulevard and Inglewood, places from the lyrics of West Coast rappers that make the whole thing seem even more surreal. How can I be passing through their world? I learn what a carpool is. I finally understand how viciously accurate the radio ads in Grand Theft Auto are.

It’s getting on for eight o’clock when we arrive at Jenn’s apartment. I sense immediate hostility from Jaguar, her cat, but I’m too wasted to care. We hit the couch and watch TV, some cop show she likes. We laugh at the plot holes. Time passes and I can feel myself slumping sideways. I tell Jenn I’m going to lie on her about half a second before my head finds her shoulder. The images on the TV no longer have any meaning. I cannot stay awake any longer.

I drift in and out of consciousness for half an hour or so, resisting Jenn’s suggestions that I go to bed. Some stubborn part of me is insisting that this whole first meeting bit isn’t going how it’s supposed to. We’re getting on fine but it’s awkward. Our conversations over distance have gone so far, yet only now that I find myself in her company do I begin to understand how little we know each other. Thinking we’d just fall into each other’s arms was dumb. Fairytales don’t translate into reality that way.

These are the thoughts that make me go to bed. It’s all confusion and disappointment and fatigue. I’m just not awake or alert or with it. I can’t find words or actions that might make sense. I say goodnight to Jennifer and drag myself to her room, where I undress, climb into bed, and immediately lose consciousness.

I don’t know how much later she comes in. She speaks to me and I say something back. She laughs and turns out the light. I hear her leave the room. All of a sudden, I’m wide awake and my mind is racing. It goes something like this:

What the fuck are you doing you’re in california for fuck’s sake you’re with jennifer and all you’ve done is mutter shit that doesn’t make any sense and crack lame jokes and put your head on her shoulder wow that was a stylish move you’re a regular frigging casanova there bud and now you’re thinking that you’ll leave it until tomorrow when you feel better and more awake but the problem with tomorrow is that it won’t change the fact that today happened and sure it was awkward but she’s beautiful and there is plenty of chemistry if you bothered noticing it instead of whining about how tired you are and thinking about how you’re going to write about this instead of actually being here and fucking living where exactly is the boy that bought a ticket with money he didn’t have to see a girl he barely knew on a whim and a dream and the way that the words and thoughts connected over an ocean and a motherfucking continent where is that boy now huh I’ll tell you where lying in bed thinking about tomorrow well let me remind you of one simple fact you’d do well to remember arsehole since you’re so worried about jetlag and timezones and the way your head and your body are all over the place because you haven’t caught up yet it isn’t actually caught up at all because where your mind is if you can follow this very simple line of thinking it already is tomorrow and by the time you quit with the frightened rabbit thing it’ll probably be the day after tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that and the reason you did this is because you only live once and you don’t believe in regrets and apologies and turning your back on the things that matter out of fear which by the way is exactly what you’re doing now YOU FUCKING CHILD!

I climb out of bed and walk to the bedroom door. I can see TV light flickering on the walls of the living room.

“You awake?” I say.

“Yeah,” Jennifer replies.

I sit beside her on the couch, sit facing her this time, watching that light on her face.

“I couldn’t just go to bed,” I say. “It felt wrong…me in there and you out here.”

She looks at me and smiles. “I wasn’t going to sleep out here.”

“Oh,” I say, and we both laugh.

Jennifer gets up. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go to bed.”

And we do.