Postcard from Limbo by Aaron Buchanan

Postcards to Limbo Postcards to Limbo

by Aaron Buchanan

Kristina looked at Interstate 80 as a buttress that kept the United States from collapsing in on itself. She never knew why. It stretched from New York City all the way to San Francisco, from one distant foreign world to an entirely different one. Some miles south of the house she grew up in, in Limbo, Kristina slid in her mom’s favorite CD—ELO’s Greatest Hits—and drove to the gas station in Red Crow. The CD skipped on the back end—the beginning of “Telephone Line”— and got worse over the last four songs. But she’d never get rid of it. Her mom had earned those scratches. And when the car’s player paused and tried to make sense of the track, Kristina thought maybe she could hear her mom in the space and void.

At the Shell in Red Crow, Kristina Monahan leaned against her car, arms folded as the gas pumped into her mom’s Chevy SUV, and thought about her dad who had not seen her off and had not said goodbye. Kristina hadn’t spoken to him since her mom’s funeral six months ago. At first she thought his continued silence was because of her operation; how when her mom was dying, she spent her savings on Kristina’s gender reassignment telling her husband he had plenty of his own money to retire on in a few years. Bill Monahan acted like he couldn’t pronounce the word transgender, and in St. Tom County, it wasn’t a word bandied about very often—even in 2002. Instead, Bill said transvestite. He spat it out. Stuttered it rather than said. And even though Kristina’s brother had married young and moved out and her sister moved to San Francisco, Kristina stayed and cared for their mom until the end. Her father said nothing as his wife passed away or as the old version of Kristina receded away.

But he never told her to leave his house. So, Kristina held the hope that he was the same man he was when they were kids; the man who had used three-by-five index cards to write little notes and sketch out doodles and put them in their lunch boxes. The cards might say I love you or learn stuff today. He’d kept it going until Ruby went to junior high. Kristina was in fifth grade. Her little brother, Dennis, was in fourth. He stopped abruptly. He’d never done them every day. Just once or twice a week. Every so often he’d tape a quarter or a half-dollar to the card. Kristina envisioned herself sitting in the school cafeteria, recalling Mrs. Fellows and her glass eye, wondering what had happened or if she or Ruby or Dennis had done something to make him stop.

Kristina kept a Roman coin she’d inherited from her grandpa in her pocket for good luck. Using one hand to steer, she pulled the coin out, rubbed at it through its clear vinyl pouch, felt

the indentation of the emperor Marcus Aurelius’ profile, and hoped for safe travels as she turned onto the entrance of I-80. She resolved to start her own postcard project. She would buy one for herself to document the Great Buttress Across America, and then she would pick out a postcard for her dad. On his postcards, she’d write a poem— or part of one.

At a rest area out outside of South Bend, Kristina bought her first two postcards for Indiana. When she reached Fisherman’s Wharf three days later, she bought two more. That last postcard, Alcatraz in the foreground, the Golden Gate beyond, she addressed it to Bill Monahan, rather than Dad, and wrote: With the ocean to the west, it’s like having a second sky.

Kristina stayed with Ruby for a week and drove south towards Los Angeles. The same day that Kristina sent Bill a postcard of the Hollywood sign, she had her first orgasm as a woman with a short, androgynous Latino she’d picked up at a gin bar on Cienega Boulevard.

They continued drinking. Had sex twice more, though she thought it was because the excess of alcohol dulled her concentration. Afterwards, she told him she’d transitioned a full month after her twentieth birthday— almost a year before—and was young enough that, with care to detail, she passed for female even before the hormones began. She was taller than most women, but at five feet seven, she was not a giantess. Still, she told him, she felt self-conscious buying shoes. He told her her eyes were “Disney eyes;” exaggerated, like picture windows; he said he could see her soul.

She thought it was a stupid thing to say, but she opened up to him; bared her soul over rum and gin. She told him that before she had undergone the reassignment surgery, she was given an instruction manual for her vagina: how to clean, care for, and to visit an OB/GYN; she didn’t tell him that it also talked about sex, about how she could learn to orgasm. She’d had sex casually in the past few months leading up to her trip, but had not been able to cum until that night.

When the smooth-skinned youth with a phrase tattooed in Latin gathered up his clothes to leave her room at the Super 8, she asked him what the phrase meant. He said, “The soul is dyed with the color of thought.” She laid on the bed, wondered if it was being away from home that had allowed her to orgasm.

On the way out of town, the seventh of August, Kristina visited the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum. The pits themselves presented an irony

to her, given the surrounding urban environment. Tar was asphalt and everything she’d seen in Southern California was coated in it. She hated using the term concrete jungle to describe it, but at least she understood how the phrase came to be. She sat on a bench across from one of the pits wondering about how many secrets the dark sludge still held and what wonderful knowledge would come from its stygian slime.

Once in the museum, Kristina was even more struck by a mural on one of the museum walls. The mural towered over her. Along its top row were scenes of volcanic c ataclysm and from left-toright she saw: the primordial stew, the single-celled organisms giving way to complex cellular clusters, then below that in this paragraph written of the history of the world, she made out the millions of years of complex organisms. In the next line, she viewed other organisms, and millions of years later more complex sea ones, until the mural showed the change between those and a new age of life in the sea that was both alien and recognizable. Then the row of dinosaurs, then finally—so out of place it was jarring—an astronaut stepping off to the right into a black unknown that could have just as soon been the tar pits standing in for space. In high school, Kristina remembered a history teacher telling her class that if the history of the world were twenty-four hours, homo sapiens only arrived at two minutes to midnight.

She thought, Wasn’t the Doomsday Clock hovering around the same spot? She pulled the silver Marcus Aurelius denarius out of her pocket, held it to the wall next to the astronaut. It might as well have been him in the suit, for

“Wasn’t the all the newness humans were in this world.

Doomsday Clock hovering around the Kristina found the postcard of the mural same spot?” in the gift shop, bought two of those and one postcard of the pits with the city of Los Angeles behind. She sent one of the mural postcards to Bill. This time, she didn’t write her own words exactly. She quoted something she’d heard in school: Time is the great physician, and then added: but deep time doesn’t heal, only creates. Kristina sped through Troias, saw a county sheriff parked at the pizzeria, but he did not pull his cruiser out after her. She rounded the bend by the St. Tom River and wondered how it could have been hotter in Limbo than in Texas. She pulled the Trailblazer into her dad’s driveway a little after four in the afternoon. Her dad wouldn’t be home for a few more

hours, depending on whether he hit the Pop Fly! Bar and Grill on the way home.

She was tired, but showered, changed, and took a walk through the woods around her house to stretch her legs. The tract of land outside Troias people called Limbo wasn’t on a map. But everyone around St. Tom County knew what it was; they said that Al Capone had a safehouse there; that The Brown Bomber Joe Louis had a cottage on the lake in the middle of Limbo. Her dad had told her and Ruby and Dennis spooky stories about seeing the ghost of Al Capone near the ruins of the old safehouse as well as stories about kids getting lost and disappearing in the woods—which gave Limbo its name.

Kristina wondered what to do next. Ruby had invited her to come out to San Francisco and stay there with her, but Kristina wasn’t sure about it yet. She actually liked the desert—so much more than she thought she would. She liked how when she drove through west Texas, she could squint and imagine roving the surface of Mars. When she stopped to take pictures of the road signs she encountered, she noticed the absence of wildlife. Now, back in Limbo, she was coming to realize how much she hated the summer sounds of horseflies and katydids that wormed into her ears and roosted even while indoors; how much she hated the pollen and blooms that made her sneeze and itch.

She’d been working at her grandpa’s old law firm in Middletown, just as her mom had done before she’d gotten sick. Her grandpa retired and handed over the practice to a younger, lazier attorney—with greasy hair who always wore shirts a size or two too small—and her mom stayed on to smooth over the transition. Kristina took over part-time, but had to quit in order to care for her mom at the end. She thought about asking Paul for her old job back.

She stepped over a log and around the stack of firewood that marked the end of the yard and the forest beyond. She heard her dad coughing, turned the corner of the ranch-style house and saw Bill sitting under the maple, on top of the picnic table.

Bill held a cigarette between his knuckles, coughed, and turned the page of a paperback book he was reading, edges frayed, pages folded behind the back.

“Jimmy Radio said you’d be home today,” he said, the first words he’d said to her in months.

“Jimmy Radio? Didn’t know you two hung out,” she said. Jimmy Radio was an elderly man with a bulbous nose and liver spots who walked—her dad used to say

taking the shoestring express around— the streets of River Junction selling St. Thomas Tribune newspapers he stole by the stack from the paper machines. No one knew his real last name, but for as long as Kristina had been alive, people there called him Jimmy Radio because he walked around talking like he was a radio station DJ or calling Detroit Tigers games with an index finger in one ear, speaking into an imaginary microphone.

Bill pulled his rainbowspackled short-brim cap—his United Auto Workers solidarity cap— over his woolly eyebrows, put one of Kristina’s postcards in his book to mark his place. It was James Clavell’s Shōgun, and she was pretty sure the postcard was Wyoming, with its barren landscape, mountains far in the background.

“Yeah. Found him passed out on the sidewalk in front of Pop Fly! a few nights ago. Took him to the hospital. Stayed with him a bit, till he came around. Last night, I took him home. We sat on his porch and listened to a ball game on the radio.”

Bill wasn’t a tall man or strong by the look of him, but he’d been a millwright at the auto plant all these years and Kristina knew by experience his vice-grip hands had worn down a few steering wheels over the years. She imagined him picking up Jimmy Radio—who was tall, but avian—putting him into his Suburban and taking him to the River Junction ER. Jimmy was the town beggar, but also strange and, she admitted, entertaining in short doses.

“So, you guys are friends now?” she asked.

“Nah. Weird dude.” Bill stood up from the picnic table, planted his feet on the worn patch of dirt around the table. “Let me be straight with you. In the hospital, Jimmy told me things. He knew things. He said you were a girl and that God had somehow fucked up. He didn’t say fuck. I’m saying fuck. Now, that got me. It’s the same thing your mom used to say, even going back to when you was a kid. I didn’t even think he knew you, but then he started talking about your mom like he knew her.

He paused. He’d never been a verbose man, but he was always a good storyteller. Kristina was transported to a time when she was younger and sat listening to her dad tell ghost stories about Limbo.

“So, I get him to his house and Jimmy is sitting there on his porch and he’s talking about the ball game and beer and who knows-what-else, but he keeps interrupting himself like he’s jumping the rails, new trains of thought or whatever. Then out of nowhere, he

tells me, he says, ‘Your daughter’s coming home tomorrow.’ He tells me, ‘Regret’s a bitch and it’s time to move on.’”

“So, you must have mentioned something about me traveling in the hospital or something?” Kristina asked. She leaned back, watched her father crunch dead leaves under the maple tree.

“No. I didn’t even talk to him in the hospital. Just sat there with the TV on the couple times I checked in on him. And here you are. So, to hell with regret and all the other bullshit. I’m sorry for being an asshole. Even before your mom died, I was an asshole and that’s my fault. I get it. Dennis and I already talked, but I been less of an asshole to him. Been more an asshole to you and Ruby. You. I had my own shit, sure, and I want to tell you.”

“Okay. Tell me what you need. Regret’s a bitch and all that.” Kristina could feel herself settling into her home. Bill was talking to her for the first time in months; what felt like years, really. And she felt like a rock who’d become wedged after settling in after an avalanche. She felt I-80 and I-5 and I-40 and I-65 drifting, crumbling away. “Your mom ran around on me a few times and even though I said I forgave her, I never did. And she knew that. She did. But I couldn’t live without her and O Christ that just pissed me off more. Add in what was going on with you and the guys at work poking fun of me about it, just made it worse. Felt like I’ve been stuck in a cave for years. Jimmy Radio was there telling me how to get the hell out. I think.

“Okay. Tell me what you need. Regret’s a bitch and all that.”

“What do you mean? I don’t see mom ever doing that to you.” “I know you worshipped her, kid, but, yeah. Started when you were a kid. Remember that church we used to go to? The one on

Garron Lake?” “Can’t forget. One of my very first memories is of that one guy with the nasty skin on his hands praying over some sick girl. What about it?”

“Pastor Charlie. Yeah. He left. Then this other pastor came, Dick Barton. Well, your mom slept with that piece of shit.”

“No, Dad…” Yet Kristina could see it. What she remembered of Pastor Barton was that he was an exuberant, mirthful man;

middle-aged, but attractive; altogether it seemed like people really liked him. He was charismatic. And she could see how her mother might find that alluring. there and listen to the wind on the plains there and imagine the sounds of Indians and cowboys and soldiers and rustlers, and just listen and be all right.”

“I could see you there. I think you should plan a visit. Go see the bison, the bears in Yellowstone,” Kristina said.

“I put in my paperwork today. I’m retiring at the end of the month,” he held up the postcard, “I’m moving there, to Wyoming. I just called an agency. A realtor’s coming by in the morning to put the house on the market. What I make, I’ll buy a place out there. Then give you and Ruby and Dennis some money we get from the acreage. The realtor says she’s going to play up the Al Capone ruins-thing, maybe drive up the price.”

Kristina stood up from the table. Her arms and buttocks were sore from the table and the driving and she massaged her biceps and elbows.

“She did. And she was sleeping with that lawyer that took over for your grandpa,” Bill said. He flipped the pages of Shōgun between his thumb and index finger, making a gentle whoosh over the sounds of the katydids loitering in the trees around them.

Kristina thought about it. She knew Paul well enough to know he probably cheated on his wife. To think he’d cheated with her own mother though?

“She never came out and admitted it like she had with Dick Barton, but it got to be obvious. And if I’d have asked, I know—I know—she would have admitted it. Then she got sick.”

All she could manage in reply though, was, “I understand.”

Bill took the postcard of Wyoming out of Shōgun and read the lines she had written on it: “Keep your dreams harmonious, but hold your assonant tongue in your pocket like a pack of cigarettes. This one was my favorite, I think,” he said and stuck the postcard back into the book. “Plus, Wyoming reminds me of what the Old West used to be. I think I could go out “Wow. I don’t know what to say, Dad. Why? Because I sent you the postcards, because Jimmy Radio told you to?”

He laughed. It was breathy and wheezy and full of mucous in a way she’d only heard smokers laugh. “Jimmy Radio didn’t tell me to do nothing. I’m telling me to. You can stay here until a deal closes, look after it.

We can sell what we can for moving money. For the both of us. Ruby said you were thinking of going out there with her. I think you should.”

“I don’t know. I might stay,” she said, though she knew there was no chance of it. “I liked Texas. Seemed like a cool place. Maybe if we make enough, I can go back to school there.”

Bill shambled to the table and sat back down, though this time on the worn wood bench of their family picnic table. Kristina thought her father seemed enervated.

“Let me tell you something,” Bill said. “I don’t care about you being gay or trans or whatever. What Jimmy said about God’s mess-up got me to thinking about what we learned in that church way back when, what I learned even going back my ma’s Catholic church. Pastor Charlie used to talk about Limbo—Catholic Limbo—and Purgatory, where the okay people go before they’re allowed to get into heaven. He said all that wasn’t in the Bible. But when I was a kid I heard about that stuff all the time. Anyway, I think this place, this world, is God’s own Limbo for making so many fuck-ups and if he is real, he’s got to work harder at making things right than anybody else.”

Bill Monahan reached inside the breast pocket of his green-brown flannel shirt, pulled out his pack of Vantage cigarettes.

Kristina reached in the pocket of her denim shorts for the coin in its vinyl pouch. She palmed it, clasped the vinyl between both hands and remembered the astronaut. She smirked, thinking of Marcus Aurelius inside the suit. She wondered what he’d have said about humans walking the heavens. Kristina inhaled the smoke of her father’s cigarette and where it usually would’ve bothered her, this time she savored it and wondered where the astronaut on the wall was going.