Bex O’Brian

Word Count 1,134

When I was seven years old, I was given the children’s novel Harriet, the Spy. After reading only a few pages, I instantly knew I was meant to be her! Throwing down the book, I dashed into my mother’s office where she kept a stash of long, narrow reporter’s notebooks which could easily be held and had thick pages which flipped quickly so an ace reporter would never miss a quote. But I wasn’t planning on being a reporter. I was a spy. An occupation I was born to do since I was keenly observant and prided myself on reading the emotional temperature of my family. Not hard actually, either my parents were warring, or drinking and having a high old time.

Off I went into the street. It didn’t take long to spot someone who looked suspicious. A woman wearing electric stockings. I realise now that they were probably compression hose. But to me, they looked like they sparked and hummed. The hunt was on. Who was she? Why was she lurking around my neighbourhood? This was Quebec in the late sixties, revolution was in the air, bombs were a common occurrence, strangers were noted in my quiet Anglo nook of the city. Were her electric stockings somehow a threat? How could they not be?

Hard to write and tail someone. So I tried to keep mental notes. She stopped and looked in a French pastry shop window, the one that still had colourful pink chick cakes on display even when it wasn’t Easter. Was she sending a signal? A code? She walked on. 

I kept my eyes on those electric hose as she crossed one street and then another until she finally entered a building that looked very fishy to me. No obvious signage, iron doors with strange symbols in relief, the windows barred. It was only then that I noticed I had travelled beyond my known world. Even though I knew my way back, I was gripped with fear. Tears started to roll down my cheeks, my knees went to jelly. When I got home, I threw myself on my bed. How could I be Harriet if I was such a scaredy-cat? How could the desire for adventure exist side by side with so little courage?

From that day I was at war with myself.

Impetuously, I would start out on some grand adventure only to feel, when the thread snapped and I had gone too far, this terrible unease and the desire for nothing more than to turn and head for home. 

But you can’t live without notions of yourself, and as I got older, I still wanted to be a spy, an explorer, or a jet-setter. I wanted to believe that, should I have lived during World War II, I would have parachuted into France, gone behind enemy lines, a femme fatale seducing and revealing double agents, slipping mickeys to collaborators. But then my fantasy would hit a wall. My mind would hurl towards an image of me sitting alone in a cafe, no one knowing where I was, worse, me not knowing where I was, and the world would hunch up and become a tangle of unknowns, evil, threatening.

My life as a spy an explorer, a jet-setter would curdle and die. I was left hating myself. I’d never be a Harriett.

I had the great good fortune of marrying a man who, as a freelance writer, covered subjects as varied as rogue teenage elephants raping rhinos to witnessing a surgical face transplant. Researching these stories took him all over the globe. When I could, I went with him. A hanger-on, not a fearless adventurer. But the world and its wonders helped soothe my ego. And, with a companion, I was the one urging us down some back alley or into some hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

But as with the gap created by the loss of a tooth, I constantly worried my fear, testing, testing to see if, by some miracle, I had grown into the brave woman I knew lived somewhere in the recesses of my body and spirit.

In my thirties, I was offered a job working on a documentary film following The Turkana, one of Africa’s last known extant nomadic tribes. Before I could think, I said yes. This wasn’t brave. I would be part of a film crew, a hermetic situation if there ever was one.

About three weeks into the shoot, we interviewed a tribal elder as his clan was packing up to move on. As nomads, I had a notion that they lit out, no destination in mind, only to wander hither and yon until it struck their fancy to set up camp again. The elder looked at me as if I was nuts. Waste energy! Tire the animals! The routes they followed had been forged over the millennia. Every stone, watering hole, patch of grass was known,

Lying in my tent that night, I thought about the walks my husband and I take in Prospect Park in Brooklyn with our dogs. He was the one who had pointed out the desire lines that ran all over the park, paths created as shortcuts or cut-throughs. No one ever strayed off these paths even though they were in every sense created by going off the beaten path. I don’t know why I was comforted by that thought, but I was. More, I felt brave. The earth is a finite orb. Nothing is unknown, untrodden upon, unseen. But would this strange epiphany have weight, sticking power? I crawled out of my tent. The camp was silent. Everyone else was asleep, even the few dogs who had taken to begging for scraps. I headed a few yards down the wadi; my way lit by a full moon. You are alone, I whispered to myself, all alone in this life. I waited for my heart to start pounding, for the dread to descend. Nothing happened, except a wind picked up, and the tops of the thorn trees began to rustle like so many needles, an eerie sound.

Since then, I have been lost many times, though I have yet to be tapped as a spy. But I am not without my long-held existential dread. If anything, my fear is more expansive. Space. Outer space. And like with most twisted relationships hating, yet seeking it out, nonetheless, I will watch anything that brings me to that infinite blackness. Most of these space yarns are silly, but they serve. I pause the action whenever the great beyond or an alien world with its three setting suns and faint shadows of circling moons is on view. Imagine yourself there, I say. That is when my heart starts to pound and I have to grip the side of the couch, scared, scared shitless

Bex lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dogs. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page, here.