Montana

 

They had hidden the Montana women, except for one. I happened to glance ahead and saw her standing outside the display window. Not too close to the glass, not looking at anything in particular. Just waiting for our bus to move on. "Honestly," I told her, "I didn't really like Missoula. It's a college town of skiers, nothing more. At least that's what I saw near the bus station." And I lit my cigarette. During the drive, I realized she'd fallen asleep on the way to Big Butte, and an hour earlier, she'd referred to Butte as a kind of Eden, where the most modest American life reached its fulfillment. "And why is Butte, on the watershed, near Anaconda, and Pipestone Pass, 'BIGGER'?" she asked upon waking. "Well," I said, "I'm not from the region, but just look at the names that surround it... At the edge of night, the stubbornness of any illusion here finds its forests," I said. I hadn't stopped to revisit Missoula, justifying it as nothing more than a major railroad junction. "Anyway," I continued, "just look at the map and see Butte in the rugged geographies of the watershed and you immediately think of Mark Twain's Nevada," I concluded. When we arrived in Butte, she decided to come with me simply because I spoke French. With that, I knew I was settling and thriving within the hour that would seize the glacier of night, but I was warned about Love. “When the human present is not just a game, it quickly becomes a massacre of archers. Mais sanscesse vaguant, déborant sa course par toute l’étendue montée de feu, tenue du vent,” I continued. Our short walk through the steep streets of Butte soon revealed itself, not the Eden she had described on the bus, but an icy black hole at the end of the world where the entire townspeople seemed to be drunk. Only then did I remember it was Friday night. “Shall we have a drink?” I suggested. The frail schoolboy K (I thought then) trying to convert the becoming into a wonderful alcoholic blood flow, while I challenged a fire so questioned, so stirred inside me, and fallen on the edge of my immobile gaze, that it seemed more like radioactive algae.