EARLIER THAT DAY, WHILE SAM TALKED TO MICHAEL’S shrink, Michael sat in Pennyman’s waiting room and reread Nadia’s letter. It aroused him, sickened him. He folded it up, stood, and slipped the single page into his back pocket. He stretched; his fingers almost touched the soundproofed ceiling. He forced himself to sit down again, picked up a copy of Newsweek, an old one with a picture of several pregnant teenagers on the cover. Nice to have been a part of that, he thought, and then, repelled by his own lonely lust, feeling that it connected him to the repulsive reality of his own father, he threw the magazine onto the carpet and stood up again. He had a strange and powerful urge to plunge his hand into the fish tank and squeeze the life out of those iridescent slivers of slime.
Michael left Pennyman’s office, not yet realizing that he could not face his father, or his mother, or any part of his life until he decided what to do with that letter in his pocket. He was already running, but he didn’t know it. He waited for Sam for a few minutes in front of the Leyden Craft Shop, next door to Pennyman’s building, but the sight of those skeins of yarn bunched up like toxic figure-eights made him physically ill: everything irritating about the move to Leyden seemed to be captured by those packets of copper, yellow, and pink. Who in their right mind would ever make or wear something in those colors?
And so he drifted down Broadway and then, when he was on the corner of Broadway and Route 100, with the Smoke Shop on one side of him and the George Washington Inn on the other, Michael, with the casualness of someone flipping a coin, stuck out his thumb.
The first car that appeared stopped. “And so it was ordained by fate,” Michael intoned to himself as he ran toward it, a Honda Accord the color of shit.
Michael opened the Accord’s door and peered in. The driver was wiry, with a freckled face, dark glasses. He looked like a pilot for a small regional airline, whereas he was in fact a salesman flogging stainless-steel juicers. He had boxes of them in the backseat, along with a tan sports jacket on a wooden hanger, its sleeves stuffed with pink tissue paper.
“What’s up, champ?” the salesman said, delivering the line with gusto, believing in the indelibility of first impressions.
Michael slipped into the car, relieved to be entering someone else’s life. The car smelled of the air freshener that came off the little cardboard pine tree that dangled from the rearview mirror. Crosby, Stills and Nash were on the cassette deck. Michael hated oldies.
“Where to, champ?”
The salesman patted his own hair and frowned. The scented pine tree swung back and forth as he negotiated a curve. They were picking up speed. He noticed that Michael was staring at the cassette player.
“You like the sounds?”
“Not really,” said Michael.
“You want to listen to something else? I’ve got tunes for every mood. Jazz, rock, torch songs—I even have show tunes. I sing along with them when I’m starting to nod out.” He gestured toward the glove compartment.
“It’s your car, you can listen to whatever. Anyhow, thanks for stopping for me.”
“Out there for a while, huh.”
“Negative, sir.”
The salesman squinted at Michael, a little uneasy with that last remark.
“You haven’t told me where you’re going,” he said.
“Correct,” said Michael. It was a form of reply he had picked up in Leyden High: to the point, crypto-military. It spread gloom in his house when he used it. The salesman looked at him and then, slowly, smiled. Michael sensed the guy was already regretting having stopped.
“So. Where are you going?”
“This way is fine. The way you’re driving.”
Now the bud of the salesman’s regret was opening quickly; it was almost in full flower: time-lapse photography.
“Are you in some kind of trouble, champ?”
“No.”
“You are, aren’t you?”
Crosby, Stills and Nash were singing about how life used to be so hard and then they bought a house in the country and a fucking pussycat and that made everything great.
“Actually,” Michael said, “since you offered, I guess I wouldn’t mind turning the music off.”
He pressed the Eject button on the cassette player and the radio kicked in, tuned to a station the car had passed through hours ago, now reduced to a storm of static. Michael touched the Power button and the car was silent. Michael listened to the hiss of the tires over the two-lane blacktop. They were already well out of town.
“You sure you’re not in trouble?” the salesman asked, in a level, almost friendly voice, as if sounding sincere would elicit sincerity in others.
“What if I am? Isn’t everybody in some kind of trouble?”
“I’m not in trouble,” said the driver.
“Then neither am I.”
“I think you’re kind of a wiseass, is that it, champ?”
“Sorry. My father’s screwing somebody and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“What makes you think you gotta do anything?”
“I just think it. I don’t know why I think half the things I do.”
“You want to know what I think? I think you and I aren’t going to be able to do business.” He was already slowing the car down, steering it to the side of the road, up on a shoulder of pebbles and pine needles. “Take a hike, champ.” The salesman drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. His nails were manicured, lightly coated with clear polish. His gold ring had a dark red stone at the center.
“Oh, come on,” said Michael. He stalled for time, but he knew he was out. He could feel the salesman’s desire to hurt him; it was like a dog whose growl was so deep you couldn’t hear it, but your bones buzzed.
“I’m not going to debate it with you, champ. This is my car and what I say goes.” He reached for the passenger- side door, brushing against Michael. Michael sensed the guy’s tense, hard body beneath the bright white shirt. The door flew open so quickly it bounced on its spring hinges and almost closed again.
“Thank you ever so much for the ride,” Michael said, getting out, carefully, insanely carefully, closing the door behind him. He stepped back as the car peeled out, the tires spitting pebbles and dirt. Michael cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted after the car, “I forgot to tell you to go fuck yourself!”
He waited there until the car disappeared and then there was silence, except for the wind blowing through the treetops.
He walked along the highway, bereft of plans, with no idea where he was going. It struck him: until this moment he had always been on his way somewhere—to school, to bed, to dinner or the movies. Even the hours of excruciating boredom were crossed by the shadow of some looming obligation. As a young child, he had once despaired that all of the continents, even every island, had already been discovered, and wherever you would go someone else had been there first. But now, at last, he had found a place to call his own, an emptiness that was his and his alone, a private preserve of nothingness.
Suddenly, he didn’t want to risk being seen. Maybe his parents were already looking for him; maybe a friend of theirs might coincidentally drive by. He got off the highway at the first dirt road. The mouth of the road was wide and dusty, but it immediately narrowed, darkened, as it wound through the dense, budding woods that grew on either side of it.
Michael walked south on Paige Road. Spokes of soft, lint-drenched sunlight fanned through the trees. Here and there, dandelion spores rotated slowly in the breeze. The sky was dark, the electric, almost pathological blue of airport landing lights.
He heard a sound, looked up. The treetops moved slowly, in a kind of visual stutter, pictures in a flip book propelled by a faltering thumb. Michael reached into his Army fatigue jacket and pulled out a lone Marlboro. In the other pocket was a book of matches Sam had brought home from Shun Lee West in New York. He lit up and stepped off the road. He didn’t know exactly where he was, or how close to the nearest house. He only smoked in private; it just wasn’t something he wanted to do in plain sight, any more than he’d want to urinate or pick his nose or read Penthouse in front of others. He inhaled voluptuously and stood there in the budding brambles along the roadside. He looked into the woods. The spokes of sunlight seemed further away. He scrambled up a slight incline and now he was in the first row of saplings. Deeper in, the trees were gnarled, thick. There was no pathway, but the trees lured him in, farther and farther. They exerted a kind of irresistible green magnetism.