Rolling down Interstate 90, they passed through the outer reaches of the town’s meager sprawl, then the requisite big-box badlands. Best Buy, IKEA, then Bed Bath &, finally, Beyond—a blessed stretch of pine forest with no visible commerce. Vance had his elbow out the window and an intolerable air of exuberant victory about him, and Richard felt certain that this was a horrible mistake. Why not, he’d thought. He’d let him come along to Portland, and maybe even San Francisco if he wasn’t too annoying. He didn’t want to have to drive anyway, and at that moment, standing on the kid’s porch, the idea of some company did not seem like the worst thing in the world.
But the same little smile kept resurfacing on Vance face, like a cavorting sea mammal periodically coming up for air, and it made Richard want to slap him. He seemed to think he’d won some kind of contest of wills, when, in fact, he’d caught Richard at his lowest point since the DUI, his most vulnerable. A vicious hangover had climbed up on his shoulders and neck, a tireless jungle cat long stalking its prey.
Vance said, “Thanks again, Mr. Lazar.”
“Don’t thank me again.”
“It’s just I think I’ve needed this for a long time and didn’t even realize.”
“What, to stay at an Econo Lodge with an older man?”
“To get out of here.”
Richard reflexively visualized the house, set back in the woods, the door open to a mustiness behind the kid like the groaning maw of some ancient creature. Not entirely unfamiliar with outposts of wretched hermitage, Richard had still been impressed. Yes, he thought, you probably did need this.
As they drove, the sun rose fully and clarified to a brilliant white-yellow, warming the air and bluing the sky, and the morning gathered itself into the kind of rare October day that you want to breathe in and save for the winter. Surrounded on both sides by lush forest, crisp Pine-Sol-fragrant air coming through his window, Richard felt correspondingly worse and worse. The calm of the earlier beers had vanished as his hangover emerged in full, like an evil creature moving up on him through dark underbrush. The pristine surroundings foregrounded his misery; he would have felt better in a condemned hovel, splayed out on a yellowy mattress surrounded by Hustlers and dirty underwear and McDonald’s wrappers. The kid’s smile and the breeze and the golden sunlight coming through the windshield assaulted him, and the inside of his skull pounded like fists on a table, unilaterally rejecting all this pleasure and beauty. He rolled his window down and vomited out a complicated, lengthy rebuke.
It took Vance—still smiling to himself and tapping on the wheel—several seconds to notice what was happening, and by that point the contents of Richard’s stomach were streaked down the length of the car. They stopped on the shoulder. An SUV roared by, and someone yelled at them—the entire history of human malevolence seemed embodied in that one shrill, trailing laugh.
“Are you okay?”
“Sorry, yeah,” said Richard, still leaning out the window and panting like a dog, though not like his dog. When he took Victor on jaunts, Victor preferred to curl up on the floorboards. Vic was currently housed in a concrete-and-chain-link kennel that resembled nothing so much as Maricopa County jail, which he knew because he’d spent the night there after his last DUI.
They stopped for a car wash at a Citgo a mile down the road. While Vance filled up the tank, Richard went inside and bought a twelver of Busch Light along with a car-wash coupon. Suspecting the kid would give him a hard time about the beer, he skulked around the side of the concrete building, past a fenced-in generator and reeking dumpster, to a concrete break area that featured a Chock full o’Nuts can chock full o’wet cigarette butts and a vista of scraggly underbrush strewn with garbage. He drained two beers in quick, gagging succession and felt the tiger retract its claws from his shoulders and slink back into its fetid jungle lair.
As he worked on a third, he idly tried to describe to himself the sensation of getting drunk, an exercise he undertook with some frequency, probably because he spent so much time describing things and drinking. What was it like? Well, it was like getting drunk, it wasn’t like anything else. It heightened all the things you wanted heightened—libido and humor and pleasure in the company of others—and numbed all the things you wanted numbed: everything else, really, but anxiety and sadness especially. That is, until you were actually drunk and not just getting drunk, then the exact opposite was true. All the good stuff died, and maudlin gloom sprang up like an unslayable movie monster, fiercer than ever. Which was to say that, of course, getting drunk and being drunk were two entirely different things.
Back in the car, Vance took the proffered coupon code and nodded at the beer, saying, “Really?”
“Light beer—it’s basically Gatorade.”
“You think that’s a good idea?”
“I think it’s a great idea. A stroke of genius.”
Vance shook his head and drove them up to the car wash, entered the code, and pulled in. As the brushes rolled over the top and sides of the car, Richard felt cleansed himself. He closed his eyes and momentarily wished he could stay there forever, in the dark and cool, soothed and buffeted by the gentle embrace of mechanical arms in a place with no future and especially no past. But all too soon the car was bright with sunlight again, and Vance was pulling out onto the access road that led back to the highway.
As they drove, the kid compulsively fooled with the radio, trying to find a channel that didn’t fuzz out at the bottom of every hill. He finally came to rest on a station playing a band Richard recognized and hated: the Eagles. The song on the radio, “Desperado,” perfectly embodied what he thought of as their signature lyrical perspective, wherein a jaded but wise narrator has some tough advice for the subject of the song and, by extension, the listener. You might want to be sitting down, you could imagine the singer prefacing the song, I hate to do this, but I’m going to have to disabuse you of some of your most cherished notions.
He hated them not only for the self-righteous lyrical pap but also or mainly because Carole had loved them, once even forcing him to attend an outlandishly expensive show at the Mesa Civic Center. The only way he’d gotten through watching Don Henley—accompanied by every single person in the arena—sing “Hotel California” was to imagine taking aim with a Browning assault rifle at the disembodied head bobbing behind the drum set, the pleasure of squeezing off a round and watching the pink vapor through the scope. The experience of that concert had made him wonder, and not for the first time, why people ever do anything. Doing things was almost always a mistake.
A succession of lakes passed by the window. First Sprague Lake, then Lake of the Branches, then Varna Lake, hives of strenuous recreational fun that teemed with people in primary-colored swimsuits and life jackets doing things: canoeing, kayaking, Sea-Dooing. He wished he was young again—there was so much he’d never done and never would do. Not that he wanted to kayak or sea-doo or had ever wanted to, but he wouldn’t have minded being able to. He remembered fondly being twenty-five and the multitude of things he’d been able to do and hadn’t—a paradise of squanderable opportunity. He drank his beer. The nice part about being young wasn’t really being young; it was not being old. Like money, the thing time was good for was not having to worry about how much of it you had. The number sixty loomed in his imagination like a titanium wall he was speeding toward, in his smoking Yugo of a body. Sixty, he thought—he should be so lucky.
The forest on both sides of the highway grew thick and dark and he thought of the Tennessee forest of his youth, the trees and cars and girls. He couldn’t think about the girls now, it was too much. The monotonous green beauty of the landscape conspired with the beers in his stomach. His head grew heavy and his sight grew dim and he had to stop for the night.
The old man’s head dropped in several quick increments and came to rest against the window. A nasal, whistling snore reassured Vance he was alive. Richard had pounded back two beers like a man dying of thirst, and those on top of however many he’d had when he’d slunk behind the Citgo. Vance wondered if coming with him had been a mistake. He was like his father, not only in the simple terms of drinking too much but also in the speed with which he cycled through stages of animation, expansiveness, aggression, hostility, depression, and, by the end of the night, a mute stupor. It aroused in Vance an uncontrollable desire to fix something that, he knew, could not be fixed—to avert the next unavertable crisis. Steven Allerby’s tenure in his son’s life had been characterized by a hectic parade of accidents and misery caused either directly or indirectly by alcohol: the time he’d shot a nail through his hand while attempting to build a doghouse, for instance, or the time he’d slept through the first and only day of a new job despite his son shaking him for an hour. In a general sense, Vance felt he’d spent his whole life around adults who acted like children, who needed constant tending to and worrying over, and a glance at the passenger seat didn’t help to dispel the feeling that he might easily take on the same role with Richard.
In sleep, the old man’s face lost its perpetual glower and looked younger, with an adolescent expression of mildly devious innocence. The thick shock of hair reinforced the impression that Richard was a prematurely aged teenager. It was hard to believe at that moment that this was a man who’d written a bestselling memoir. Not that it was hard to imagine Richard experiencing what he’d experienced; it was hard to imagine him actually sitting down and writing about it. It was hard to imagine him producing a single paragraph about how he spent his summer vacation, let alone six excellent books. But, somehow, he had. Thinking of the work freshened Vance’s gratitude to be where he was, next to Richard, driving the car. Whatever reservations he had about the old man’s behavior, being out on tour with him had to beat moldering in his room, and—though the thought filled him with shame—looking after his mother, as well.
He hadn’t realized, before Richard had shown up, before the words had escaped his mouth, how much he needed to be anywhere in the entire world but there. He stepped on the gas and gripped the steering wheel a little tighter, and the green piney nothingness that surrounded him, that had always surrounded him since he was born, blurred by. His mother’s depression had become his own, and it was like a fog that had enveloped them both, so ubiquitous and thick as to be imperceptible. Only in, however briefly, getting away from it all—his mother, the house, his job, himself—could he see the fog’s blurred contours and feel its lingering grasp on his person.
When Richard woke up, they were clattering over a bridge into Portland, which lived up to its reputation for being both overcast and silly. They drove through a misting rain, down streets slick with the oily tears of a great clown. At one point, they passed a jug band playing on a street corner, then they got stuck behind a peloton that included a man riding an actual penny-farthing. Finally they made the bookstore, a three-story citadel commanding an entire city block. Vance went off in quest of free parking, leaving Richard in front of the display window. A banner strung across the top advertised his appearance and, below it, there was a stand-up thing with his name on it and a stack of his books. There were other bestselling books in the display window, as well, and they seemed to fall into one of two categories: a book by a woman, named something like Memories of Feelings or Still Sisters, featuring a picture of a house on the cover, or a book by a man, named something like The Templar Encryption or The Revenge of the Magi, featuring occult imagery dripping with blood. What was his doing there? It had barely grazed the bottom of the list, true, but still. Maybe the reading public had confused him with someone else; maybe they’d heard his book featured serial killing. It did contain some death and mayhem, so there was that. He called Dana and brought her up to speed, with some obvious omissions.
“You’re taking the kid from the college with you?”
“Vance.”
“Why?”
“It’s just for a stop or two. I needed to make it up to him.”
“Mm-hmm, that makes sense. I got an email from the college. Apparently you were in rare form last night.”
“I don’t know if ‘rare’ is the word.”
Dana sighed, and Richard could almost hear her rubbing her temples. In a pattern that had repeated itself with almost every woman he’d known throughout his life, his publicist’s exasperation was somehow deeply pleasing to him; undoubtedly, he knew, it had something to do with a lack of motherly affection, but he just didn’t care enough to figure it out. She said, “Look, please just do the reading tonight and go to sleep, okay? I can’t worry about you constantly for the next two weeks.”
“I’ll call from San Francisco, Dana.”
Vance slumped across the street. Together, they entered the bookstore, where they were greeted by a tall cat-eyed woman who introduced herself as Anne-Marie. Richard relished the momentary satisfaction of having possession of her name, even as it became enshrouded in the perpetually encroaching fog of his perpetually worsening short-term memory. Her dark hair was held back by a mint-green headband, and she smelled, pleasingly, like cigarettes. He said, “I’m Richard. This is Vance.”
“Hi, Vance,” she said. Vance had turned and was gawping at the store around him, which was huge and impressive, admittedly. He wandered off like a goggle-eyed yokel in the big city for the first time, which was, more or less, what he was.
“My assistant,” said Richard.
She surveyed Richard’s condition and said, “Are you all right?”
“Why is everyone asking that lately?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Rough night.”
“Well, we’re very happy you’re here, Mr. Lazar.”
“Say that again, would you?”
“Why?”
“I’ve just heard that sentence so rarely in my life. Especially coming from a beautiful woman’s mouth.”
She laughed. “We’re very happy you’re here, Mr. Lazar,” a passable Marilyn imitation. “There’s some food and drink in the green room.”
The green room, so called, was located in the Employees Only rear of the store, which contained more bookshelves, desks in disarray, special-order forms taped to the concrete walls with no apparent logic, bookstore employees on break, and a card table in the corner on which a carafe of coffee steamed and a tray of cucumber-and-cream-cheese finger sandwiches quietly wilted. A cartoon arrow pointed down at the table, beneath a mordant sign: GREEN ROOM. Despite not liking cucumbers, wilted or otherwise, Richard ate one, determined to enjoy the spoils of success, even if they were spoiled. He poured the coffee, which he also didn’t want, into a little Styrofoam cup and drank it with a shaking hand, and by the time what’s-her-name came back to tell him he was on, everything was gone.
Vance floated around the store in a dissociated fog. As long as he could remember, he’d wanted not only to lose himself in books but to build a physical fortress out of them, a citadel of words to keep the world at bay. And when he was younger, in fact, he’d done just that, building forts from his burgeoning collection. This store felt like an actual adult version of that impulse brought to life. The Russian literature section alone was the size of his bedroom. The nineteenth-century British section was the size of his house. To work at a place like this would be a dream come true—spending entire days here, being entrusted with a key and living here, making camp here at night among the endless, towering rows.
This was a substitute, he knew, for what he really wanted, which was to actually live inside a book. He’d always been a reader, but ever since his father had left and his mother had gotten sick shortly thereafter, he’d had a book in front of his face like a shield. It had worked, too, for better or worse. His brother, John, had spent his high school years in a constant, simmering rage and put that rage to use in the military as soon as he legally could. Vance had, instead, locked himself away in his lair and contented himself with his novels and fantasies.
He made his way through a circular maze of books, one that started with world history in the outer shelves and, as he walked, slowly morphed: to English history, then historical fiction, war crimes, true crime, and finally, in the middle of the shelves, a small alcove filled with paperback hard-boiled detective novels from the forties and fifties. A young woman sat cross-legged on a bench seat in the alcove, bent over the sleuthing of Spade or Marlowe, twisting a piece of hair by her ear. Each twisting pull seemed, in turn, to stab him through with a sharp, erotic pang. She looked up and registered his presence, and he hurried away. Back through the conch spiral he went, gathering acceleration until he was shot out into the depopulated environs of Great Literature.
Frowning, he thumbed through a dog-eared used paperback of Lolita. It felt leaden in his hand—not a repository of ideas, the best humanity has to offer, life distilled into words, but like a bunch of brittle pages glued together inside a cover that featured a jaundiced nymphet against a sickly pink background the color of raw liver. Dead weight. He put it back and shuffled on, waiting for something to catch his eye, but nothing did. As he had in his room the night before, he wondered if books were the problem. In books, something happens to a character, and they’re never the same. It may be something good or something bad, but whatever the case, it alters and propels them forward. The character changes and is unable to go back to their old life. He found himself idly expecting those moments in his own life—cruxes, hinges, thresholds, points of equilibrium, moments freighted with such transformative power and import that he might gaze into the darkness and, with his eyes burning, see himself as he really was.
The problem was, real life wasn’t like that. Real life passed without much event, and what event there was provided not epiphany but narcosis. A slow, deadening acceptance of the encroaching borders of your own existence. He’d watched it happen with his mother over the years. She’d been prone to bouts of silent depression since he could remember, but it was as though when his father left, the illness had moved in permanently to take his place. It had gotten worse over the years despite an endless battery of different medications and despite his best efforts to help. In six years, there had been no turnarounds, no moments of stunning realization—just minor ups and downs, mostly downs, a haze of cigarette smoke, and the constant, faint chatter of the TV. The worst part was not the illness itself; it was her assent to it, her willingness to live in her own shadow. In his manuscript, he had written about her, about living with her, and in this fictionalized version, she pulled out of it. The narrator, a diffident and sensitive young man, watched as she began building a new house in their front yard. Over three years, she poured the foundation, built the frame, and, one by one, laid the bricks. Then together, they destroyed the old house.
“Can I help you find something?” The voice plucked him from his reverie, and he turned to see the same girl from the hard-boiled section. She wore a store name tag, he saw now, although he couldn’t read it due to, it really seemed, a sudden attack of eyeball perspiration.
“No.” She started away, and he called after her with “Um, D. H. Lawrence?” in a voice so cracking and desperately lame it shocked even him. She stopped and motioned for him to follow. At the end of the aisle, Lawrence’s disreputable oeuvre, in many different editions, reclined luxuriously on a long shelf.
“Anything in particular?”
“No, just looking.”
“Okay. I have to say, I’m kind of impressed. Not many people read old David Herbert these days.”
“He’s great.”
“I agree.” She was not especially attractive, looking up at him with eyes set wide in a pointed, foxy face, but at that moment, Vance would have murdered a thousand men if she’d asked. He couldn’t think of anything to say. She said, “Well, enjoy!” and moved away with a bright, brief flash of calf. Somewhere in the distance, a microphone crackled on, spearing the stale, dusty air with feedback. “Thank you for coming,” rumbled Richard’s voice, and Vance fought his way back through the maze, the catacombs of books.
The reading went well, or at least undisastrously; Richard took a few questions from the small but packed room, and then it was over. He asked Anne-Marie—he had relearned the name, and written the initials AM in tiny script on his palm—if she wanted to get a drink, and she said sure, that she’d be delighted. He wondered if he’d ever before occasioned delight in another person. Surely he had delighted Eileen once or twice during their years together, but that had been a long, long time ago. He asked Vance if he wanted to join them, but the kid demurred; predictably, he wondered if it might not be a better idea to take it easy tonight.
“Make hay while the sun shines.”
“The sun’s not shining, though.”
Vance returned to the hotel—laden with an armful of D. H. Lawrence, of all things—and Anne-Marie took Richard to a place just down the street that she said was new but that looked old. Waiting an unreasonable amount of time to be served at the unbusy bar, he saw it was a trendy type of faux old, with lots of oak and brass veneers and vintage mirrors made of smoked glass and a bartender wearing those arm braces bartenders wear in westerns. Anne-Marie ordered them both locally distilled artisanal rye whiskey, whatever that was. They sat in a corner booth, under a speaker that played Sinatra or some similar wife-beating big-band crooner, a style of music Richard hated. But they talked about him, which he liked. He got to be all cannily self-effacing and funny, yet soulful and serious, a routine that he vaguely remembered working with women during the Carter administration. When she smiled, which she did a lot of, her eyes crinkled a bit around the edges in a very fetching way, and when he glanced down at her long legs, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible he was going to, as he and his friends used to say decades ago, get some. The last time that had happened had been three years earlier, with a woman—a regular at the Tamarack—that the other regulars knew as the Hound. The Hound was called the Hound for many reasons, among them the physiognomy of her face (questingly long and comprehensively jowled), her ability to sniff out a free drink, and the tenacity with which she pursued the men on whom her terrible favor fell. The Hound had taken a liking to him, and one night she had hung out until close, given him a Viagra, and demanded he take her home. He eventually did, and things had happened, terrible things he tried to forget about but couldn’t. The possibility that the Hound had provided him his sexual swan song was a thought capable of poleaxing him with regret.
So: Anne-Marie. Despite his lingering hangover and generally wretched condition, he felt compelled to give it a shot. He got a second round, and she drank it; he made jokes, and she laughed. Things were going well—shockingly well—until he leaned over and attempted a kiss.
She pulled away. “Whoa. But.”
“Sorry. I,” he said.
“I’m. Wow.” She stood next to the booth, smoothing down her dress.
“I thought,” he said.
“It’s just.”
“There was.”
“I know,” she said, pulling her keys out of her purse and pulling a silver necklace with a silver ring dangling from it out of her décolletage. “But I’m married.”
“Oh.”
“And you’re”—she briefly searched the oaken walls of the room, as though what he was was written on them, as though it wasn’t obvious—“old.”
“You could have left it at you being married,” he said. “That worked fine by itself.”
“Sorry.” She went to the door and looked back. “Good luck.”
Good luck. He sat there and drank his drink, thinking how there was no phrase in the English language more devoid of the sentiment it existed to convey. It was probably for the best—he put his odds of having achieved an erection somewhere between one to negative infinity against and none. He stared at the fine grain of the table, the less-fine grain of his own hands. That’s that, he thought—women, love, the whole shebang. Goodbye to all that. Who were you kidding?
Back at the hotel, Vance was already asleep, on a cot at the foot of the bed. Richard was touched by the kid’s consideration, not to mention the way it reminded him of Victor, who liked to sleep in the same position. He lay on the bed, on top of the covers, not even trying to sleep, just searching for some kind of equilibrium within himself, a state of balance in which he could momentarily stop wanting things. Not finding it, he heaved himself up and made his way down to the lobby, manned by a desk clerk staring intently at his singing phone. Past the front desk lurked an unpromising sports bar called the End Zone. The sign featured a crude painting of Snoopy wearing a football uniform and leather helmet, doing his happy dance after scoring a touchdown. The sign was almost unbearably sad, and he had to look away from it to avoid bursting into tears.
The End Zone was quiet at this hour and probably at every other hour, occupied only by a couple wearing matching Roethlisberger Steelers jerseys and eating cheese fries. The bartender—a dour, mustachioed fellow—emerged from the back with an affect that suggested he’d just been fondly nestling the barrel of a twelve-gauge in his mouth. After Richard’s third gimlet and third tip, the man grudgingly asked if he was staying at the hotel.
“Why else would I be here?”
“Good point. What brings you?”
“I’m doing a book tour.”
“No shit.”
“Nope, no shit.”
“What’s the book about?”
“Me fucking up over and over.”
“Well, looks like you’ve found the right place.”
An hour or so later, Richard was completely alone. He missed Anne-Marie. He missed Victor. He missed the Steelers couple and looked back on their tenure at the End Zone as a sort of golden age of bonhomie. The bartender had vanished again, perhaps having slipped into the back and finished offing himself. The lights overhead had dimmed and made dark yellow spots on the bar, like pools of urine. His drink was gone and he wasn’t drunk. Through the window, a car’s taillights dwindled, twin red coronas like dying stars. Only two days into the tour and he was completely spent. The rest of the trip, not to mention his life, stretched out before him like one of those bleak country roads that eventually peter into nothingness—like the one he’d recently lived on, in fact. It was strange, after all those years living out in the desert—not happily, but with a certain amount of calm resignation—that two days in civilization had so thoroughly unmanned him. He thought of calling Cindy or Eileen again, but just as quickly banished the notion. Then he pulled the cell phone out and dialed.
“Hello?” came the voice, thick with sleep.
“You asked me the other night, at the thing, what advice I’d give young writers. And I gave you some glib answer, and I feel shitty about that. I probably acted like I think it’s all a waste of time, which I do, but still. Everything’s a waste of time, but books are better than everything else. There’s some kind of dumb honor in it, at least. You know what I mean? At least it’s trying, somehow. It admits death. It’s not just pressing buttons on some shiny thing. All of this technology, all these bells and whistles, are just distractions from the fact that one day you’ll wake up with blood on the sheets, right? No sight in one eye. There’s honor in looking into the eye, isn’t there?”
He would have continued in this vein indefinitely, had someone not put a hand on his shoulder. Vance stood there, dressed in the same clothes he’d worn that day. He sat next to Richard and said, “She was a little young for you.”
“And married.”
Richard hung up the phone. They sat there for a little while longer, under the epileptic flicker of a Rolling Rock sign, until Vance finally put his arm on Richard’s arm and led him up to bed.
The next day, the sky overhead was gray and mottled, a mirror image of the road underneath them. Vance had his elbow out the window, despite the chilliness of the air, and tapped his hand on the side of the car along with a rap song on the radio. Richard wasn’t offended by the vulgarity or the constant stream of obscenities or the jittery curlicues of the musical arrangements, but the insistent emotional sameness of it was oppressive. No joy, no despair, no love or humor, just pissed-off boasting, dick jokes, school-yard taunts. On this, as with most things, of course, he knew his opinion was wholly unqualified; yet again, as with most things, he didn’t let that stop him from airing it. “You really like this shit?”
“Jay-Z? I don’t know, I guess so.”
Playing up the ignorant old-timer angle—which, being old and ignorant, was not hard to do—he said, “My jewels, my money, my bitches, my boats.”
“My boats?”
“Yachts?”
“It’s not all that stuff. You should keep yourself open to new things.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. There’s too much stuff in the world, too much crap. You should try to keep yourself closed off to as much of it as possible.” Richard reclined fatly in his seat, irritated by the kid’s determined innocence and by the length of the pauses he took before he spoke and by his long, mournful face, its look of defeated hope. He said, “Besides, you’re one to talk. When was the last time you did something new?”
“I’m doing something new right now.”
“What, driving me around?”
“Sure.”
“I mean something meaningful. Falling in love. Eating fifty hard-boiled eggs.”
In obvious reprisal, Vance changed the channel, cranking the volume on some horrible classic rock station playing a horrible classic rock song. Over a burbling sea of organs and mandolins, the lead singer wailed lyrics that seemed to be, horribly, about chess, admonishing the listener not to surround themselves with themselves. Richard yelled, “So, how long are you going to chauffeur me around, anyway?”
“That’s up to you.”
“You ever been to San Francisco?”
“I’ve never been anywhere.”
“Why don’t we say San Francisco. I’ll get a rental there.”
“That’s only tomorrow. I had kind of hoped—”
“I know, it’s really too bad. But let’s say San Francisco.”
They stopped for lunch at McDonald’s, and, waiting in the drive-thru, Vance suggested they take a small highway west and get on the 101. He’d heard the 101 was incredible, he wanted to drive down the coast. It was a travel day, and lacking a good reason to say no, though that was his inclination, Richard grunted an assent into his leathery McDouble with cheese. All along the way, beefy clouds barreled overhead in what looked like time-lapse photography, but when they reached the ridgy shoreline where the highway met the 101, a giant wall of fog hung over the churning water, like some kind of cloud factory that cranked out the cumuli traveling inland.
The craggy splendor of the drive reminded Richard that he had once, decades earlier, taken the PCH from Carmel to Los Angeles. He remembered it being much the same as this: dramatic cliffs, crashing surf, salt-sprayed air, winding roads, old people driving RVs at eight miles an hour. The noncoastal sections of the drive were remote, and the little towns they passed—with their bait shops and flounder shacks and tie-dyed-kite stores and whimsical woodworking concerns—were already abandoned for the off-season. The only person they saw in downtown Waldport was a defiant seagull standing in the middle of the narrow road. When Vance got out of the car, it reluctantly walked away, like a dignified town elder with his hands clasped behind his back. Maybe it was the mayor, thought Richard.
It had been the summer of 1977 when they’d taken the PCH. A stranger had snapped a photo of Eileen (buckskin moccasins, baseball jersey, pigtails) and him (triangular bellbottoms, vest, shag helmet) smiling next to his old VW on an overlook. This photo had hung totemically by their front door in no fewer than five different apartments and houses they’d occupied. He had no real feeling about the image captured in the picture, but he had a vivid sense memory of the picture as the last thing he saw before exiting their home. Over the years, its continued presence had made him variously happy, sad, and finally irritated by Eileen’s insistence on reminding him of better times. Like an addict—a love junkie—she was always trying to reclaim the high of those early days.
Richard and Vance passed from Oregon into California on a homely little stretch of road, the border parallel with a red-barned gift shop. A new blue-and-yellow sign on the right welcomed them to California, and an old white-and-green one on the left effused OREGON THANKS YOU, COME BACK SOON! No, Richard thought, that was unlikely—he guessed that Oregon had seen the last of him. They drove on, regaining the coast just as the sun was dropping quickly into the sea. In the vicinity of Eureka, they began stopping at hotels, but each one was booked up solid—an infuriating development after having seen no more than a dozen people in nine hours of driving. It turned out every room in the area had been reserved months in advance for something called the Blackberry Arts Festival.
“You want to camp out?” said Vance as they drove away from the fourth place they’d tried.
“No.”
“I keep some gear in back. It could be pretty nice.”
“No.”
The next motel they encountered, ten miles south of town, was a dreary cluster of run-down stand-alone huts called Famous Ray’s. Richard assumed the name was in honor of a locally famous murderer who had done his best work on the premises. At the front desk sat an old man bent to the newspaper, pencil in hand, a ragged Jumble with many letters tentatively written in and scratched out pinioned before him on the peeling linoleum.
“Name?”
“We need a room.”
“No reservation?”
“No.”
“You kidding?” the man scoffed, returning to his work. “It’s the Blackberry Arts Festival.”
Ten minutes later, they cut off from the 101 and drove alongside the bay, curving around on a spit of land that looked out onto the Pacific and offered spectacular views of a nearby power plant. It was unlit and seemed abandoned, its white-blue domes glowing ghostly in the bright moonlight. Vance stopped the car along the shoulder and retrieved a brightly colored nylon tent from the trunk. Richard got out of the car and followed the kid down a gentle tree-lined slope to a scrubby area twenty or so feet from the water. He gingerly lowered himself onto a large rock just on the dry side of the lapping water and turned toward the land. He liked the sensation of having his back to the ocean, ignoring the majesty, not being humbled.
Vance squatted to pound in the tent pegs with a rubber hammer. Richard said, “This is the kind of place where people get murdered, you know.”
“It’s beautiful here.”
“I’m not saying it’s not beautiful. It’s just a good murderin’ spot. No decent murderer could resist killing someone here.”
Vance got the tent pitched and then set himself to building a fire, scurrying around and gathering little sticks and dry leaves. In spite of himself, Richard admired the kid’s outdoors facility. Although he’d grown up in East Tennessee, spending much of his life near mountains and otherwise living close to or in the boondocks, he’d never been much for camping or nature. What had he been much for? he wondered sometimes. Drinking, being hungover, chasing skirt, getting in stupid fistfights, arguing with girlfriends and wives, trying to make amends, regretting things, all the while trying to put something meaningful on paper, and usually failing.
After eating rancid Vienna sausages and granola bars procured earlier at a mostly cleaned-out convenience mart, Richard and Vance sat around the quietly crackling fire. Richard pulled out the half-empty pint of Old Grand-Dad that he’d bought from an adjoining liquor store while Vance was using the convenience mart bathroom and couldn’t stop him. Vance waved away the proffered bottle.
“Come on, have a drink,” said Richard.
“I told you, I don’t drink.”
“If you can’t have a nip of whiskey sitting in front of a fire by the ocean, I don’t know what.”
“Fine.” Vance pressed the bottle to his pursed lips, tipped his head back, and made an unconvincing show of swallowing whiskey that probably never entered his mouth. “That’s awful.”
“Everything good for you tastes bad.”
The water was insistent behind him, like a small child tapping on his back, and he twisted to see what it wanted. Far away, the lights of a fishing boat flashed. Crabbing, most likely, out for forty-eight hours at a time. That should have been his life: out there on all that black water, a world without end—no one to rub up against, hurt, or be hurt by. One wrong move, a towering wave or unsecured mainsail, and you’d be drifting to the ocean floor, completely erased from the world’s record. It sounded fine to him, the proper order of things. He’d lived his life far too messily, and even as he’d moved into the desert, thinking it would burn everything down to its simplest essence, it hadn’t worked—here he was, in the world again. He needed to push off shore in a leaky rowboat and never look back.
Vance sat cross-legged and was writing in a notebook he’d pulled from his bag. He kept glancing over at Richard as he wrote. Finally Richard said, “You drawing a picture of me or something?”
Vance looked down. “No.”
“What then?”
“Just recording the moment.”
“You go around taking notes all the time?”
“Don’t you? How do you remember things for later?”
The fire danced in front of him, and he was thirteen again, hunting with his father for the first and last time. Scared shitless of killing a deer, and—equally—disappointing his newly returned father. Holding the .22 in his arms like a snake that might bite him—even then he’d had no taste for firearms or shooting things. He liked reading about people shooting things, but that was as far as it went. Silence later around the fire, after a fruitless hunt that had culminated in a clear kill shot he’d refused to take. The deer had bounded away in a graceful, ungainly seesaw. His taciturn father drank something from a bottle like the one he held now, a brown sloshing liquid, probably whiskey, though he didn’t know for sure. Unlike him, the old man hadn’t seen fit to share—he hadn’t earned a drink. Men got a drink. “I have this thing called a memory,” he said. “Other than that, mostly I make shit up.”
Vance shrugged and continued writing, and Richard scooted closer to the fire. He lay back in the rocky dirt and looked up at the pin-pricked sky. The sky was better than the sea, he thought, infinitely more vast, yet humble—not crashing and clamoring for constant attention. The sky was the real God, fit for worship; the sea was a small god, jealous and mean. He shouldn’t have been a sailor—he should have been an astronomer, stationed in Greenland. His mind wandered to the Dutch one, or was he Danish, with the golden nose. What was his name? One of those things that he’d heard as a child and had stuck with him. He feared losing information like this to the ravages of time and alcohol, and so he closed his eyes as he strained to remember. The name was there and then not there in the same instant, an afterimage of itself. He couldn’t get it by brute force and began going through the initial letters. Would one light up as he scrolled through? T seemed right; it had a soft glow. As he lay there his mind wandered further, an image of the table of Henry VIII, who died from overeating. Was that true? Or poisoned by his own urine, that was someone. Burst stomach either way. Those were the days—maggots festering in the caked-on makeup of courtesans, the writhing painted faces of the ladies of the court. Rampant venereal disease. He’d had VD when the clap was still called the clap. Three horse pills cured it. The good old days—going around with a gold nose on.
When he opened his eyes again, Vance was inside the tent, and the campfire had died down to embers. The kid had covered him with a blanket before going to sleep. He sat up drinking the last of his whiskey and shivering in the wind. Going back to sleep seemed unlikely, given the cold and the strangeness of the surroundings. He watched the dark water, half expecting some terrible, slavering monster to rise out of it.
In the sparse woods to the right of their little campground, something moved. The sound of the ocean did not quite mask the crackling of branches. Before he had a chance to get properly terrified or wake Vance up to see what it was, something ambled out of the woods into the moonlight. In his misty, smoked-glass vision, he could only tell that it had four legs, but that was enough to reassure him they weren’t about to be murdered. Likely a deer, of course. Could he shoot it now? he wondered, seeing the doe from his youth—bob-tailed, with walnut spots on the white ruff of her chest—chewing a leaf with a look of nervous distraction. Probably not. He wasn’t that different now than he’d been then; so much time and energy spent going nowhere. From inside the tent Vance snored innocently, a soft glottal sigh. Whatever it was out there moved away, grew fainter and fainter, at some point melting back into the smudged darkness of the trees. It had sensed his presence and moved away—embarrassed and unsettled. You are the monster, he thought. It’s you.
Tycho Brahe.