The “storm of the century” had not abated. We were at sea level now, hugging the sublimely gorgeous coastline, and weren’t facing any challenging mountain passes, so the threat of snow closing roads and sending us hurtling on another Pig Route had diminished, but the persistent rain made the going tough in the unwieldy camper van. The winds lashed at it. Provisions and kitchenware rattled in the secured cabinets and drawers.
“The Cougars of Christchurch Book Club.” Jack couldn’t stop laughing at Hana’s title of the next stop on the book tour.
“Book tours have evolved, or devolved,” I said, to Jack’s bottomless mirth. “Wherever there are readers, there are potential sales,” I rationalized.
“Brother, you are on some kind of literary journey,” Jack bellowed through eye-watering laughter, unable to comprehend, or empathize with, the fate of the contemporary author. He shook his head in bemusement and adjusted the rearview mirror.
Riding shotgun, I had Max cradled in my lap and he had the gimlet eye on the windshield again. Every buffeting of the lashing wind startled him. After a year of the peace and quiet of Prophet’s Rock, the strange noises of New Zealand’s winter discomfited him. My hands gripped him tight so he couldn’t dart into the back, where I feared he could get into trouble, lose his balance, hurt himself getting knocked around, or find some place to hide where we couldn’t get him out.
“We’re going to the Cougars of Christchurch Book Club, Max man,” I said out loud to him, petting his head.
“You need to talk to him, don’t you?” Jack said.
“He’s my conscience. He keeps me on the straight and narrow. There’s a current of understanding that emanates from him I can’t put into words. He’s the mirror I hold up to my soul.”
Jack shot me a dismissive look. He hated when I waxed philosophical. “Didn’t know you were a cat guy.”
“I didn’t either until I got Max. A lot of writers were. Chandler. Highsmith. Hemingway . . .”
“Okay, okay.” He nodded, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Amanda has a golden Labradoodle.”
I shuddered at the image of the two of them with what I could only interpret as canine bling. “The neediness of dogs saps me of energy.”
“I hear you,” Jack said, the creases lining his face drawing him momentarily into the vortex of an uncharacteristically downcast look.
“Does the Washed-Up Celebrities hosting gig pay well?” I asked Jack, wanting to veer off the subject of pets and the sentimentalities they evoke.
“It does,” Jack said, “it does. And if it gets picked up and they don’t bump me for someone younger, then I guess I might be moving permanently to Oz.”
“And the stage-four clinger?”
“I don’t know, man.” He shook his head in self-reproach. “She has a pretty nice pad in Byron Bay, and I can’t deny I like it there. She’s possessive as hell, but she also made this Washed-Up Celebrities happen, so give her credit. Of course, I didn’t want to tell her—”
“You’re shit low on cash and have no future?”
Jack smirked. “Something along those lines. She googled me on CelebrityNetWorth, and apparently I’m worth two million.” Jack howled in amusement at the thought.
“I’m supposedly worth five.”
“You should be. What if those CelebrityNetWorth fuckers saw us now?”
“I’m guessing we’d get downgraded. To reality.”
“To reality,” Jack echoed with emphasis. “What the hell is reality?”
The road from Oamaru to Christchurch snaked along the ocean on a winding, narrow road with few turnouts. Here and there intrepid fishing boats burned black dots against the enormous east of the Pacific. We lumbered by farmland and ranchland, sheep and cattle ubiquitously predominant, as one might expect in a country as verdant as New Zealand.
“Who’s the mother of your daughter?” Jack said.
“A beautiful woman who lied to me.”
“How so?”
“It’s too painful to go into. I’m still processing that email and how it’s upturned my life.” I turned to Jack. “I don’t want it to be a cloud hanging over this trip of ours.” I patted him on the shoulder. “It’s been five years, Jackson.”
Jack smiled. “Yes. It has. Too long.”
“I try to live alone to avoid complications,” I began by way of an explanation. “Then you meet someone new, and like metal filings to a magnet, you’re drawn inexorably back in. With their warmth. Their insight. Sometimes their inspiring presence.”
“And their fuckability.”
“A word I wouldn’t use to describe our better half, but yeah, that too.”
“That’s the conundrum in a nutshell.”
“Conundrum. Isn’t that a ten-dollar word for you, big guy?”
“Wasn’t that the name of the publisher who turned down your first novel, the one that didn’t get published, not to raise a sore subject?”
“Yeah,” I said ruefully. “Don’t remind me.” I stroked Max’s head and scratched him behind the ears. “But back to the conundrum of women. It’s wonderful at first. You feel reborn. But in my case, the next phase is always the makeover one.” I turned to Jack. “You know that Maya—”
“The Santa Ynez Valley beauty?”
“Right. She advised me to burn the book that is my legacy work.”
“You should have left the cunnilingus-on-the-golf-course part out, dude. Talk about shooting a hole in one!”
I laughed in spite of myself. “You know I bare my soul when I write.”
“A tad too much sometimes,” he said, shaking his head. “And I thought Maya had it going on.”
“I thought she was everything, but I had to let her go on aesthetic grounds. And it hurt. But it hurt me worse she hated the book I wrote about our adventure. You know what she said to me?” Jack shook his head. “To my face, she said, accusatorily, almost irately, ‘How can you be so personal?’ Offended, I said, ‘How can I not?’ Isn’t being personal the definition of art?” I said to the fur of Max, which I stroked unstoppably to keep him calm, more for my comfort than his, though I knew it comforted him, too.
“Grab me a beer back there. I need something to take the edge off. I’m still traumatized by those fucking ostriches.” He exaggerated a shudder.
“Yeah, we won’t go there,” I said, laughing.
“Please don’t.” He wagged a finger at me. “And don’t put that in your next book! It’ll make me look bad.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I set Max on the passenger seat, jackknifed over into the rear compartment, and unlatched the refrigerator. I found Jack a Searchlight Brewery Thieving Bastard ale, which Hana had stocked, and which made me chuckle because I wondered if she was sending us a message in code. On the can with its riot of colors was featured a lizard-like dinosaur, its mouth hung open and its teeth bared as if readying to go to battle against another primordial creature of its cruel era. For myself I hooked a finger around the neck of a terpene soda and climbed back up into the cab, repositioned Max on my lap, passed Jack his beer.
“Thank you, man.”
Out the windshield the clouds had been torn apart by enormous invisible hands, and the first patch of blue in days greeted our eyes and splashed the dash with a mottling of sunshine. We both instinctively donned our sunglasses, another first. In our camper van, all we needed now was a pair of sheep sweaters and some steaming mince pies and the expat conversion would have been complete.
Jack pulled on his can of beer with a quiet desperation. In his grooved expression he seemed to signal he needed it. Can half-emptied, his face was reddening perceptibly, and he crossed from the edginess of the morning to the bluing afternoon, where the selfsame burrs were sanded down with the fine grit of a low-alcohol beverage.
“What’s that you’re drinking?” Jack said with a quick sidelong look. His beard had come in and he scratched the side nearest to me.
“A terpene-infused drink,” I said with deliberate inscrutability.
“A what?”
“Terpene. Compounds found in plants, including cannabis. Supposed to be healing.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that wellness shit.”
I pouched out a cheek with my tongue. A dark wave broke over me. “Ella said it might be good for the neoplasm.” I turned to Jack. “Look, truth be told, I don’t have the health insurance to take care of it. One of the other reasons Ella was pressuring me to get married. I could soak New Zealand’s generous national healthcare system.” I threw up a hand. “But that’s out the window now. If it’s cancer, I’m fucked, okay?”
“Get it biopsied, man. I’ll pay for it.”
I shook my head.
“When’s the last time you looked at it?”
“I don’t remember. I only know it’s burgeoning and darkening at the gates to my gonads.”
“Miles, man,” Jack wailed, “I can’t lose you.”
“If it’s malignant, I wouldn’t be able to go on this book tour.” I turned to Jack, slapped him facetiously on the knee. “And I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”
“Fuck off, Miles, this is serious shit now. You leave the planet and I’m only half of who I am, and that’s me getting personal and I don’t need a sarcastic comeback.”
“I can’t deal with it. Too much other shit going on.”
Jack’s nearly drained IPA produced an animated look on his face. “Miles, you can’t go out on me. The loss would be incalculable. Why not at least get it biopsied?”
“Because I don’t want to know,” I exploded, hoping the sharpness of my words would end the subject, and now regretting I had ever mentioned it.
“Drink some of your terpene soda, man, and calm down.”
I took a sip and nodded. I stroked Max’s head, then massaged his whiskers with my index finger. “Max is going to outlive me,” I said in an undertone.
“Don’t say that, Miles. Max is going to outlive me,” he mocked. Jack shook his head in disgust.
“His perpetual look of awe and wonder at the world does fill me with hope,” I said to the passing countryside.
“You’re losing your edge, Miles.”
“May-be.”
“Look, I have a confession.” He waited for me to respond.
“What?!”
“You remember you gave me an early peek at your new book.”
“Figured you wouldn’t read it, so I wasn’t worried about the reaction.”
“I read, Miles. And not just doomscrolling and tabloid shit on the internet. Real books.”
“I know you do, man, I know you do.”
“And I also, as you know, occasionally produce.” He looked at me with widened eyes. “And guess what?”
“What?”
“I’ve got Dan O’Neill attached to star in and direct A Year of Pure Feeling.”
“What?” I said, that carrot-at-the-end-of-the-stick excitement rising in me once again for the umpteenth time, the way it does to us veteran Hollywood moths to the proverbial flame of cynical optimists. “Dan O’Neill. Mr. Age of Uncertainty?”
“Yep. And he flipped for it,” Jack said. “Loved it!”
“How’d you get to him?”
Jack rolled his tongue over his front teeth, promoting the seed of a specious answer.
“Jack?”
“The stage-four clinger,” he finally admitted. “She knows him.”
“Oh, great.”
“Doesn’t matter. Dan said your story had so much depth and pain, and comedy, too.”
“Dan O’Neill wants to turn A Year of Pure Feeling into a feature film?”
“Yep. Dan O’Neill, legendary Kiwi actor, multiple Oscar nominee, wants to do it, yep.”
I swiveled my head to look out the window, a smile creasing my face and laughter of delight wanting to escape. I longed to be one of those lambs grazing on the radiant green grass. I longed to be a Kiwi bird soaring over these pristine landscapes. It must be what death feels like, I epiphanized.
“What are the next steps?” I inquired cagily, always on the qui vive for the prevarication designed to lift my mood.
“We start rounding up the usual suspects,” Jack said. He turned to me. “Assuming you’re on board.” He cleared his throat. “I need you to sign on the dotted line when the team can get all huddled together.”
“Aha! Multiple ulterior motives. The possible documentary of this book tour, the book-to-film deal . . .” I laughed out loud. “Always working an angle, Jack. Always trying to leverage something.” I shook my head, delight and execration clenched in the talons of their holy marriage.
“Hey, don’t be like that,” he said, feigning hurt. “There’s money in this for you, brother.”
“Who’s doing the adaptation?”
“You are, of course.”
“Writers Guild minimum, I’m assuming.”
“More than WGA minimum.” He turned to me. “And it’ll get you back on your health insurance so you can get that neo-thing looked at and don’t have to be conscripted into marriage to stave off a premature death.”
Believing him, I said, “I’ll need it now that the marriage is off.” I fingered the engagement ring bobbing on my sternum, looked at it wistfully. Dan O’Neill, if he put his weight to it, probably could get my book made into a film, and that’s where the real money was. He could hoist me out of the doghouse of no health insurance and buy me another half hectare of Pinot if I decided to return. In the scudding of a single cloud, Jack had transited from a beleaguered wingman to an angelic savior.
Reality stomped open the door when Hana’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie: “We can shower at the venue,” she trilled. “And park and camp there.”
I reached for the walkie-talkie and hit the press-to-talk button. “Thanks for the update, Hana. A shower would be an improvement over last night’s debacle.”
Jack looked at me and nodded. “All right.”
“All right. Hot showers. Movie deal. Mood definitely improving. I think I’m going to celebrate and pop that Quartz Reef bubbly I’ve had my eye on.”
“Now you’re talking.”
I slithered into the back. “And you’d better keep fucking that stage-four clinger,” I said. “Get a refill on those ED meds, if you have to. My treat.”
“I’m not there yet.” Jack tooted the horn to no one. “Cougars of Christchurch, here we come.”