Jack was lying in the upper bunk, his face ghoulishly illuminated by his phone, when I returned from the outside, having braved a pee in the howling winds and the beginnings of yet another winter storm of biblical proportions.
“What’s up?” I said as I took two steps to the bed I had fashioned in the lounge area and climbed in fully clothed, bone cold, haggard.
“Amanda’s on the way,” Jack said.
“Batten down the hatches.”
“I tried to talk her out of it,” he bullshitted. “Can’t believe she fingerprint ID’d me and can get inside my account and has been tracking my movements ever since I left Oz. Then when she saw the post on Instagram, she went DEFCON Two.”
I pulled the comforter up to my neck, interlocked my hands, and pillowed my head in supplication to more madness. “Aside from the cockamamie documentary idea, what does this mean for us, I’m loath to ask?”
“Somehow she managed to get a copy of your book tour itinerary, saw the next one is near Blenheim and that it’s a”—Jack looked at me with a puzzled expression—“couples book club?”
“I haven’t looked at the schedule. I’m afraid to. From the Tough Guys to the Cougars to champagne connoisseurs who go in for the long drop when the alimentary canal starts rumbling, nothing would surprise me. We’re moving in a strange world, my friend.”
“She’s thinking maybe we could be in the couples book club,” he said.
I barked a laugh. Hearing me, Max crawled out of his carrier and climbed up onto my bed using only his forepaws, padded over to my chest, and curled up under my chin. “Little Max man,” I congratulated him on getting up on his own. “Couples Book Club in Blenheim, are you ready for that?” I stroked the top of his head. Max began purring, but every time Jack started talking, Max would pause as if Jack’s voice capsized his feline sangfroid. “Are you in love with this woman or what?”
“She’s powerfully connected and she’s made a lot of shit happen, including your book-to-film deal,” he confessed, dipping his phone at me from the top bunk for emphasis.
“So it’s transactional?”
“It’s more than transactional,” Jack said, offended.
“Then I suppose we have to humor her,” I said, resigned.
“She will not be deterred. She is a force of nature.”
“This book tour’s got another couple weeks to go, Jack,” I reminded him. “Where’s she going to stay?”
“I’ll work it out. I always do. She wants to meet you. She’s excited about this doc.” He craned his neck down from the upper bunk. “And apparently has someone she wants you to meet.”
“Who’s that?”
“Some writer friend.”
“Tell her to forget it. I’m not interested in being set up.”
“Could be a bridge woman to get you over your river of misery with Ella.” Jack reached over to the control panel and tapped a few icons, and the camper van plunged into darkness. Wind whistled through its automotive bones. We were mere panels of aluminum and glass from feral animals, windblown oceans, ghosts of marauders, New Zealand’s wild, barbarous South Island. I hugged Max close to me. He nuzzled his face between my clavicle and chin, seeking warmth.
The morning dawned ragged and raw. I fed Max, then stepped out of the camper. The step my bad eyes assumed was there wasn’t, and I pitched forward and splashed into squishy, clayey mud. I clambered to my feet like a man with no hinges in his joints, my feet sliding in the clay in a desperate attempt at purchase, a mannequin robot controlled by a deranged and cackling puppeteer. When I had regained my balance, I shook my head at the step-down ladder that had been taken out by the mailbox post in Christchurch and how I still hadn’t gotten used to its absence. I brushed myself off, scratched my beard, combed my matted locks with my muddied fingers, and wondered what an illustrious literary giant like Julian Barnes would make of this camper-van book tour. Not only would he not be subjected to one, he would scoff at the mere suggestion, let alone the appearance of it with, say, his wine-aficionado, wordsmith-extraordinaire buddy Jay McInerney. Imagine the two of them in a camper van! I laughed out loud to myself at the comical image. An Oxford-educated Brit and a dapper dresser married to the scion of the Hearst fortune in a camper van, on a book tour, in the dead of winter, on the South Island of New Zealand, hawking prestige, high-end literature to adoring fans. Celebrity author, my ass. Jesus! Inexperienced, first-time publicist. Maxed-out corporate credit card. Defecating in outhouses over a hole in a wooden plank. A special needs writer in love with a special needs cat. Best friend embroiled in yet another relationship shitstorm. “Fuck the one percent! I am who I am, right, Max?” I said to Max, who had ventured to the door’s edge and gazed out at me with wonder and worry and whatnot.
Storm clouds had gathered over the ocean. A freezing wind had kicked up overnight, mottling the Pacific with churning whitecaps, making it look wild and downright dangerous. Nonetheless, a few fishing boats bobbed on the waters, a living to be made by their hardy captains, a habit to be exercised, a partner to escape from—who knows!
I closed the door to the camper van and ensconced Max safely inside and splashed through the puddles over to where Hana’s Subaru was parked. Clothes had been hung in the windows to seal out the sunlight and were flapping in the breeze where they extruded. I craned my neck around and espied Hana in the back in a sleeping bag—had she known free camping was in the job description? Or did she always come prepared? Jesus, I thought, book tours have sunk to a new bottom when your publicist is sacked out in the back of her car.
I knocked on the windshield, and Hana sprang to life. A look of horror contorted her expression. A moment later the face of an attractive woman with purple-dyed hair popped up out of the sleeping bag next to her. I raised my hand in an excuse me and wandered off, chagrined I had caught her with her lover unannounced.
Twenty minutes later a gray SUV I hadn’t noticed peeled away down the dirt road, and a sheepish Hana approached me where I was sitting on a cold, lichen-covered rock, cradling Max in my lap.
“That was my partner, Sofia,” she confided.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
She shook her head, then rolled a cigarette with a mixture of tobacco and marijuana, open now about her habit. She scratched a match aflame, lit it, inhaled deeply, then held the burning joint up to me. “Want some chop?” she offered.
“What’s chop?”
“Weed mixed with tobacco.”
I waved away her offer. “I’ll get the fear. Not that I’m not already possessed of it.”
“We can’t have that now, can we?” She laughed, then took another lung-expanding hit.
“Have you been getting stoned this whole trip? I noticed you smoking before.”
“Stoned is normal for me. Reality is terrifying.”
“I can only imagine.”
She reared back and studied my appearance up and down. “What happened to you?”
“I took a dive into the muck.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder to the camper van. “We lost the stepladder on the Beast escaping from the Cougars. Took out their mailbox, apparently.”
Hana threw a backward glance and narrowed her eyes at the camper van. “Hughie’s going to be pissed.”
“Fuck him.”
Hana power-smoked her chop, her nerves rattled.
“Look, Jack’s got a girlfriend who’s coming over from Australia to join us for a few days. From all the information, she’s a bit of a piece of work. I want to alert you to her presence.”
“Why is she coming?”
“Jack, as you might have guessed, finds himself in these complicated relationships. I think it’s what keeps his blood flowing.” I set Max down on the fescue, petted him to make sure he stayed still. “She’s a producer of crap TV, a former actress who sort of made it but sort of didn’t, which is a volatile mix in the entertainment business when it comes to a person’s sanity.” I waited while Hana chortled at my cynical view of Hollywood, a world that both fascinated her and that she could have cared less about. “Jack is in her money purse—how deep, I doubt he possesses the humility to tell me.”
“I see.” She turned to me. “How does this affect me?”
“I hope it doesn’t,” I said without meeting her gaze. “I just wanted to alert you to her coming, that’s all. She’s going to shoot a little documentary that Hughie told you might be happening.”
“I didn’t know it was Jack’s girlfriend.”
“That’s okay.”
She took a few more apprehensive back-to-back hits, then extinguished the “chop” on the bottom of her boot, put it in its plastic baggie, and stowed it away in her purse for future psychoactive salubrity. As we watched the storm clouds darken and the blowing morning materialize, her dishevelment bore a pulchritude not difficult to fathom. A randy smell emanated from her.
“When’s the last time you showered, Hana?”
“I get by with the campgrounds.”
“You’re not staying in hotels?”
“Hughie said he can’t afford it.”
“Cheap Kiwi fucker.” I shook my head in disgust, turned to her. “As a Māori, do you experience persecution? Discrimination?”
She shrugged. “I was bullied as a child.”
“How so?”
“Beat up.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“By who?”
“A bunch of girls who schemed to ostracize me, didn’t want me in their little social circle, I guess.”
“When did that end?”
“High school. But it turned more subtly microaggressive.”
“How?”
“It’s harshly cliquish. White over here, Māori over there.”
“How does it manifest itself?”
“Say I go shopping in a high-end clothing store. The employees will follow me.”
I nodded, reflecting on prejudices I’d never been subjected to. “But Māori have certain powers in your country?”
“We do. And we’re getting more and more. But we’re not in parliament. We’re not at the levers of control. We’re getting there, though.” She stirred the sand with a contemplative finger. Beautifully ornate tattoos decorated the backs of her hands and rode up her arms, narrating her ancestry in intricate scrollwork.
“Love your tattoos,” I said. “I bet they tell quite a story.”
“They do,” she said, gently touching the tattoos on her right arm with the fingers on her left, sinking into their meaning, their memory. She grew absorbed in them and seemed to have been transported away for a few reflective minutes.
“Someone once did my ancestry tree,” I said, to break the silence. “I’m positive yours is more colorful, if just as tragic.”
“What is yours?” she said to her tattoos.
“I told the woman researching my ancestral tree to stop when she landed on some coal miners in Austria who had died of black lung disease.”
That lifted Hana out of her trance. “Seriously?”
“I don’t know. It was depressing. No English royalty, no famous artists, just some characters out of a Dickens novel who didn’t make it past forty.” I turned to her. “I’m faring remarkably well for a Raymond. Though the name dies with me, the ancestral tree goes dark.”
“Why?”
“None of my siblings had kids. Parents were both only children and now both dead, thank God.”
“Why thank God?”
“They were heavy drinkers, agoraphobes, depressives, miserable.”
“No children with your ex?”
I shook my head.
“No children at all?”
That stopped me dead in my tracks. Milena’s email flew up in my face. I dropped my eyes to the ground. “You googled me. You know my whole story.”
“Not why you might have to go back to the US,” she prodded.
“Like I said, it’s too painfully personal.” I fell silent.
Hana gazed off. The last ragged pennant of blue sky got closed off by clotting black clouds, and the landscape darkened. The wind kicked up and blew sand across the shore. We folded our arms around our torsos and shivered in the cold.
“Why so many book clubs in such a short span of time?” I wondered.
“Hughie wants to get you across Cook Strait. We need to be at Picton three days from today.”
I stared at the ominous horizon. “What’s with this Couples Book Club?”
She turned sharply to me. “Miles, you told Hughie you were willing to do anything to sell your book. Book clubs started out as real book clubs, but in truth they’re merely excuses for like-minded people to get together over anything. You should thank me for not signing you up for the End of Life Book Club!”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Keep it in play. We might need to close on that one, the way this book tour is going.”
Hana barked a laugh. Her large teeth gleamed white in a blunt instrument of hope.
“What’s on the agenda for today?”
“Short drive into Blenheim. We’re camping at this cool place called the Coterie. They’re a collective of young winemakers.” She turned to me: “They’re excited to meet you, Miles. They say you changed the wine industry.”
“I don’t want to get pigeonholed as the Pinot guy. I like to believe I have other arrows in my quiver.”
“They’ve read all your books but of course remember the famous one made into a movie. Be proud of it, Miles.”
“I don’t know,” I said, stirring the black sand with an index finger.
“They supposedly make awesome wines.” She looked away. “And they have bathroom and shower facilities.”
“Sold.” I turned to my left to pet Max, but he wasn’t there! “Max?” I called out, jolting anxiously to my feet. “Max!”
Hana leaped to her feet. She whipped out her phone and started pecking frantically at it.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Max?” A light rain had begun to shower us. The wind gusted and blew harder, sandblasting us with the shore’s debris. The catastrophic thought of losing Max was crushing my soul. If I lost him, I don’t know what I would do. “Max?” I bellowed with overt dismay in my voice. “Max?” I swept the beach with searching eyes, evidencing no sign of him as I staggered along the shoreline in a panic.
A fog materialized out of nowhere, and visibility cratered to mere paces. All of a sudden I felt like the only human left on planet Earth—it was that eerie. Instead of calling out for Max, I cupped my hands around my mouth again and yelled, “Hana? Hana? Where are you?” I grew disoriented, a light plane pilot flying into a dense bank of clouds with no instruments, suddenly experiencing vertigo. In that moment I saw what Death must look like: a disembodied voice in a featureless world crying out hopelessly as the skies grew darker and darker until finally, at last, there was nothingness.
“Miles, over here,” shouted an elated Hana.
I sloshed over the sand and fescue, my arms breaststroking through the fog, in the direction of her voice. Within a matter of minutes, I had transited from suicidal despair to believing in life again. There was little Max man perched on his haunches, growling and hissing at a pair of slumbering sea lions, one of whom was barking now at my intrepid cat. I picked Max up as Hana held out her phone and showed me, with enlarged eyes, the tracking device she had used to recover him.
“Aren’t you glad I got this?” she exulted, looking at me, her eyes absorbing light and gleaming her triumph.
“I am,” I said as I cradled Max in my arms and hugged him close to me. “I love you, little guy, I love you,” I whispered into his whiskers.
“Use it, for fuck’s sake,” she said, “if I’m not here. I recommend keeping that little critter in the camper. If you’re going to let him out, get himafuckingleash,” she admonished.
I gave her my solemn promise I would in an upbeat tone now that Max was safe and sound and back in my arms.
We clomped through the wet sand and dense fog back in the direction of our vehicles. I cleaved close to Hana’s side, as her eyesight was superior to mine and she seemed to know where she was going, following some instinctual sense of direction I had long ago surrendered to the geographical discombobulations brought on by age. In a weak moment I thought about telling her I had once had a numinous encounter with death, but it was early in the morning, and I didn’t want to scare her with the prospect that maybe I was losing it.
As the fog parted into diaphanous curtains of dissipating gray, Hana and I came to a halt when we saw a shiny new black four-door midsize pickup truck with a small, box-shaped camper trailer hitched to the rear with a bright white logo reading: “Marlin Campers.” Showing a chagrined Jack around the compact trailer was a tall, attractive woman with shoulder-length chestnut hair framing an angular face etched in perpetual circumspection. When she turned and smiled at Hana and me, she didn’t show her teeth, only the age lines in her almost-for-sure-Botoxed face.
“Hi, mates,” she called out in an Aussie accent, waving amiably as we anxiously approached, as if the ground were booby-trapped. “You’re Miles, of course, and”—she turned to an anxious Hana—“and you must be Hana, the Māori publicist.”
Hana scowled at her, preferring not to be singled out as an indigenous person.
“Meet Amanda,” Jack said, breaking into the group, realizing everyone was nonplussed except for Amanda, who seemed to instantly fit in like we were expecting her.
I was still taking in the tiny camper trailer and all the repercussions of that vision when Amanda thrust out her hand. I took it. It was greasy with lotion and her handshake crushed my hand, as though it were fashioned from the bones of a songbird and hers from a corporate CEO on a fast track to a billion-dollar empire. The tan jodhpurs and the black riding boots that rose to her knees were a bit sartorially theatrical for my tastes. All that was missing was the fetish flogger, but no doubt that was stowed away in the Marlin Campers Cruiser Deluxe model. “Well, here we are,” Amanda exulted.
Jack manufactured a smile from a long-ago TV show.
Hana stared stoically.
My stomach roiled with the stench of disaster.