I woke in sodden clothes in the middle of the night to the sonorous music of insignificant waves slapping an unseen shoreline. Feeling shaky, I disentangled myself from the twisted covers, stumbled a few steps in the passageway, and found an opened bottle of Prophet’s Rock Chardonnay I had stowed in the refrigerator. I uncapped the screw top and filled a drinking glass and drank half of it down like water, badly needing to take the edge off.
“You okay, Miles?” said a woman’s voice, staggering me by how close it was to my one exposed ear.
I raised my eyes. Hana’s head poked out from under the covers of the bed above the cabin, where Jack had been sleeping before Amanda had crashed our party and spirited him away to the Marlin Cruiser. “No, not really,” I said, blinking her into focus. Her face was lit up by her phone, and she looked spectral. “Where are we?”
“On the West Coast. A beach north of Nelson,” she said. “Get some sleep.”
“What happened?”
“You don’t want to know.”
I found Max in his carrier, beckoned him out, and carried him back to bed. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. Hana’s breathing, Max’s purring, and the Prophet’s Rock Chardonnay combined for a salutary feeling. Two Advil fished from my Xanax vial assuaged my sledgehammer-pounding-a-pier-piling headache. If only I could remain like this forever, I imagined. Unfortunately, life’s respites are temporal, there is no peace, there’s only the next storm on the horizon, I wrote in my head as I fell asleep with Max’s warm soul next to my depleted one.
Morning dawned on a rocky shoreline at a place named Boulder Bank Scenic Reserve. A vast flock of silver-back gulls was shrieking murderously over caught fish. The surface of the water was watercolored in hues of gold and orange. My brain was trying to piece together the previous night when Hana emerged from the camper van, combing out her long, black, curly hair with an oversized bristly brush. Had she risked a shower in the combo bathroom? Seemed like it from the sweet scent of soap that emanated from her when she sat down next to me.
“How’re you feeling?” She directed her question to the waves, slapping politely at the shore, her voice competing with the shrieking silver-back gulls, who knew no satiety in their ravening for fish.
“Not too hot.” I glanced at her. “So, what happened?”
“Amanda got the Couples Book Club all riled up, I guess for her sizzle reel, and, well, it spiraled out of control from there, and everyone was confused about what was going on, and you had another one of your epic meltdowns and went to the dark side before passing out.”
“And it’s all on camera, I presume?”
“I presume.” She faced me with an earnest look. “I had to get you out of there. This may be good for publicity, but it’s not good for your reputation,” she said. “Or mine.”
“I’ve only done one book tour. Nothing like this. Jesus FC. I have hosted some large wine festivals where things went a little sideways.”
A silence fell over us. When I glanced at her, Hana looked like she was screwing up the courage to say something. “We’ve got to be in Picton by one o’clock,” she finally said.
“What’s in Picton again?”
“It’s where the ferry docks.” She turned to me. “I promised Hughie I would get you across Cook Strait to Wellington . . .” She trailed off. She picked up a small, jagged piece of driftwood and drew a design in the sand.
“How are you doing, Hana?”
“Not well,” she started, lighting a joint she had been meditatively rolling, and inhaling it deeply.
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
Hana hung her head and struggled to gather herself. “I realize this book tour has been kind of a disaster,” she began.
“Kind of?” I barked a mordant laugh.
“Okay. A total disaster. I did my best. With no money, little lead time, and a first-time publisher who doesn’t know whatthefuck he’s doing.”
I nodded. I didn’t like the sound of her preamble. “You know I’ve never met Hughie in person.”
“Seriously?” Her expression displayed surprise.
“Seriously. It’s all been email, text, and Zooms.”
“Well, you’ll be meeting him in Wellington.”
“Right.” I shuddered at the prospect.
She crossed out her design in the sand with a show of futility. “Ever since Jack’s producer partner showed up, it hasn’t been the same for me.”
“I understand.” The sun was rising over the hills to the east of us and the ocean shimmered, blinding me. I reached into my pocket for my sunglasses and shielded my sensitive eyes.
“We’re booked for the event in Wellington at the Welsh Dragon Bar. It’s a little touristy now but it used to be a public toilet.”
“Sounds metaphorically perfect.”
“Their book club is called—”
“Let me guess,” I chopped her off. “The Public Toilet Book Club?”
Hana laughed. “You’re smart.”
“Actually, I’m the dumbest dude on the planet. I gave up a beautiful woman for the writing life. And now a brilliant winemaker for a dark secret I’m holding inside.”
Hana blinked her large dark-brown eyes. “There’ll be a lot of young people there, people who’ll want to hear your story, hopefully buy your book.” The new design in the sand was taking shape. It looked like the ouroboros, the dragon eating its tail, the symbol of eternity and regeneration. “And then there’s the big Featherston Booktown event outside Martinborough. That promises to be great,” she consoled. “You’ll get to experience a pōwhiri.”
“What’s a pōwhiri?”
“A Māori welcoming ceremony. You’ll see when you get there.” She threw back her mane of coal-black hair, grappling with something unspoken. “I would have loved to have been there to talk you through it, but . . .” She lowered her head, sighed, and paused dramatically. “I’m leaving the tour.”
“What?” I said, panicked, turning to face her.
“I can’t take Amanda. She’s got a streak of that Aussie bigotry we Kiwis are all too familiar with.” She looked at me. “And I’m notherfuckingPA.”
“I’ll talk to her,” I said, “straighten it out.”
“I didn’t want to say this, Miles, because I like you, I respect you. But it’s either her or me, but if she’s got a deal for this reality TV show, I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t want to be in it. Period.” She threw her drawing stick away to underscore her decision. “I could recommend other publicists, if you want me to,” she offered.
“I don’t want another publicist. What other publicist would crash in her own car? You’re a team player, Hana.”
“Yeah. A team player.” A dark shadow crossed her face. “I’m not sure I’m cut out for this profession. I might take out a loan and go back to school and get my masters in theater, or business. Figure out my life.”
I exhaled through both nostrils, resigned to her decision. “Yeah, being a book publicist today is like being a restaurant critic in the postapocalypse.”
“Funny. You’ve got all these great expressions.”
“They keep you sane in a dwindling cultural universe where books are going the way of lacework, where movies have diminished in magic by having been dragged to the internet and our ubiquitous devices. The world I came of age in is no more, Hana.” I turned to her. “But your life is just beginning.”
“Do you think there’s hope?”
“Not as long as the Amandas of the world are puppeteering it.” She laughed. “If there isn’t hope we’ve reached a cynical nadir, haven’t we? Even if we don’t think there’s hope, we have to believe there is hope because in believing we maintain a conviction to live, if that makes sense.”
“You don’t believe there’s hope?”
“No. But paradoxically, I’ll believe there is in order to keep fuel in my tank, because if I lose all hope, then I might as well off myself.”
“You couldn’t off yourself,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because of Max. He would miss you. His eyes would guilt-trip you out of it. I might understand, but he wouldn’t. It would be perceived as a great absence of someone he’s bonded with.”
I was impressed with her perspicacity. “A friend of mine told me when I got Max and found out about his metabolic bone disorder he would bankrupt me.” I paused and chuckled to myself. “And then I realized he wouldn’t necessarily financially bankrupt me, but if I lost him he would emotionally bankrupt me. You’re right, I couldn’t off myself unless I could find a good home for him.” I nudged her shoulder with mine. “If something happened to me, would you take him?”
“No! Because then I would be left with the guilt I gave you permission to kill yourself.”
“You’ve got a brilliant sense of logic.” I bent my head to her profile. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She had already left, and I tried one last time to bring her back. “How are you doing, Hana?”
She shook her head, then looked down. “You want to hear my story?”
“Sure.”
“When I was fourteen I was caught stealing in a high-end clothing store. I was fingerprinted and booked. It was beyond humiliating.” She raised her head and met the Tasman Sea of her despair. “I knew I was going to be persecuted beyond anything I had ever experienced before, so I . . .” She paused, her words stalled on the cusp of a painful memory. She sucked in her breath. “So I, uh, went into the bathroom, got in the bathtub . . . and slit my wrists.”
“Jesus.”
“My parents found me, called 111, and they saved me.” She nodded contemplatively at the memory. “After that my parents slept outside my bedroom on the floor for six months because they were deathly afraid I was going to attempt suicide again.”
“What great parents,” was all I could manage.
“I had to leave the private school I was attending, which I loved, because the arrest meant I would be expelled, plus the ostracization was going to be too much when everyone found out about my stealing expensive clothes and jewelry. As penance, I had to enroll in public school, which I hated, and that’s where I was bullied beyond belief.”
“You don’t have to tell me this, Hana.”
“No, I want to. I want you to know who I am and where I come from, okay? Before I leave this tour and never see you again.” Emotion choked her words.
“Okay.”
“I started realizing I was not physically attracted to men, but rather to women. I met a girl named Claire, and I fell in love with her, and she made me feel good, proud of who I am.” She took a hit off her chop and blew smoke. “Of course I had to come out to my parents, you know, and tell them I was gay.” She paused, her story hobbled by her recounting of it.
“How did they take it?”
“Not well. I waited until I got accepted into university and had moved out before telling them.” She took another dramatic pause. Tears leached from the corners of her eyes. “They didn’t speak to me for three years. Completely shut me out.” When I glanced at her, she was drying her tears with the knuckles of one hand. “I got my degree in marketing and communications from Victoria and found a job working in publicity for a government agency, but I fuckinghatedit.” She nodded. “Then I found this job. Publicist for a famous writer on a road trip.”
I smirked an exhalation.
“You are, Miles. Anyway, I thought it was an incredible opportunity. I’ve worked my ass off to be creative with these book clubs. I’ve endured declined credit cards, sleeping in my car, trying to look presentable, but I realize I’m a failure, that I’ve failed you, Miles.” Her words tumbled into sobs. She clasped a hand to her mouth.
“You haven’t failed me, Hana, that’s ridiculous.”
“Yes, I have,” she said, her words muffled by the hand covering her mouth, her tears running over her tattooed fingers. “I wanted to be good at something, and I failed, and now I have to start all over again, reinvent myself as something else, and I don’t know what that is.” Weeping openly, she sounded like someone who felt all alone in the world.
I gazed off into the distance.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be.”
“You understand why I have to leave the tour?”
“I wish you would reconsider.”
She glanced at her iPhone, started to clamber to her feet. “Look, we’ve got to get to Picton.”
I nodded and rose, shakily, to my feet. At that moment, the sky suddenly closed off with a massing of black clouds.
Hana tented her eyes with a flattened hand and scanned the horizon. “There’s a massive storm on the way again,” she said. “A bomb cyclone. There’re rumors the ferry will close. I hope we make it.”
We climbed into the camper van, Hana at the wheel, me in the passenger seat, too hungover to even consider driving. Her confessional story, her excavation of a painful time in her life and what she was going through on the tour, had produced a somber, unspoken understanding between us. Thinking of all Hana had said about Max, I lifted him out of the carrier and set him on my lap. He immediately began purring.
The Hana driving the camper van seemed like a different person from the one I had met in Cromwell. It was as if she had everted her soul and confessed everything and now, like me, was naked to the world. If only I could live in the moment like Max and not ruefully dredge up the past all the time, or dwell on the asteroid vectoring Earth’s way and the sixth extinction, the cosmic event that would wipe out mankind. Maybe it would be a blessing if we could all start over tabula rasa.
The storm worsened as we headed north out of Boulder Bank Scenic Reserve. It was too generous of Hana to wrest me out of Wrekin and away from the disaster of the Couples Book Club and Amanda’s first day directing Washed-Up Writers, perhaps feeling guilty she had arranged it.
“Someone taking care of your car?” I said.
“Yeah, my girlfriend, Sofia.”
“What does she do?”
“She works in the government,” she said, without elaborating.
“Are you getting along with your parents now?”
“Better,” she said, smiling for the first time that morning.
“Hana, look, you didn’t fail anybody. And, plus, you have youth on your side.” She turned to me. “Look at me. Washed-up writer. The sands are mostly in the bottom of the hourglass. I maybe have two more books left in me. You have time to write an entire oeuvre, star in a dozen plays.”
“I appreciate that, Miles.”
“I wish you wouldn’t leave.”
“I wish I didn’t have to.”
Hana cranked the wipers up. Looking tense, she gripped the wheel with both hands and slanted forward and peered through the blurred windows. She bravely navigated the six-ton automotive leviathan on the narrow two-lane road through wooded countryside in the direction of Picton. The pouring rain obliterated the passing landscape from view. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine a summer of glittering blue estuaries, flocks of migratory birds hurtling their small bodies in fierce upper-atmosphere winds, guided by the galaxies, to this verdant, supernal paradise that was New Zealand. But all I saw was leaden gray. All I heard was windshield wipers swishing back and forth, locked in a fierce battle with the torrential rain.
“If this keeps up, I’m not sure I’m going to make it all the way to Auckland,” I said, fearful now that Hana was leaving the tour.
“You’ll have Jack. And his girlfriend.”
“Are you joking?”
“It’ll be better on the North Island.”
“I appreciate your sharing your story back there,” I said. “I’m glad it didn’t end in tragedy.”
“Then you never would have heard it.”
“Point taken.”
She turned and smiled at me. “I like you, Miles. I hate to do this to you.”
“I understand, Hana. You and Amanda are on different tracks. It would never work. It’s demeaning to you. I’m sorry.”
All of a sudden we heard the sustained blaring of a horn. A large truck swerved, nearly sideswiping us. Hana jerked the wheel to the left to avoid a collision. We heard a BANG, the camper van shuddered . . . and then Hana shrieked, “What was that?”
Hana braked and pulled over to the side of the road at the first available turnoff. We climbed out together. I touched down gingerly because the remaining passenger-side step on the destroyed ladder was dangling from exposed screws. Shivering in the rain and cold, we inspected the vehicle. The left wheel well and step had struck something, and the fiberglass housing was smashed in. I followed a wordless Hana backward to the scene of the impact. We deduced the left side of the camper van had struck a waist-high, sturdy, round mileage post at the side of the road. The post was still standing, but paint scraped from the wheel well had streaked it in white. In the pouring rain I picked up a piece of the headlight housing, a jagged shard of orange plastic, and stared at it with dejection.
Back where the camper van was parked, Hana started viciously kicking the back of it. “Shitfuckshitfuckshitfuck!” she screamed angrily.
“Come on, Hana,” I consoled. “It’s not your fault. Accidents happen. At least we’re okay.”
She turned to me with a pained look. “This whole book tour is my fault,” she wailed.
“Come on, Hana, don’t beat up on yourself. It is what it is. It was what it was.” I threw my arms toward the skies pouring rain down on us bedraggled two and gave it two middle fingers. “Fuck you, God!”
Seconds later we saw a jagged fulguration of lightning light up the storm-occluded skies, followed by a low growl of thunder. I kid you not.
“Miles!” a bug-eyed Hana shouted.
I leaned back and tilted my head to the heavens. “is that all you got, motherfucker?”
Seconds later, another incandescent bolt of lightning tore open the sky, this time closer. Thunder pealed to underscore the threat.
Hana and I, both superstitious, raced back inside the van, me having to hoist myself up since there no longer existed a step, and closed the doors. Hana locked hers. Max was meowing up a storm. We didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then I snorted a laugh at the absurdity of everything. Then Hana laughed. We shared a cathartic, eye-watering laugh.
“And right there is the argument against atheism.”
“I can’t believe you did that,” Hana said.
“It was an inexplicable coincidence!”
“I don’t think so,” she said in all seriousness. Hana looked at me with bulging eyes, then shook her head in repudiation of my explanation.
I felt like pouring a glass of wine, but I knew Hana would reproach me. She looked tense, upset, and a thousand things I had no clue about were ping-ponging around in her head. She turned the key in the ignition. The engine turned over on the first try and Hana steered us back onto the highway.
We continued on the sinuously narrow road into the small, charming town of Picton, the disembarkation port for the Interislander ferry that would take us across the fabled Cook Strait to the North Island and whatever new tragedies and ignominies lay ahead for this pathetic book tour.
In Picton, Hana found public parking off London Quay and pointed to a coffee shop across the street. “Cortado café. That’s where everybody is. We have a couple hours before the ferry leaves.”
Edging up closer to Hana was her girlfriend, Sofia, behind the wheel in Hana’s Subaru. She parked and climbed out. She was a beautiful brunette, a tad heavyset, with a round face broken into a welcoming smile. She was eager to talk to Hana, so I backed away.
“I’ll meet you back here in an hour,” said Hana.
I waved and marched across the rain-slick street to Cortado café. It was spacious inside. Two tables had been dragged together, and Jack, Amanda, and the three-person documentary crew were clustered around a laptop, gales of laughter erupting from them every few seconds.
Seeing me, Jack waved me over. “Miles, come here. You’ve got to see this.”
Wincing, I shook my head, waved him off, not wanting to relive a moment I was blissfully oblivious of. I crossed the café to the counter and ordered a flat white with a triple shot of espresso. The young female counter attendant handed me a silver holder with a number mounted at the top—13! No!—and I retreated to an empty table and plopped down, the weight of Hana’s words about leaving the tour bearing down on me, trying to process the repercussions—Jack and me? Jack and me and Amanda?—shaking my head at her suicide confession, trying to understand how hard it must have been growing up Māori in a land of mostly rich white descendants of marauding invaders.
A moment later, Jack approached and sat down across from me. He sensed my downturned mood. “Where were you? We thought you had gone on a walkabout.”
“Hana drove me to the Tasman Sea. There we rested, got down, watched prehistoric birds clamoring for prey, a sun lifted by the hand of God and spilling liquid gold onto an ocean so pristine I wanted to Virginia Woolf in it and meet Poseidon.”
“Are you okay, Miles?” Jack knew my waxing lyrical was sarcastic doomsday opining and not because I had found the way, the truth, the life. He waited.
“God threw a lightning bolt at me, and I had an epiphany.”
“Oh no.”
“I’m going to retire from writing. I’m wrung out, Jack. I have nothing left in me. No more stories to tell.”
“All because you saw some lightning?”
“It was heavier than that, but I’m keeping it a secret between Hana and me.”
The server brought my flat white over and set it down. He wordlessly took the number holder away.
I took a few sips of the strong coffee, then raised my head to meet Jack’s beseeching, bloodshot (drink + sex + sleeplessness) eyes. “Hana’s leaving the building.”
“What?”
“She’s not interested in being your girlfriend’s PA, is essentially the gist of her reason for bailing.”
“We still need her for scheduling the events. Just because we’re doing Washed-Up Writers doesn’t change anything.”
“To her it does! And Washed-Up Writers? Really, Jack? Really? Is this the nadir we’ve sunk to? I mean, I get Washed-Up Celebrities and you hosting that. It sounds like kitschy fun and a hefty payday, but this is me, Miles Raymond. This is my life.”
“It’s only a working title. And if it’s a hit, it’s going to sell books—come on.”
“It hurts me deeply we alienated Hana.”
Jack glanced back at Amanda and the reality TV crew, who were still laughing their asses off over the footage from Wrekin they were screening on a MacBook. “This show’s going to be a hit,” Jack said, grinning.
“I could give a fuck.” That silenced Jack. I sipped my flat white, the caffeine helping make visible my blurred view of the world. The rain slashed at the windows. More Kiwis streamed into the café to take shelter from the biting cold, the gathering winds, blowing hard now, colorful flags snapping audibly, trash pushed along the gutters in eddying currents, the Picton inlet white capped.
Jack slid two white pills across the table. “Here.”
“What’s this?”
“Dramamine. I’m told by our crew to fasten our seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”