Juan Ponce de León went to Florida in search of the River Jordan, that he might have some enterprise on foot, or that he might earn greater fame than he already possessed.
—Memoir of Don Hernando d’Escalante de Fontaneda (1575)
I ARRIVED HOME ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON TO FIND MY FORMER life in ruins. I’d been mostly gone since spring. It felt like a year, a lifetime. In the living room, Lauren had rearranged the furniture in creative and unfortunate ways, her way of telling me that I was dead to them. My chair was in a whole other quadrant of the room. I didn’t recognize the place.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello? Anyone home?”
The house was in disarray. Fruit flies had colonized the breakfast nook. In the dining room, I found Effbomb (now six years old) drinking from a bowl of water on the floor, like a dog, while another child wailed in the hallway about how her panties felt on her body.
“I hate them,” Beetle (now eight) said. “I am literally dying of hating my panties.”
“Where is your mother?”
“These panties are hurting my feelings!” she said.
Upstairs I found Stargoat (now ten) sitting under a desk reading The Pilgrim’s Progress with a flashlight like some kind of Christian terrorist.
I finally discovered Lauren in the bathtub, dying.
“I’m dying,” she said, clutching her chest.
“Of what?”
“It’s a heart attack. My third one today.”
“You’re not having a heart attack.”
“I’ve had one every day for the last three months.”
“You’re very strong.”
“I’m the strongest woman alive,” she said. “Also, my face hurts.”
“What part of your face?”
“The face part,” she said.
“Face cancer,” I said.
“Face cancer,” she confirmed.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d have to leave again, that the tour was not exactly over, that the book festivals would soon be pitching their white wedding tents across the land and I would have to disappear again, in search of those tents.
“The children seem distraught,” I said.
“They’re broken,” she said. “Something inside them broke.”
“They’re drinking from bowls and eating food off the floor.”
“They’re eating?” she said. “Good. That’s good.”
“I should do some laundry,” I said.
“Welcome home,” she said.
* * *
I gathered up the children and presented them with many gifts—T-shirts, candy.
“You look old,” they said. Whole sectors of my beard were now white.
“Shave your beard, Daddy,” they said. “Shave off the white. It’s scaring us.”
They embraced me, despite my haggard appearance, as did Lauren, when she finished dying in the bath.
“Read to us,” the children said.
In those moments at home with my family, I felt, by degrees, my heart being stretched by some benevolent force, the walls of it sagging with gladness and exhaustion, making room for new dreams, while somehow also providing more space for my own. My heart hurt with happiness to embrace these children. I felt like a man traversing a permafrost desolation who’d closed his eyes beside a dying fire, knowing he would never wake up, only to open his eyes and find himself naked in a hot spring, holding a bowl of steaming ramen, my daughters the noodles.
Being apart from these people had worn the walls of my family thin. I thought of my deployed friends, Army folk, men and women who disappeared for six or twelve or eighteen months. It is a divine gift that any military marriage does not end in divorce. One has to be made of iron and mercy. I was no soldier, but had missed many moments. When you’re not there, whether you’re out stitching harelips or eradicating giardia or fighting the enemies of freedom or reading aloud from a book for strangers, history will write you right out of the story.
“Let’s go out to eat,” Lauren said, gathering new life. “Let’s celebrate.”
I wanted to eat at home, at my table. To touch it, lay my head on it, lash myself to it with the tattered remnants of my hopes and dreams. Over the next few days, I took the girls to the pool and let Lauren lie on the bed and stare at the wall, which is what her dream was, now. That first week back, she hid in quiet rooms like a cat.
I’d find her in the guestroom, the lights off.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Quiet.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Where are the girls?” she said.
“Outside.”
“Don’t tell them where I am.”
It was nice, not pretending to be famous anymore. Lauren seemed happy to have me home. Daughters are a lot of work, especially when they’re constantly covering their bodies in Nutella and glitter like it’s Burning Man.
“Don’t ever leave again,” she said, that first night home, in bed.
Our love was stronger than ever.
“I won’t leave,” I said, “for at least three weeks.”
* * *
It was over, but it was not over. An archipelago of festivals and conferences stretched out to the end of the year and around the horn of an unknown continent and into the undiscovered land of this whole other year, which might contain a paperback, should HarperCollins deem it so, based on what data I could not say.
And so we would limp on, I guessed, the way those old conquistadors did, Pizarro, de León, de Soto. My mind turned frequently to these and other fearless Eurotrash, God bless them. What were they after? The fabled waters of a New World River Jordan that might grant eternal youth? A city of gold?
At some point, in all their many thousands of arduous miles over water and swamp and red dirt and piney woods, you know that they knew they weren’t going to be finding these things. Maybe a little gold, sure. Maybe a nice natural spring in which to rest their searing flanks, absolutely. Gorgeous unfettered primitive beauty of a kind they simply had never seen before, with such creatures in it, yes, yes, but no age-altering geysers, no streets paved with platinum. When you see that the thing you’re after is probably not going to be found, what do you do? I mean, they hadn’t searched every square inch of the Americas, had they? Something had to be hiding just over the next hill, no?
My dream had come true, but also, the truth of the dream was now mutating, and I was not sure what to make of that. Do I keep going?
One ineluctable fact: Most conquistadors died on the road, on the way toward something they never quite reached. Perhaps every dreamer does. The dream just keeps evolving, birthing new and more complicated dreams, every new road forking into three new roads of joy and possibility and potential death. It’s hard to know when to stop and celebrate with that beer.
I had worked for decades to learn to turn on the spigot of human laughter at will. Why would I voluntarily shut it off now? Isn’t this the life I wanted? And so, I was off once more, floating like a ghost among the many book festivals of our land, happy gatherings of authors and readers, piles of books under tents, green rooms hidden beyond velvet ropes, filled with room-temperature ham.
* * *
One thing you learned about festivals is, everybody thinks you’re being paid to be there, but you’re not. This is not Coachella. Almost nobody is getting paid to be there, except the bestselling authors of many dozens of books about subjects like murder, and also murder, as well as sex and murder. Some festivals pay for your room, if they enjoy a well-oiled fundraising apparatus. Some festivals give you an honorarium, enough to buy tacos from a truck.
If you go to festivals with a debut novel or even your second or third one, probably, you’ll more than likely be spending a year or two buying your own plane tickets and hotel rooms and spending $200 for room service bread, which must be buttered with your own hands, which means each festival costs upwards of $1,000, which is a lot of money for a man whose family burns through panties like they invented cotton.
The upside is gift bags, filled with all sorts of luxurious giveaways, for example, gift cards for restaurants that do not open until several hours after you need to be back at the airport, and samples of cash crops and regional exports, like a pound of enriched parboiled rice, which comes in handy when bartering with local tribes.
The handlers are kind. They drive you places. One day, on my way back to Reagan International, I asked the driver, “Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever driven?”
“You!” he said.
“Do you know who I am?”
“You are the Harrison Scott Key!” he said, looking at the sign with my name on it.
“You had to look at your sign to remember,” I said.
“I drive many peoples.”
He was from Cairo, he said.
“Do you read many books?” I asked.
“The Stephen King is very good for reading.”
“Yeah, he’s a good one.”
“Do you write like him?”
“I use some of the same words.”
“This is very good, maybe I like you, too!” he said.
When I got out, he waved.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Goodbye, Robert!” he said.
I woke up one morning in another alien hotel room and a fevered panic, realizing with horror that I could not remember the color of my lawnmower.
Where was I? Los Angeles? Fairfax? Halifax?
The next night, on a ridiculously beatific autumn evening in a palatial courtyard in what turned out to be Nashville, at the foot of a large bronze statue of a nude Victory, surrounded by many authors, of which I seemed the newest and worst-selling, I could see, yes, so much is striving, that you work so very hard and so very long in solitude and madness to find your calling, your voice, your book, your publisher, your readers, that when it finally happens, it can be a shock to see how many more people have already done this, and done it better than you. It’s like Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had arrived at the top of Mount Everest to find themselves largely ignored by a cocktail party in progress and then accosted by the mayor’s wife, who wanted to know if they’d tried the pork sliders.
I walked home from the party, alone, sagging through the streets of Music City like a man in a Randy Travis video. At the hotel, I sat down with my book, its cover gnarly and rubbed raw from being tumbled about a hundred airports and Ubers. Pages had begun to fall out. I flipped through it, alighting on a passage, then another, startled by what I found.
“I wrote this,” I thought. “This is what I wrote.”
Some of the writing, I felt, was a little silly. I winced, a few times. Other times, I marveled. I could hear ambition and desire bulging up through every clause. I had wanted so badly to be great at something.
The book seemed heavy now, heavy as a man’s casket. I thought of my father. The book was him, in a way. It was weird. Clearly, I was doing penance out here, on the road, and why? It was silly, how difficult I’d made things on myself. I was living my best life, and everybody knew it but me.
* * *
I sat in airports in every time zone in North America and watched the faces of the people. Which of them had a dream? Who was living it? Who was almost there, but not quite? It is very difficult to tell who is happy just by looking, unless they were one of those people at the Atlanta airport eating Popeye’s chicken for breakfast. The expressions I saw all around me told stories—hope, longing, a belief that some better future is out there, just ahead, at the next city, the next day. Sometimes, you think you see it, like a large bird in the trees, obscured by the spidery branches of panic and fatigue, there, yes:
A look.
Hope.
Confidence.
Faith.
Peace.
Fire.
You see it everywhere, on the faces of everyone on television, sidewalks, tarmacs, escalators, sports arenas, the faces of humankind striving for greatness—gold medals, research grants, green cards, the big sale, the white whale. Remember what happened to Ahab? I guess that’s the lesson of so many stories. Be careful what you dream.
In October, in another airport in another alien city, I received my first royalty statement, via Debbie. The document was three pages of grids and tables. It looked like the lab results of a cholesterol test, featuring many interesting vocabulary words like:
Subtotal of Deductions
Subrights Earnings
Payment Due
Payee Share
Advances
Unearned
Canada
But how many books had I sold? How many books is enough? Enough to not be embarrassed when you visit your publisher’s office? Enough to be able to purchase a jet ski without regret or shame? Nobody knows.
“Ten thousand,” Debbie said. “That’s a good target.”
Even she sounded a little tentative, like she wasn’t quite sure, either.
HOW SALES WERE
HarperCollins was not going to make me pay this money back, and there was more good news: My lawnmower was yellow! I remembered.
But what color were my children?
And when was my wife’s birthday?
Everywhere I went, everybody asked, “Is your wife with you?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh, I wanted to meet her!” they said.
They wanted to see what she looked like, I suppose, to see if I’d made her up. The book had made her more famous than me.
“We would be friends, I think,” they said of her.
* * *
“You’re a strong woman,” they said to my wife at church, while I was off, somewhere, on the road. “How do you do it?” they said.
And she fed the girls and dressed them and managed their hair while I slouched in a chair in the sky somewhere over America, trying to pay for the house in which they refused to get dressed, and then I’d land, and Oh, God, it’s beautiful, it’s autumn in Savannah, warm and cool and clear as glass, and they’re all four waiting in the front yard, Effbomb on the swing, Beetle on the sidewalk, Stargoat next to Lauren on the steps, now running to the car squealing, “Daddy! Daddy!”
The Uber driver said, “You are a lucky man.”
And I said, “I am.”
The condition of the year was one of absence, of visiting, of being a guest, everywhere, even in my own home. Once, at church, an elder greeted me as a visitor.
“How are sales?” everybody asked.
Nobody asked if I was having fun, or if it was wild, living my dream.
What they asked was, “How are sales?”
“Selling many books?”
“Sales strong?”
“How are they, generally?”
This is one of the questions everybody asked. They wanted to know about numbers. They wanted to measure my success. Which is frustrating, and perfectly illustrative of the contradictions of the American dream, which is that you will want to quantify it, so that you can assess your progress toward it, and this is impossible, for the target will never stop moving. What they are really asking is, Are you a victorious conquistador, or not?
Yes, I would’ve said, had they asked.
Another question everybody asked was, “What’s your next book about?”
“Writing another?”
“Will it be a memoir?”
“A novel?”
This, too, revealed another paradox of the American dream, that the urge to conquer and create and do something new will not let you sit still and enjoy what you have made. I didn’t want to think about what’s next, but people wouldn’t let me not.
“How long did it take to write your book?” everybody asked.
“Nations rose and fell,” I said. “Empires were founded and crumbled.”
Sometimes, they asked real questions, the kind that go deep down.
“You wrote a book about having a father,” one man said, somewhere in Virginia. “Are you a good father?”
And I said, “I am a terrible father. I haven’t seen my children in years.”
And everyone laughed, which is what people do when you tell them the truth.
I was gone every weekend that fall, and came home every Sunday night, and now I saw a look on my wife’s face that I thought I’d never see again: She missed me. What a glorious thing, to see a woman who’s seen you in all your ugliness and wants to kiss you anyway. Just a little one, right there in the yard, while the girls dig in your pockets for candy from the gift bag.
“What did you bring us?” they asked.
“Premium long grain rice,” I said.
I stood with my wife in the kitchen next to the calendar and marked all the days I’d be gone, what I would miss, every weekend in September, October, November, February, March, April, May, stretching out to the edge of eternity, de Soto refusing to stop, moving the hulk of a dying dream to a golden city that simply is not there.
“Remember how hard we worked for this,” I said.
She was tired. I was tired.
At every turn, together, we had done the impossible thing, and climbed onto a new ledge to discover that a dozen impossible things were still required of us both.
It was cool now, fall. The backpack was heavier with sweaters.
“Don’t you need to go to the airport?” Lauren said, jostling me awake at four o’clock in the morning. I’d slide out of bed and into my backpack and float to the airport in the dark. I would not be making my family breakfast today, or taking Lauren a cup of coffee, to say thank you in this ridiculous trifling way, thank you, thank you, for letting me make a dream real, for allowing it, nurturing it alongside me. No, I would be in a truck, in a cab, a Lyft smelling of dead things and mountain berry Glade deodorizer, miles away, preparing to cross borders into unknown lands like the mad conquistadors of old, heading to another airport, looking deep into the Georgia night and wondering where I was going or if I was already there.