America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

She didn’t believe in it, what you spent your life on, but I don’t want you thinking that woman on fire had anything to do with you. That woman was empty of who she had been, someone invented a thousand times over in as many mirrors as she could find, and that was something her country allowed her to do.

  We’re just very young, my mother would say, scanning the headlines of the papers she bought religiously, shaking her head. I didn’t understand then who she meant, that she could be talking about the nation as a whole. She had a tendency to see any system as living, a creature that might behave another way if only it could be enlightened to what waited for it. When she’d had too much to drink, my mother could be persuaded to perform the pliés and fouettés that had won ribbons in her childhood. She kept many of her gifts hidden, as women do, worried about what love their talent might keep them from. My mother hated her country, and she was a part of it.

  Wright

  17.

  1988

  Earlier in the bleached-out day a bird had gotten in, and the attempts to remove it were still visible hours later, a handprint on the window, the tented yellow caution sign where in the chase a pitcher of beer had spilled. A busboy had stood on the back booth’s table and held up a broom, waving it like a carnival barker. Also a smell, the collective perspiration of the lunch crowd who had forgotten their fries to watch it play out, and the tiny bit of blood high on the wall of windows, noticeable only if you knew where to look. From the line at the counter of spinning seats and the two-tops that ran down the middle of the room, people had called out imperatives, close the shades, turn out the lights. The staff had nodded like this was helpful, but the diner was twenty-four hours, and the lights were on timers they had not been trained to change. The shades were mostly cosmetic, the floor-to-ceiling windows designed with tinted glass. Its shape was famous to every American, the peaked eaves that had once seemed futuristic, the color of its logo instantly recognizable, a yellow that only meant one thing. The chain’s promise was a basic sameness, mild, uniform.

  “—need is a sheet,” someone had yelled, a voice that sounded like it hadn’t been used in weeks. “Create a wall that di-rects it out of there.”

  So many had offered suggestions, loud with apparent feeling, but the bird had not survived. The table where it had finally fallen was seated now by a traveling family, a mother with wet wipes in her fanny pack, children in souvenir hats purchased at the theme park six hours away. Its body was wrapped in the promotional glossy about the seasonal waffles and deposited in the industrial trash out back. By the encampment of Dumpsters the line cooks smoked, holding their cigarettes like small, powerful tools, arguing about things that could not be proved.

  There was a sign, identical to all others at locations across the country, that said PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED, but he had curved around it and settled at the counter. He was the sort of person other people noticed, particularly here where the only sound was the highway, particularly because he was hard to place. Nothing distinctive about him but the woman’s ring on his finger, no accent in the way he asked for a hamburger medium. Of course, there was his face, there was who he looked like. But it had been long enough that even that was slow to surface in the minds of people who stared at him. Was it a celebrity or just some man you had wanted to love you, some man who had gotten the job you deserved. The idea of a person on the moon felt like a curious outlier, something that happened at the close of that furious decade like an isolated remark made at the end of a wild dream, and so instead of knowing, immediately, who it was he resembled, the people at the diner only behaved with a breath more deference, treating him as something familiar and beloved, nodding at him if he caught their look. Even the waitress, whose life turned on the appearance of a new face, who asked questions about marriage and money before the second cup was approved for refill, somehow felt it right to be quiet around him. Instead of asking what he took in his coffee, she brought out all possible answers, milk, nondairy creamer, nonsugar sweetener, more wooden stir sticks than could be needed.

  The light was the biggest part of the room. It caught on the laminate dessert booklets, gave a forgiving glow to the baby’s breath and carnations dyed antacid pink. Coming from the back was the sound of an argument, Alejandro who had tried to usher the bird through the doors and the cook who had mocked him out back for saying a prayer over its collapsed rib cage. There was the industrial fan from the kitchen and the crushed ice settling in enormous sodas and the highway, less like a series of sounds than a circle that hemmed all others in. Management encouraged staff to keep the television off. This would entice the customer to put his money in the jukebox, to make that meal his own by the songs that would recall it. People chose almost anything over silence. The waitress, who had woken up in the dense blue of four thirty A.M., crossed to the wall-mounted Sony above the bottles of liquor. She took down the remote attached to its side by Velcro and began to assault it, flipping channels for the reminder of options. In this life, the television said, or close to it, there was a terminally ill child, a toothy beauty in purple, who had made a miraculous recovery. There was a high-speed chase in a city that buried its dead aboveground, a woman who had fallen from a parking garage and survived, a millionaire who had lost it all, a lottery winner who had gained it. There was a cat who could sing, a house you could buy with a pool at the edge of the horizon. Her thumbnail on the rubber button moved with the instinct of hunger, orange polish put on yesterday and already chipped, three seconds better than six, each channel a wish made and granted in the same moment.

  It was when he spoke that she really looked at him. “Could you turn it back,” he had said. He had the sort of grainy complexion, freckle on tan, that made it hard to tell how clean he was. His fork he held in a way that was both very feminine and somewhat crude, like the practice was a new one, and he was being careful with it. “Could you turn it back.” He repeated this with a look on his face that was too big for the request. “The—the shuttle,” he said. She snapped the fluorescent yellow gum in her mouth and she pressed the button in the other direction, three times, five.

  . . . niner, the television said. Soon to go subsonic, the television said. No changes to wind or weather. Sixty-five miles from the landing site at Edwards Air Force Base. Thermal protection heat shield. The first mission since the Challenger explosion two years ago, and a real feeling of pride in the audience. We’ve got celebrities in the stands, we’ve got Vincent Kahn. On-screen a gray face, briefly, then the return to the blue.

  Before its shape could be seen it was just an interruption in the sheet of sky, a manic deviation that needed to be corrected. Over and over, the camera lost it and found it again. Cutting through the blue, finally it revealed itself, a shape like an inverted Y, its chase plane beneath it then behind it, loyal as a child. Then it was a thing with wheels and decals on its side, and then it painted shadows on the dust. It prompted applause from hands unseen as it rolled through desert, whiteness of land so complete as to seem like water.

  She was watching it, too, so she couldn’t see his face when he spoke again, but later she remembered his last words. She always remembered walkouts. In her ten years waitressing she’d had something like twelve, and their faces were with her like old boyfriends, asking the same questions in her memory. Could she have seen it coming, their leaving? Was it a decision made in minutes or seconds? Was it anybody they would have let down, or just her? Was there anything she could have done? It upset her more deeply than she cared to admit. The feeling was not just being robbed but something under that, your time and voice and how you used your body, how you offered it to the comfort of someone you didn’t know—that, also, made worthless.

  In this case what was strange, what she told friends over all-syrup margaritas later, was that she’d watched him leave, turned around to see him pass through the first set of double doors and didn’t think to look down at the bill he’d left untouched. He’d been so calm, stopping to use the restroom, knocking the wood of the hostess
stand on the way out, that she hadn’t suspected a thing. He had approached a truck in the lot and removed his keys from his undersized denim jacket and then—what? Thought better?

  “He didn’t get in the car,” she told them, her hand cupped a little as if to catch the missing information. He looked left and right, then crossed the highway, walked into what she knew was a long patch of nothing, three miles of heat uncut by shade that led, eventually, to the border.

  “Anything strange about him?” they asked. “Funny last remark?”

  He looked like somebody, she said, who she didn’t know. It would come to her. In her impression of him she was hushed, trying to communicate how he had spoken, like everything he said was something he had already, and didn’t want to again.

  “That’s all I needed to see,” he had said. “You can turn it off now.”

  18.

  The story about him changed depending who you talked to, ten years later or fifteen, in the Mission or the Castro, whether the day had been bright on the hills or it had hardly bothered to reveal itself, stayed hidden by the gray weather.

  He thought his father was the first man on the moon, a boy of twenty might say, in an oversized lamb’s-wool coat that fell halfway to his bare knees, his face mostly its big green eyes under blue mascara. Such a sad delusion. Can you imagine thinking that while you were dying? Bradley, I think. Twenty-seven.

  You’re thinking of his friend, who got the what do you call it, the moon clock, the space watch.

  What watch? What are you talking about, the space watch? How many have you had, Moon Clock?

  In another version, sugary and miraculous, Vincent Kahn was the happy long-lost father. His son was someone most people claimed to remember and a good few, older, claimed to have a friend who had slept with him.

  At a bad party in the Sunset, in a stucco building that had just gone up—a forty-minute bus ride and for what—somebody with an unfortunate scramble of teeth leaned out over the balcony, holding his cigarette between middle and ring finger. The depth of the park across the way could be felt, the people the city had forgotten sleeping on cardboard in the groves of juniper. The green had a smell, the damp had a color.

  A real beauty, a real slut, who wasn’t. He had a superhero jawline and this turquoise ring.

  And did he ever say—

  It wasn’t a real talking-about-your-dad–type situation, but he had class. Left a note with a little drawing of a whale saying A whale of a time, which Andy kept, which I know because I cleaned out his apartment. What I heard was that he went there, where is it, Missouri, Ohio, where Vincent Kahn lived. And Vincent Kahn took him in, but it had to be very quiet, a national hero with a gay son, can you imagine?

  You’re telling me he’s still there, living some secret life with his long-lost astronaut father? I mean, does this story make you feel good to tell? What are your thoughts on JFK? He’s taken up papier-mâché with Marilyn in Bel-Air, right? Do you subscribe to the National Enquirer or prefer the thrill of buying it at the store?

  Let him tell it, said a boy in a dewy drugstore lawn chair. Relax.

  Believe what you want. Some people think he had it and died there, but I don’t know. I like to think of them cooking breakfast, talking the headlines. And if it went the other way, don’t you think it could be better? That at the end of your life you’re entrusted to somebody who only gets to know you then? There’d be none of the comparisons, when he was healthy he was this, people crying just because of how your skin looked. Your identity would just be your transition. It would not be such an embarrassment, having to die.

  There’s a cheery little thought. Are there lightbulbs inside I could eat?

  It doesn’t not make me happy to think about.

  Who was his mother, then? Who has the son of the first man on the moon and doesn’t cash in on that?

  You know, those guys could have whoever they wanted. I had an aunt who screwed a fighter pilot, they all started as that, the astronauts, test pilot, I can’t remember which, and she said, she got too drunk at Thanksgiving, “That’s a rough mistake I’d make again.” His mother could have been anybody. It doesn’t matter, for the story, who his mother was. History belongs to men, blah, blah, blah.

  In another story, he shows up at Vincent Kahn’s door unannounced, a twink in the wrong place, and Vincent Kahn calls the cops. The police arrest him somehow, on inadequate grounds, because Vincent Kahn is the biggest thing that has ever happened to this town and they’re in his pocket. They humiliate him at the station, they make him cut off his hair with an old pair of office scissors. In almost every story, he has beautiful, famous hair. Kaleidoscopic, someone says. They sprinkle the cuttings over his county jail dinner and make him eat it, or they burn it like incense for the three days he’s there. The smell makes him gag, but every time he gags they blow a high-pitched whistle, so he learns to swallow it. After this, the story doesn’t know where to go, and it stops abruptly. Anecdotes like this, unbelievable cruelty in the hands of power, have become as dependable as syndicated television, and their entertainment value is the same, satisfying if you’re looking for confirmation that the world is stacked in the same way it was a year or five before—in this case, against you, against people who look and talk and feel like you.

  I don’t need to hear this, says a man with a beard as neat as his sweater, pushing his cleared plate to the center of the table. Someone put on a record.

  There’s another version, told less often in the city, and it involves a small town in the redwoods. Guerneville. Before the men from San Francisco started buying up houses there, it was pronounced with a middle e. They decided better without—a stately two syllables sounded more like how the dank place felt—and the locals, over the course of two decades, must have slowly agreed.

  Most often he’s a little older, the person telling this version, than the person listening. Here it’s a host and his visitor, a generation between, all told in the time it takes to drive from the main drag to the gray ocean. Snaking along the river, which drowns an early swimmer every March, letting up on the clutch of the Saab that’s his pride, the driver takes the curves through the ancient trees, so dense that the rule, even at two in the afternoon, is headlights. The river takes its name from the Russians who settled it, who built wooden forts against the ocean and ran a pelt trade. Their rivals were the loggers, always American.

  Anyway, says the host: the boy who believed Vincent Kahn was his father. For years he’d been writing to Vincent Kahn, something he was ashamed of, something even his best friend, who he lived with and knew everything, didn’t know. He was a strange case, no family, very charismatic, maybe something a little off with his mental health. The sort of person who is at every party for months on end, then disappears for just as long.

  Is it always so dark like this? What was his name?

  Just for the next stretch, then everything opens up completely. The way the land changes here.

  The host waves a hand, steering wheel to open window, to indicate his broad feeling for this part of the country. The boy reaches into the buttery leather of the backseat for another sweater.

  A letter comes, one day, from Vincent Kahn himself, neither confirming nor denying. He packs up in a matter of days, telling some lie about how he was driving to New York anyway and a stop in Ohio was basically nothing. The friend was very active—he organized, maybe you heard of it, that die-in at one of the last bathhouses to stay open, that nightmare in SoMa, the exact number of men who’d died in the city, numbered in greasepaint on T-shirts flat in the street. Also a real cook. The kind of person who thinks, Oh, Tuesday: I’ll just prepare duck for eight.

  Around here the road rises, shaking off the old trees, and the river changes into something else, gaining salt and sand. Ahead is blond farmland, tawny cows at home in the serpentinite rocks that cradle it.

  He has promised to call the friend, but nothing. It’s not unlike him—some people are oysters, some people are clams. I’m not this wa
y, I’ve never done anything alone in my life. Three people know not when I have a cold, but when I think I might.

  Beautiful, the boy says. It’s like it totally forgets what it just was.

  Weeks go by, and then this package comes. Barely a letter, something like, I’ll let you know when I’m on my way. Sell this if you need to. I’m sorry. Inside is this watch, enormous and decked out with all kinds of dials. On the strap, sewn to the strap, it says, whatever, NASA. An Omega Speedmaster.

  They crest a high curve, a turn decorated with white feathery plants that grow waving in green reeds from between boulders.

  The friend is furious, a real moralist, very unhappy to be in the possession of stolen property, but keeps this to himself. He does not sell it for rent, he finds some subletter. Their whole friendship has been an Italian wedding, shouting matches, big declarations, a fair amount of pleading. The watch goes in the drawer of his bedside table, a year goes by. A test comes back positive. His was the type, by the way, where he wasn’t sick, wasn’t sick, wasn’t sick, then was sick. Anyway there are all the appointments and tests, no insurance of course, he’s a waiter, he’s twenty-six or twenty-seven. A month or two later he more or less loses his job, drops five plates he’d stacked on his arm for the second time, and to the two friends who come by it’s obvious. Pneumonia, the hospital, let’s go. They’re rooting through his room to find his wallet, he’s delirious in three sweaters, and in the nightstand they find the watch. He’s babbling that it’s from the friend, it’s Vincent Kahn’s, told me to sell it, and they’re brushing him off, trying to get an overnight bag together, but somebody looks at that label and starts to think. He’s French, something of a devil-may-care.

  The windows are up against the wind now, and the driver barely slows to turn. If there wasn’t enough light before, now there’s all of it.

  Long story short, while they’re at the ER, he walks down to a pawnshop, the place on Mission and Duboce with the neon arrow, you’ve seen it.