Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

  “Long list.”

  “Do you wake up screaming?”

  “No.”

  “So they’re not really nightmares then …”

  “I do wake up with a sense of impending doom, though.”

  “How often?”

  “Every day.”

  “You don’t strike me as particularly doom-laden.”

  “Yes, well, I put on a brave face.”

  She looks at me. I twist my mouth into a facsimile of clown bravado. She giggles again, like a piccolo flute.

  “So let’s tell Innocent that we’re getting remarried.”

  “Then again, let’s not, Meyer.”

  “So what are we going to tell him?”

  “That you lied to me and gate-crashed.”

  “Oh, OK.”

  “He may be in college, but he’s a man now. We need to treat him like one.”

  “Man, schman. I seem to remember that being in college was somewhat like being in preschool. With the added benefit of sex and drugs.”

  Actually, being in college was everything it promised to be. I remember this through a thick gauze of lightly scented nostalgia. Everything brimmed then, like a near-boiling kettle. Steam and rumble. Learning, fucking, licking, toking, drinking, smoking, discovering, experimenting, studying, braying, baying, arguing, wondering, exploding. Just fucking exploding with the joy of having no shackles. For the first time ever. The onetime viewing of an expanding universe, before the sharp intrusion of responsibility.

  “Does he have a girlfriend?”

  “None that I know of. I think that they hunt in packs.”

  “I remember that.” And I did. “So, what should we all do this weekend?”

  “Well, until you gate-crashed, I was going to spend some quality time with my son, so you decide.”

  “OK. We’ll catch up on a couple of games and do some clubs.”

  “Funny.”

  As we turn a gentle bend, a hitchhiker comes into view. It is a woman, with a backpack. She looks young. I turn to Grace.

  “Let’s give her a ride.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “C’mon, Grace, it’s not safe for her to be hitching. We have room.”

  We slow down as we pass her. She looks afraid, but perhaps I am projecting. Grace pulls over onto the shoulder. The hitcher runs up to the car.

  Dread makes a quiet entrance. Who the hell hitches anymore? Once upon a time it was a form of safe and flexible public transport. And then, in the ’80s, a series of widely publicized incidents of mayhem and rape and dismemberment, fodder for horror movies, and it was over.

  The only hitchers left in California are the desperate, reckless, ignorant, or predatory. As I said, I am a student of the odds. Desperate, reckless, ignorant, or predatory. Lots of potential dread buried in those probabilities, Bayes’ theorem not required. What in the world possessed me to make this suggestion? Milk of human kindness? Adventure? As she opens the car door, I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Thank you so much.”

  She is even younger than I thought. She leans in.

  “Where are you going?” Grace asks.

  “Get the fuck out of the car.”

  Huh?

  That fast?

  No preliminaries?

  A tiny smidgeon of dread inflates into three sudden Technicolor dimensions. I am staring at an eighteen-year-old girl holding some set-department standard-issue snub-nosed gun. I notice that she’s pretty, but her eyes are dead. Fuck, I’ve drawn a full house. All four—desperate, reckless, ignorant, and predatory. I am reasonably pleased, though, considering. Being told to get out of the car is a whole lot better than being driven to a dry river bed and executed.

  Except for the fact that Grace has not heard her properly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Grace is now twisted around in the driver’s seat, her smile in freeze-frame as she sees the gun.

  The problem with most crises, particularly real-time crises, is that the only guide we have is what we have read or seen on a screen somewhere. There are no honest reactions anymore. Only poorly executed copies of old movie dialogue. Scenes flash by. Motive. Motive above all. Why is she doing this? I twist around further, so that I am facing her.

  “You don’t want to do this.”

  As the words come out of my mouth it strikes me as the silliest line ever written. Of course she wants to do this. That’s why she is doing it. Surprisingly, she slides into the rear seat and closes the door.

  “Mister, I do want to do this. What do you see? What you see is a child with a gun. Can there be anything more dangerous than a child with a gun? I like to steal money and do drugs. I have no future at all. So get the fuck out of the car before I shoot you between the eyes.”

  Grace starts to open her door.

  “Hang on, Grace, we’re not going anywhere. And what do you see, young lady? You are looking at a techno geek. I am recording you right now; it’s going out on the Internet.”

  Without even a glimmer of hesitation she slams the gun down on my head. I dimly wonder how she avoids crushing her fingers, something I have always wondered in similar movie scenes. It hurts like hell. Grace yelps, bringing her hand up to her mouth.

  And then we are standing on the shoulder, the car fishtailing down the road.

  “Fuck. FUCK. FUCK! I can’t believe that just happened. We could have been killed.”

  This is Grace swearing. This pleases me. I am holding my head, which is throbbing, but not bleeding, at least as far as I can tell. Then I start giggling, because it seems like the appropriate thing to do.

  Grace is appalled. The blood has not returned to her face.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Because I have always dreaded being carjacked; it is one of my recurring dreams. Now it’s history.”

  CHAPTER 21

  VICTIM OF VIOLENT crime. I have become this earnest statistic. I am thrilled, as though I’ve been given some sort of industry award. Avoided serious injury, missed hours of fear, was not humiliated too much, didn’t lose anything of importance, can’t say I feel too violated.

  Grace does not agree. She is trembling, near tears.

  “Meyer, what were you thinking? You could’ve gotten us killed!”

  “I was acting on impulse.”

  “Well, next time act on impulse with somebody else’s life. That’s why we broke up. You were always acting on impulse.”

  “But you used to love that about me, used to tell me that you loved my impulsiveness.”

  “Meyer, we were staring into a barrel, for God’s sake. It’s not the same thing.”

  We are sitting on the shoulder of the highway, awaiting the cops, who I have called on my phone. She will be arrested soon, this is certain. Either in the Honda, or the next time, or the next. Nobody who does something this rash can make it for long. She obviously wasn’t a student of the odds. I try to capture her face, in case I am ever called on to do a lineup, which is unlikely. Oval face, light skin, a little acne-scarred, deep green eyes with dark lashes, ski-jump nose, pretty dimples, slight cleft chin. Short straight dark brown hair, cut short, dirty.

  Even while I am trying to recall her face, I realize that I am making half of this up. If memory is famously fickle, then visual memory is particularly deceitful. I sometimes cannot remember the faces of people I have spent hours talking to. I briefly wonder how many people have been erroneously admitted into our justice system based on somebody’s traumatized and untrustworthy recall.

  The world is full of people like her. OK, maybe not full, but omnipresent. The overflows and rejects and remainders who live among us. Whose lives have cruel and sad turns, either self-inflicted or by random careen, lives so offtrack and outside the normal protections of common sense and prudence that they eventually power headlong into the stern gaze of protective statute and steel bars. How did this young woman arrive at such a juncture? At a point where murder was contemplated, at least with
some level of intent. Whose victims were to be strangers, Good Samaritans even, mere barriers to the temporary freedom of a temporary vehicle.

  It gets worse, though, moving out of the realm of the interesting near miss. The cops arrive. We are questioned. Dockets are opened. We are taken to San Francisco. Dropped off at Hertz to rent a car.

  Within an hour, we get a call. The car was spotted, a chase ensued, the car is a wreck. Our bags are caught in bureaucracy, but they will be returned at some point. And the driver, I ask. Is she behind bars? Will we have to testify?

  There is a moment’s silence on the line.

  She is dead. Killed instantly.

  I find it difficult to formulate an appropriate emotional response. A human being whom I know has died. Suddenly and violently. I am a party to this, perhaps even a cause. Certainly, if one works the chain theory, I was an important link. If I had, for instance, simply acceded, stepped out the car when Grace first tried to, there would have been the matter of a different space-time continuum. Everything would have been delayed by some thirty seconds, the time it took me to resist and the time it took her to react with the pistol. And those thirty seconds were likely, I suspect, to have changed her course of history. Whatever caused her to lose control of the car may not have happened and the ensuing call would simply have been for us to come and collect the undamaged car.

  These causal chain arguments, retrospective imaginings, and forward engineering are the root of infinite strands of anxiety. Chains of events are long and complex and a what-if analysis of this and anything else will ruin my sex life forever.

  I shake my head and resolve to depersonalize this. Her death was regrettable, I decide, using the icy phrase dredged from stone-faced military spokespersons.

  Grace is not so sanguine. She collapses in tears. She is unable to articulate her grief. We sit. I have my arm around her shoulders in the saturated yellow of the Hertz rental agency and I wait for her to stop sobbing.

  “She was just a girl, Meyer.”

  “Yes.”

  I am going to tread carefully here. This is not a time to enter into philosophical debates about either causality or divine justice, which is another thought that briefly pops into my head before being contemptuously banished.

  “She didn’t deserve to die.”

  “Yes.”

  “Especially in my car.”

  “Yes.”

  “She probably has parents, siblings, maybe even children.”

  “Yes.”

  Her sobs are subsiding now.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  Yes. No. I try to wriggle out of talking about this.

  “I am still in a state of shock.”

  “You’re trying to wriggle out of talking about this.”

  Fuck’s sake. She’s like a witch.

  “No, I’m not. Really.”

  “Then tell me how you feel about it.”

  I know I am under scrutiny here. A wrong answer and it’s back to the distant ex-husband for me.

  “It’s awful, Grace.”

  This is clearly not going to cut it.

  “Meaning what?”

  “She seemed lost, even though she smashed a pistol over my head.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  Ah. I am on the right track.

  I make a few more conciliatory comments that I don’t really mean, because now that the initial moment is past, I solidify my position. This was not my fault. It may be true that she didn’t deserve to die—at least not in this way—but I must hold my moral high ground here. I even risked life and limb to give her a chance to back out of the transaction.

  But Grace stands elsewhere—behind a gender curtain that I will never fully understand. There is a slight stab of guilt as I commit the small deceit of pretending to feel more than I do.

  So be it.

  We decide to have coffee before driving on to Berkeley. Fisherman’s Wharf beckons, notwithstanding its hoarse tourist barking that does little to damage its unashamedly picture-postcard aspect. We find a place at a coffee bar hanging over the harbor and feast on the bay, Alcatraz, the majestically engineered and history-colored bridge, the headlands, Sausalito, Oakland. We are silent for a while, allowing the spectacle to settle into perfection.

  Grace is quiet, the trauma of the hijacking affecting her in a way that seems to have eluded me. We react differently to trauma, I suppose. Perhaps it’s because I expect it, every moment of every day. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t.

  Farzad is right. The fucking world is collapsing, caught in multiple traumas of every stripe. Capitalism’s banner boys, from the US to the civilized countries of old Europe, stagger around drunk and teeter on collapse, while leaders offer platitudes and promises and economists and academics flail. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on. We have statistics pouring out—unemployment, debt, growth, housing starts, markets—looking a lot like those failed states on far-flung continents upon which we have grown used to pouring smug and silent scorn. Economists snipe at each other over failed models and faulty algorithms. Banks twiddle their risk policies, regulators fret about capital requirements and other arcane ratios. But for the rest of us proximity to the euphemistically titled “economic collapse” looms, sending millions into the purgatory of reduced circumstances—unemployment, underemployment, constrained expectations. And at the center of it is the white American male breadwinner and master of his domain, his seat at the table no longer reserved, trying to hold on to any shred of dignity. I am among them, staggering around, center of gravity lost, buffeted by all matters uncertain, which are many and varied.

  Grace’s face looks haunted. I take her hand, apprehensively. She does not pull it away. Its warmth and softness stir me beyond my expectations.

  “You OK?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I am sorry. I hope it doesn’t ruin the weekend.”

  “I’ll be OK.”

  She smiles gamely. Her hand is still in mine.

  “So.”

  “So.”

  “You glad I came?”

  “Besides the fact that we got hijacked and someone got killed?”

  “Let’s ignore that for the purpose of the question.”

  She removes her hand.

  “When are you going to settle down, Meyer?”

  “In what way? I like being unsettled.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know something about you, Meyer. Remember?”

  “People change.”

  “Not in my experience.”

  I am at a tipping point here. Grace is not going to be interested in the Meyer she remembers. She needs a new one.

  “I have changed. In some ways. In the important ways.”

  “Go ahead. Make my day.”

  “I don’t want to be a famous musician anymore.”

  “That’s not internal change. Lady Luck didn’t smile. It was not to be. It took no courage for you to reach that decision. You just had to face facts.”

  Shit.

  “Yeah, but I submitted gracefully. With dignity. Continued to play. No bitterness.”

  “OK, I’ll give you a half-point. What else?”

  “I am not promiscuous.”

  “Define your terms.”

  “Uh, what do you mean?”

  “Do you still look at women with intent?”

  Shit again.

  “I suppose, but it is appreciation rather than leering.”

  “But you don’t act on it.”

  “No, not when I’m in a relationship.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have changed, like I say.”

  She takes a long sip of her coffee. Eyes stare at me hard. There is a small glint of affection.

  “Maybe you’re too old to get someone to sleep with you. Maybe your confidence is gone. Maybe you can’t get it up anymore.”

  I feel my male pride squawk in protest.

  “Wel
l, I’ve got news for you. …”

  “Yeah, yeah, Meyer, I know—you’re still a stud.”

  And then, suddenly, she is kissing me. Her mouth is still partially full of coffee, which decants into mine, while her warm tongue darts in behind, and then retreats. She pulls away. Her eyes are locked on mine. A small flush of red creeps up her neck, a state of fluster I remember well.

  “Forget that I did that, Meyer. It means nothing.”

  It means plenty.

  CHAPTER 22

  THERE ARE SOME things I understand. Like what kind of altered chord will enhance the emotional underpin of a musical phrase. Like when the flattened 5th or minor 3rd is being overused in a blues solo. Like when I have just played something awful, or good. Like the inner workings of a computer. I mean the deep inner workings. What the microprocessor does, the function of registers, how a transistor works, how a compiler works, how a device driver is written, transport protocols, radio transmission, Shannon limits, Moore’s law, Metcalfe’s law.

  But there is much more that I don’t understand. In fact, if you compare the volume of things I know about with things that I don’t, I understand almost nothing. Bill Bryson had this problem. So he wrote down all the things he didn’t know about and wanted to know about, and then went on an über-search to find out, and then wrote a book about the things he now knows about. This is breathtakingly impressive and well beyond the outer reaches of my disciplines and capabilities. I do not want to meet Bill Bryson. He intimidates me. Even though, when you read his books, you immediately want to be his best friend.

  Most of the things I don’t know about do not bother me much. It is ignorance well chosen. The absence of these large wedges of knowledge has little effect on me. As long as someone knows about particle physics, or how to pick a lock, or how to tell a person’s age from an old skeleton, I can potter about in my little corral of knowledge in peace, safe in the certainty that out there, somewhere, someone knows how to make pesto from pine nuts and basil.

  Which leaves the things that I want to know about and don’t. This should be a manageably small pile, but it isn’t. The pile itself is nebulous and shape-shifts like some imagined and evil alien creature. However, like all mushy things there is some consistency.