Edward Adrift

by Craig Lancaster

  I set the Cadillac DTS on cruise control at exactly 65 miles per hour, and I take a swig of water from the bottle in the cup holder beside me. I’ve always heard singers pay tribute to the open road—it seems that you cannot be a singer for long without singing about being on the road, as if that’s required by the international singers’ union or something—and for the first time, I think I understand what they mean. I’m not sure why I waited until I was forty-two years old to do this.

  Michael Stipe, incidentally, is not singing about the open road. He’s singing about a crush with eyeliner through my bitchin’ iPhone, which is plugged into my Cadillac’s speakers. Michael Stipe is pretty inscrutable (I love the word “inscrutable”) sometimes.

  Thirteen-point-seven miles into my trip, Michael Stipe is singing about how everybody hurts—a song that has resonance with me—when I realize that I hurt, or at least my tallywhacker does.

  I have to pee really bad.

  Luckily, I am close to the exit for Laurel, the town directly west of Billings, when the urge to urinate strikes. I pull off the interstate and into the parking lot of a gas station, and I hustle inside, holding my tallywhacker through my pants as I look for the men’s room.

  As I’m standing there, draining my ever-filling bladder, I think of a word I like: “retromingent.” This means “to pee backward.” I am not retromingent; I pee forward. Cows are retromingent, though. I find this curious.

  In the gas station’s store, I buy a pack of sugar-free gum. I don’t like gum very much, but I don’t think it’s right to use the store’s facilities without contributing to its economic well-being. This seems like the right choice.

  Soon I’m back on the interstate and headed west again. Michael Stipe is singing about his harborcoat. I have to say, putting my extensive collection of R.E.M. music on shuffle was a smart move by me. While I know that each song will be R.E.M., I have no idea which exact song is coming up until the first notes are struck. I am enjoying this spontaneity.

  And yet this enjoyment is balanced by a sadness I haven’t been able to shake since September 21, when R.E.M. announced that they were disbanding. I still wish I knew why Michael Stipe and the rest of R.E.M. had to leave me.

  I want to talk about why I’m going only 223 miles on the first day of my trip. Certainly, driving the entire 686.5 miles from my house to Donna and Victor’s would not be impossible to achieve in a single day. If my father were still alive and making this trip with me, I have little doubt that he would say something like, “Teddy, buckle up. We’re going the whole route.” I don’t like to be called Teddy; my name is Edward. But if it meant that I could see my father again and hear his voice, I would be willing to endure it.

  The reason I am going only 223 miles today is it’s hard for me to concentrate on a singular task like driving for much longer than that. This is one of the byproducts of my condition, Asperger’s syndrome with a strong streak of obsessive-compulsive disorder. My mind wanders, and that can become a dangerous situation when one is driving a car, especially alone without anyone to talk to. I’m going to try to drive the remaining 463.5 miles tomorrow. If I make plenty of stops to allow my brain some rest time, I should be able to do that, and once I am at Donna and Victor’s, I will be able to get as much rest as I need to recover from the arduousness (I love the word “arduousness”) of the trip. If I cannot go 463.5 miles tomorrow, I am prepared to spend a second night in a motel. My condition sometimes allows me to do some dumb things, but failing to make contingency plans for a trip like this is not one of them. I have already scouted out the lodging options between Butte, Montana, and Boise, Idaho. I am developmentally disabled. I’m not stupid.

  It’s 140.7 miles from my driveway to Bozeman, Montana, and it took me two hours and thirty-two minutes to cover that distance. That segment of my trip took longer than I anticipated because I had to stop to pee twice.

  The first time was just outside Columbus, Montana, at mile marker 418. The rest area sits atop a high hill that overlooks the Yellowstone River valley. After taking care of my business, which is a euphemism, I walked along the sidewalk and took in the view. On an unseasonably warm December day like this one, with the sky clear and no haze, it was as if I could see forever, which is of course an optical illusion.

  As much as I was tempted to sit down in the grass and look at the scenery for a while, I pushed on. I had many miles to go, and I would not want to disappoint Donna, Victor, and Kyle by being later than necessary.

  Thirty-eight miles on, near the small town of Greycliff, I stopped again. This peeing business is getting a bit ridiculous, although I suspect that I make it worse by drinking so much water. By the time I got to Greycliff, I was on my second bottle, and I hadn’t yet covered a hundred miles. As unlikely as it seems, I may have to invest in a second case of water.

  It’s also possible that I did not maintain a constant 65 miles per hour on the interstate. In Livingston, for instance, 27 miles from Bozeman, the Cadillac DTS was blown aggressively by the wind. And as I came through the mountain pass into Bozeman, I deviated between going faster than 65 miles per hour down hills and slower than 65 on tight turns. The mountain pass between Livingston and Bozeman is a good representation of why I am taking this trip in small chunks. It stresses me out to drive through mountain passes.

  Now I am in Bozeman, at a coffee shop on Main Street because I am hungry. I left the house at 7:51 a.m. having eaten only oatmeal and three handfuls of sunflower seeds (which I have now abandoned because they’re messy and I do not like messes), and it’s now 10:23 and I am a bit lightheaded. That’s not good.

  I order a sugar-free chai tea which I’m eager to try, never having heard of such a thing, and a granola bar that the nice lady at the counter said would be OK for me to have in my condition.

  “I’m diabetic, you know,” I tell her.

  “Well, I didn’t know that, but we can work out something just fine,” she says.

  I appreciated that, both for her willingness to work around my dietary needs and for her pointing out that she had no way of knowing about my condition. It was silly for me to have suggested she did.

  I’m on my second gulp of the chai tea, which is really good and comes in a tall, thin glass that I find visually appealing, when a young man with close-cropped blond hair comes up to me and says, “Oh, you’re a bright boy, aren’t you?”

  I look around. I haven’t heard anyone say “bright boy” since I saw the 1946 movie The Killers, in which William Conrad says it several times in the opening scene.

  “Me?” I ask.

  He points at my sweatshirt. I look down. It reads: University of Montana, 2001 National Champions.

  “Yeah, you,” he says.

  “Well, I am pretty smart sometimes,” I say.

  He pokes me in the chest with his finger, and it hurts.

  “It’s not smart to wear a Griz shirt in Bozeman.”

  I look past the young man to the counter, but the woman who gave me the tea and the granola bar doesn’t seem to notice. He and I are alone in the back of the coffee shop.

  “I don’t care about the University of Montana Grizzlies,” I say. “I’m a Texas Christian University fan.”

  This makes him angrier.

  “So you’re just fucking with people then?”

  “No.”

  “It seems like you are.”

  “Conjecture can be a risky thing,” I say. “It seems that you’re assuming the reason for my wearing this sweatshirt, and as it turns out, you’re incorrect.”

  My father received it from a friend of his, a University of Montana supporter, and I got it from my mother when she was sorting out my father’s clothes to give away after he died. I wore it today because I was thinking of him.

  “You’re a real smart-ass, aren’t you?”

  “No, just smart.”

  What happens next is so abrupt I have no way to prepare for it. The angry young man hits me square in the nose with his fist. Intense pain spreads acr
oss my face, and my eyes begin to water. I almost fall off the chair I’m sitting on, but I catch the edge of the table with my left hand and hold myself up. I taste something tinny in my mouth, and I touch my nose. It’s bleeding.

  “Fuck you,” the young man says, and he turns and heads for the door.

  The woman who was working the counter runs past him the other way to check on me.

  “Are you OK?” she asks.

  “I’m bleeding.”

  I want to cry, and I probably could because my eyes are watering, but I don’t want to do that in front of this woman.

  “Let me grab something,” she says.

  She runs back to the counter and runs a washcloth under the hot water. She then brings it to me.

  “Tilt your head back,” she says.

  I do as she tells me. She gently passes the washcloth over my nose, which still hurts. When she lifts it, I can see that it’s inundated (I love the word “inundated”) with blood.

  “I’ll be right back,” she says.

  As she leaves me again, I call out, “Who was that? Why did he hit me?” The first question is real; the second one is rhetorical. There is no good reason for hitting someone square in the face like that.

  “I don’t know,” she shouts to me across the room. She holds up a hand to a couple waiting at the counter, to tell them she’ll be back in a moment.

  “Here,” she says, handing the clean washcloth to me. “Keep your head back and hold this on your nose.”

  “I didn’t do anything to him,” I say.

  I’ve begun to cry. I can’t help it.

  “I know you didn’t. Do you want me to call the cops?”

  I don’t like the police. I’m not going to get into it with her, but the truth is, the cops were called on me a few times before my condition was brought under control with Dr. Buckley’s help, and it’s a conditioned response that I just don’t like to see them.

  “No,” I tell her.

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “OK. Listen, I have to see what these folks want. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “OK.”

  After she leaves, I stand up, holding the washcloth on my face, and I make my way to the far back of the coffee shop, where the restroom is. I don’t have to pee.

  The single bulb in the restroom casts a dim light. I push my face forward until it’s about an inch from the mirror, and I examine the damage. My nose is inflamed, and I see swelling around the bridge of it. Flecks of dried blood line the edges of my nostrils.

  I touch the swollen parts of my face, and pain shoots to the spots where my fingers have been. I will have to be very careful until things have had a chance to heal.

  All things considered, though, it seems that the damage is minimal, except to my feelings. All I wanted was a snack and a few minutes to relax, and I got a punch in the face.

  I didn’t deserve that. It was wrong of that young man to punch me like that.

  But then I remember that deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.

  It is 83.15 miles from Bozeman to Harrison Drive in Butte, where my hotel room is waiting for me. The route covers some of the wondrous country Montana is known for—river valleys, mountain ranges (I particularly enjoy the Tobacco Root Mountains, which have a great name), and the sky that is so impressive that the state has been given a special name: Big Sky Country. I take all of this in, but aside from a pee break at the Town Pump in Whitehall, I do not stop. I do not take photos with my bitchin’ iPhone. Periodically, I look at my face in the rearview mirror, and I see that the swollen areas around my nose have not receded much and, in fact, have begun to turn a violent shade of purple. This sucks elephant balls. It’s ruining my trip.

  Finally, at 12:37 p.m., I pull into the parking lot of the Best Western Plus Butte Plaza Inn. I retrieve my duffel bag from the trunk and trudge inside to check in.

  “Whoa, buddy, what happened to your face?” the desk clerk says.

  “I got punched.”

  “By who?”

  “By whom, you mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Somebody who didn’t like my sweatshirt.”

  He peers over the top of his glasses at my chest.

  “Huh. Good team.”

  “Are they?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t care.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Well, they are.”

  I start to say something but abandon it. His attention is on his computer screen, and he doesn’t seem interested in talking to me anymore, which is fine. I sigh, and he frowns. Finally, he hands me my keycard. I take it and walk away.

  “We have a continental breakfast starting at six in the morning,” he calls after me.

  After a shower, I lie across the motel room bed in my robe and close my eyes. I keep thinking about the young man who punched me, and I keep wishing I could see Dr. Buckley again, because this is something she and I would have talked about extensively. My trust in her was complete, and that’s something I don’t enjoy with Dr. Bryan Thomsen—which, I suppose, is why I don’t call him and tell him what happened.

  I think back to Tuesday, February 1, the day when Dr. Buckley told me that she would be retiring at the end of April. She said that her husband had already retired from his job as a cardiovascular surgeon at Billings Clinic, which I didn’t realize because, first, Dr. Buckley and I talk mostly about me and not her and, second, my family gets its medical attention at St. Vincent Healthcare. My father was on the board of directors there and was loyal to it. He died there three years, one month, and ten days ago. I haven’t thought about it before, but I hope wherever he is—if he is anywhere at all other than the Terrace Garden Cemetery—he’s happy that he died at St. Vincent Healthcare instead of Billings Clinic. I think that would have mattered to him.

  Dr. Buckley said she and her husband wanted to do some traveling before “we’re too old to get around anymore,” and I told her that was silly, that she looked young and vibrant and ambulatory (I love the word “ambulatory”). She said, “You’re sweet, Edward,” but I wasn’t trying to be. She really does look good, or at least she did on Tuesday, April 26, which was the last time I saw her. It would be conjecture to say what she looks like now. In any case, I have no way of knowing whether her husband is healthy, as I have never met him. Maybe he’s about to die. Maybe Dr. Buckley’s haste is warranted.

  Before Dr. Buckley and I parted ways, we had five joint sessions with Dr. Bryan Thomsen. Dr. Buckley said this would allow me and Dr. Bryan Thomsen to “ease into” a patient-doctor relationship. She said that she was sure we would “hit it off” and that Dr. Bryan Thomsen, being more my age, might even relate to me in a way that she could not. I had my doubts about this, because I never saw any evidence that the age gap between me and Dr. Buckley was an impediment (I love the word “impediment”), but I told her that I would try.

  I’ve been right so far in my suspicions about Dr. Bryan Thomsen. He’s been a poor substitute for Dr. Buckley. Most of the time, that doesn’t bother me, but it sure does right now.

  Unable to sleep because I keep touching the part of my face that hurts, I decide to watch Adam-12 on my phone. I am so far behind. I have not been good about watching this show daily like I used to do with Dragnet. But I’m trying to hang in there. Dr. Buckley and I worked diligently to break my destructive compulsions while properly channeling those that brought balance to my life, like the daily complaint letter I used to write. But in this shitburger of a year, it seems that many of my routines have been shattered. I hope that reestablishing a balance with my show watching will help settle me down. Hope, of course, is fleeting and unpredictable. I’d rather have facts.

  I’m watching the twenty-second episode of the first season, called “Log 152: A Dead Cop Can’t Help Anybody.” I should have watched it two days ago, but I fell asleep, and then the excitement of planning my trip overtook me.

&nb
sp; It has taken me a while to figure out things about Adam-12, and while I still think it is vastly inferior to Dragnet, I’m starting to warm up to it. Neither Officer Pete Malloy nor Officer Jim Reed is as wise and logical as Sergeant Joe Friday, but between the two of them, they make almost the perfect cop. Malloy is older and more crotchety (I love the word “crotchety”), while Reed is a young hotshot. Their respective attributes—wisdom and reserve, youth and strength—serve them well as they tackle crime in the streets of Los Angeles.

  I think I will keep going with this series.

  After eating a grilled chicken dinner at Perkins, I take a walk around the immediate area. It’s a nondescript place close to the interstate. Tomorrow morning, in fact, I’ll have to go west for 6.6 miles farther on Interstate 90 to get to Interstate 15 South, which will carry me into Idaho.

  The sky has gone dark. While the weather is variable, the time of sunset is not. We have not yet reached the winter solstice, when the stretches of daylight will begin growing longer. The sun was down before 5:00 p.m. I pull my coat up to cover my ears. It’s quite cold here—much colder than it is back home in Billings.

  I’m adrift. That’s the feeling I’ve had since setting out today—and, really, for much of this shitburger of a year—and I’ve finally found the word to describe that feeling. My home is 223 miles behind me, and my destination is still 463.5 miles away. I don’t feel comfortable here, my feelings are still badly hurt over getting punched, and I’m nervous about seeing Donna and Victor and Kyle again. That seems strange to me. If you’d asked me on any of the 189 days since they moved whether I’d like to see them, I would have jumped up excitedly and said, “Yes, please, that would be very nice.”