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For Janet, my love
Yes, friends, these clouds pulled along on invisible ropes
Are, as you have guessed, merely stage machinery,
And the funny thing is it knows we know
About it and still wants us to go on believing
In what it so unskillfully imitates, and wants
To be loved not for that but for itself.
—John Ashbery
“The Wrong Kind of Insurance”
Sincerely I live. Who am I? Well, that’s a bit much.
—Clarice Lispector
Near to the Wild Heart
How could one advance on the horizon, if it was already present under the wheels?
—Robert Smithson
“Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan”
ONE
Later, in the glove box, the police found a folder of notes. It said:
Notes for the police:
(Or anybody else who finds this and wants to read it)
My name is Troy Alan Falconer. These are the things I love most: I love checking into a motel room on a hot afternoon, when the cool air inside smells of freon and anonymity. (They always leave the A/C running for you.) I love checking out at dawn, my hair combed wet to meet the world. I love hard-shell luggage and Swiss-made watches. I love black Roper Boots and white dress shirts with pearl snaps, starched so the placket stands up like pasteboard. I love full-size automatic sedans with electric windows and bench seats, upholstered in breathable fabric, not vinyl. I love driving cars like this down empty highways in the middle of the night, listening to the music of sincere-sounding country singers like Wynn Stewart and Jim Reeves.
I love these things for their own sake. But I can enjoy them only when they possess a certain additional quality, a quality that purifies the others—the quality of belonging rightfully and legally to someone other than myself.
If you’re lucky in this kind of life, a single motel room can offer up everything you need. Inside the room is a suitcase. Inside the suitcase are the traveling possessions of a man more or less your size, a nonsmoker with passable taste in clothes and aftershave. Inside his billfold—lying right on the bedspread; salesmen like to take a swim before supper—is enough cash to keep you out on the road for two or three weeks. And on the nightstand in the cut-glass ashtray are the keys to his car, parked on the diagonal just outside the door, the windshield making a convex portrait of the afternoon sky.
For me, the instant when I settle down behind the wheel of another man’s automobile is the most satisfying part. While the feeling lasts, the earth is full of promise. It’s more like getting out of something than into it—like slipping my skin, breaking clean from all the things I need to leave behind (among them the last car in which I’ve had this same feeling). I check the mirrors, ease the key into the ignition, and idle quietly out onto the road.
The first car I stole solely for my own sake was in Lubbock in the fall of 1970. A brand-new Ford Torino hardtop with hideaway headlights, it belonged to an Air Force second lieutenant who kept a change of civilian clothes on an aluminum tension rod over the backseat, and in the armrest rack a row of neatly maintained eight-track tapes, including a few by the aforementioned singers.
I had never come across a car equipped with an eight-track before. There were only a few good songs to choose from, but I knew I was finally going to get to do the choosing, not some disembodied disc jockey out there in the ether. When I heard the sound of the music coming from the speakers under my command I was so happy I almost forgot to doubt the feeling.
This was past midnight—those empty hours when the highway patrol has nothing better to do than radio in tag numbers—but I cranked up the volume and rolled down the windows and drove straight through to Plainview before I pulled over to take care of the plates.
I’d like you to believe that I started out with some kind of justification, a reason better than anger and want. But that was mostly it—same old story. It wasn’t until later that it changed from a profession into a way of life, a calling that felt almost religious if I’d been inclined that way.
If I had, I would have been its reverend, preaching my message of freedom through loss from my pulpit behind the dashboard. But I’d have been delivering the sermons to a congregation of one, a nondescript man whose freshly shaved face could be seen sticking up into the rearview mirror from the driver’s side. And believe me, he’s heard it all before.
*
Troy drove back into town on a Friday night in November of 1972 during the final week of the high school football season, when an away game had all but emptied the small grid of graveled streets. He had planned it that way, consulting the schedule in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. People in small places don’t forget their own, particularly the disappointments, and Troy didn’t want to be recognized by anybody in town except his brother, who would be where he always was, at home, findable by the light from the television, watching Gunsmoke or a fight if he could tune one in.
New Cona wasn’t yet a century old. It was one of the farming towns that took root at great intervals on the cheap land formed by the final closing pockets of the American frontier. For those who arrived later, born there, it was never easy to understand why anyone had settled in this particular place in a part of the country that maps had once called the Great American Desert, a place whose previous inhabitants had used it mostly as a hunting ground and a near-waterless pass-through in which to strand their enemies.
The town sat halfway down the western edge of a caliche plain formed by the earth that flowed down to the Gulf of Mexico as the Rockies pushed up. The mesa left in the wake was hard and slab-flat, a hundred and fifty miles across, devoid of trees and all but the hardiest brush, covered with low grasses that fed every living creature except coyotes and wolves, which ate the creatures that ate the grass. The Spanish called that part of what would later become Texas the Llano Estacado, the staked plain, maybe because the breaks at its boundaries looked like palisades or because horses’ leads, with nothing to tie them to, had to be staked to the ground itself. But the name could have meant something else, orphaned in translation like so many others left over from the Spaniards and the Mexicans.
A few trees could be seen now, in town and clustered in the distance near farmhouses, looking conspicuous, like uninvited guests. Other things rose from the flatness—radio towers, water towers, telephone poles, torqued cedar fence posts in endless rows alongside the roads—but in most visible ways the land had changed little as a result of civilization, and outside town the structures seen from the road all sat low to the ground, obedient to the horizon. The oldest were bleached sere brown, as if the elements were winning a slow war against their intrusion. Looking out past them into the distance, it wasn’t hard to imagine the fear a cavalry soldier must have felt here once as he mounted the mesa in pursuit of some enemy he couldn’t see. But the land no longer seemed actively hostile. It just seemed like one of the places on the earth that had long ago stopped bothering to hide its indifference.
That night a new moon had left the countryside almost invisible. The only way to gain a bearing beyond the headlights was to look for the distant glow of town drawing a silver bead across the windshield, and this far out the lights remained so faint that Troy�
�s eyes picked them up only when he looked away. The line began to brighten and dissipate into discrete points that spread across his field of vision, and as he drove into them, the outline of a water tower materialized above, dimly visible under a crown of red aircraft beacons pulsing into the dark.
Five miles out he passed a cotton gin, which on long stretches of road in many parts of Texas holds out the first sign of human existence, and it was alive this time of year, even this time of night, casting an orange halo of night-work several hundred yards from the road. A newcomer driving past a working gin for the first time in late fall might mistake its emission for an early snow—alongside it for several hundred yards cotton dust blanketed the road and the bar ditch in dirty white, covering the catenaried telephone wires with strands of cotton lint that hung down like icicles.
About a mile out Troy passed a yard of liquid fertilizer tanks whose vapor lights made them look like phosphorescent pillars hovering just above the ground. The road plunged back into darkness until it reached a rare curve that skirted the bins of a defunct grain elevator and crossed a set of switching tracks not in use since before Troy’s birth. Past these tracks the first streetlight cast a silver-green oval onto the asphalt.
As much as he wanted to drive directly through town to see what had happened to it in his absence, he resisted and turned off west of the city limits, taking a service road that cut through a pasture of stubbled buffalo grass and gave over to dirt. Clouds of dust rose into the headlights as the car passed through fence lines and over cattle guards that made the tires thrum with a sound like a kettledrum. The road ended at the back gate of the small county cemetery, where Troy finally stopped and got out of the car and dropped the chain from the gate and knocked the heel of his right boot against the ground to get the blood flowing again after the long drive.
The nights were not yet cool but he could feel the fall in them, the sense that the shadow of the day’s heat no longer lay on the land the way it did on summer nights. The only sound he could hear, from somewhere miles in the distance, was the steady metallic keen of a pumpjack. He decided that as long as he was sneaking into town by way of the cemetery he should probably take a detour through the gravel lanes to pay a visit to his family’s plot—for the sake of decency, but maybe also for some kind of advance absolution for the reason he had come back here.
The cemetery sat atop a small hummock, the only natural upswell in the land for miles, and Troy looked out from it toward the lights of town as if their arrangement might tell him something. The graves marched up the rise in roughly chronological rows. The oldest, from the teens and twenties, sat at the eastern end. As the ground rose to the west the stones grew newer, larger, and shinier, some decorated with small American and Texas flags and faux-pewter vases filled with plastic floral arrangements. The town wasn’t yet old enough for the dead to outnumber the living.
Troy clicked up the headlights and idled along the main path through the cemetery until he came to a gathering of headstones on the southwestern side, edging up against the groundskeeper’s cinder-block shed. He killed the motor and stepped out again, but as soon as the quiet surrounded him he regretted his decision and almost got back into the car. Even as a child he had struggled to understand why people looked for comfort in cemeteries, staring at names on squared-off stones. All he had ever felt in a cemetery was a sense of looking for something in the wrong place, worsened by the simple awkwardness of walking upright through fields of the permanently supine.
But he walked up into the headlights, adding another shadow to the ones glancing off the backs of the gravestones. The light shone on the full given names of his father and his mother, buried side by side though separated in death by so many years. He was too young to remember much about his mother’s funeral, but he remembered what it felt like on the blistering July day when he had arrived here just after his father’s ceremony and hid in his car beneath a ridiculously large cowboy hat and a pair of sunglasses, watching from the road as two county workers mounded the dirt and took down the canvas canopy that had been over the grave, leaving it unprotected against the sun. Out in the fields behind them a tractor was going about its business, raising a cloud of red plow dust against the horizon. Troy remembered it suddenly occurring to him, as he sat there, that if his father had been able to climb up out of the hole and stand on the near side of the opening, he would have had a clear view down the rise and across the wedge of fallow pastureland all the way to the corner of their house, sitting at the northwestern edge of town. The thought of this line of sight brought him a measure of irrational comfort, as if at least one thing would be okay.
In the semidarkness he could make out a half dozen or so gravestones flanking his parents’, those of his father’s father and mother, who had died before he was old enough to remember them; two cousins—one who had never made it out of the delivery room and another whose body had never returned from Korea, so that his steel casket had been buried with an Army-issued Garand and unworn dress blues inside; a great uncle who died young in a combine accident and another who died at one hundred and one and was buried here against his wishes, having wanted his body to be taken back to Texarkana, where there were trees and civilized bodies of water. Troy stood with his hands in the pockets of his suit pants, looking at the grave markers, feeling as if there was something he should do, though he didn’t know what, so he lingered for what felt like a respectful length of time and turned back to the car. As he did a newish-looking grave marker he hadn’t noticed caught his eye, several feet to the other side of his father’s, and he squinted trying to make out what it said. The tablet was small, a brown granite slab sitting plumb with the ground, and he had to draw up to it to make the light play off the surface so he could see it. When he did he read the name of his younger brother—Harlan Edward Falconer—framed inside a little dogwood oval, cut into the stone in sans-serif letters crowded to fit.
Troy stepped closer to the tablet and crouched down on his calves, studying the letters, trying to figure out what kind of mistake he could be making. It had been more than six years since he had seen his brother in the flesh. But he had spoken to him on the phone only a couple of weeks beforehand to tell him he would come back to help him look for his ex-wife, or the woman who was still legally Harlan’s wife but who had walked out on him with all his money that summer after only a few months of marriage.
In that conversation, Troy had omitted at least four pieces of pertinent information—that he knew his brother’s wife, Bettie, and had in fact known her before she married Harlan; that it was his fault she had taken the money; that if he’d had the slightest idea where Bettie or the money was, he would never have called his brother in the first place; and that if he had found her or the money, Harlan would never have known. But he had no clue where Bettie had gone. He didn’t even know if Bettie was her real name, and he hoped Harlan might have some scrap to go by, a general sense of direction, a town. Among all the untruths Troy had told his brother over the years, he tried to think of those about Bettie as ones that Harlan needed to believe almost as much as he needed them to be believed.
Squatted down in front of the gravestone for a few seconds Troy finally managed to understand what he was seeing: a placeholder. The birth year on the stone sat by itself, followed by a dash—that cruel piece of punctuation standing in for a man’s whole life—and on the other side a void of granite awaiting a slightly larger number. The stone was a funeral home special, a layaway installed out here on this sorry flatland excuse for a hill. The deal probably included the mortuary services and casket, Troy thought, maybe even one of the burial suits with the shirtfront and tie sewn into the jacket.
He stood up and took the keys out of his pocket and let out a low whistle into the night. Harlan was a thirty-two-year-old man, in more or less decent health as far as Troy knew.
“You always did like to be ready for things, didn’t you, Harl?” he said.
He got back into the car and dimmed the head
lights and drove through the front gate of the cemetery, following the back road into town.
July 19, 1972
Besides the fact that they both provide short-term habitation, hotels and motels have little in common and there are many reasons why I work only motels. The architecture of hotels is designed specifically to encourage temporary communities to form, in the lobby, in the restaurant, the bar, the ballroom, the conference rooms. The rooms face inward, toward halls that lead unavoidably toward and through these communities, where bellhops and clerks and hotel detectives mark the passage of guests. Motels, by contrast, have rooms that face outward, away from each other toward the parking lot and the road, linked only by open landings and stairs that provide multiple, largely anonymous means of exit. There is no central gathering place; the office is never more than functional, just enough room for a desk and a newspaper machine, a little couch that’s the last place anyone would want to sit, a rack with outdated magazines. The only real gathering place is the pool, which is big enough to provide a discreet distance, and optional anyway. The café is usually an adjoining building, often run by another proprietor, which frees the diner from being identified necessarily as a motel patron.
The best thing about motels is the way they seem to provide the evidence of human hands without their visible presence, a personal touch completely impersonal because whoever does it does it for everybody and so for nobody in particular—the turned-down coverlet; the drinking glasses with their crenellated paper caps; the sanitary band bisecting the bowl; the tri-corner toilet paper fold, a meaningless act of hospitality and yet I admit I’m disappointed if I return to my room in the afternoon and it’s been forgotten.
This morning while I was shaving I noticed the steam building up on the mirror slowly revealing the swirls the cleaning woman had made the day before when she wiped it down. With the hot tap running, the patterns materialized in front of me like vanishing ink becoming visible. I waited until evaporation had cleared the mirror again and with a dry finger I wrote out on the glass, I WAS HERE BUT I’M ALREADY GONE.
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