“She’s not worth this, man,” Mason shouted. “She told me it was okay.”
“Fuck you!” I shouted back, screaming at the light, the brick wall it became, closing in around me, faster and faster, the ring on my finger choking me, the wall closing in on me, and I felt myself needing to do something I’d regret, needing to break out of it to survive, overwhelming light streaming from the window next to me—
I stopped and stared up into it. Tiny red birds, a dozen western tanagers, fluttered over the name, BAULD BOOKS, chipping off the top of my glass. I’d found my way back to the bookstore from the night before, following the birds. The light shrank back into its source.
This kind of bookstore made no sense in the modern world. Each book looked older than the last, barely qualifying as “used” books, unorganized and piled high on top of each other on both sides of the store, split by a center line. One side was FICTION. The other, NONFICTION.
I could feel my body inside of my skin again, my left hand trembling uncontrollably, my chest and face swollen with pain, my skin bitten with frostbite.
An old shop owner emerged from the back. The only hair he had left clung to either side of his wrinkled scalp, a tiny forest into which the legs of his glasses disappeared. “What can I do you for there, bud?”
“Just looking,” I muttered.
“Well, if you’re looking for anything specific, you’ll probably need my help to find it.” He leaned against the back wall.
“What’s with the birds?”
“It’s from a book,” he said. “One of our favorites—”
“Why don’t you have a filing system? Like every other bookstore?”
“Got one, right here,” he said, and lightly tapped his skull with two fingers.
I held up a book, A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. “This is a memoir. It belongs in the nonfiction section.”
I tossed it across the line and the man laughed. “Yeah, according to him.”
“Well, he’d be the authority.”
“Far as I’m concerned, a man’s history of himself’s usually a hell of a lot more fiction than it is fact.”
“No,” I said.
“Just ’cause someone says it happened—”
I reached for another nonfiction book and waved it at him. “No, because it actually did happen. In his past, that’s what nonfiction is.”
“Eh.” The old man shrugged. “That’s the thing about the past, kid. It’s really just the fiction we all decided is true.”
I turned back to the fiction section.
For five minutes, he watched as I pulled books from random stacks, thumbed through the first page, then tossed them off into a different stack. Even as I assaulted his “filing system,” he kept smiling.
“How do you even keep this place open?” I asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean, business-wise. Do you have a lot of customers? Did I come in at a bad time?”
The man didn’t give me a fight. He chuckled and shook his head. “No, I suppose not.”
“Do you have any books written, I don’t know, in the last ten years?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Then how do you stay open?”
He shrugged and continued to smile. “Life finds a way.”
“There’s a word for meth lab I’ve never heard before.”
He stopped smiling, crossing his arms sternly. “What is it you need, kid?”
“Just looking.” My eyes found a display in the back of the fiction section. There were three paperback novels, their covers bent and faded, but with a colored-pencil wooden shack and gray-purple sky still visible.
“You have identified our prized possession.” The old man walked straight past me and grabbed the first copy of A World Away. He turned it over and over in his hands. “Signed by the author and everything. We got a couple signed copies a few years back, sold ’em, and that’s what’s kept the doors open.”
The words caught me across the jaw. “Signed by . . . Arthur Louis Pullman?”
He rocked the book gently in his arms. “Life finds a way.”
“How did you . . . I mean, how did he sign them? How’d you get them?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
I didn’t say anything, just watched him watch the book. It was strange, how closely people held something my grandfather had let go of so long ago. I’d never seen anyone look at my grandfather that way. The old man handed it to me, and I sat back onto a stack of books directly in the center of the room, straddling the line between fiction and nonfiction, unsure of which side was which and where I belonged.
The old man trembled as he told the story. “He just wandered in here, same as you. Poor bastard. Looked cold as hell, kept writing in some little journal, saying his name over and over again, ‘Arthur, Arthur.’ I ask him, ‘What are you looking for, buddy?’ You know, thinkin’ there’s some old folks’ home I’ll have to track down. But I go to help him and I see in his book, he’s got it written down, A World Away, so I say, ‘Oh, yeah sure, we got a couple of those, let me find ’em.’ And when I grab it, I see the picture on the back, and, and I don’t know, I just knew it. Granted, guy on the back here looks like a kid, kinda like you, actually, but . . . I could just tell. I thought, This is the guy! And he’s got his ID on him; sure enough, Arthur Louis Pullman. All he says the whole time is ‘I gotta get on the train.’ So I say sure, I’ll take him, if he doesn’t mind signing some books on the way. He spent most of the drive just writing in this little journal, not paying much attention to me, but when I gave him the books, sure enough, he signed them.”
I swallowed. The coincidence felt too great. I started to feel sick to my stomach.
“Did you see anything else in the journal?” I asked quietly, my eyes running back and forth across the cover of the book.
He shook his head. “Nothing. He didn’t want me reading it, that’s for sure. Just caught a glimpse.”
The book felt light in my hands, like it might break if I squeezed it too tightly.
“He even wrote a little inscription.” The words choked on the way out of his mouth. “Here I was, mumbling on like an idiot, about the store, about money, about all this bull hickey, and he doesn’t say a goddamn thing, just writes two words into every book. And those two words, that’s all it took. Changed my life.”
The corners of the paperback were hopelessly bent and there were stains on what remained of the front jacket. It had been read so many times that the book fell open, the binding of the book trained to reveal the title page with my grandfather’s signature and two words of his hesitant cursive:
keep going.
Part Six.
McCook.
1.
may 1, the 1970.
i am nothing but a mosaic of the people i’ve met & the things they’ve carried.
the woman across the aisle has a one-way ticket & she is rapidly moving life to life. she’s imagined herself a place called indiana where her three children will be happier & is leading them without hesitation or doubt or fear. their names are not names in the traditional sense, they are affirmations of the love that created them.
treasure.
precious.
beautiful, the youngest, rushing around the car with heaven on her fingers. she does not care that we are older or that we do not look like her or that perhaps we look dangerous. she’s so young that she’s not yet been taught how to not love. she instead runs to touch our faces, filled with the joy & curiosity that is our basic nature. she is a self-fulfilling prophecy,
& i am her beautiful eyes.
the man next to us is unable to stand up, unable to walk, unable to think. he is covered by his own jacket, shivering cold, because he left all of his warmth on the doorstep of a woman who could not return it. he’s imagined himself a place called new york where joanna doesn’t exist, but he’s had to sedate himself with the bottle in
his pocket just to take the first step away from her.
he has to begin every day by asking himself questions,
is it worth it?
should i start over?
& whiskey answers for him, so long as he never leaves it. he says it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, but it’s the only thing that’s ever loved him. he wouldn’t even know where to begin putting it back together,
& i am his broken heart.
the man outside the window stands in a field too big in a world too big for just one man. his horizon looks the same every day, gray-purple in the morning, gray-orange at night, punctured by light green corn, swaying unanimously in the only thing that changes: the wind. his hands are worn from the tools he must use to support the life he never chose, the life he was born to & will die to.
but his hands are not weak. his hands have taken the blisters & turned them into calluses. his hands have grown stronger with pain.
every day, at 7:30 a.m., he watches the train go by, every day waiting for the stop it will never make.
every spring he watches life begin
& every fall he watches it die
& every summer he sweats until he has nothing left
& every winter he worries & he prays
& every day he watches the train, but the train goes too fast, & now he just waits for the end.
but he is not sad. every day he wakes in the morning to watch the train, because he is strong where it matters. he is strong where he holds his entire planet,
& i am his hopeful hands.
i am nothing but a mosaic of the people i’ve met & the things they’ve carried.
—arthur louis pullman
2.
“GOOD MORNING, MOURNING doves! Arise and greet the new day with open arms and—and, well, honestly, don’t get too excited. It’s just Nebraska, and it’s gonna be for a while.
“We’re coming up into McCook, right on time, and with no one jumping aboard to join us, we should be off immediately, onward and upward into the new day.
“If anyone needs me, I’ll be up here McCook-in’ up something clever for the next stop, which is . . . Holdrege. Gonna need all the help I can get on that one.
“That’s all, from your brilliant and loyal conductor.”
3.
THE TRAIN RATTLED and shook me from my half coma. I hadn’t been sleeping, because my eyes were open, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d moved. It had probably been hours. It might have been the entire night.
From a kiosk in the Denver Amtrak station, I’d purchased a topographical map of the United States that spread the country in front of me in soft blues and greens, fading into oranges where the plains gave way to mountains and black-dotting every city serviced by a cross-country Amtrak train. I’d drawn lines connecting all the cities I’d been to so far, measured their distances with the inside of my thumb, and then charted a course forward, circling stops that might make sense. The train was reaching the end of my next circled section, and I’d stared at the map long enough to decide that there was nothing significant to be observed from it. I might have been able to figure it out if I’d had the clue he left in Denver, but that clue, and all the others, were gone.
We were edging farther and farther into the enormous patch of sapphire blue in the center of the map—the Great Plains, as it was affectionately known. I don’t know if people in the Midwest ever appreciated the supreme irony of calling their region “the Great Plains,” like there was something great and significant about their mundanity. I don’t know if people in the Midwest appreciated irony at all. The sign outside the approaching station read MCCOOK, NE, but it could have been ANYWHERE, NE; it was all the same: long, slow-sloping hills of corn underneath the same hopelessly wide sky.
For all the terrible, twisting, irreconcilable confusion, I felt strangely content watching the world pass, arriving east and departing west out of the tiny window in the back of the train where I’d sat. I’d heard a Buddhist monk on a daytime talk show once describe the work he did with death-row inmates, and how they were actually more peaceful than most people he knew who weren’t awaiting their imminent death. “We’re all on death row,” he’d said. “They just have a schedule.” I imagine it felt something like this. When you can see death in front of you; when you have a relationship with your mortality, not as a stranger, but as an acquaintance with an appointment, you can be content in whatever direction you’re taking to get there.
At least I knew that this was the direction my grandfather had gone. At least I knew that I was doing what he wanted me to do. He told me himself to keep going, so I did. I watched the sky outside, hoping a burning planet would go streaking by.
As the train screeched and slowed to its final resting position, I saw a man outside the window, only there long enough to be a single image as we flew by. He was standing alone in a wide field of grass, visible in the low light of morning under patches of slowly melting snow, wearing faded blue jeans, a winter jacket, and an expression that I’d seen a thousand times before: mostly blank, but haunting and hopeful.
His arms were open, his hands pointed toward the track, as if he was looking for me, reaching into the train to find me. Every process in my body froze, my breathing and my blood.
It was my grandfather.
He was alive.
I sat motionless, petrified. By the time I put my face to the glass, he had disappeared into the morning mist.
I sat staring, ripped cushion and Amtrak logo where his body had just been. Where I thought his body had just been.
It was a hallucination. Of course it was a hallucination. He couldn’t have actually been there, in a field in Nebraska.
I shook the image from my head.
But still, from the resting train, the world outside looked like a world I’d seen before. The station was wooden and unimpressive. The horizon behind it was gray-purple, punctured by stalks of light green corn, swaying together in the wind. The breaks between colors blurred and softened, almost like they were drawn in . . . in colored pencil.
I had seen this image before. And the light red text around it.
It was the cover of his book.
This was A World Away.
The mirage became real.
I threw my backpack over my shoulder and tumbled down the stairs, past where the Amtrak attendant was preparing to close the door.
“Hey, buddy!” he shouted, snatching at my backpack as I ran past him. “We’re closing the door! You can’t smoke here!”
“I know!” I was already off the train and onto the platform.
“Well, this ain’t your stop! And next train’s not till tomorrow.”
Without my commanding them, my feet moved west, back up the track.
“Do you at least have someone to pick you up?” he shouted at my back. “There’s nothing here! You’re headed toward a bunch of nothing right now.”
I leapt off the wooden platform and onto the grass, avoiding piles of leftover snow. I was too far away to even hear the door slam.
The mist was thicker than it appeared on the train, but I pushed myself into it, faster and faster, the inner thigh threads of my jeans ripping at each other.
The train began to move, following the track east, our paths in opposite directions, and soon, it was gone.
Still I ran, mist closing around, flying in and out of my chest in breaths that became slower and slower, my legs starting to hesitate. I couldn’t see directions in the mist; had I veered off? I spun, edging my way forward until—
One hundred feet ahead of me, a figure broke the fog. His outline appeared first: arms wide-open toward where the train had just been. He was real.
“Grandpa!” I called, unable to stop myself. The outline of his head turned to me, frozen; a ghost suddenly realizing mortal eyes could see him. I threw my arms out.
But he didn’t move toward me. Instead, he turned his head back over his shoulder and walked in the opposite direction. “Grand
pa, it’s me, Arthur,” I said, the words pouring out with five years’ worth of force. His walk became a run, plowing forward, faster away from me. “Grandpa! What are you doing?! It’s Arth—”
Without warning, he dove off into the field to his left, leaving a few shivering stalks where his brown coat had just been. I didn’t hesitate, launching myself in after him.
As soon as I entered the cornfield, the world shifted dramatically. There was no mist. High leaves blocked most of the morning sun, the only light fighting its way through in tiny rays. It was cooler, and silent. Evidently cornfields felt the wind but didn’t hear it, as none of the whistling could permeate their fortress. The only sound was the occasional chirp of an insect.
I inched forward. Every time I pushed a stalk out of my way, it recoiled, sharp leaves biting at my skin like the edges of paper. My eyes began to sting, and I remembered my father telling me about the pesticides used to treat the corn that rested on its leaves. My face and hands swelled. It was almost unbearable, but still I wandered, deeper and deeper into the maze.
I couldn’t tell if it had been five minutes or thirty. Every direction I looked, I saw nothing, just stalks and leaves and darkness on an infinite loop.
“Arthur, what you’re talking about is a hallucination,” Dr. Sandoval said, sitting atop his high-backed orange chair in a clearing. “When you’re fixated on someone, you project them into the world. Those conversations you’re having, they’re not real.”
“This one was real.” I stopped moving. “I saw him.” Dr. Sandoval shook his head and wrote something on the pad in front of him. “What are you writing?”
“You see people exactly as you remember them. You don’t think it’s strange that they’re always wearing the same clothes? Or that they always say the same things in conversation?”
A Lite Too Bright Page 18