Downtown Owl

by Chuck Klosterman

  Maybe I don’t need a relationship at all, she thought. Maybe thinking about these conversations was just as good as having them. She could sit in her Honda in the dark and experience whatever kind of life she wanted. Sometimes you think, Hey, maybe there’s something else out there. But there really isn’t. This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn’t matter. You just live.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  8:00 P.M.

  (Horace)

  We all have to make decisions. We don’t know if they’re right or wrong until later. Gordon Kahl made a decision to shoot and kill federal marshals over taxes. Horace would have never made that choice. He knew that. After the murders, Kahl fled across the country alone, leaving a distraught wife and a critically wounded child back in North Dakota. Faced with a similar state of affairs, Horace might have done the same, but he wasn’t sure. In the end, Kahl elected to be burned alive before surrendering. Horace liked to believe he would have done the same thing, but—here again—he could not be positive. We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

  His pickup was running out of fuel.

  The engine was knocking. It was operating on fumes. Every time Horace turned off the motor to conserve the remnants of gasoline, he feared it would be impossible to restart.

  It was dark out. It was very dark out.

  The wind was not decreasing.

  Sometimes the howl would momentarily relax, but then it would gust and explode all over again. Even inside the cab, he could feel the Canadian air biting through the driver’s-side window, dragging the interior temperature lower and lower and lower.

  A candle inside a coffee tin cannot solve your problems.

  If only he knew when this blizzard might subside; a rudimentary weather report would solve so many problems. For the first time in his life, Horace wished that his pickup had a radio. For years, he had viewed the introduction of car radios as a laughable innovation—a needless luxury for people who were too shallow to concentrate on the process of driving. Car radios were for insurance salesmen and con artists and orange-juice drinkers. He refused to install one in anything he drove, and he had actively removed the one that had come standard with this truck, solely on principle.

  What a fool I was, he thought.

  I deserve this.

  My life, my fault.

  So here were his choices, and he had only two: He could stay in the truck and possibly (probably) freeze, or he could try to walk back to his house through the blizzard and either live or (absolutely, irrefutably, undeniably) die in the open country. He was only a quarter mile from his home. Four hundred and forty yards. High school boys could run that distance in under a minute. Plus, he knew where he was. It was a walk he believed he could make blindfolded (and that detail was important, because that’s how it would be). However, he also knew that the biggest error any traveler could commit during a whiteout was to leave the safety of his car. Everybody knew this; it was another one of those things everybody knew. If Horace died in the storm and his corpse was found on the road, all the boys at Harley’s would say, “What the hell was he thinking? Why did he leave his truck? Didn’t he know you’re never supposed to do that?” It would be a humiliating legacy. And he would never be able to live it down, because he would already be dead.

  I should stay put, he thought. Maybe I have more fuel than I think.

  Then again, maybe I don’t. Maybe this pickup truck is my metal casket.

  But—still again—maybe I don’t even need to run the heater. Pioneers lived through blizzards, and all they had were sod houses. Sioux Indians lived in rawhide tents. I’m tough. I’ve lived through worse than this. I’m tough enough to spend one cold night anywhere.

  But—then again—maybe I’m not.

  Maybe I never was.

  After seventy-three years on earth, Horace was amazed by how little he knew about himself.

  We all have to make decisions. They are more arbitrary than most of us will ever admit. Horace picked up the flashlight, turned on the bulb, and exited the vehicle through the passenger-side door. He forced himself to ignore the multitude of invisible ice needles poking against his cheeks. He pointed the lamp in the direction of his home. The light was useless; it allowed him to see a tiny circle of moving whiteness within a blanket of motionless black. He struggled up the ditch and onto the road, and he began walking in (what he believed to be) the direction of his driveway. He had drafted himself.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  8:12 P.M.

  (Mitch)

  It’s hard being wrong. It’s hard being wrong about what you think you can do, and it’s hard being wrong about who you are. People who are wrong during particularly important moments inevitably spend the rest of their lives trying to explain how their wrongness was paradoxically correct, or—at the very least—why their wrongness “felt right at the time,” which is very, very different from being authentically correct.

  We do this because it is impossible to live happily when your life is defined by a mistake.

  Yet this is how it goes. Always.

  We are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is validated by others. We are what we cannot do.

  Mitch could walk no farther.

  He could not feel his feet, or his hands, or his legs, or his face. He didn’t feel cold or warm. There were no more feelings. He was blood and lumber. He couldn’t remember things; he had insane, non-sequitur thoughts about polar bears and Tina McAndrew’s lips and surgeons extracting the lungs from his cadaver. The wind no longer sounded terrifying. It sounded like one of those heavy-metal cassettes Zebra would play in the car. Was this what Zebra meant when he said certain kinds of music sounded “heavy”? Maybe. Maybe this wind was how ZZ Top sounded to Zebra.

  Mitch had regrets. Not as many as Mr. Laidlaw, but enough.

  He should have spent more time with his sister. He should have asked her more questions about her life and her friends. He should have gotten her a better Christmas present, like a telephone or a wristwatch. Now there would be nobody to throw her the football. That had been his responsibility. She was the most naturally gifted wide receiver in North Dakota history, but nobody would ever remind her of that again. Over time, she would forget how incredible she was. He had let her down.

  He should have talked to his parents more. He should have talked to them in general.

  There were so many questions he had never asked himself. If playing football made him so unhappy, why had he cared so much about being good at it? Wasn’t it cosmically unfair that some people were able to love ZZ Top, but he couldn’t even like them? How did he really feel about his friends? How did they really feel about him? Would they cry at his funeral, or would they just sit there and think about themselves? Had he unconsciously planned on living in Owl for the rest of his life?

  It dawned on him that he was going to die a virgin. Did that make his death sadder?

  Well, he thought, at least I’m dying while I still want to live.

  He dropped to his knees. Even though the denim was frozen stiff, he could feel the snow through his pants.

  I could just lie down, he thought.

  Lying down would make me feel better, he thought. Everyone always says that about freezing. Everyone says it’s the easiest way to go. You just fall asleep.

  But Mitch did not do this.

  He did not lie down. He stayed on his knees, and he kept his eyes open. He could not stand up, but he could still remain vertical. He crossed his arms and waited.

  “I will sleep when I’m dead,” he thought. “I will sleep when I’m dead.” And this is what he continued thinking, until it was true.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  8:18 P.M.

  (Julia)

  Here are things y
ou need to do when trapped inside a car during a blizzard:

  1) Stay inside the vehicle.

  2) Remain calm.

  3) Periodically examine your exhaust pipe, making sure that it is not blocked by snow.

  4) Roll down a window (that is not directly facing the wind) one to two inches.

  Here are things Julia did when trapped inside her car during this blizzard:

  1) She stayed inside the vehicle.

  2) She remained calm.

  Carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that derives from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and from volcanic eruptions.

  These are the symptoms of carbon-monoxide poisoning:

  1) headache

  2) depression

  3) nausea

  4) tachycardia (a rapid beating of the heart)

  5) confusion

  6) unconsciousness

  7) death

  This is how Julia rationalized the experience of quietly dying:

  1) “My eyes hurt. The dry air is making me ill. My car needs a humidifier.”

  2) “Sitting alone is so boring. Who would want to live like this? Why did I come here? I guess this is how it goes.”

  3) “Warm Tab tastes crappy. It’s like carbonated hemlock.”

  4) “Am I in love?”

  5) “It’s all so wonky: I live in a town where everybody supposedly knows everyone else, yet I’ve never spoken to half the people who supposedly know everything about me. I see them on the street, but don’t even know their names. How is living in Owl any different from living in Hong Kong or Mexico City or Prague? Is every place essentially identical?”

  6) “I think I will shut my eyes and wait until the morning. I will listen to the radio and the wind and have nice dreams. I am tired. This is not so bad. I needed a break.”

  7)——

  The red plastic phone inside her apartment continued to ring, unanswered.

  FEBRUARY 4, 1984

  8:19 P.M.

  (Horace)

  He had taken five steps down the road when the wind tore the eyeglasses off his face. They helicoptered into the blackness, far gone and irretrievable. He didn’t even notice until it had already happened. Normally, such an event would have thrown Horace into a panic: He was extremely nearsighted, and—more to the point—glasses were expensive and difficult to replace. (He would have to find someone to drive him to the eye doctor in Jamestown, which was always a hassle.) If you are a person who has worn glasses for most of your life, you grow to love them as much as you love your nose or your teeth or your ears; the thought of losing them is petrifying, embarrassing, and omnipresent. But the loss did not bother him tonight. Tonight his eyeglasses were irrelevant. There was nothing to see. This was probably better.

  “Maybe I should run,” he thought. “Maybe if I jog and sprint for three or four minutes, my momentum will take me to the driveway. Besides, running would accelerate my circulation. I’d feel warmer.” This, of course, was insanity. And Horace knew it; he was merely brainstorming with himself. Horace knew that if he started to run, he would undoubtedly veer off course and fall into the ditch. He also might have a heart attack, since he could barely remember the last time he had run anywhere. He chased a stray dog out of his yard during the fall of ’77; that was the last time he had tried to run, and the attempt had not been successful. It was terrible being old. No. He would not run. No. Running would kill him faster than the blizzard. His only hope was to shine the flashlight forward and follow its light, even though the light illuminated nothing. He needed to walk in a straight line and hug the left shoulder of the road. If he did exactly that, he’d eventually hit his mailbox, and then he would be halfway home.

  He placed his odds of survival at one in six.

  The wind was like a jackhammer, except when it gusted; then it became a sledgehammer, driven by God and Dave King-man. The sporadic hammer gales would briefly knock him off balance, intermittently forcing Horace to stop and crouch in order to stay on his feet. His progress was slothlike. The ultrafine snow filled his lungs whenever he inhaled, paralyzing the walls of his nostrils and jolting him awake. It was like drinking one hundred cups of frozen coffee. He had never been more conscious of being conscious. This was a bad sign.

  “Pray,” he told himself. And he did, but not in the way he intended. Somewhere inside his brain, Horace repeated the Hail Mary over and over and over again. But he ignored the words completely, almost as if he were being broadcast over the radio in Italian. It was just rote repetition, which is what memorized prayers are for. This is why we force children to memorize prayers—it’s so they can be effortlessly repeated while the cerebellum deals with more pressing problems.

  I could have lived anywhere, he thought.

  That notion had never occurred to Horace before, or at least not with such overwhelming clarity. It was something he had (of course) always realized, but he had never completely believed it; it was so obviously plausible that it was utterly impossible. He could have lived anywhere. Everything about his life could have been different. He could have moved to Tulsa after high school and worked in the oil fields; he would have married a different woman and had a bunch of children. He’d have a Southern accent and a darker skin tone. He also could have stayed in Owl until he married Alma, but then convinced her to relocate to Minneapolis. She was flexible about that sort of thing. They could have opened a restaurant or a funeral home. He also could have married Alma, stayed in Owl until she died, and then taken the insurance money to Alaska, where twenty-five thousand dollars would have lasted fifteen years. He could have joined the Army during peacetime, even though that always seemed superfluous. But who knows? Maybe he would have become the one general who knew how to win in Vietnam. It would have been so unthinkably easy to become a different person. Even if he just sold the farm and moved into one of those new apartments in Owl—which a lot of people advised him to do after the funeral—everything would be different. He would be watching Fantasy Island right now, lying comfortably beneath a dead woman’s quilt. Why had he refused to consider living any other life?

  But this (of course) wasn’t an authentic question.

  He knew why.

  When Horace hit his mailbox, he thought it was a car. He thought it had hit him. How was such a collision possible? How could he aim a flashlight at a chest-high metal box and still not see that it was there? This blizzard was not merely ferocious; it had now become sarcastic. It mocked him. He found himself hugging the mailbox without shame. It felt like a pillar of dry ice: The aluminum was so cold, it was hot. Horace looked back toward his pickup. Nothing. It could have been parked three hundred miles away. He looked up the road in the opposite direction. More nothing. He looked down at his boots. He couldn’t see them. Maybe they were there. Maybe his feet were inside. Jesus, this was beyond the pale. If he survived, would he even be able to explain what the experience had been like? Would anyone even believe him?

  It did not matter.

  One hundred steps. There were one hundred steps between the box and the porch. Exactly one hundred. There was no way this was a coincidence. If you divided the specific distance of the driveway by the hyper-specific gait of Horace’s thirty-four-and-a-half-inch stride, it unreasonably manifested itself as the most perfect of round, whole numbers. If there was a reason for anything, there must be a reason for that. He looked at the chasm where his house was supposed to be. It was the first time he had ever looked at his house without seeing it. It better be there, he thought. There would be no guides. The gravel driveway was flush with the lawn, so there was no ditch to follow. He would just have to trust himself. And that was not so easy. In fact, it was getting harder every second.

  He released the mailbox from his bear hug and took the opening step. “One,” he said. He took another. “Two.” This was going well. “Three. Four. Five.” As long as he did not miss the house completely, he could absolutely do this. “Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.” He was invincible. His memory
was without flaw. But then the sledgehammer returned, and it struck him on the shoulder blades. Horace went down. He got up as quickly as he could. It struck him again; again he went down. He waited for the ungodly howl to abate. It did not. The noise sustained itself like a machine. Things were different now. The sledgehammer was no longer the wind when it gusted; now it was the wind all the time.

  Somehow, the storm had intensified.

  Horace lay facedown on the ground, shocked that this turn of events had even been possible. It was almost amusing. This was more than bad luck; this was existential scorn. He was forty-four steps from surviving, but he could not stand up. He was going to die in his driveway. He would be a laughingstock. No one would forget about this. Everybody would know.

  He started to crawl.

  At first he felt like an infant, which is how most adults feel when forced to move on all fours. “This is how I came into the world, and this is how I will leave,” he thought. “Seventy-three years and nothing has changed.” His existence was frozen. The air inside his lungs was cold enough to store pork chops. His limbs were probably dead already; he could no longer feel them ache. He would crawl until he couldn’t crawl, and that would be it. He would perish like a baby, helpless and alone. That would be the story of his life.

  And then he hit wood.

  There was a flat wooden board right in front of his face. He could barely see it, but he recognized it immediately.

  His right hand was on the first step of his porch.