He wondered now what had happened to Lacey Gaudet. She’d gone off to LSU, he knew, but then he’d never seen her again, never come across her name in the Times-Picayune, never heard from someone who knew someone that she’d gotten married or had had a baby or had wound up divorced. How could it happen that people simply disappeared from your life? And her father—was he still alive? Was he still living in that house? Then it occurred to Henry that even if Mr. Gaudet was alive and still living in Bucktown, the house he’d built with his own hands was certainly now gone. Henry closed his eyes and tried to imagine it, tried to envision not just the Gaudet house but every house in the city underwater: his mother’s house, Amy’s. He imagined water rushing street to street, climbing walls, bursting through windows. Oh God. Was it really possible? Even though he was seeing it on the TV, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t really create a convincing picture in his head.
Henry stared at the screen until dawn, until he noticed the line of light at the edge of the room’s heavy curtains, then he turned off the television and stepped outside, out onto the parking lot, the asphalt glistening, the few cars and pickup trucks there shining with dew. Where was he? How had he wound up here? There was no one, not a single person on this earth, who knew where he was, what had become of him.
No, there was this one person, a complete stranger: Latangi. L as in library, a as in love. A as in love? T as in flowering telegraph lines?
Nothing made sense anymore.
Henry looked beyond the motel’s gray walls and flat roof to the mountains, but the air was misty, and the mountains seemed to have disappeared overnight, seemed as though they had simply been erased.
He stepped back into his room, lay down on the bed in his dirty clothes, closed his eyes, and slept.
Two
AS USUAL, his sleep was fitful, littered with the fragments of dreams, each with the same absurd, entirely predictable theme—that he was lost, that the world lay in ruins around him. In each he appeared as a sort of shadowy figure, a phantom or nomad. Or worse: a tourist who had misread his guidebook and had wandered into a neighborhood or across a border where he wasn’t supposed to stray.
One moment he shuffled unnoticed through a bustling, dusty market somewhere in Senegal; in the next he bent above a legless Armenian beggar to hear the plaintive strains of a reeded duduk. At a Shinto shrine in Nara, the ancient Japanese capital—a place he’d actually visited with Amy—he knelt on a carpet of cherry blossoms before a mural depicting the sun goddess’s brother Susano, the god of storms, brandishing his sword above the roiling waves to slay an eight-headed dragon.
Like a portentous National Geographic Channel special, these fragments of dreams were accompanied by an interminable narration, a relentless litany of woes intoned in a weary, measured cadence. The world is irreparably in thrall to violence, the voice declared. Everywhere soldiers flash their rifles and spit curses. Men, women, and children cower in the street. Villages burn, cities collapse, cars explode into blossoms of bright shrapnel and black flames. Somalia. Yemen. Sierra Leone. Iraq. All is chaos, misrule. All is fury and vanity and desire.
How is it, the narrator pondered, that this man who would throw away his life has survived? Why hasn’t he been shot or captured and held for ransom or beheaded? This man who no longer believes in luck, in providence, in blessedness or good fortune? This squanderer? This coward? This louse?
The dreams went on, a turgid and wearying documentary, inexpertly spliced, the narrator’s voice a caricature of Henry’s own, his baritone deepened to a bottomless bass. Henry watched himself shoving his way through teeming streets, past young girls twirling in the last tatters of taffeta dresses, past boys who bared their scrawny chests and flexed their withered arms as though their bodies were made of steel. Henry saw himself crossing deserts and traversing mountains, braving listing buses and smoke-spewing trains. He had no idea where, in these dreams, he was trying to get to, where it was he thought he was going. He was lost. He was always lost. He didn’t need these dreams to tell him that.
And then the girl appeared, as she always did now, and Henry was struck once again by the sheer desolation of his desire. The downy swell of her abdomen, the torturous landscape of still-ripening breasts and thighs. Her delicate hands, the nails jagged, gnawed, unpainted. The melancholy smile, the schoolgirl shrug of her shoulders, the clack of a peppermint, the sweetly indecipherable scent of her skin. The images descended into the obscene, a jumbled litany of erotic enumeration: lithe folds of labia, dark areolae of breasts, ass and calf and snatch—all of it tawdry and overwrought, as if the words had been stolen from some slathering poet: the pouting berry of lips, the jaunty cock of hips, the sinuous stretch and spread and coiling whip of ecstatic release, song of the demonic, protrusion of nipple, juice and sweat, blossom and blossom and ache.
Oh God. And now, for the first time in all of these dreams, the girl had acquired a name: Clarissa Nash.
Clarissa Nash. Henry had no idea where this name had come from, who the girl might be. She was not one of his former high-school students, thank God, at least not one he could remember. And why—and how?—would he remember someone he didn’t remember? He tried to persuade himself that she must be simply a character from a book, but he knew that this too could not be true. She was far too real, far too—absurd as it might sound—detailed. How old was she? Nineteen or twenty, Henry guessed, maybe a bit older. Not a child. At least not that. Even so, he was forty-one. His desire was unyielding, sublime, pathetic, absurd. Whether or not she actually existed seemed, in a way, the least of his concerns. He just wanted her, wanted these dreams, to leave him alone.
The girl, unnamed then, had begun to appear in his dreams three months ago—in May, when Amy had finally given up on him and left New Orleans. She hadn’t cried when she told him she was leaving; she’d been resolute, abrupt, unflinching. He’d asked her to stay, to give him time; he’d explained that he was doing better, that he was figuring things out.
“You’re living in a grocery store, Henry,” she’d told him. “What is it exactly you think you’re figuring out?”
It was true. Nine months earlier he’d moved out. He’d taken everything he owned to the empty grocery store, which he’d bought with his share of the money from his mother’s estate. It was a vast, fluorescent-lit aluminum-and-glass building on Magazine Street a few blocks from their house on Prytania—Amy’s house, actually, a beautifully renovated shotgun he’d simply moved into when they got married. Everything about the grocery store was tired and sad and downtrodden, the front windows smeared with grease and dotted with the taped corners of old advertisements, the aluminum shelves sagging and bent, the red-tiled floors cracked. Fresh and Friendly had been the grocery’s name when it was still operating, though Amy had dubbed it the Stale and Surly. She’d refused to shop there, pointing out that the canned goods were always covered with dust, that the floor was always sticky, that the one shelf reserved for international foods included, as if they were exotic delicacies, anchovies and Vienna sausages. She’d said that Melvin the butcher, in his white shirt and thin black tie and bloody apron, constantly complained about the weather and about foreigners and about children’s grimy fingers on the glass of the meat case.
Amy had nearly killed Henry, of course, when he told her he’d used his mother’s money, his only inheritance, to buy the building.
She’d shaken her head, disgusted. “You’ve fucking lost it, Henry,” she’d said. “This time you’ve really fucking lost it.”
He’d tried to explain it to her, had begged her to understand. Now, though, to be honest, he couldn’t really remember what he’d been thinking or what he’d said to Amy in his defense. He had just felt—he had known—that he couldn’t keep the money from his mother’s estate, that he didn’t want it. And when the store had been put up for sale, he’d bought it. It was crazy. He’d known it was crazy. But it had been necessary. That was one of the words he’d used with Amy. Necessary.
“Ne
cessary?” Amy had said, incredulous, irate, packing her bags for a trip to Central America, to Guatemala and Honduras and Belize. Hunting the Palm’s Heart: A Hundred Recipes, her next book was to be called. She’d told him the names of the different trees: the cohune, the waree, the jipijapa, the pokenoboy. She’d told him that each had a different heart. The names had spun in his head; he’d imagined the spiked leaves, the towering trunks. He hadn’t been able to respond, to think clearly, to explain what he meant.
“You’re going to open a business, Henry?” Amy had said, and he’d known from the way she’d said the word business precisely what she meant—that he was not equipped to run a business, to run anything: a lawn mower, a vacuum, a blender. He’d tried to think of something he could say that he planned to do with the building—open a bookstore, maybe, or perhaps a concert hall or coffee shop.
“You could have a restaurant there,” he’d told her instead. “I bet you could do it.”
“If I’d wanted a restaurant, Henry,” Amy had responded, “don’t you think I’d have mentioned it by now?”
She’d looked at him, fuming, waiting to hear what on fucking God’s green earth he might say next. God’s green earth. That was one of her favorite expressions. He’d said nothing, so Amy had zipped her luggage shut, looked at him again, and sighed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” she’d said, her voice quiet now. “I understand something’s wrong, but I can’t tell you what it is or how to fix it. I wish I could. Believe me, I wish I could. But you’re going to have to do it on your own. You’re going to have to find someone, Henry. I’ve thought about this a lot. Before this. Before now. While I’m gone, you’re going to have to find someone. You hear me? You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” he’d said, “I understand.” And she had just left him there.
No. First she had put her arms around him, told him she loved him, told him that he was the kindest man, the most generous and loving man, she’d ever known. She told him he’d get through this, that she knew he would, but that he needed to figure out how. “You need to,” she’d said, but he hadn’t been sure if that was a plea or a threat. Then she’d left.
He’d stood there in the bedroom, waited, then sat down on the bed. He’d wanted to call out to her, tell her that he had lied, that he did not understand anything, that he was—his mind was—addled. Disordered.
Then he’d heard the door close, heard Amy leaving. He understood what he was losing, what he had lost, but he couldn’t help himself.
Find someone, she had said. He’d known exactly what she meant: Find a doctor, a therapist, a shrink. Talk to him or her. Take whatever pills were prescribed. Get better. Get himself unaddled, unclattered, de-pithed, unbent.
Instead he had simply moved out of their house and into the store. This, too, he had decided, was necessary, was something he needed to do even though he could hear Amy’s voice in his head, even though he knew what she would say, the very words she would use.
Crazy.
Idiot.
Disaster.
Unforgivable.
Too much.
The end.
He’d thought about his father’s disappearance—home and then not home, here and then gone. Now and now and now and finally then. These words took on a flavor in his mouth, a certain metallic bitterness. They acquired colors and shades, even shapes. He saw them in the late-afternoon light spilling through the grimy storefront windows and in the dust his feet kicked up off the red-tiled floor.
So unremarkable had been his father’s departure that he had no memory of the final words that had passed between them, a final glance or touch. Here. Gone. Now. Then.
With Amy still in Central America, unaware of what he’d done, he’d settled in. He slept on a mattress in the nook of the elevated customer-service counter, all of his possessions—his books and records and CDs and fountain pens and photographs, his clothes and his collection of old inlaid wooden boxes, his father’s double bass and beat-up guitars and banjo, a kora from Mali, congas from Cuba, a few of his mother’s strange, garish paintings—all of it spread out across the grocery-store shelves as though he meant to sell them. He didn’t know why he was there, didn’t know what he was doing, what he would tell Amy when she returned. His mind wasn’t right—that was about the only thing he knew. He felt sometimes as though his eyes wouldn’t quite focus, as if his pupils were dilated and taking in too much light. His thoughts wandered like a dog endlessly tracking a phantom scent, like random musical notes on a staff that, when played, produced something that vaguely resembled a melody but was not, was simply noise. When people started peering through the windows and knocking on the glass doors, asking what he wanted for this or that, he let them in, told them to pay whatever they thought was a fair price. It was usually more than he would have thought to ask for.
He figured that, soon enough, everything would be gone and he would be released from his life, but then at night or early in the morning, people began leaving their own stuff, their own unwanted possessions, outside the door: bags of clothes and toys, toaster ovens and boom boxes and ice skates and prom dresses and bow ties and bicycles and picture books and paperback novels and ceramic vases and dog crates and infant car seats and shoe boxes stuffed with photographs and postcards and letters. Henry hauled everything inside and put it all out on the shelves, and before long there were teenagers with spiked hair and young couples holding hands and old women and antiques dealers spending hours rooting through the junk, homeless men coming inside for the coffee he made in one of the half a dozen drip machines—two Mr. Coffees, two Black and Deckers, a Krups, a Braun—that had been left at the store, men who couldn’t manage more than a few words of conversation but liked to pick up his father’s banjo or one of the old guitars and pretend they could play, mumbling the lyrics to songs they hadn’t heard in years, songs that reminded them, Henry guessed, of women they’d known before their lives had fallen apart.
Just like me, Henry had thought, and a song by Paul Revere and the Raiders leaped inside his head: It’s just like me to say to you, Love me do and I’ll be true.
He recommended books to those who came in looking for something to read, not the books he’d taught his high-school kids over the years—The Grapes of Wrath and Leaves of Grass and The Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying—but old paperbacks with yellowed library cards glued to envelopes on the inside covers, books that he hadn’t actually read but that had been left outside, their titles full of a kind of inept promise: The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, Detour to Oblivion, Wild Angel, Gideon’s Mouth, The Bottom of the Garden, Pray for a Brave Heart.
They might be terrible books, Henry thought, but they would all be good names for bands—Wild Angel, Detour to Oblivion, Gideon’s Mouth—and he would use one if only he knew how to play an instrument or sing, if only he weren’t completely talentless and also, by the way, forty-one, as Amy had reminded him, two decades too old for such nonsense.
He played his records and CDs all day, and soon people began to bring in their own, desperate to share with Henry, as if they were talismanic good-luck charms, their all-time favorite songs: Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” and King Crimson’s “I Talk to the Wind” and Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66’s “The Look of Love” and—brought in by one thin, ancient woman, her white hair tied up in a gold scarf, the skin on her arms translucent—Ernestine Anderson singing a Harold Arlen song, “As Long As I Live,” the woman twirling down the aisles as the song played, her eyes tightly closed, her arms out as if she were being led by a partner as graceful as Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. Henry’s head was filled not just with these songs and their lyrics but with thousands and thousands more, an endless encyclopedia of rhymes and puns, verses and refrains and choruses and codas.
Of all the regulars who wandered into the store, Henry’s favorite was an old man named Tomas Otxoa, a squat, bald man with striking blue eyes and a great hooked nose beneath his broad forehead. He seemed to Henry t
o have the kind of face you’d see carved in profile on ancient coins, a face that suggested both absolute confidence and implacable serenity, though Tomas was, Henry knew, a profoundly hopeless drunk. He arrived most afternoons with a large plastic tumbler filled with some concoction—Beefeater’s and tonic, he told Henry, with a thimble’s worth of olive brine—and left an hour or so later, the tumbler empty, one or two of Henry’s jazz albums tucked under his arm, albums he would then return the next day, handing them back and nodding in appreciation.
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Page 3