A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

by John Gregory Brown

  Henry could not have found, had he been asked to do so, the precise words for this quiet, for the absolute peace he felt.

  Henry took the blue truck and drove back to the real estate office—Marge had given him directions—only to catch Rusty Campbell walking out the door. “Mr. Garrett,” he said, shaking Henry’s hand. “Good to see you again, sir. I’ve got a nice A-frame heating up on Long Mountain. Two folks back to back want to see it. Care to take a drive?”

  They drove west, toward the line of mountains.

  “What’s on your mind?” Rusty Campbell asked, lowering his window and pulling a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Henry tried to explain the way he’d felt in Mohit’s study—the magic of Mohit’s poem, the calm it had brought over him. He wanted to know if this seemed like another version of the craziness he’d been through before. “It seems different to me somehow,” Henry said. “It feels more real, if that makes sense. It feels more like being okay than being sick.”

  Rusty Campbell leaned forward and squinted as if he were having trouble seeing. “I know doctors are supposed to believe in science,” he said. “You know, cause and effect, treatment and cures. But I was never convinced that’s all there is to it. And that motel where you’re staying? I had my own kind of healing there. Spirits,” he said, and shook his head, “and spirits—there’s a world of difference, isn’t there, between the two meanings one word can have.”

  “Spirits?” Henry said. “You mean, as in haunted?”

  “I mean that too, I guess, but mostly I just mean liquor.” He looked over at Henry and then back at the road. “I went to the Spotlight to dry out. More to the point, I was deposited there by my wife, who told me she was not letting me in the house again and would get a court order if necessary to keep me out. Well, the help I needed was losing every goddamn thing I ever had.”

  He threw his cigarette out his window. “I was visited by more than a ghost or two, and I figured my choices were being dead or being better. I finally chose better, or better finally chose me, and that happened in a month’s time at the Spotlight.”

  They passed a lumber mill, pine trees heaped on one side of the property like giant matchsticks, neat stacks of two-by-fours on the other.

  “I’m not saying there is or isn’t something special about that place,” Rusty Campbell went on, “but I tried church and I tried the hospital more than a few times without success and the one occasion when it worked was when I found myself waking up every morning in that one dark room at the Spotlight and wanting nothing really but to be a man who was sober enough to stand in front of his two boys again and look them square in the eye and say I was done with that past nonsense and I was ready if they were to start from scratch. I wanted nothing so much in this world as their forgiveness.”

  He looked over at Henry. “Which, by the way, is what I got.”

  “And your wife?” Henry said.

  “Well, you win some and you lose some.” They turned up a steep gravel driveway. “That’s one I lost. Big-time. But this—” He stopped in front of a beautiful house looking out over the valley below. “This one I intend to win.”

  Henry waited outside while Rusty Campbell led one couple and then, fifteen minutes later, another through the house. He sat down on a bench at the top of a clear-cut and tried to figure out what he was seeing down below among all the trees, if he could indeed discern, as he thought he could, Main Street in Marimore and then Route 29 running north and south alongside it. He tried to find the stretch of 29 where the Spotlight stood, but he couldn’t.

  When Rusty Campbell was done and the second couple drove away, he walked over and sat down next to Henry. “Beautiful up here, ain’t it?”

  “It is,” Henry said. “You make a sale?”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “Here’s something I didn’t know: this real estate business takes patience. And patience is something I’ve always had to learn. I started out in the emergency room. A problem presents itself, you tackle it. Broken leg, ruptured appendix, stab wound, psychotic break. It can be rough and it can be scary, but at least you know what needs doing. But that’s not how it worked when I came out here to practice.”

  “Why’d you stop working in the ER?” Henry said.

  “Well, the hospital administrators decided—fairly enough, by the way—that they didn’t want me working for them. That was one of the things my drinking cost me. Anyway, when you’re a country doc, you’ve got folks’ whole family history and all their good and bad affairs and money troubles and other worries to consider. Any one of those things might be the reason their head has been hurting or their leg has been twitching. Or it might be much worse, something that’s going to get them in the end, but nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it isn’t. The biggest lesson I learned was to just sit there with folks and wait them out. You wait long enough, they tell you what you need to know. Same in real estate. You just wait and it all becomes clear. But you’ve got to be willing to wait. If you don’t wait, I’ve learned, you scare folks away.”

  Rusty Campbell pulled a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lit it. He turned and looked back down the mountain, at the winding road and the gravel drive that had brought them up here to this house. Henry wondered if he was expecting someone else to come see the property. “Is that what you’re doing now?” Henry said. “Waiting me out?”

  “I’m resting is all,” Rusty Campbell said. He coughed. “Anyway, I thought you said you were better.”

  “I feel better. I do,” Henry said.

  “That’s something, then.” He took another drag on his cigarette and then held it out and squinted at it, as if he were surprised to find it there. “But you want something more?”

  Henry sighed. He noticed a deer and then another skitter in the woods. “Don’t we always?”

  “Yes, I guess we do,” Rusty Campbell said. “I guess we do.”

  Rusty Campbell bent forward and coughed again, and Henry wondered if he might be truly sick. He thought again about The Awakening. Edna hadn’t been sick the same way, but she also hadn’t been well. She’d been depressed and miserable and one day she just swam out to sea and that was that. What if, though, there’d been someone to give her a pill?

  There wouldn’t have been a novel then, would there? There wouldn’t have been a story to tell. She’d have felt a little better, gone off for a swim, and then what? Would she just have returned to her life? It seemed impossible somehow. She couldn’t have just gotten better.

  Then it occurred to him: What about his father? Or his mother? How different would things have been?

  Rusty Campbell seemed like he might be asleep; his eyes were closed, his chin resting on his chest. But he was just waiting, Henry knew. He was waiting to see where Henry’s thoughts took him. Finally Rusty opened his eyes.

  “I need to take something,” Henry said. “Something, you know, to keep me sane. That’s what my sister told me. I think she’s right.”

  “That could help.” Rusty Campbell nodded. “Given all you’ve said, I think it will. But even with all the stuff there is these days to take, it’s not enough on its own. There’s usually more to the story than that. There’s still things to sort out. You understand?”

  “I do,” Henry said. “Yes, I do.”

  After they drove back to the real estate office, Rusty Campbell gave Henry some sample packs of something. “Prozac,” he told Henry. “Pretty basic stuff. See what you think. If anything strange happens, call me. Don’t expect to feel different right away. You won’t. And don’t expect any miracles.”

  “I won’t,” Henry said. “Thank you.”

  Rusty Campbell touched Henry’s shoulder as he turned to go. “You know,” he said, “my father worked with Marion Hughes’s father for the railroad. It was Norfolk and Western then. My father was the station agent. His father was a fireman on one of the old coal engines. They both worked hard, but a fireman was as tough a job as there was. Dangerous as hell and a
bout twice as hot. Marion and I played around outside the station sometimes when we were kids. I wasn’t there the day an engine caught fire, but I soon learned his father was the one who’d died. I never saw him again until he was grown and his wife got diabetes and needed dialysis. She faced losing some fingers and then one leg and then another. That was a tough thing, telling them such news, but it was made a whole lot tougher just knowing what all those years had done to Marion Hughes, all those years since he’d just been a child who’d lost his father.”

  Henry nodded, and Rusty Campbell shook his hand. “You might take that into account,” he said. “It’s not the same, I know, but you went through a similar loss. Take it easy on yourself.”

  “I will,” Henry said. “I’ll try to.”

  In his room back at the Spotlight, Henry took out the sample packs that Rusty Campbell had given him and left them unopened on the vanity. He’d start taking them in the morning. He couldn’t stop wondering, though, what it would mean, how he might be changing his own story. What if the path he was heading down was predetermined, the place where he was supposed to go? Wasn’t it a good thing, though, to try to change it? Hadn’t he done enough harm? Even so, he was worried there was some essential part of himself he’d lose. But looking around his room—at the stuff that he hadn’t given to Mrs. Hughes, at the painting of the flying child and the worn purple carpet and the lamp with its paper shade—he couldn’t imagine what it was he could possibly fear losing.

  Fourteen

  IT WAS only a moment, the briefest glimpse, but Henry was absolutely certain of what he’d seen. He could not possibly be mistaken. He had not imagined it or dreamed it or allowed memory and its accompanying ghosts to swirl through or obscure or alter his vision.

  What had happened was this: That night, when he couldn’t sleep, when the clatter had started up again in his head, he’d walked back down to Mohit’s study, took the manuscript from the drawer, untied it, and began reading. The poem was so familiar to him now that he remembered long passages; he could easily conjure up in his head the images of the prince and princess, of the gods and goddesses.

  He thought about what Mohit’s hero had done, what all his years of reading had taught him every hero must do. He thought of Don Quixote, of Ulysses, of Ishmael setting out on impossible excursions that seemed destined to fail but in the end did not, would not, could not.

  All along he’d thought his journey was leaving New Orleans, casting everything aside, escaping his life. What an idiot he’d been, he told Amy. The true journey—the journey that mattered—was to return.

  He’d left Mohit’s study and gone back to the room where he’d stored all the things he’d been given. He’d turned on the TV and watched a CNN report on how difficult rebuilding and recovery would be when residents were finally allowed to return. They’d showed Lakeview and Gentilly, Mid-City and the Garden District and the Marigny. They’d showed Bywater and Tremé and the Ninth Ward and up Esplanade all the way past Claiborne and the cemeteries to City Park. And when they showed Carrollton and then Uptown, he’d watched as the camera moved building to building along Magazine. The reporter was talking, explaining this and that, providing estimated costs—two hundred million here, fifty million there—but Henry had stopped listening when he realized he knew exactly where the camera was going, one block to the next and the next. He had leaned in, stared intently, was ready when the shot finally arrived: Endly’s.

  And there, right there, through one of the cracked, grimy plate-glass windows, clear as day, he could see him, inside, looking directly out: Tomas Otxoa.

  “Who?” Amy said, sitting across from Henry in her kitchen at a small black lacquer table. She’d let him in, though it had already been well past midnight when he’d seen the news report. He’d gotten into the blue truck and made the drive to Lovingston, the truck’s headlights again and again illuminating deer grazing along the side of the highway. He’d pulled into Amy’s driveway as if he were a thief, coasting to a stop, engine switched off. He hadn’t wanted to frighten her, though of course his knocking on the door until he woke her must have done so anyway. He hadn’t thought to wonder if she would be alone until she’d opened the door, let him in. It was nearly three a.m.

  “Right,” Henry said, recognizing that he’d need to explain it all, that of course Amy didn’t know who Tomas Otxoa was or about all the stories he’d told Henry or the fact that one day he had simply disappeared. She wouldn’t know that Henry had searched for him, walked everywhere in the neighborhood for days and days, hunted for him in abandoned buildings and at the wharves along the river. She wouldn’t know what it might mean that Henry had now seen with his own eyes that Tomas, after all this time, was alive and had wound up back at Endly’s, that he had taken refuge in the old grocery store after the storm, maybe even during the storm, and—the most incredible, astounding thing of all—that Henry had seen in that brief camera shot not only that Tomas looked haggard and confused but also that he was holding against his chest a cardboard box, one precisely the size and shape of the cardboard boxes he’d seen Amy use again and again when she received or shipped off completed copyedits or page proofs, a manuscript box that, though he knew he couldn’t be certain—how could he be certain, as impossible and crazy as it seemed?—he nevertheless believed was exactly and undeniably that: a box with a manuscript inside, a manuscript Tomas Otxoa, wherever he’d been, whatever he’d endured, had managed to keep safe during the storm. Maybe it was simply the manuscript of one of his brother’s old novels. Or maybe it was a new one. Maybe he’d found his brother after all, or maybe all this time he’d been in possession of this one final novel and now he’d kept it safe, cradled in his arms, this one copy the only one and thus in danger of winding up, like everything else in the city had wound up, ruined and lost. Henry didn’t know any of this for certain, of course, but he’d seen what he’d seen, and it might well be true; it was as likely to be true as not, wasn’t it?

  He stopped. He let the rush of his words become silence. He looked at Amy.

  Yes, he knew what he sounded like. He knew what she was no doubt thinking. And how could he—there was no way he could—convince her otherwise. Who would believe him, such an absurd coincidence—Mohit’s manuscript here and Tomas’s there, these two unknown works, singular, irreplaceable, finding their way somehow into his life, though, look, look, he had brought Mohit’s poem with him. Here it was—and he pushed it, tied once again with the colored thread, across the table to Amy. At least she could read this, see for herself that this one manuscript, at least, was real, was what he claimed it to be, and maybe she would then be persuaded that he wasn’t crazy or delusional or ill.

  Amy’s eyes were teary, her mouth pinched closed, her shoulders slumping forward. He saw in her expression the devastation, the pain, the damage he’d caused. He saw the exhaustion. Then he watched her run her hand through her hair and erase all of it, make her face go blank. “Okay, Henry. Okay,” she said. “I’ll read it. I need to get some sleep but I’ll read it.”

  She waited.

  “Yes, okay,” he said, defeated. He must seem to her crazy, irresponsible, out of control. Not a person to be believed, not worthy of her forgiveness.

  But he was not wrong; he wasn’t. She would read Mohit’s poem. She would encounter its grace, its great epic grace. She would be swept up in its story of refuge and redemption, of gods and princes, of the young couple longing for a child, bathing in the Ganges beneath the stars.

  And he would find Tomas, save him, see what lay inside the box he held cradled against his chest.

  He had no idea how he was going to manage it, just as he didn’t know how he was going to pay Mrs. Hughes the money he’d promised. Maybe there was still money stuffed in the coffee cans at Endly’s. Maybe the insurance he’d been required to take out on the property would yield more, much more, than he alone needed.

  But he didn’t even have a car to get to New Orleans. And even if he did, how would he gain access
to the city? It was still shut down, every news report repeated; it was still without electricity or running water. Bodies were still being discovered, dehydrated and delirious survivors found in collapsed homes or wandering among the wreckage. There were roadblocks on the interstate and on the causeway and on the bridges that hadn’t been washed away.

  He had to figure out how to get there, how to save Tomas.

  He’d come here to ask Amy for—what? For her car? For her company? For her faith?

  Amy led him back to the front door, quietly shut it behind him even before he’d reached the truck. He drove the winding road out to the highway in the awful darkness, and now the deer grazing on the side of the highway and the possums crouching in the median or slinking along the edge of the woods were all looking up as he passed, their pairs of eyes quick flashes of blinding light, twin matches being struck again and again and again, and he gripped the truck’s steering wheel in his clenched fists and pressed his foot down on the accelerator until he could feel the truck’s shuddering shoot up through his wrists and into his shoulders and, finally, into his chest.

  He slept. And when he woke he realized the stupidity of what he’d done—he’d taken the only copy of The Creator’s Mistress and left it with Amy. She wouldn’t, in her disgust and despair, simply throw it away, would she? Even if she were filled with rage and grief at what he seemed to have become yet again—the delusional idiot who’d left her and moved into an empty grocery store—she cared enough about words and manuscripts and a man’s lifelong devotion to poetry and his loving wife’s faith in this improbably grand and romantic endeavor that she wouldn’t just throw the whole thing away. Would she?