by Lorin Stein
Makes me think of Alan Baron for some reason. Are you still in touch with him? Did he ever publish anything? Always telling me about Tantric yoga and how I should try it. He wanted to show it to me.
So, did he?
You’re kidding.
She was leafing through the pages with her long thumbs.
They’re always talking about Tantric yoga, she said, or telling you about their big dicks. Not you, though. So, how is Pam, incidentally? I couldn’t really tell. Is she happy?
She’s very happy.
That’s nice. And you have a little girl now, how old is she again?
Her name is Chloe. She’s six.
Oh, she’s big. They know a lot at that age, don’t they? They know and they don’t know, she said. She closed the book and put it down. Their bodies are so pure. Does Chloe have a nice body?
You’d kill for it, he said casually.
A perfect little body. I can picture it. Do you give her baths? I bet you do. You’re a model father, the father every little girl ought to have. How will you be when she’s bigger, I wonder? When the boys start coming around.
There’re not going to be a lot of boys coming around.
Oh, for God’s sake. Of course there will. They’ll be coming around just quivering. You know that. She’ll have breasts and that first, soft pubic hair.
You know, Carol, you’re disgusting.
You don’t like to think of it, that’s all. But she’s going to be a woman, you know, a young woman. You remember how you felt about young women at that age. Well, it didn’t all stop with you. It continues, and she’ll be part of it, perfect body and all. How is Pam’s, by the way?
How’s yours?
Can’t you tell?
I wasn’t paying attention.
Do you still have sex? she asked unconcernedly.
There are times.
I don’t. Rarely.
That’s a little hard to believe.
It never measures up, that’s the trouble. It’s never what it should be or used to be. How old are you now? You look a little heavier. Do you exercise? Do you go to the steam room and look down at yourself?
I don’t have the time.
Well, if you had more time. If you were free you’d be able to steam, shower, put on fresh clothes and, let’s see, not too early to go down to, what, the Odeon and have a drink, see if anyone’s there, any girls. You could have the bartender offer them a drink or simply talk to them yourself, ask if they were doing anything for dinner, if they had any plans. As easy as that. You always liked good teeth. You liked slim arms and, how to put it, great tits, not necessarily big—good-sized, that’s all. And long legs. Do you still like to tie their hands? You used to like to, it’s always exciting to find out if they’ll let you do it or not. Tell me, Chris, did you love me?
Love you? He was leaning back in the chair. For the first time she had the impression he might have been drinking a little more than usual these days. Just the look of his face. I thought about you every minute of the day, he said. I loved everything you did. What I liked was that you were absolutely new and everything you said and did was. You were incomparable. With you I felt I had everything in life, everything anyone ever dreamed of. I adored you.
Like no other woman?
There was no one even close. I could have feasted on you forever. You were the intended.
And Pam? You didn’t feast on her?
A little. Pam is something different.
In what way?
Pam doesn’t take all that and offer it to someone else. I don’t come back from a trip unexpectedly and find an unmade bed where you and some guy have been having a lovely time.
It wasn’t that lovely.
That’s too bad.
It was far from lovely.
So, why did you do it, then?
I don’t know. I just had the foolish impulse to try something different. I didn’t know that real happiness lies in having the same thing all the time.
She looked at her hands. He noticed again her long, flexible thumbs.
Isn’t that right? she asked coolly.
Don’t be nasty. Anyway, what do you know about true happiness?
Oh, I’ve had it.
Really?
Yes, she said. With you.
He looked at her. She did not return his look, nor was she smiling.
I’m going to Bangkok, she said, well, Hong Kong first. Have you ever stayed at the Peninsula Hotel?
I’ve never been to Hong Kong.
They say it’s the greatest hotel anywhere, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo.
Well, I wouldn’t know.
You’ve been to hotels. Remember Venice and that little hotel by the theater? The water in the street up to your knees?
I have a lot of work to do, Carol.
Oh, come on.
I have a business.
Then how much is this e.e. cummings? she said. I’ll buy it and you can take a few minutes off.
It’s already sold, he said.
Still has the price in it.
He shrugged a little.
Answer me about Venice, she said.
I remember the hotel. Now let’s say good-bye.
I’m going to Bangkok with a friend.
He felt a phantom skip of the heart, however slight.
Good, he said.
Molly. You’d like her.
Molly.
We’re traveling together. You know Daddy died.
I didn’t know that.
Yes, a year ago. He died. So my worries are over. It’s a nice feeling.
I suppose. I liked your father.
He’d been a man in the oil business, sociable, with certain freely admitted prejudices. He wore expensive suits and had been divorced twice but managed to avoid loneliness.
We’re going to stay in Bangkok for a couple of months, perhaps come back through Europe, Carol said. Molly has a lot of style. She was a dancer. What was Pam, wasn’t she a teacher or something? Well, you love Pam, you’d love Molly. You don’t know her, but you would. She paused. Why don’t you come with us? she said.
Hollis smiled slightly.
Shareable, is she? he said.
You wouldn’t have to share.
It was meant to torment him, he knew.
Leave my family and business, just like that?
Gauguin did it.
I’m a little more responsible than that. Maybe it’s something you would do.
If it were a choice, she said. Between life and …
What?
Life and a kind of pretend life. Don’t act as if you didn’t understand. There’s nobody that understands better than you.
He felt an unwanted resentment. That the hunt be over, he thought. That it be ended. He heard her continue.
Travel. The Orient. The air of a different world. Bathe, drink, read …
You and me.
And Molly. As a gift.
Well, I don’t know. What does she look like?
She’s good-looking, what would you expect? I’ll undress her for you.
I’ll tell you something funny, Hollis said, something I heard. They say that everything in the universe, the planets, all the galaxies, everything—the entire universe—came originally from something the size of a grain of rice that exploded and formed what we have now, the sun, stars, earth, seas, everything there is, including what I felt for you. That morning on Hudson Street, sitting there in the sunlight, feet up, fulfilled and knowing it, talking, in love with one another—I knew I had everything life would ever offer.
You felt that?
Of course. Anyone would. I remember it all, but I can’t feel it now. It’s passed.
That’s sad.
I have something more than that now. I have a wife I love and a kid.
It’s such a cliché, isn’t it? A wife I love.
It’s just the truth.
And you’re looking forward to the years together, the ecstasy.
It’s not e
cstasy.
You’re right.
You can’t have ecstasy daily.
No, but you can have something as good, she said. You can have the anticipation of it.
Good. Go ahead and have it. You and Molly.
I’ll think of you, Chris, in the house we’ll have on the river in Bangkok.
Oh, don’t bother.
I’ll think of you lying in bed at night, bored to death with it all.
Quit it, for God’s sake. Leave it alone. Let me like you a little bit.
I don’t want you to like me. In a half whisper she said, I want you to curse me.
Keep it up.
It’s so sweet, she said. The little family, the lovely books. All right, then. You missed your chance. Bye, bye. Go back and give her a bath, your little girl. While you still can, anyway.
She looked at him a last time from the doorway. He could hear the sound of her heels as she went through the front room. He could hear them go past the display cases and towards the door where they seemed to hesitate, then the door closing.
The room was swimming, he could not hold on to his thoughts. The past, like a sudden tide, had swept back over him, not as it had been but as he could not help remembering it. The best thing was to resume work. He knew what her skin felt like, it was silky. He should not have listened.
On the soft, silent keys he began to write: Jack Kerouac, typed letter signed (“Jack”), 1 page, to his girlfriend, the poet Lois Sorrells, single-spaced, signed in pencil, slight crease from folding. It was not a pretend life.
Issue 166, 2003
Jeffrey Eugenides
on
Denis Johnson’s Car Crash While Hitchhiking
A short story must be, by definition, short. That’s the trouble with short stories. That’s why they’re so difficult to write. How do you keep a narrative brief and still have it function as a story? Compared to writing novels, writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out. What you leave in must imply everything that’s missing.
If you’d like to learn how to do this, you’d be well advised to study Denis Johnson’s blisteringly acute “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” In this story—and indeed, in all of the stories in Johnson’s brilliant collection, Jesus’ Son—Johnson found a way to leave out the maximum in terms of plot, setting, characterization, and authorial explanation while finding a voice that suggested all these things, a voice whose brokenness is the reason behind the narrative deprivation, and therefore a kind of explanation itself.
The first two paragraphs of the story divulge the entirety of its action: “A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping … A Cherokee filled with bourbon … A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student … And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri…” This appears to be a straightforward recounting of events except for that one word: forever. What “killed forever” means isn’t entirely clear. It’s a strange thing to say, as if it were possible for a person to be killed temporarily. Soon, other unusual statements appear. “The travelling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside of it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.”
And then comes the kicker: “I didn’t care.”
We are, at this point, about twenty lines into the story, and the ground has fallen away beneath us. Who is this guy (identified, elsewhere in the collection, only as “Fuckhead”)? What has happened to get him in this altered state? Why is he capable of making vatic utterances about the weather and of registering the sweetness of human voices while not caring about their impending demise? No explanation is given. The story rolls on, rubber-necking its way through the car crash, the individual sentences veering from poetic reverie (“Under Midwestern clouds like great gray brains”) to detached commentary (“The interstate through western Missouri was, in that era, nothing more than a two-way road.”) The description of the accident is frightening in the extreme, and leads to a scene in a hospital, when the wife of the injured man learns of his death: “The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”
It’s impossible for the reader to know how to interpret this. Customary narrative procedure has disappeared and you realize that you’ve entered, or better, been sucked into, Fuckhead’s world. By removing any rational linkage from the story, by refusing to provide any form of accepted behavior on the part of the narrator, Johnson brings the reader to a place where these things are no longer operative, as they are, after all, in an addict’s twisted mind. The story hasn’t told you about an experience so much as made that experience your own. Which is as good a definition of fiction writing as I can think of.
Up to this point, however, as chilling as “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” is, it still isn’t a story. It doesn’t become a story until the last paragraph, where Johnson makes an amazing move. Mirroring the chronological liberties of the opening paragraph, he leaps forward: “Some years later, one time when I was admitted to the Detox at Seattle General Hospital, I took the same tack.” Fuckhead goes on to describe the voices that are speaking to him in the room, and the lush hallucinations that appear before his eyes, as a “beautiful nurse” gives him an injection.
By the end of the story, then, we glimpse the narrator’s eventual descent into drug-fueled insanity, and we get a clue to the reason he’s been able to write about these events with such clarity. The story is a description of “the pity of a person’s life on this earth” as well as a testimonial of redemption, without any sentimentality or even the prospect of permanence. (That “one time when I was admitted to the Detox” suggests that it happened more than once.) The narrator’s recovery, which allows him to relate these events, doesn’t absolve him of his heartlessness during them or bring the dead people back to life. That’s the meaning of “killed forever.” Sobriety and sanity, precious as they are, do not compensate for the tragic senselessness of life. Redemption is glorious, and it isn’t nearly enough. It saves only one person at a time, and the world is full of people.
As if to emphasize this hard truth, the story concludes with a furious last line: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” Fuckhead isn’t Jesus. He’s Jesus’ Son, which is a different thing entirely. He’s a person graced with an intuition of heaven who still lives in hell on earth.
All this Denis Johnson does in a little over a thousand words. By conflating registers of time and tone, he delivers a narrative where the personal brushes up against the eternal, all from a single incident, or accident, on a rainy night.
Denis Johnson
Car Crash While Hitchhiking
A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping … A Cherokee filled with bourbon … A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student …
And a family man from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri …
… I rose up sopping wet from sleeping under the pouring rain, and something less than conscious, thanks to the first three of the people I’ve already named—the salesman and the Indian and the student—all of whom had given me drugs. At the head of the entrance ramp I waited without hope of a ride. What was the point, even, of rolling up my sleeping bag when I was too wet to be let into anybody’s car? I draped it around me like a cape. The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully. The travelling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel sc
raped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside of it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.
I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.
The man and the wife put the little girl up front with them and left the baby in the back with me and my dripping bedroll. “I’m not taking you anywhere very fast,” the man said. “I’ve got my wife and babies here, that’s why.”
You are the ones, I thought. And I piled my sleeping bag against the left-hand door and slept across it, not caring whether I lived or died. The baby slept free on the seat beside me. He was about nine months old.
… But before any of this, that afternoon, the salesman and I had swept down into Kansas City in his luxury car. We’d developed a dangerous cynical camaraderie beginning in Texas, where he’d taken me on. We ate up his bottle of amphetamines, and every so often we pulled off the Interstate and bought another pint of Canadian Club and a sack of ice. His car had cylindrical glass holders attached to either door and a white, leathery interior. He said he’d take me home to stay overnight with his family, but first he wanted to stop and see a woman he knew.
Under Midwestern clouds like great gray brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas City’s rush hour with a sensation of running aground. As soon as we slowed down, all the magic of travelling together burned away. He went on and on about his girlfriend. “I like this girl, I think I love this girl—but I’ve got two kids and a wife, and there’s certain obligations there. And on top of everything else, I love my wife. I’m gifted with love. I love my kids. I love all my relatives.” As he kept on, I felt jilted and sad: “I have a boat, a little sixteen-footer. I have two cars. There’s room in the back yard for a swimming pool.” He found his girlfriend at work. She ran a furniture store, and I lost him there.
The clouds stayed the same until night. Then, in the car, I didn’t see the storm gathering. The driver of the Volkswagen, a college man, the one who stoked my head with all the hashish, let me out beyond the city limits just as it began to rain. Never mind the speed I’d been taking, I was too overcome to stand up. I lay out in the grass off the exit ramp and woke up in the middle of a puddle that had filled up around me.