Changing the Subject

by Stephen-Paul Martin

  Finally I saw what looked like a driveway. I turned off and followed it more than a mile, until it stopped in front of a huge stone house, apparently uninhabited. My first impulse was to turn back, but I was getting too sleepy to drive, so I went to the front door and knocked as loud as I could. The door opened on its own. I stepped inside. The darkness felt like a series of transparent curtains, opening finally onto a broad staircase. To my left and right were doorways into large rooms filled with old furniture. I stumbled through the room to my left. The first thing I saw was a grand piano. I sat at the bench and banged on the keys. Instead of music, I heard laughter. Something told me to leave as fast as I could.

  But something else told me to go upstairs. I went upstairs. All the rooms were furnished with the same combination of antique mirrors, dressers, and armchairs, with freshly made four-poster beds. I wanted to sleep. But the beds were so perfectly made, the sheets were so crisp and clean, that I felt I’d better sleep on the floor. In one of the rooms I found a small door, which didn’t open into a closet, but onto a steep narrow staircase. I climbed into what I assumed would be an attic. But it turned out to be a large room with French windows looking out over an expanse of pines toward the moonlit snow of distant mountains. I collapsed into a small unmade bed, warming my freezing body with an old blanket I found stuffed under a battered armchair. I fell asleep in seconds.

  All night I could hear the wind against the windows. At some point I heard a voice. I woke. The words continued. I sat up and quickly scanned the moonlit room. There was no one else there. The voice was clearly mine, but it wasn’t coming out of my mouth. It was on the other side of the room, above the battered armchair, speaking like someone reading to himself, struggling with phrases and sentences that he couldn’t seem to grasp at first, repeating some of them three or four times before moving on, a narrative about someone doing exactly what I’d done several hours before, driving away from a city into the desert, driving away from a café into the mountains, as if the house were haunted by the ghost of my immediate past. I was scared and wanted to get up and leave, but I forced myself to listen. The crescent moon in the window disappeared behind a cloud. Slowly the voice faded into the wind. I drifted back to sleep.

  I woke early the next morning, opened a can of dog food for my dog, then got on the road, driving for hours down mountain roads, the landscape changing gradually from pine forest to desert scrub. Soon I was flooded with sunlight on a straight level road. I stepped on the gas and made good time, arriving for lunch in a town that seemed to be one street of old brick buildings. I found a small café and went inside. The man with the magician’s hat sat at a corner table, eating a double cheeseburger with fries and a Coke. Slow jazz came from someone’s open window. When the waitress appeared with long brown hair and a white sweatshirt, I ordered a chef’s salad, but she brought me a double cheeseburger with fries and a Coke.

  I said: Sorry, this isn’t what I ordered.

  She said: It’s not?

  I said: No. I ordered a chef’s salad.

  She said: That’s not on the menu.

  I said: Can I see the menu again?

  She looked at her pad and said: I wrote your order down right here. You ordered the double cheeseburger platter.

  I said: I’m sure I saw a chef’s salad on the menu. Can I see the menu again?

  She looked puzzled but nodded and smiled and went back into the kitchen. When she didn’t come back right away, hunger got the best of me, and I quickly devoured the best double cheeseburger platter on the planet. She finally returned with another double cheeseburger platter. I got frantically hungry all over again and ate quickly, ecstatically. She soon returned with another double cheeseburger platter. I told myself I was eating too much too quickly. Instead of wolfing down more food, I thought I should try to talk to the magician. But he met my eyes again with silent laughter, and I looked away, back to the food on my plate. I felt frantically hungry. I ate quickly, ecstatically, and when I looked across the room again the magician was gone.

  The waitress came back and said: Can I get you anything else?

  I fought the urge to say no, I guess not, just the check. Instead I said: What’s going on here?

  She stood there with her mouth open, pencil poised above her pad. Finally she said: What do you mean?

  I wasn’t sure what I meant.

  She said: What does what’s going on here mean? You’re in a small café. You ordered something for lunch.

  I wanted to blurt out something about absurdly overpriced condos. I wanted to make her say that she hated swimming pools. I wanted to take the hate in her voice and fill it with vitamins and minerals, grind it up and put it in a can and sell it. But I knew that I hated swimming pools too, and though I told myself that the hate was the problem, I couldn’t get myself to believe that anger and disgust were out of place, especially when I thought of all the happy self-important faces of people using cell phones. Who was I to turn away from someone whose only crime was that she bluntly expressed the contempt we both felt, the contempt we both felt any intelligent person would feel and want to express?

  She tapped her pad with her pencil, cocked her head and said: You’re in a small café. You ordered something for lunch.

  I looked out into the fading light. Again the sun was going down too soon. According to my watch it wasn’t even half past four. I looked at the waitress tapping her pad and cocking her head. I cocked my head and started tapping my finger on the table. I tried to crease my brow so that I looked like I was thinking. I tried to tell myself what I was thinking. It wasn’t easy. As soon as I put my thoughts into words, it felt like I’d replaced my thoughts with words, with sounds and shapes that had no firm connection with anything beyond their own sounds and shapes, defining themselves only in relation to each other.

  I looked back outside. My car’s windows were open. My dog had jumped out and was running down the road. I put a twenty-dollar bill on the table, excused myself and rushed out to my car. I drove as fast as I could but my dog seemed always to be the same distance away, a dot on a long white road, until he disappeared into the deepening twilight. I pulled off the road, got out and shouted my dog’s name as loud as I could, over and over again. There was no response, just the echoes of his name. For the first time since I’d adopted him five years before, I felt alone. But I knew the only thing I could do was keep driving and hope for the best.

  The road was climbing out of the desert into the mountains. The fading light was deceptive, the pavement increasingly icy. I felt that at any moment I might skid off the road and over the edge of a cliff. On the other side of the road was the forest, pines framing patches of snow that grew larger and more frequent as the road curved upward. The steady sound of the engine was making me sleepy, bringing me to the edge of a trance filled with shifting patterns of moonlight split by thousands of branches bending in the wind. To keep myself awake, I turned on the radio. The DJ said she was broadcasting from the moon, which I thought was a stupid joke, except that the music was unlike anything I’d ever listened to, resembling the motion of a box kite in the wind, erratically darting up and dodging side to side and diving, resembling the motion of a swing gliding up into a sunlit pause and gliding back down into shade, resembling the motion of a waterfall plunging and rising in faint prismatic mist, resembling the motion of an ambulance on a slippery mountain road, sliding up and down one steep switchback after another, resembling the motion of a lifeboat in a storm, lifted into the sky with each wave, trembling briefly in the foam of each crest, dropping quickly into the frothing dark before the next wave, analogies superimposed, each above and between and below the others, not moving and changing from moment to moment, but moving and changing into the depth of a single deepening moment, finally stopping in front of a huge stone house.

  It looked at first like the house I’d slept in the night before. But when I circled it several times, peering through the windows, I saw that the rooms were empty, not filled with ant
ique furniture. I knocked several times before going inside. I walked down what seemed like a long corridor filled with Dutch landscape paintings, though I could see that the walls were bare. Finally I came to a staircase. I went up slowly, pausing with each step, for some reason trying to count my way up, but mixing up the numbers. When I finally got to the landing, I walked straight into what looked in the dark like an open doorway, until I realized that I was stepping into a floor-length mirror, passing through my own reflection coming toward me. It felt like a split second of rain. Something told me to stop but I kept going, refusing to turn back and look at myself turning to look back from the other side of the glass. Even though I was now apparently functioning as a reflection—an unobserved reflection—it didn’t make any difference. My footsteps made the same sound they always made on bare wood floorboards. I walked down the hallway to another flight of stairs, which spiraled up into a large room filled with moonlight.

  I found a blanket in a closet and slept in a battered armchair facing open casement windows. When I woke the next morning, I felt afraid, like I might get in trouble for sleeping in a house that wasn’t mine. I hurried downstairs and was shocked at first to see myself coming toward me. But then I remembered the mirror and passed again through my reflection. This time I turned and looked back at myself looking back, a split second of laughter.

  Soon I was driving back down the mountain. Five thousand feet below, the desert floor stretched out for hundreds of miles. It looked so pure, so free of morons blabbing on cell phones. But something was wrong. If the desert floor was a page in a book, the words were having trouble holding the scene in place, suggesting that the late morning light pressing down on each object might just as well have been peeled off and folded up and used for something else.

  I drove for a long time, hoping my dog would suddenly appear as a distant dot in the deep white space. I turned on the radio. A tragic voice caught between bursts of static announced that President Bush had been struck by lightning. I turned to another station. A tragic voice caught between bursts of static announced that President Bush had been struck by lightning. I turned to another station. A tragic voice caught between bursts of static announced that President Bush had been struck by lightning. I pulled over and got out. I lifted my arms to the sky and shouted with joy. For ten seconds, I believed that nature functioned according to moral principles. But then I remembered that good people often got killed in earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions, while bad people routinely did horrible things without cosmic retribution. I also remembered that Bush had been in the White House for almost five years, and that if nature truly functioned according to moral principles, he would have been hit by lightning before he took office.

  I looked at my watch. It was 2 p.m. Why was the sun going down? Why had the days gotten shorter? Where were the missing hours? Would the same thing keep happening as the days passed, until there was no time left at all? Was it up to me to invent the time that was missing? And if I failed to do so, would the disappearance of time mean that I too had vanished? It was too soon to tell. But it did seem clear that there had to be a connection between the rise of George Bush, the obsession with cell phones, and the sudden collapse of time. Was it too much to say that the world had become so stupid that there was no longer any reason to keep track of things, that time was vanishing because it had better ways to spend its time? The question circled above my head like a hawk in the desert sky, something I could only admire from a distance. I felt closer to the assumption that I was slowly giving myself up to a pattern of behavior and events that existed only because I was slowly giving myself up to it. No matter how limited such a world might be, it was better than being surrounded by people on cell phones.

  I stopped for gas. I wanted to get a map but the convenience store was closed. I could see the lights of a town in the darkening distance. But when I got there everything was closed, perhaps because the president was dead. At the end of the main street, something moved in the dark. I called my dog’s name and he came running, wagging his tail. He jumped into my car and I broke out a can of dog food. Then I saw that a light had come on down the street on the second floor of a brick building, and soon some kind of jazz was floating softly from an open window. I followed the music through a door beside an empty storefront, up a flight of stairs, and down a hallway to someone’s apartment.

  I knocked three times. There was no answer. I opened the door and stepped inside, prepared to make an awkward explanation. But the room was empty. I called out to see if anyone was home. No one answered. Jazz came from a CD player beside a bookshelf, on top of which I saw three tropical fish in an artfully furnished aquarium. Their graceful movements made the music even more graceful, and I realized that it wasn’t jazz I was listening to, but the same lunar symphony I’d heard in my car the night before.

  I went down a hallway past a kitchen where three hamburgers were frying in a skillet, came to a small dark bedroom and switched on the light, but no one was there. Just another bookshelf and a mattress on the floor, a pillow on top of a neatly folded blanket, a faded oval rug that looked like the earth photographed from the moon. I turned off the light and went back to the living room and sat on a futon couch. The music was enchanting, advancing and receding at the same time, making the distinction between the two motions obsolete, but the sound of food cooking in the kitchen distracted me. I got up and turned off the flame. Then I went back and sat and watched the fish and listened to the music. I’ve always liked music better in the dark so I turned off the light. Between the fluttering white silk drapes, the open window framed a half moon floating in the dark windows of old brick buildings across the street. The bubbling sound of the aquarium filter played with the gusting sound of the wind, as if they were parts of the music I was listening to.

  Soon I got hungry. I turned the stove back on, waited a minute or two, got bread from the breadbox, and quickly gobbled up two delicious hamburgers. I took the third one outside and gave it to my dog. Then I brought him up into the apartment and he curled up on the floor and fell asleep. I found a bathroom down the hall and took a quick shower. The warm, relaxing water felt like music on the moon. I stretched out on the couch, covering myself with a blanket I took from a closet next to the bathroom. The cold wind playing in the drapes filled me with pleasure, which took the form of doubt: Had anything really happened? Had any of my encounters over the past few days been real? Had I been so devastated by the world of cell phones that my perceptions had been permanently deformed? Or was I rather about halfway into the process of recovering from a world so pathologically fake that partial unreality was the best my perceptions could do? There was no way to know for sure. But I did feel certain that something had to have happened, even if I wasn’t sure what it was. And if what I remembered wasn’t real, it was up to me to fill the emptied space those unreal places and actions occupied, to come up with alternatives to the recent past. But since those alternatives would also have been uncertain, nothing more than verbal constructions, I saw no reason to waste my time inventing them, which left me with no recourse but to accept what I now remembered, approaching its uncertainty with pleasure, much as the drapes accepted the wind that was tossing and shaping them.

  I fell asleep slowly and pleasantly. At some point in the night I woke briefly to the sound of footsteps moving down the hall to the bedroom. But when I got up the next morning, the room was empty, looking precisely the way it looked the night before, except that the blinds in the window above the bed had been opened, offering a view of distant mountains above the housetops.

  Monstrous noises came from the street. I rushed outside. At the western end of town, I saw wrecking machines at work, knocking down buildings. I stood there for ten minutes, watching in shock, as homes and bars and shops were reduced to piles of brick, splintered wood, dust and shattered glass. I wanted to find out why, so I walked down the street and signaled to a man driving a yellow bulldozer. He looked at me briefly, scowled, and w
ent back to work. I called my dog and we drove out into the desert again.

  I tried to get some local news on the radio. But between bursts of static, I heard nothing but voices tragically discussing the death of President Bush. Finally, at the far end of the dial, I heard something about plans to wipe a town off the map, but I couldn’t get the name of the town or the reasons for its destruction. I told myself I should get a map, but the only store on the road was the place I’d stopped the day before, and it was still closed. The only thing to do was to keep going straight, hoping I could find another store and get a map. I wondered why I felt such a need for a map, why I wasn’t just finding hiking trails and walking around and looking at things. If there wasn’t really any place to go, why was I in such a hurry to get there? Was I still so hooked into the world of cell phones and computers that I needed to see where I was in relation to everything else? Was I afraid of being lost? I stepped on the gas and soon the road began climbing into the mountains.

  On either side of the road there were giant boulders, so white and smooth they might have been huge eggs. I thought of huge predatory birds, hatching fully grown, sweeping over the desert and wreaking havoc on the civilized world. I imagined people with cell phones wandering through shattered streets talking endlessly about nothing, finally starving or dying of thirst, until there was only one person left blathering into a cell phone, the last human words on earth, with no one listening.

  The sun was going down, even though it was only half past noon. I turned on the radio but there was nothing but static so I turned it off, turned it on ten minutes later, got nothing but static and turned it off again. My dog was sleeping peacefully beside me, not even slightly concerned that time was being carted off piece by piece. The sunset was a blaze of reds and golds on huge clouds changing in the wind. I felt like my car was about to get blown off the road, so I pulled over and got out. It was colder than I expected. I took a heavy coat from the trunk and got back inside. My dog woke up and watched the sunset for a few minutes, then put his head in my lap and went back to sleep. There was something so comforting about this that I felt no need to start the car and find a place to stay for the night, and as the clouds and colors faded slowly in the west, I fell asleep.