by James Sallis
Okay. I’d indulge in a few moments’ small talk and tell him sorry, obviously I have the wrong person. Wrong town, maybe. Completion, closure. Then back the Z up, U-turn, and get the hell out of there.
But I saw in his eyes, or thought I saw, some trace of recognition. And something about his face, something in the pace and cadence of his words, was familiar.
“Can I help you, sir?” he said, keeping a distance.
“I…I seem to have lost my way. Can you tell me how to get back to the interstate?”
“Well, I reckon you’re lost all right. Leastways the highway is.” He laughed. “But you just turn around and go on back down the way you came a few miles, and when you fetch up against the creek, you turn left. Don’t you cross the creek, now, just turn at it. Mile or two farther along, you’ll see your highway.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
He stepped closer to the car.
“I know you?”
“Don’t see how.”
“Not from these parts, then?”
“No.”
“And I been here my whole life. But I do know you. We’ve met up before.” He shook his head and shrugged. “In some other life, maybe. Who knows about these things? You okay now on finding your highway?”
I said yes, thanked him again and sailed back down the ruts.
Who indeed knows?
As I’d told the postal clerk, before this man I thought I was making up out of whole cloth took on flesh and spoke to me: What do we have if we don’t have our memories?
What I believed pure invention had become more, seemed in fact to have made its way to the surface from some clandestine well of memory.
What if memory itself, in turn—his, my own—were only invention?
19
For the next hundred miles a Ford Escort moved up to number one on the charts.
Talk about protective coloration. A Ford Escort?
It picked me up not long after Carl’s Bay and the unseen sniper. A Dodge van had come around some miles back, so for a while it was a toss-up, both with a bullet, as they say, but then the van turned off and never came back, meaning either that it didn’t figure at all, or that it was running a classic A-B tail and had passed me on to the Ford.
So that’s the song we were dancing to.
I drove along thinking of those first weeks in the Buick following my retirement, the endless miles of highway I covered and recovered, all the open road I had felt beginning to unfurl in my mind and life, Brubeck and Bird and Sidney Bechet unwinding on the tape player the whole time. That stuff wasn’t readily available then; I’d paid dearly to have collectors dub it for me from their stashes of old records and acetates.
I thought of men long since dead, of a woman’s face in Chile, of part of a child I found beside the road one morning in Salvador. I remembered what it felt like when someone died there beside you, how your own body became in that instant instantly more real, more alive.
I wondered what use a soldier with a conscience could possibly be, and if indeed I had one (but I was here, wasn’t I?), and what conscience was.
No more trustworthy, no less unreconstructed, perhaps, than was memory?
Just after lunch the Escort ceded favor to a Mazda pickup that paced me at such a calm distance I became certain I was this time in the presence of a pro.
Mazda sat uncomplaining in a vacant lot the whole while I stretched a steakhouse dinner to almost two hours. When I left, it came along quietly. And when I went to ground, it pulled into the parking lot between tourist cabin number nine and the sole exit.
Fair enough.
He knew the moves without having to work them out. I was no longer dealing with amateurs.
The cabins were pure fifties postcard: fake frontier, as though some Titan’s idiot child had been given a set of Lincoln Logs for Christmas and turned loose, complete with brown plastic chimneys and slab doors painted to look like four planks with crossties. Inside, it was even worse. You could barely turn around in there without bumping into something; it was packed full with a green Naugahyde sofa and chair, a bed whose headboard put one in mind of tombstones, matching blond dresser and bureau, a corner desk shelled with aqua Formica that after many years of bondage and struggle had almost succeeded in emancipating itself from its support brackets.
I used the cabin’s phone and my own calling card to send a telegram to a deadfall address: Xanadu tomorrow stop.
More confusion and background noise.
I left open the canvas curtain with its frontier scenes—wagon wheels, lariats, a chuck wagon—and turned on the TV to a Special Report about recent mass murders in Utah. Canted newsreel footage of the suspect, of abandoned backyards and one-time schoolrooms, of a town square, a storm-laden sky. Interviews with a psychologist specializing in (caps? italics?) the criminal mind and with, unaccountably, a “television consultant.” (A what?) Having become instantly, momentarily, an actor, each spoke his lines with heavy sadness and certitude. Apparently it occurred to no one that, inasmuch as explanations and answers did exist, they were complex ones, and might only be found in the suspensions of true discourse or of art, certainly not in homilies, slogans, threadbare aphorisms.
Strike another blow, I thought inanely, for American no-how.
The newscast was followed by a poorly dubbed Japanese mystery, Ransom, that nevertheless immediately swept me up and carried me off, more from the intensity of the lead character’s features and the stark, angular black and white of the film itself—like something out of his own mind—than for any facility of plot or technique.
A three-time murderer (though none of them committed in passion), Osho is released from prison during war with the understanding that, in return for his freedom, he will kill again: this time a most peculiar patriot, an old, once-great soldier now leading his people away from confrontation and towards negotiation. Osho instead flees, settling in an obscure mountain village where he becomes protector for a young, mildly retarded woman with whom he falls slowly in love, and for her family. Raiders—refugees from various war zones, deserted soldiers—periodically come upon the village by chance only to be dispatched, violently, by Osho. There are brief flashbacks to beatings he received from his father as a child; to (at the beginning of this same war) the imposition of martial law and subsequent confiscation of his home village’s sole source of income, its fishing boats; to the single boat he and a friend carried into the hills and the officer they struck and happened to kill when he came upon them there; to the man whose throat he slit years later in a barroom brawl over a woman whose name he never knew or asked; to the face of a man he almost killed, but from whom he drew back at the last moment, in prison. By film’s end, despite all he has done, despite his final, passionate killing, one feels a great compassion, a spilling tenderness, for Osho. In the movie’s last frames, half a dozen policemen in plainclothes climb slowly up the mountain to put him to death for defaulting on his bargain. The country is at peace.
I walked to the window, half-expecting the Mazda’s driver to be in the window opposite looking back, the same film coming to its end on the screen behind him.
But there was only blackness out there, blackness shot through from time to time with the lash of passing lights, broken by the dull thunder of trucks on the interstate a mile away.
And behind, there was only more news, more detective shows and sitcoms, endless advertising, an interminable hour of sophomoric British comedy in tuxedos and drag.
I slept well, dreaming of the countryside of southern France, its small caves and restaurants, its pâtés, oversize bottles of local wine, cassoulets, greens and rolling green hills. I was a leaf carried along by wind. Wind whispered softly to me and would never grow tired. Ma feuille, the wind said, ma petite feuille, ma jolie feuille…
In the morning, no less surprised than I might have been upon receiving, by return post, a reply to a message in a bottle, or to words whispered into the darkness, I received a response to my telegram.<
br />
“Mr. Anderson?” the desk clerk said when I picked up the phone. He was probably also owner, maintenance man and half the housekeeping staff. “I’m sorry about disturbing you at such an early hour, but I have a telegram here for you.”
“Yes?”
“You want me to read it?”
“Please.”
“Oh. Okay. Let’s see…it says: I await you. And there’s something else here, a name maybe. K-U-B-L-A? That’s it. Be checking out this morning, will you?”
“Yes. Thanks again.”
“Oh no: thank you.”
Ten minutes later, the Mazda pulled out behind me. We drove up the street like a very small circus and stopped at a truck stop for breakfast. Plenty of parking in front. This time he came in, sat at the counter and ordered coffee.
20
I ate breakfast slowly and, afterwards, carried a second cup of coffee over to the counter and sat beside him. He was on his third or fourth, with milk and with sweetener from sky-blue packages. Where we were, you could see stacks of glasses in wire racks against the kitchen wall, a tottering tray of napkins rolled, burrito-like, around silverware, a badly encrusted waffle iron.
“Come here often?”
A lot younger than I would have thought—but aren’t they all?—and good-looking in some indefinably continental way; functionally dressed in loose jeans, sweater, ski jacket, running shoes. I wasn’t the only one who thought him good-looking. The waitress spent an inordinate amount of time seeing to his coffee.
“Capricorn,” he said. “And no, I don’t want to dance.”
We sat there a while. Truckers came in, made calls over coffee and burgers and left. Travelers whose children could be seen looming into the windows of vans outside like sharks in aquariums materialized at the counter and voyaged back out with cartons of food in hand.
“So what do we do next?” I said. “You supposed to smother me with a jelly doughnut?”
“Thought maybe I’d just persuade you to order the chili. That ought to do it.”
“Or I could jot down my itinerary, we’d meet a couple of times a day for meals. Save you a lot of trouble. Easier for everybody, in the long run.”
“Hmmmm,” he said, and got more coffee from the waitress. Can’t let a good customer take two sips without a refill. He nodded to her and smiled.
“We could even consider carpooling,” I said. “I can’t remember if there’s an energy crisis right now, but if not, one’s bound to be along shortly.”
He shook his head, half an inch in either direction, once. “Don’t think so. I’ve seen the way you drive.”
“There’s that. But you do have to look at the big picture.”
He looked into his coffee instead and suggested a walk. I paid, waited as he spoke with the waitress, then we went out together into a chill, sunny morning. Sunlight on everything, just lying there, trying to get warm.
We walked down the main stretch a block or two, then onto a side street that barely managed to harbor six buildings and a building-size, overgrown parking lot before surrendering to the chaos of kudzu and what people hereabouts called woods. I’d had similar feelings once on a brief assignment in Midland-Odessa, Texas: this sense that three paces out from the city I’d step abruptly off the continental shelf, into quicksand and nothingness—as though aliens had carved the city from its environs and deposited it here.
“Do you remember a morning in the fall of ’71, on Cyprus?” my companion said after a time.
A woman’s face floated into my mind. The smell of lemon trees, kerosene.
“I do. But there’s no way you could.”
He went on. “Because of your presence, because of what you did, or caused to happen, there—I don’t know the details of this, and you yourself may or may not recall them—a woman selected to die instead was reunited with her children.”
Oh, yes: I remembered.
“Years later, far from those islands, in a far different life, in a different world, that woman again found love and remarried. Her husband was a Russian émigré, a childless widower who had long believed his life over, his family name never to be forwarded, his fortunes at an end.
“Dmitri was at first astonished, then grateful, to find love and family so late in his course. Gratitude did not come easy to him, you understand. He had clawed his way up from the rudest dock work. It was difficult for him to credit fortune, chance, destiny—to credit anything but his own determination and labor—for what happened in his life. And because that recognition, that gratitude, came with such difficulty, it was taken most seriously. Taken to his heart, as he himself might say. It became one of the central facts of his life.
“In time that gratitude extended itself to the person he knew to be responsible for his wife’s survival. And so, declaring someday that person would be properly thanked, Dmitri turned his considerable resources towards discovering the man’s identity.”
My companion paused, watching an Amish buggy make its plodding way along the road’s shoulder.
“It was, as I’m sure you know, a formidable task.”
Stressed on the second syllable, as the British do.
“I’d think so.” Hope so.
“One fraught with false trails, laden with dead ends, blinds, misdirections. And impossible to say, finally, whether it was dogged persistence, money—vast sums of it, pirate chests full of it—or simple luck that’s carried me at last to this long-desired end.”
“This is the end, then? Here?”
“The Russian, Dmitri, died many years ago—as good a man as will ever see this world. His wife, the woman you knew as Cybelle, followed shortly after.
“In thanking you now, I discharge both my father’s gratitude and the vow I made to him.
“Spaseba,” he said, holding out his hand. “I am Michael. And now, I suppose, finally, I can get on with my life.”
Thinking of his obvious professionalism, I said:
“But surely this is your life.”
“No. I’m an engineer, a shipbuilder, actually. Not that I’ve had much chance to practice that profession.”
We had come back around to the truck stop.
“For all his efforts and dedication, the old Russian was never able to discover your identity. In fact he learned almost nothing. What else was there for me, then, but to become, myself, what we knew you to be? If you wish to find wolves, become a wolf.
“This is what I did. I trained and had myself sent out as a field agent and before long in that clandestine, circumspect world I began encountering certain…stories, I suppose you would say. You may or may not know: a kind of myth, a hollowness, exists in the place you once occupied. As in Voznesensky’s poem for Robert Lowell:
встал в пустоту, что осталась от роста Πетра.
“You were ensconced, shrouded, in that space. But then it began to seem as though the space might be no longer vacant, the hollowness filling. Rumbles of far-off thunder made their way to me. Rumors, unexplained occurrences, movements on the horizon. All of which led me inexorably to this assignment. To you. And thereby to the end of one career.”
We stood near a huge plate-glass door plastered over with travel stickers. Our breath pedaled out into the chill morning air. A middle-aged couple on a Gold Wing pulled up at the curb and sat with engine idling, studying separate maps, he in half-moon reading glasses, she holding the map out away from her, squinting.
“I had assumed it was my career that was supposed to end,” I said. “And my life.”
“So, apparently, had others.” Michael looked into the café. The waitress looked back at him from behind the counter. They both smiled.
“I must tell you: I am not at all certain that I recognize the game pieces in use here, or that I know their proper moves. And the board itself seems a most peculiar, oddly shaped one. I hope that you will take particular caution, my friend.”
He held out his hand and we shook.
“How very stra
nge to call you that: friend. You have been central to my life for much of it. Yet I’ve not met you until this day. And now will have no reason to see you again.”
“Unless you come simply as a friend.”
I stood for a moment watching through a tiny map of Texas on the door as he reentered the café and sat at the counter. A cup of coffee was put before him. The waitress, apparently, was on break; she came and sat beside him.
21
For the remainder of that day and much of the next—presumably until someone got around to discovering Michael’s apostasy—I was a solo act. Sailing free and alone on the interstate and through adjunct towns, at peace with myself and surroundings.
Then about three in the afternoon, roughly alongside a stretch of fiberglass hot tubs turned on edge like huge jigsaw pieces and another service-road store selling “chainsaw art” (totemlike figures of bears and other wildlife liberated waist- or haunch-up from tree trunks), with acquisition of a sporty little white job and a moose-like Pontiac—countertenor, bass—I became a trio.
They took the Datsun out an hour or so later.
There wasn’t a lot I could do. We’d cat-and-moused for thirty miles or more on the straightaway before nosing into a cluster of tight, contradictory curves. The Pontiac had lugged up hard on my outside then, holding me in the curves and crowding close against me while the sports car, a Fiat, nipped and nibbled at the inside like a good cow dog.
It was all timed perfectly, almost balletic. And when finally I did leave the road—more or less electively, as it happened, taking what I decided might well be my last chance—for a moment, just before the rear wheels lost purchase, I thought I’d done it, thought I might actually have pulled it off.
The Datsun hit the far bank and paused, listing for an interminable moment during which several Latin American nations changed their names, political ideology and rulers at least once, then, very rapidly, gaining speed all the while, began rolling.