Where Three Roads Meet

by John Barth

  "I swear," swears he, with sigh and headshake as if I'd said that last aloud instead of to myself (and speaking now 'twixt quote marks as if to keep that distinction clear): "Just thinking about all that hassle's enough to tempt a guy to say Screw it, you know?" Left hand still on the wheel, he scrabbles with his right through the junk on his buggy's floor. "Once upon a time I had me a six-pack in this old wreck somewhere. If I can find that sucker, I say let's set our butts down right here, pop ourselves a cool one, and shoot the shit a bit, okay? Let the Dragons and Princesses come to us for a change."

  Says I, "Count me in, amigo"—no more quite meaning it than he did, was my guess—and I hauled over to his rolled-down window and stuck out my hand. "Name's Fred, by the way."

  "Yeah, right." But gave it a squeeze. "Like mine's Isidore."

  "Isidore?"

  Grin: "Izzy for short—or Isn't he? You get the idea. And hey—" Opens half-stuck creaky driver's door with left hand while right holds aloft (like old Perseus brandishing Medusa's head, as I recall the scene) four-sixths of a pack of ... uh, some cloudydark brew in unlabeled bottles with unmarked caps? Two of which—once he'd climbed out of his queer clunker and set himself and his trophy down on my bench-rock—he offed with the appropriate thingie on his Swiss Army knife. Then hands one bottle to me, a good fourth of it already foaming over from being either not chilled enough or not aged enough.

  "Unlike you'n me, huh?" says he with stage wink behind his wire-rim specs, as if he could ... well, read me like a book. "Some country boy's home brew, I reckon. Found it in that borrowed Vee-hickle. Here's to us?"

  "Whoever that might be this time around. You leave your engine running?" For he'd made no move to turn it off.

  Shrug. "More'n likely she'll run out of gas. Like us? But once you shut down an old fossil like that, who knows if it'll ever start up again." Raising his bottle, "You joining the party?" and takes a proper pull. As did I then, and resumed my place on the bench, the now two-pack between us.

  Not a bad brew, considering.

  "Thought you might think so. And on the bench pretty much sums us up, right?"

  Speak for yourself, Isidore, said I to myself, there being evidently no need to speak aloud: Me, I've got an inning or two yet to play before I leave the field.

  "Sez you," says he, but amiably, and adds, "Sez me too, pal. And like as not we're a brace of bullshitters, but I for one am in no rush to find that out."

  Says you, pal, says I, likewise amiably: If I'm not mistaken, that's mainly why you're here.

  "Mistaken you're not," allows he, and takes another pull of that yeasty world-temp brew. "No more'n half, anyhow. I'm here to find out where we go from here, same as you, but be damned if I'm in any hurry."

  "Same as me"—speaking in quotes now, I see, same as he—and did same as he, and there we sat: Old-Fart Tale and ditto Teller, the one retold so many times that he doubts he has an encore left in him, the other having told so many that he doubts the same, but both with a half-assed hankering for Just One More before the narrative bar shuts down for keeps.

  "Speaking whereof," says Mr. Call-Me-Izzy, and fishes out his handy-dandy again to uncap "what we can't rightly call our Last Drafts, can we now, seeing's how they're not on tap and you'n I are still in First Draft. If you follow me?"

  Well, I didn't at first, but then did, sort of; enough anyhow to pick up on that follow me business and say, "This time you got the job descriptions right, bro: I go where you tell me, so I'm told."

  "Beg to disagree." But cordial clink of bottles, swig of contents, and wipe of mouth on back of hand before declaring, "Seems to me it's you go and I tell you: tell the folks Out There where you went, and went next after that, and what did en route."

  Says I, "Whatever"—whereupon Pal Izzy intones, "And there they sat, and maybe sit yet: two bumps on the narrative log. Seems to me," still him talking, "that like it or not, we're what they call made for each other?"

  I considered that proposition. Whatever it'd been before, the landscape round about our intersection was a flat plain now, as featureless as—

  "A Samuel Beckett stage set?" offered my—

  "Self-Appointed Sidekick?"

  Yes, well. As I was remarking, there were only the two roads forking oblique left and oblique right, straight to the bare horizon, at equal angles to each other and to the road behind—which once upon a time had led to and from Home Base, but now (when I glanced back that way), to my surprise, stretched likewise to the three-hundred-sixty-degree Out Yonder.

  "From all of which one infers," inferred Sir Self-Appointed, "that there's been some Narrative Movement, shall we say? You're farther down the capital-R Road than you were before I drove up, and methinks that's because I drove up, in yonder bucket-o'-bolts Dramatic Vehicle."

  "Do tell."

  With conspiratorial elbow-nudge, "My job description, right? Who not only, in driving up, assumed ipso facto the role of Sidekick Helper, but in due discharge of that classic role supplied nonplused Hero with better-than-nothing Magic Potion plus handy-dandy Tool/Weapon/Whatever"— indicating in turn the now-empty brew bottles and the now-pocketed Swiss Army gizmo wherewith he'd earlier flipped their lids—"and ready-for-action tricyclical DeeVee. In return for which, thankee, you've got me Telling now a mile a minute, who just a few pages back was wondering whether I had anything left to tell!"

  "And not only telling," I started to say, "but—"

  "Taking words out of your mouth instead of putting 'em in? I know, I know: Forgive me that, man"—smacks me upside the near shoulder—"it just feels so damn right to be back in action again, you know?"

  So I'm told, said I, unless he said it for me: Putting pedal to the metal on one of those DV contraptions can do that to a fellow. Been there myself.

  "And time to go again!" cries he—exclaims, exuberates, whatever, up off our bench and on his feet. "Before old Lizzie runs dry."

  Like us?

  "Speak for yourself, friend—so to speak? And never mind job descriptions from here on out: We're in this together."

  Mm-hm. In what, exactly?

  Tugs my coatsleeve. "In medias res, man, soon's we climb aboard. You drive the Herocycle; I'll narrate the blow-by-blow."

  Um...?

  "Okay, okay: You drive; I'll narrate and navigate as needed. Nudge things along. Sidekick 'em, let's say."

  Like for instance (we're in his not-all-that-Dramatic Vehicle now, his quote Herocycle, and I tell you this in parentheses because my dialogue quotes seem to've gotten left back on that rock-bench with our empties), which way do we go, S.K.? Can't flip a coin, unless you happen to have a three-sided nickel in there with your Handy-Dandy.

  He cranes his stringy neck to consider, or at least to seem as if considering, our options in turn. Adjusts his specs. Then says, "Well, now: Seeing's how you came here from Back There," indicating the road that once upon a time led from my City, a bit east of north from our conjunction, "and I came out of Left Field yonder"—left from that city's point of view, and a bit east of south from said conjunction—"I reckon we should head out yonder on The Road Not Taken—at least not by us, at least not this time out. Off we go?"

  My turn then to consider, as H.C. Lizzie idled erratically and I checked out her four-on-the-floor transmission, her mostly nonfunctioning dials and gauges, stiff steering, too-soft brakes, and what-all. Back There was everyone I'd ever been, for better or worse: not Oedipus/Odysseus/Perseus/ Aeneas & Co., but their stories (including old Don Quixote's, whose nag Rocinante was the four-legged equivalent of our sputtering, spavined three-wheeled Liz). Off yonder where she and her geriatric driver had rattled in from, if we take him at his word (and what else is he, Mr. S.K. Izzy, if not his words?), was every tale he'd told to date—no doubt including a few variations of Yours Truly in one getup or another, if he was like most of his ilk. Why rerun old footage from any of those once-upon times? What's more (you can do this on your watch dial, Reader, if you don't happen to have a compass on your Swiss
Army knife), inasmuch as Where I'm Coming From lay more or less north-northeastward—five minutes past the hour, say, at the 1 on your analogue watch?—and where he came from lay south-southeastward at the 5 (or twenty-five past), Road #3 stretched out due west, straight into the sun just now approaching set at a quarter till: fit hour for our game's last quarter, and mine. No capital-H Hilltop in sight over there beyond the 9 on your watch dial, but "Maybe that's what makes the thing Mysterious," offered we-know-who: "Shall we go have a look?"

  By way of reply I shifted Liz into first, eased out her cranky clutch, stick-shifted into second, and—so I'm being told! —floored that mother.

  2

  How come this part's labeled "2," some sharp-eyed nit-picker's bound to ask, when what went before it wasn't labeled "1"?

  Time was, I could answer back, when "Fred" and I minded such p's and q's, but we're past that nowadays. Fact is, however (I might point out in my capacity as the guy's faute de mieux Teller this time around), that inasmuch as he, for one, couldn't've known there'd be a Part Two till he hit Lizzie's pedal and landed us on this side of yonder space-break, he couldn't've bloody known that where we were before was Part One of anything, could he now, mate? So just maybe it's Symbolically Appropriate, as they say, for Part One to stand unlabeled as such; and just maybe some of us with a card or two still up-sleeve knew that all along.

  Further questions?

  Needn't've asked, I guess: There's always one eager beaver with hand in air. How's that? You're wondering why the "I" in "1" was Call-Me-Fred, the Old-Fart I've-Been-Told Story, but here in "2" it appears to be Call-Me-Izzy, the Sidekick Teller?

  Well, since you've asked: You may recall F. and me a-hassling each other a bit about "job descriptions" back there in "1"? What the issue came down to was, does he do what I say, or do I merely say what he does? 'Twas a tricky enough matter back when "he" was Odysseus and "I" was one of Homer's bards: The sly guy finally gets home not because it occurred to me to make it happen, but because (as the whole house knew) that's how his story'd always gone, which "Homer" most memorably arranged so that hacks like "me" could invoke Ms. Muse to sing you the news (through us) with whatever riffs and flourishes we saw fit. Got that? Later on, when "he" becomes Aeneas, say, and "I" become Virgil, the game changes: Within the stretchable bounds of Roman folk tradition, A. does what he does because V. was inspired not only to dream up his doing it, but to write those imaginings down for all time in good Latin hexameters that are in large measure A.'s marching orders as well as V.'s artful report thereof: "I sing of arms and the man," goes Maestro Virgil's written score, not "Sing, O Muse," et cet. Come then to a "he" who's e.g. Don Quixote and an "I" who's Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, everything "he" does he does because "I" say so: Although I pretend I'm just reporting the news from La Mancha, D.Q. shoots exactly the shots I call, exactly as I've seen fit to invent those shots and call 'em. Things don't get truly dizzy-making again until you get an "I" who's Mr. Mark Twain, say, and a "he" who's young Huck Finn telling his own story first-person—i.e., as an I! "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," etc. Yet even that comes down to a fairly simple division of labor, finally, between Author/Teller and Narrator, doth it not? Twain "records" Huck's report of what-Huck-did-because-Twain-imagined-and-put-into Huck's-words-Huck's-doing-so, right? Or, to put it another way, Author tells Reader Narrator's telling-to-Reader of Tale-made-up-by-Author.

  A tad vertiginous, sure, but no problem! Nor any question who's finally in charge. But now—fasten seat belts, folks—suppose First-Person Narrator of story to be not only its principal character, but It: the Story itself, telling us itself itself! Who's in the driver's seat now, I ask you, leapfrogging space-breaks and barreling us westward lickety-split through a landscape thus far featureless perhaps for want of Narrator's supplying us with its features? Moreover, since Setting is an ingredient of Story, as are accessory characters like Yours-Truly-as-Sidekick and Dramatic Vehicles like three-wheel Lizzie, how can "I"-the-Narrator of "Me"-the-Story differentiate himself from them/us in order to tell you us (except, I suppose, as "I" might tell of "my" toes and fingers, "my" hopes and fears, "my"self...)?

  Well: "I," for one, get dizzy just thinking about such things, and so while "Fred" was shifting our buggy's gears from first toward third, I took the opportunity to do the same with him, narrative-point-of-view-wise. It's still his been-told story being told, mind, and he's still It, but I'm telling you the sucker from here on out, at least this part of it/ slash/him; otherwise we'd all go around in such who's-in-charge-here circles that the three of us would likely keel over from narrative vertigo, and old Story's story'd disappear up its own asshole: a Mysterious Consummation for sure, but not likely the one Fred has in mind.

  Indeed, while I've got the mike, so to speak, with your permission I'll just fill in a few blanks and maybe redo a detail or two? To begin with (excuse the expression), Mr. Hero-cycle-Driver's name isn't "really" either Fred or I. B. Told, any more than mine is "really" Isidore/Izzy/S.K./Et Al., except insofar as all of us turn into the stories that we tell ourselves and others about who we are. Which, no doubt, we all do, more or less. For while it may be true, as has been wisely said, that "the story of your life is not your life; it's your story," it's also true that our stories have "lives": They grow or shrink in their recollection and retellings; they add or lose details, whole episodes and characters even, as they age—and that's before we get to their ever-shifting slants and interpretations, by "ourselves" and others. Some are stillborn, some short-lived; others are all but immortal (not to say interminable), enjoying or anyhow living serial lives, multiple simultaneous lives, lives resonant with avatars and reincarnations...

  But never mind all that, for now: A story that'll serve as Fred's and mine here in Part Two of "A Story's Story" happens to be that of——— —which, the way I tell it, goes something like this:

  ———'S STORY

  Open any fair-size Anglo phonebook to the B's and you'll find a handful of entries last-named Blank. The word is, after all, just a from-the-French version of the more common English name White or German Weiss, with the added connotation, perhaps slightly negative, of that color's absence rather than its presence. In any case, one doubts that Blank, Dr. Shirley M., D.D.S. thinks of herself as any sort of absence, any more than Weiss, Stanley B., C.P.A. regards himself as particularly pale; most last names mean something, but most bearers thereof are indifferent to, if not ignorant of, such significance.

  Name a Blank kid Phil, however, and he's in for trouble. Yet that's what Michael and Madeline Blank of State College, Pennsylvania, saw fit to dub their firstborn in the Eisenhowerian early 1950s: Philip Norman Blank, his first name Mike's late dad's, the second Maddy's née.

  O comparatively innocent American time and place! Two cataclysmic world wars already history, the Korean War fought to armistice, and the Vietnam tarbaby only just beginning to attract U.S. fingers. The nation's traditional hard-liquor culture was in salutary mid-shift to wine, and although most folks still poisoned their lungs and others' with cigarette smoke even in college seminar rooms, such heavier-duty narcotics as heroin and cocaine—just beginning to be a problem in large-city ghettos—were all but unknown on American campuses and small-town streets, where even marijuana was uncommon. Redbaiting, witch-hunting, blacklisting, and loyalty-oathing there was aplenty, alas, in the same anticommunist political fever that piously inserted "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance; the military-industrial complex flourished as Cold War supplanted hot, and the rest of the economy did all right too, though over everything hung the nightmare possibility that the U.S.-Soviet arms race could trigger nuclear apocalypse. But most Americans felt reasonably easy despite the new black-and-yellow Civil Defense signs on public buildings, the occasional neighbor's armed-and-provisioned bomb shelter, and vague though well-founded worries about radioactive fallout from atomic weapons testing.

  No youngster, anyhow, wa
s liable to lose sleep over such matters, especially at such remove as central Pennsylvania's Allegheny-nestled "Happy Valley," where the land-grant college after which the town was named (not yet a university in those days) turned out the commonwealth's next generation of engineers, foresters, agriculturalists, business administrators, "home economists," and schoolteachers in a farm- and forest-surrounded community whose chief employer was the ever-growing academic institution, and whose student population nearly matched its non-. A peaceful place, State College PA, except on football weekends: solid tax base, good public school system, and virtually full employment; no super-richies on the one hand and few dirt-poors on the other; enough input from faculty, students, and resident alumni to preserve it from acute small-town parochialism, and a freedom from urban problems that went far toward compensating for its geographical isolation and any lack of sophisticated big-city amenities. All in all, a good venue for raising children, and the Blanks—Maddy herself an elementary-school-teaching alumna of the college before and after her pregnancies, Mike a civil-engineering alumnus employed by the County Roads Commission—were more than content to raise theirs in its tranquil neighborhoods of laurel and rhododendron, its avenues of not-yet-blighted American elms.

  Happy enough offspring of a happy enough couple, sturdy little Philip and baby sister Marsha, who came along two years later: like their parents, neither exceptional—physically, mentally, psychologically, or characterologically—nor deficient, except by comparison to the exceptional. No problems in the campus nursery school or the public school kindergarten; only in first grade did young Phil Blank's schoolmates, perhaps prompted by classroom exercises instructing all hands to Fill in the blanks, pick up teasingly on his name.

  "They call me Phil-up the Blank!" he complained to his parents one brilliant late-September Saturday, as the family's "pre-owned" Oldsmobile wagon climbed through hem-locked hills toward a state-forest lakeside picnic. "And sometimes just Phil the Blank, like I'm not there! Billy Marshall calls me Phil N. the Blank! I hate them!"