by Arjun Basu
Not that I felt that joy immediately. I ignored everyone my first few days and nights here, ignored the obvious questions (“So where’d you walk from?”), not talking, not making eye contact, peeling my apples and carrots, eating a lot of fruit and vegetables, taking one shower after the other. Like I was trying to shed my skin. That’s what someone said. Had I been more social then I would have told them I was just trying to get clean. I was obsessed by the thought that I was dirty. I couldn’t get clean enough. I had much to erase.
When I got here, I would lie in bed in my narrow room, feet propped up on the faux-wood paneled walls, thinking about things like: God. The nature of dreams. The unconscious. The idea of the vision. Immutable things. How could I speak to strangers with these kinds of thoughts and not make them recoil? I was a freak. Self-aware, perhaps, but a freak nonetheless.
I didn’t choose this place. Finding it was like stumbling upon a hundred dollar bill. Or, better, winning the lottery. I was anonymous here, just as the land was anonymous to me. So before I became social, I had to do some thinking. Absorb the realities of my life. Assimilate some facts. And then I would go out, smile, be social. Sell myself.
And confront my own happiness. This was something I felt here quickly and it surprised me. My anonymity was reassuring. I smiled. I was a loner who didn’t speak to anyone and smiled for no reason. And yet they let me stay.
My station here afforded me a freedom that was hard to describe. After months of living before the world, of scrutiny, of feeling owned by others, of being both a construct and a victim of the media, of suffering under the tyranny of something I still have trouble defining, anonymity was like a gift, a return to being me. The joy of being ignored was a joy I had never even imagined. It was a green light to get on with my life, to live again and write new endings to stories unknown.
It wasn’t as if these people didn’t have access to my story. There were, there are, televisions here. The ranch is hooked up to satellite television. The place is wired. There’s Wi-Fi. The media reaches here. It comes in. This place isn’t disconnected from the world in that sense. The only thing lacking is standard cell phone reception and they have built this into the PR as a way of selling the place, a “stress-free” environment where the real world need not intrude. Given its proximity to nothing but mountains and tall grass, I imagine the ranch will be “stress-free” for quite a while yet.
I arrived here feeling like a failure. Worse, I felt a comic failure. And I asked myself, got bogged down by this question: is comic failure the true definition of tragedy?
Because I had let people down. People I knew and didn’t know. I had disappointed my family. I had spent a summer running toward something but also from something and I had strung the world along. Through no fault of my own. I want to be clear. I didn’t ask for the attention. But there are people wandering around, perhaps even close to this place, and I am a possible enabler to their disappointment. This was a fear. Now, after some thought, it’s just a worry. A worry I can handle.
And once my fears became worries, once I had started to let things go, I started to socialize. Because I realized, finally, something about happiness. I understood parts of the equation that make up our lives. That freedom from worry, from trepidation, from want, equals happiness. It sounds silly to say, but I had not been a happy man. Only now do I realize how unhappy I was. With the discovery of my happiness, I greeted my coworkers. I became flirtatious. When my fears became mere worries, I began to feel human again. I began to speak. I began to trust people again.
And so this place, the ridiculousness of it, works for me. The Big K Ranch and Spa. Thirty-four rooms, each with a plasma screen TV, stocked minibar, Swiss shower, Jacuzzi, plunge pool, fireplace. Horseback riding, hikes, yoga, full spa with aroma and massotherapy. A lecture series with a guest speaker list that reads like the media guide to a big city PBS station. The head chef published a well-received cookbook. This is the kind of place that generates buzz thousands of miles away. It is a literal oasis, an artfully contrived piece of luxury surround by nothing more than earth and sky.
Guests receive a Stetson upon arrival. Reservations include questions about hat size. The Stetsons are custom-made in Helena. Guests tend to leave with a lighter wallet but buttery skin and a moderately optimistic outlook on life.
I like the idea of optimism.
My most superficial worry, right now, is winter. I’ve heard about the winters here, about how the wind runs down from the Arctic like a rabid wolf, about how people have lost the use of their facial muscles because they were outside for twenty minutes. I’ve heard that sometimes it snows here in the middle of August, something I don’t want to believe.
And I’m worried about winter because I can’t imagine I’m going to leave. And this worry was, is, annoying. How can I assimilate the past if I’m worried about the future? About the weather? This is trivial, isn’t it? Had I come all this way to worry about trivia? I had been trivia. I knew from trivia. I already know that I’m going to end up as an answer to some incredibly snarky comments on late night television. Maybe it’s happened already. I’m OK with that. A legacy is a legacy. We can’t control our stories. No matter how hard we try.
I need to get on with my life. I think I am. This is what I’m thinking: I’ve decided to be optimistic. And this place breeds optimism. There’s something very American about it.
When the sun sets over the mountains, the sky becomes a royal shade of purple. And then the sky turns pink. And the sun is transformed into a dazzling orange producing the sweetest juice. And then the light that covers the peaks is like hearing last call when you haven’t had time to finish your first beer. And finally, as the disappointment dies away, you find yourself inside an all-encompassing darkness. Movie theater dark. In every direction the horizon is nothing but a rumor, an imagined place where the dark land meets the dark sky.
You realize how threatening the darkness can be, especially if you’ve come from the city.
And then suddenly you notice the stars, and the amount of them is enough to make you feel the weight of the universe, the insignificance people have felt since people could think about these things. The horizon is transformed once again and becomes a shadowy line between the star-filled sky and the dark, empty land and you realize it is the sky that looks full of life, full of stuff, in a way so beautiful that it hides its true nature from us, hides the fact that one day the sky will explode and swallow the earth.
This is our setting and it’s enough to leave you hurting to breathe. It is a setting where any human emotion has to be understood in the context of the grandeur of the place.
In the city, one never notices the stars. Or the sky. You just don’t look. The landscape is not dependent on looking up past the ends of the skyscrapers. In New York, the sky has been obliterated and you don’t even notice that it’s gone. There’s nothing to see.
When I was a kid, we were close enough to New York’s electric glow that the sky never really turned black. It was the color of electricity, of a far-off light. And then here, I finally noticed how big it is.
The property sits on one hundred and fifty acres surrounded by grasslands that take you right to the mountains, one of those spots that makes you feel special and lucky and small all at once. It is primitive and primordial and the dichotomy created by the luxury of the place is the point of the whole enterprise.
That’s what they’re selling. The specialness of being human. Even here.
Thirty-four guesthouses surround a central lodge done up in timbers and whitewash. Inside the lodge, another six suites, two dining rooms, a bar, the administrative offices, a small staff lounge. A library with a fireplace. Off the north end of the lodge, a large barn houses the ranch’s horses and behind them, the workers’ quarters. One hundred and fifty of us work here.
South of the lodge, between the main gate and the first of the guesthouses, the spa, a la
rge two-story adobe structure with lap pools on the roof. Behind the spa, a fifty-meter outdoor pool. There’s another one inside the spa. Further south, five private tents, the most luxurious accommodations on the property. King size beds, claw foot bathtubs, mahogany dressers, dining tables. No televisions. No stereos. All covered in cream-colored canvas. Personal butler. And behind each tent, surrounded by brush for privacy, open-air showers, a Jacuzzi for two, and a common sitting area where “campers” can enjoy an end-of-day cocktail and munch on popcorn with truffle butter. And off in all directions, but mostly heading toward the mountains, trails leave the ranch like the arms of octopi. Jogging trails, horse trails, hiking trails. One for ATVs. The horses hate the sound of those and a debate has raged about eliminating them. The Japanese love off-roading. They can’t get enough of the ATVs. It is part of the irony of this place, the silliness of building a brand and then tearing it down all at once. It is conforming to people’s expectations and not the other way around. The brand is confused and so the offer to the customer is as well. Even with the economy in the tank in so many places, the people come. The ranch does well. There’s an endless desire for what this place offers. The nightly rates can top $1,000 during the summer. The tents start at $5,000 a night. But now that I’ve been here a while, I can see it could be more.
Sitting by a campfire near the trailers, you can hear the horses if the wind is blowing right. The breeze is a constant here. It never stops. And I wonder how far the breeze has had to travel. How much further does a wind travel before it lies down in some field to die? Where must it go, what force must it meet, to die? Does it die gently? Or is it eternal? Does my breath end up somewhere, up in the jet stream, to become the eternal wind?
I have taken to whistling. Especially in the darkness. I walk back to the trailer at night and I whistle. If only to confirm my existence.
Oh Mr. Postman
And then a few days later, a sad, tired-looking guy with droopy eyes from one of the papers came and sat next to me and started asking questions. He carried a pen and notepad, which I found quaint. He also had a laptop, a digital recorder, and a leather pencil case, all in a cheap nylon backpack. His hair was short, the sides speckled with gray. He was from the Post, which didn’t seem surprising. His name was Dan Fontana, the name of some eponymous character from an old cop show, I thought. But he was media. And I was wary. “How’d you find out about me?” I asked.
Before she’d stopped talking to me, Angie had predicted I would become a celebrity if I kept the wait up and now here was someone from the media, ready to write my story, the first act in the making of celebrity. The Post is as good and legitimate a place as any to start this kind of ascent. I knew how this worked. A newspaper story. A blog. Something shared on social media. A few links. Another newspaper. The battle between old and new media. I looked at Dan looking old, a representative of the dying breaths of an industry, perhaps, and I saw the future.
“My brother told me about you,” he said. “He owns the pizza shop on the corner.”
I had been sending the kids to the corner to buy me slices when the Tupperware mothers were not forthcoming with tastier fare. So at least once a day the kids were buying me slices, and the pizza man had tipped off Dan. That the pizza man’s brother was a reporter for the Post was beyond humor. The pizza was bad. Just another block away, the pies were made with love. But it was too far for the kids. Because kids are lazy. And to them there is no such thing as bad pizza.
Dan looked like a reporter; his suit was rumpled and creased and pinched at the shoulders. His tie was crooked, as if he’d just taken it out of his pocket and rushed to put it on because of some old-fashioned sense of what looked professional. His shirt wore the morning’s coffee. His shoes, however, were spotless. Brown brogues. With an elegant heel and toes that just stopped short of pointy. He was a shoe man. The spotless shoes spoke of a culture behind the facade of the rumpled suit. And of someone not necessarily in the Post’s target demographic. Of cultivation. A desire. I understood desire. As any woman will admit, you can tell a lot about a guy by the state of his shoes. Dan’s life suddenly interested me. “I’m curious,” I said. “I’m curious how it is that you became a journalist and your brother became a pizza man.”
Asking reporters personal questions renders their lives strangely meaningless. I’ve always felt this. Once, when I was a kid, I ran after a mailman and asked him for a stamp. And then laughed. And the face he made was what I was seeing now. Dan’s face turned sour. Whether or not he was interested in me then, I don’t know. I think I threw his world off balance. Just by asking a question. “How do you mean?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Your brother bought that place, what, seven years ago?”
“He bought it from our uncle,” Dan said and I immediately knew that he meant Sal, the man who could make a decent calzone, unlike his nephew, Dan’s brother, who put shit for all anyone knew into his calzones. Students bought his calzones. Crackheads when we had them. You drink seven beers and his calzones start to taste decent. Tourists who think everything they eat in New York is superior to what they can get back home order his calzones. I can imagine some out-of-date guidebook wrote them up. There was a time when the eating options in this neighborhood weren’t so varied. That’s not true anymore. The only culinary limitations now are those imposed by your wallet. The neighborhood has seen glass boxes come. There are now fake speakeasies hosting theme nights centered around, say, flavored gin. There’s a hotel down the street and it attracts a lot of Brits with messy hair and Germans in linen suits. This neighborhood got built up and people could keep wearing their aviator sunglasses because they were suddenly cool. Dan’s brother was a reminder of what the neighborhood used to be, of the fabric stores and machine parts wholesalers and greeting card shops. Dusty places that had endured and sold goods and services to a local clientele. I could remember rusted out cars here, not so much parked as dumped, used as hiding spots for paper thin guys, feral and wired, selling low-grade dope. That’s the feeling you get eating that pizza. I don’t miss the grit of the old neighborhood. I like the fact that leggy blond models from Brazil are eating sushi a block away.
“So the joint’s a family business?” I asked.
It was early in the morning and Dan needed more coffee. And now he was going to have to go through his family history to get a lousy story out of me. In my boredom, I sensed in Dan an unexpected source of entertainment. Who was it that said comedy was tragedy that happened to someone else? “You could say that,” he said.
“And it didn’t interest you?” I asked. He wanted to close his notepad, I could tell, but he didn’t and that, too, changed my story forever.
“It was my uncle’s,” he said. “He was closer to my brother.” Dan had the air of having lost the battle. I was a two-paragraph story buried between car and futon ads somewhere near the obituaries and this was going to be work.
“And what about your father?”
Dan tapped his pen on his notepad. He sighed. “He’s in the mining business.”
“Mining?” I said, impressed by the word’s implication of wealth.
He could see where this was going. And I saw the Man across the street. He was doing a crossword puzzle and sipping a coffee. “We lived in a good neighborhood if that’s what you mean,” he said. And I could tell he was a New Yorker, too. He had that air. And so I saw him somewhere, perhaps not Manhattan, but Brooklyn maybe, growing up surrounded by more people like him, like his father, in a solidly upper middle class milieu.
“What kind of mining?”
Dan exhaled. “He didn’t actually dig.”
“Gold?” I asked.
“Something weird. Like molybdenite. It’s an ore. Tungsten. Stuff like that.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” I said.
Dan put the recorder in the backpack. “He used to go to Utah a lot when I was a boy. But he had an office not far from
here.” He pointed north. Which meant the office could have been anywhere.
“What’s it for?”
And at that, his gaze bore into mine and he lost his patience. He cleared his throat. “I came here to interview you.”
“I heard you,” I said. The Man walked across the street to the sidewalk before us. He was going to listen. As if he couldn’t already. “Your family situation seems interesting. Two brothers, two wildly divergent career choices. I’m not a philosophical person, but I have time now. There’s something to be said for things like fate.”
Dan opened his notepad. “Mind if I take notes while we talk?”
“I keep thinking what would have happened if I were, say, a garbage man,” I said. And this was true. I was wondering if I would have had the dreams, if I had listened to the Man, had my situation been different. Were my dreams some kind of odd bourgeois affectation? As an ad person, was I chosen because I could sell this?
“What do you do?” Dan asked, trying to steer me toward a quote or two he could use in the article. Trying to do his job.
“Do you think you can convince your brother to give me free pizza while I wait?” I asked. This was shameless, but I was being rational. The more I got for free, the less I would worry about not working. I needed sponsors. I needed the business community to look after my costs. I had no income. And I wasn’t getting up to walk to the bank. The thought of not receiving a paycheck gave me a scare. What if I ran out of money? What if I had to call this off because of economics? The Man took another sip of his coffee. He looked ready to whistle. “Because if I can get free pizza once in a while, then I can do this for as long as it takes. Neighbors keep giving me free food.” I pointed to the small pile of empty multicolored Tupperware next to me. “And I appreciate that. It’s the kindness of strangers thing. But moneywise . . . I don’t want to touch the investments, the savings. I’ve never been good at saving and I finally have something put away and, sure, I got hammered, everyone did, and my lack of urgency about this before is finally going to screw me.” I laughed. “My parents will kill me if they read that.” They saved and cut coupons and treated anything that was “on sale” with the formality of a military funeral. They bought a house in Jersey and my father started his own business and they succeeded. Their story is why millions still want to come here and are willing to die to do it. “I don’t care what you write. Really. I make, or made, a very good living, but I’m young. Sort of. Thirty-something’s the new twenty-something, right? So I’m in my mid-twenties given that calculation. I haven’t always been smart with money. And I guess that doesn’t make me all that different from anyone. I don’t think I’m old enough to worry about the future.” I paused. “Which obviously isn’t true.”