by Arjun Basu
Outside Billings, I turned off the interstate and drove through town and past the airport and headed north again. Dan phoned and asked me where I was going and I thought the question stupid and funny and I hung up without saying anything. I drove blindly. I did not see the countryside. I have some memory of mountains. I remember the haze that surrounded me. I remember that I could not really see. I remember that I don’t remember. I could have been driving anywhere. I know I drove through Montana but I could not tell you what the roads looked like.
Angie had been sleeping but she woke up now and stayed awake as I drove through the night. We kept our thoughts to ourselves. There’s nothing to talk about, she had said. I drove slowly, carefully. The long road was almost over. This is all I remember thinking. And Angie. I replayed our washroom tango like a loop.
I stopped for gas at a place that was remote and desolate and I remember being amazed by the gas station as it appeared alongside the road. And things became clearer again. The black bus pulled up to the gas station and Dan came out and walked straight toward me. “You trying to get us lost?” he asked. The media got off the bus to stretch, everyone’s face puffy with sleep, the toil of their jobs, the inanity of this job, causing them to rethink their lives, relive the many paths that led them to this point, to this remote gas station in a remote part of Montana.
“I can feel him,” I said to Dan. “I don’t know what that means but I can feel him everywhere.” I was lying.
Dan’s eyes brightened. “Here?”
“I don’t feel as if I’m driving,” I said. “I can’t explain it.”
Dan walked back to his colleagues and told them what I had just told him. They craned their necks to look at me, to look around, to take in the scene, wondering how the visuals of the place enhanced the story, wondering what the event would look like on television. A cameraman came out of the bus and started shooting some footage. It was a nice enough place. Computers were produced to update blogs. Camera phones. The lone gas station set amidst the plains. Mountains surrounded us. The trees in the distance that covered the mountains gave the whole place the appearance of a toy train set. Even the gas station looked like something you could buy in a box. An accessory.
I asked Angie if she was hungry and she said no. The reporters went into the small store and emerged with chips and chocolates and jerky and a giant bottle of soda. I felt sorry for them. I felt sorry for what had become of their diets. I felt sorry for the ones who had children. I felt sorry for the children. I felt sorry for the ones who thought they were signing up for a few days driving along the eastern seaboard and now found themselves in Montana with no resolution in the offing. The only person I didn’t feel sorry for was Dan.
Angie ran into the store and emerged with a paper bag. “Can you believe it?” she said. “They have tampons!” She ran to the ladies room and did what she had to do.
We got back in the Odyssey. I drove off. When I felt I should turn onto a different road, I did. I let my hands go off the steering wheel just to see if the minivan would drive itself and it veered toward the shoulder.
We drove. We drove through great forests that edged close to the road and made every bend another mystery unsolved. We drove through Great Falls and got on another interstate and still I did not see the Man. We were heading north, always north, and the further north we went now, the further my heart sank. My disappointment mounted. I was starting to give up hope of ever seeing the Man again. I felt dead suddenly. Or at least like I was driving to a funeral. Mine.
There was nothing ahead of us but rolling hills and tall grass. Ranches. Some forest. Campgrounds. The Rockies were everywhere and nowhere. In the distance I could see snowcapped peaks. Lonely mountains sprung out of the plains like popcorn in all directions. I took Angie’s hand and she pulled away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry we did what we did.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It makes everything complicated. I had an itch that needed scratching.” She sighed. “That sounds so crude. I’m sorry. I had a moment. I think. I don’t know what to think.” She leaned her head against the window, her eyes blank. “I needed to. I needed to with you. I wouldn’t have done that with anyone else. I felt something. I needed that feeling.” And that was that, obviously. “We had our chance once. I think,” she said. I felt my heart turn brown and wither up inside me. I had not invested anything in our coupling and now I was because its potential had been taken away. It was now an event. History.
I didn’t know what to say anymore. I felt like stopping. I felt tired. And as I drove north, I had an urge to once again lose the interstate and I did. I got off at an exit and turned onto a desolate road that went straight toward the horizon and lost itself there. In the rearview mirror, I saw the black bus continue on the interstate. “Say goodbye to the bus,” I said.
Angie reached for my cell phone and threw it out the window.
I could imagine Dan’s face at that moment when he’d figured out he’d lost us. I felt sorry for him now, finally, because everything he had invested in me would amount to nothing. Without the end of my story, the money Dan had seen for himself remained a wish. Was his story valuable? He had endured the journey because of the money. The payoff. And now . . .
“I didn’t take any photos with that thing,” I said. I’d just realized it. Everyone around me had documentation. About my life. About this. Except me.
I drove on dirt roads and over creaky bridges. Past lonely oil rigs pumping away heroically. I remember the Odyssey surrounded by hundreds of steers, angry-looking beasts that seemed to comprehend their collective fate already. We drove through little villages that looked like abandoned movie sets; the road widened, a building appeared, pickup trucks parked in front of feed shops, and then the road narrowed again and the town was behind us. “This is too much,” Angie said at one point. “You’re lost.”
And I remember thinking the concept of lost was inapplicable. I wasn’t lost. I was definitely near something, I was no longer waiting for the Man to come to me. To appear before me. I had the sense that perhaps I was going to him. This was his home. There was an energy I could feel, a force, that kept me going. When I turned the steering wheel and drove down another empty dirt road I did so because something was telling me where to go, something was guiding me. I gave myself up completely to this feeling. It was all I had now. Angie was already someplace else. Why she was still in the minivan with me was a mystery. In her mind she was back home. Far away. I was already past tense. She couldn’t even look in my direction. Perhaps she was taking it all down. Perhaps she was writing a book in her head.
The Visitor
The wind has more bite today. It cuts its way past the layers of clothes, past the outerwear, past the fleece, past the cotton, and gets inside you; the cold inhabits the body like a curse.
Yesterday, I enjoyed a Thai massage and a lithe Hispanic woman dug her toes deep into my back, all the while humming to the relentless pan flute flowing from the speakers. The pan flute lives on in the world’s spas and on public television. I was thinking some old slide guitar would work in this environment. Ry Cooder, for example. The pan flute didn’t work in Montana. If it worked anywhere at all.
The ranks of guests has thinned out. There are no ski hills nearby. In winter, apparently, the mountains are home to hoofed mammals and semiconscious bears and badgers and wolves and other creatures not worth confronting.
Some of the staff are planning winter getaways.
Athena says the owners would like me to present an overall plan for the branding of a group of high-end ranches across the West. She offers me a three-year contract. I can live wherever I choose. I tell her I’ll think about where I’ll live. I accept the contract. The pay is remarkable and the taxes here are low. She says, “I think this could be fun.”
“Fun is relative,” I say, Scrooge-like.
At breakfast, I eat a bowl of oatm
eal, consider taking up jogging. I’ve known people who have considered taking up jogging for years, as if the act of consideration itself makes one healthier. Psychosomatic exercise.
I need to draw up a strong list of B-level celebrities. I might have to employ Lindsay’s probable skill at celebrity wrangling. A friend in New York had a well-paid job keeping his ad firm’s celebrity clients happy. He was a highly remunerated gopher. His cynicism wore Prada. I should call him.
Tomas joins me at the breakfast table, a copy of yesterday’s Chicago Tribune in hand. “You can just print it off the internet,” I tell him.
“I like the feel of newsprint,” he says. “I’m a sense person. Especially touch. I have to touch everything. I like the stains even.”
I used to enjoy reading old news. My living room in New York was awash in old editions of the Sunday Times. I could pick up any section at random and read. In some ways, news never gets old. Events just add layers of meaning to the original story.
“If the Cubs lost two days ago, they still lost,” I say. Tomas is buried in the sports section.
“There’s something eternal about the teams in Chicago,” he says. “They have their place and they play their roles.”
A horn sounds outside, to signal the delivery of today’s produce. Tomas looks at his watch and gets up. A truck’s horn here makes about as much sense as a lion’s roar. There are towns and cities not that far from here. Relatively speaking. But this is the kind of country where your next-door neighbor might live fifteen miles away.
I need a research assistant.
The wind outside is now howling.
At the front desk, the phone rings incessantly with guests making spa reservations.
In my office, I order a large planning calendar for my wall online. I order my favorite pens. A notebook. I read the Times. I don’t miss New York.
I decide to study the history of Montana. And then the West in general. I’m sure there’s more to this place than Lewis and Clark.
I go up to the employee lounge and drink three fingers of Woodford while reading a printout of the Mets’ front office problems. Three fingers become six.
I step outside and lean into the wind and have a smoke. I don’t enjoy it. I think of Angie and I think of Sophie up in Montreal. And realize I shouldn’t. Ever again. If that’s possible. I try to concentrate on the Mets.
In the lobby, I run into Athena. “OK,” I tell her.
“OK what?”
“I want to live here,” I say. “At least for now.”
“I’ll draw up the papers.”
“I’m tired of that trailer finally,” I say.
She says, “I have to go,” and she rushes off in the direction of the dining room.
Keith walks into the lobby, our eyes meet, and he turns and walks out.
Back in my office, I decide I need a couch. A better light fixture. Perhaps a plant. One that doesn’t mind shade. I still don’t know what I want to do with the stuffed goat.
Glamorous B-list celebrities.
The power of narrative allows all of us to feel important, to connect to the world, to feel alive. A connection is important for any brand. The consumer wants to see himself in the narrative of a brand. A company without a compelling narrative has nothing to offer in the end. It can’t tell anyone what it’s about. It can’t sell itself because there’s nothing to sell. A strong brand is a narrative that helps sell stuff.
The line between two points. The arc. Details that say nothing and everything. Embody values that allow the consumer to imprint their own. Impose without being imposing. Make people feel better about themselves. Associate themselves with things that are good.
The big Afro may come and go but the pan flute is finished forever.
I’m toying with some lines. They are shameless but only because I thought them up:
Find Your Story
Discover Yourself Here
Discover Your Story
Let Us Tell Your Story
Live Your Story With Us
Find Your Story.
The long-range forecast is calling for snow. In Montana, global warming is not so much a threat as a promise.
Athena sends me an email. It is a photo of an island in Greece. No message. Just the photo.
I have started a letter to my mother once a day for the past month. I should get on that.
I could tell her of my happiness. Of how I have found myself in a place I feel I belong. Of starting anew. Of the possibilities and direction promised by the endlessness of the sky. I could tell my parents to come for a visit.
Yesterday, it was announced that one of the horses is pregnant. There was an extravagant celebration in the trailers to honor the news.
A knock on my office door. It’s Dan. And he’s smiling.
LET ME STAND NEXT TO YOUR FLOWER
We drove on dirt roads and one-lane roads and small two-lane roads that passed through a desolate landscape. We drove by small towns that consisted of nothing more than a gas station. We saw oil rigs pumping away on the fields, steel grasshoppers quenching a never-ending thirst. We passed signs for provincial parks and only then did we realize we were in Canada. “When did we cross the border?” Angie asked. There was alarm in her voice.
I drove on, driving toward something, my body driving the Odyssey somewhere. I did not know where I was going. Every turn was a surprise.
Roads would end and I would have to back up and try something else. The land felt emptier than any place I’d ever been. I felt afraid. “Maybe you should turn around,” Angie said. “I don’t like the fact we crossed the border without telling anyone.”
“I’m not turning around,” I said. “I can let you off but I’m not going backward. If we’re here, we’re here for a reason. Everything that’s happened to me, to us, has gotten us to this point.” I stopped the Odyssey and got out and walked toward a lonely fence. On the other side of it was more of the same, miles and miles and miles of prairie. The fence looked ridiculous here. What was it trying to keep in? Or out?
Angie stayed in the minivan. “Really, Joe. I want to go back,” she said through the open window.
“So go,” I said. “I don’t care. Take the van.”
“I will,” she said.
“I’m not stopping you.”
I stepped over the pathetic fence and started walking.
“Joe, please,” Angie shouted. “Don’t go.”
I don’t know how long Angie sat there watching me disappear into the tall grass. I imagine she waited until I was out of sight, until she could no longer be certain that I’d return.
I walked to the crest of a small rise. On the other side of the hill, a deep gully broke the carpet of tall grass. From the top of the hill, I could see the world. I watched the Odyssey driving away, kicking up dust behind it. It faded from view until it was swallowed up by the prairie.
I’d left her. I’d walked away. Once she realized that, there was nothing for her here. She was left with her own search. I imagined she’d try to find America again.
Night fell. I hugged myself to keep warm. The sky was an invitation to a party of stars. To an immensity of awe and wonder. Shooting stars raced across the firmament of what must have been an ancient people’s idea of heaven.
I stared at the sky and I yelled at the Man. Who are you? I yelled and my voice echoed out of the prairie and I could hear it go around the world and then it returned and went inside of me. The question lodged itself in me and it stayed there.
And then I felt myself leave my body. I felt myself flow into the wind and above the earth. Time became fluid. I saw myself sitting on the hill and then I saw my life unfold in a dream as lucid as if I’d lived it. I had, of course.
I was in a silent place. The silence was unbearable. I heard my beating heart, the blood traveling through my body
, the movements of my muscles. I heard myself think. I felt as if I were flying. And I was. I was in space. I was in space zooming in toward the earth. The earth was floating in front of me, a hazy orb, a single globe, and I flew toward it, out of the metallic effluent and toward the world. I saw the invisible arms of history cut through the people of the world. I saw everyone. I saw the population. I saw all that had come before them, the immolated, the conquered, the divided, the heroic, the millions of acts of cowardice, of surrender, the billions of anonymous lives lived anonymously. I saw the minutiae of history, I saw history, like the thin strands of tissue connecting axioms in the brain, linking everyone, all of whom had either chosen to forget or never knew or even remotely imagined the interconnections that bind them together. I saw the air, the air that sustains billions of breaths every day, the air that holds in it the dying wishes of some great and not-so-great and even vile people, everybody, all inside the same polluted air.
And then I heard the sounds of billions of hands clapping, the drone of billions of laugh tracks on billions of televisions, the failing engines of millions of cars, a trickle of noise that soon becomes overwhelming. It was noisy.
And then I was close enough to smell the smoke, smoke from industry and kitchens, the smell of cyanide and oil refining and curries and seared flesh and the burning of healthy trees. The smell hit me like a blind-side cheapshot. And I braced myself for entry, for the blood-boiling heat of a thousand suns, for the heat that is the final line of defense for a fragile sphere floating miraculously in the numbing emptiness of our collective home.
I passed by colors, colors that melded together as if they were melting. By oranges and blues, lavenders and greens, reds and yellows. I imagined I could hear the Wicked Witch of the West screaming her death’s lament and then I realized, no, I was screaming, I was bellowing, cursing, begging. I was melting.
And then I was falling. Floating was past. I was part of the earth. I recognized the familiar shapes of the oceans and continents. I was feeling gravity’s pull. And I fell through the radioactive belts of Van Allen, the charged solar particles that do nothing to keep you warm, rapidly falling through exosphere, thermosphere, down to stratosphere, through a particularly nasty part of the sky called the dust belt and into the troposphere. And then the science changed and I considered topography, geography, geology, hydrology, the brown and green shapes of land unencumbered by lines and divisions. By politics. From the upper reaches of the sky, the world looked good, healthy, natural, peaceful, though I knew better, falling through high, thin, wispy cirrus clouds, pancake-flat altostratus clouds, marshmallow-soft cumulonimbus clouds, I fell, through powder puff cumulous clouds, falling with a disquieting, almost humorous speed.