The Grand Tour
Page 25
———
Lying beneath a giant hamburger. No, before that.
———
Someone opening the door, bathing the room in fluorescent light. He stood there, a dark figure in the threshold. Other men lay in the room, snoring, moaning, talking to themselves, palsied hands waving through air humid with urine.
“Get up,” the person said. It was Vance.
“Where am I,” Richard croaked.
“Jail. The drunk tank. I was out looking for you all night.”
“Where’s Cindy?”
“She’s gone, don’t you remember?”
Out of a lifetime spent waking up in strange places and not knowing where he was, this was the most disoriented he had ever been. The light in the room refracted crazily off fragments of his own story. He couldn’t shake the notion that the kid that stood before the bed was in the army. Home from. When Johnny comes. Tie a yellow.
“I’m done with this,” the soldier said.
“Negatory to that,” he mumbled. “AWOL will land you five years. Do your duty, son. One more tour.”
The kid came over and helped him upright. “There’s no more tour, it’s over.”
“I’ll run it up the CoC tomorrow. We can still make New York.”
The kid sighed. “Come on.”
“Copy that,” said Richard, and together they moved toward the shining door.
———
Before that. Driving through Kansas, the remorseless prairie scrub whipping past. Drinking from a half-empty bottle, which he’d hidden in his bag under a pile of unfresh T-shirts and socks and boxers. Stowed away, for emergencies. Well, if this wasn’t an emergency, he’d thought, unscrewing the top and bringing the bottle to his lips, he didn’t know what was. Life was an emergency.
Vance looking over at him. “I thought you weren’t drinking anymore.”
“I wasn’t. Now I am.”
“Why don’t you wait until after the reading?”
“Because I want it now. Because I want. Because, because, because, because, because.” Singing off-key with the Kansas grassland dancing in all directions. When they stopped for gas, he climbed into the backseat and positioned himself where the kid couldn’t watch him, and he sat for the remainder of the drive with the whiskey sloshing against his lips. Give baby his bottle! There was something gratifying, freeing, about completely giving up any pretense of control—really, he should have done it years before.
———
Standing in front of a university, an imposing gothic building that resembled an enormous sea monster bearing down, maw agape, on the unsuspecting green quad. Shaking hands with people, and these people leading him into an elevator and up to a room where he shook other people’s hands. Sitting for a while in a burgundy leather chair, the impressive kind embroidered with iron nails, and they—whoever they were—diligently approached him, with an air of mild, gracious irony, like savvy villagers paying respect to a cut-rate viceroy. Despite Vance’s vigilant chaperoning, he managed to get one young girl to sneak him a glass of wine. Then they were in some sort of backstage area, which he was able to deduce from the red velvet trembling in front of him.
The kid was holding his arm. “Let’s go. I’ll tell them you weren’t feeling well.”
“I feel fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
The audience applauded on the other side of the curtain. He wrested away from Vance and attempted to push through it, but became caught in its voluminous folds. He felt a hand on his arm again, but again he twisted free. For a moment his person was fully contained inside the heavy, red sway. Why was the entire world against him? Finally, he’d picked up the curtain’s weighted bottom edge and pulled it over himself, or himself under, to a room full of laughter. You like me, you really like me.
———
Staring out at the audience staring back at him with a massed expression of amused dismay. Vance looked on grimly from the side of the stage, arms hanging limp at his sides. The auditorium’s silence was broken by a cough, which brought him back to the task at hand. He looked down at the book and tried to figure out where he’d left off. What the hell was he reading? It seemed like nonsense to him—unfollowable, hieroglyphic.
“Sorry,” he said, uselessly flipping the pages. The problem was the lights. They were instruments of torture, designed to confuse and blind him. He needed water, craved it as he never had. His tongue was a fat snake stuck in the dirt hole of his mouth. He picked the book up and held it about four inches from his squinting eyes. His face was a crumpled wad of paper. Finding a paragraph that looked familiar, he resumed reading, though it was more like running some kind of horrible obstacle course in which every word, every syllable, was a barrier to be surmounted, defeated, climbed over. In the middle of the thing, he kept forgetting who the characters were or what they were talking about. It was not an unfamiliar sensation or mode of reading, although typically it happened right before he went to sleep, and not in front of an audience of three hundred people.
Somehow he got to the end of the chapter. He turned the page, just to make sure, and discovered that it went on! Ah, wretched life! Ferdinand Magellan himself could not have been more anguished to see the limitless Pacific stretch out before him after navigating the straits that—like Richard’s book—cruelly bore his own name. He continued for a moment, but finally stopped again in the middle of a sentence and peered out into the audience. Some blonde woman whom he momentarily thought was his daughter pushed out of the room and loudly slammed the door behind her. But Cindy was gone, he remembered. Vance swayed on the side of the stage. The whole room swayed in unison, underwater plants doing a gentle, sinister hula.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, shutting the book. “My daughter hates me.”
———
An endless series of hallways, lost in the guts of the beast. Emerging into an expansive atrium, its walls bedecked with portraits of similar-looking old white men. He got lost trying to leave, twice entering the same lecture hall, the second time to sarcastic applause, before finally pushing outside into the dim, merciful chill. As he lurched directionlessly down a brick-lined path, the men in the paintings seemed to stare at him from the ether of the early purple dusk. They were rich men, obviously, viciously sober and responsible men; men who had dedicated their long lives to making money and building things; things that bore their names in etched stone; stone that exemplified their belief in themselves and God, in life’s inherent value and design and purpose. If they could see him, what would he look like to men like that? Nothing, of course. Just a ridge of shit, a russet smudge under the waterline of a dirty toilet.
He shuddered across the campus in a kind of time lapse: a building would appear in the distance, and then he would be careening past it; a remote cluster of girls chatting among themselves seemed to teleport to his right flank, where they pointed and whispered. He hadn’t expected, or meant, to get quite this drunk. The problem, of course, was that he hadn’t been drinking—he wouldn’t make that mistake again. Once more feeling the intense need to escape—from the campus, from public view and comment, and, ideally, though impossibly, from himself—he aimed toward a distant wall of trees.
———
Scurrying through the woods. To his right, red and blue lights flashed horribly. What had he done? All he wanted to do was get away. But you couldn’t do it—you couldn’t get away, you just couldn’t. He tripped over a rotting tree stump, got up, tripped again, felt something in his ankle buckle. It hurt, everything hurt. Ten ten ten. He paused, panting next to a large tree. A used condom hung off one of its lower branches, like an offering to the gods. He pressed on, past strange shapes hanging in the trees, nightmare fruit, people watching him, faces looking down: leering strangers, the judge at his DUI trial, old lovers turned to crones, his daughter’s, his own. Why couldn’t he get away?
Without warning the woods opened up. He was thrashing through grabby underbrush, stumbling up the grass str
ip beside someone’s house. Through the blurred rheum of his own twinned vision and thick patio glass, a large TV glowed blue and cast in shadow the two people on the couch in front of it. A wall of books, a table and chairs, gas grill on the patio. It looked simple, perfect. Why do other people’s lives always look so much more appealing than our own? Eileen had told him once that his problem wasn’t that he didn’t count his blessings; he just also counted everyone else’s. Standing before a window, a child sleeping, a little boy with a brown swirl of hair and delicate half-moon eyelids lit by the dull-orange glow of a night-light. A look of uncorruptible peace that suggested an absolute faith in his security, in the adults in the other room. Had Cindy ever looked like that? Then the child’s eyes were open, locked through the window on Richard’s, and the look was gone, replaced by the opposite. The mouth in a black O, screaming at the monster from the deep, the murdering ogre in the night.
———
Lost again, sitting at the end of a cul-de-sac, watching the squaddie pull in. Its squawking siren and flashing lights—his unwitting accomplice in the ruination of childish sleep. Another car pulled in behind, prettily bathing the dark lawns in red and blue. A cop got out, mumbled something into his staticky shoulder, graciously opened the rear door of the car, and Richard obligingly tumbled in.
———
Riding in the cool dark, lying down on that cool seat, oh never never never let it end.
———
He’d fully regained his senses—an unfortunate development—in the back of another car: Vance’s. Outside a place that served hamburgers, apparently, judging from the giant plastic patty melt on its mammoth concrete plinth. It hovered upside down in Richard’s vision like an invading UFO. The spray-painted green of iceberg lettuce and the floppy red edge of a beefsteak tomato floated merrily overhead. Vance returned with a grease-stained bag from which he pulled a small bouquet of wilted french fries.
“Where are we going?” said Richard.
“The airport.”
“Why?”
“So you can fly back home.”
“The tour’s not over.”
Vance started the car. “The tour’s definitely over.”
They arrived at the airport. KANSAS CITY, the sign said. DEPARTURES, the sign said. Large midwestern people pulled large midwestern bags from large midwestern SUVs. The kid set his battered Samsonite on the sidewalk and waited for him to clamber out. Richard steadied himself on the suitcase handle, and for a moment they stood there looking at each other. Vance offered a solemn hand, as he had when they first met—but how different he seemed now.
Richard said, “I’m still going to do the New York stop. Come on. It’ll be fun.”
“You think this has been fun?”
“Yeah, some of it.”
“I thought you were dead last night.”
“I thought I was, too. Look, I’m sorry, okay? Come on. Don’t you want to find out how this all winds up?”
“What?”
“This trip. Remember how you said my story was a cop-out? How I needed to figure out the ending?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you head west on that interstate, you’re copping out. It’s not a real ending.”
“And you think there will be a real one in New York?”
“Yeah, I do,” Richard said. “Come on.”
An airport police car approached and honked three times. The cop motioned out the window for them to wrap it up. “Sorry,” Vance said. “Good luck.”
———
He bought an exorbitantly expensive same-day ticket to New York, then, after somehow making it through security, bought an exorbitantly expensive Bloody Mary at a place called Tiki’s Jungle Lounge. He sat in a dark corner table under a mounted, hopefully fake, tiger’s head, its mouth open in what was probably meant to be a snarl but seemed closer to a grimace, the default expression of everyone in the establishment. Plastic palm fronds scraped his arm as he drank and quietly retched away the three hours before boarding. An unpleasant and debasing phone call to Dana, marked with many apologies and as many false promises, reestablished the New York stop. But it wasn’t really that hard of a sell in the end—after all, she wanted him to make the appearance. It wasn’t ever that hard to convince people of something they already wanted to believe.
“And you think you can tone it down for the next few days?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, stirring his third or was it fourth drink. “Absolutely.”
Then the boarding, the shambling entrance, the barf bag, and now the flight attendant, unsmiling, nixing his request for a timid glass of rosé before he’d even asked. He leaned away from his hateful double, steeling himself for what would come, the blue, serene ozone a millimeter from his hot face.
———
In a sweating dream, he was pursued through a giant indoor mall by a man wearing a bear suit. The man waved his arms and growled unfrighteningly, and Richard felt sorry for him and therefore compelled by civility to feign terror and keep jogging past stores filled with exactly one item each: a toaster, a hair dryer, a book of stamps. He stopped at a shop that contained some sort of parchment or scroll, and when he had the scroll in his hands, the man in the bear suit entered, and he saw that it was, of course, himself. He and himself in the bear suit stood looking at each other in mutual embarrassment, for a long time.
The bear began speaking, some alien language that, as he woke, morphed into a garbled announcement from the captain. Seat backs, tray tables, laptops, twenty minutes. His temple remained pressed against the cool window, night falling on the turbid marshlands below. Manhattan bristled into view. He’d been to New York three times in his life, twice after his army discharge and once with Carole. They’d ridden doltishly around Central Park in a hansom cab, but he’d drawn the line at reenacting the “Chopsticks” scene from Big, which had caused a tense moment at FAO Schwarz. He’d never known what to think of the place—its immensity and persistent growth in the face of all reason or common sense said something grand and tiring that he didn’t feel like figuring out but that struck him as essentially human, in the best and worst ways. Equal parts indestructible hope and unconquerable stupidity, or something like that.
He caught a taxi and slept most of the way to his hotel, the strangely named Best Western Hell’s Kitchen. His legs were leaden with fatigue, not to mention with the hangover he’d had since Kansas City, a hangover he suspected he would have for the rest of his life. Standing in line at the front desk, he momentarily turned to talk to Vance before remembering he’d gone home. Not that Richard blamed him. He didn’t blame anyone for getting tired of dealing with him. On the other hand, he couldn’t feel too sorry for Vance or anyone else on that count, either—he’d been dealing with himself for over fifty years.
In the lobby, a white-haired black man slept in one of the armchairs, his head tilted back and mouth wide open, agape at whatever outlandish dreamworld he inhabited. The walls of the hotel were some kind of textured faux-adobe that made Richard’s eyes swim. He got the key and rode the grease-smeared elevator up to the third floor. Door locked and blinds drawn, he called FreshDirect, ordered up a pallet of beer and three days’ worth of imperishable foodstuffs, and hunkered down for the next seventy-two hours.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Vance pulled away from the curb. In the rearview, Richard struggled heroically into the airport, counterbalanced by the suitcase he dragged wheels up, but Vance didn’t watch. He sped down the airport exit ramp, coasted out onto I-435, and was free. The junction with I-70 approached in ten miles. He’d looked up the route while waiting for the station clerk to process Richard’s paperwork. Back the way they’d come, I-70 to Denver, I-25 to Cheyenne, I-80 to Salt Lake, 15 North all the way to Butte, and then good old 90 east, back home to Spillman.
He turned on the radio in an attempt to dispel the twinge of doubt he felt about this return journey. Accompanied by reverb-soaked guitar and anodyne fiddle, a country singer effused in
a yodelly hiccup about the bygone pleasures of rural puberty: fishin’ ’n’ dreamin’ ’n’ kissin’. Vance tapped his fingers on the steering wheel along with the music, batting away one by one the uneasy thoughts that kept popping into his head. Pizza Boy. The dining room table and its snowbank of bills. Particularly insistent was a vision of his bedroom, the dark ossuary of his own adolescence, with its cairns of books, like markers for each year he’d spent down there, gladly entombed. He thought guiltily of his mother, and he hoped she’d eaten something in the last week. A week: it felt like he’d been gone for six months. He didn’t want to go back.
He turned off the radio and said it out loud: You can’t go back. To go back and be happy, he would have to unexperience everything: one billion Las Vegas lights winking in unconscious concert, Richard gray faced in the hospital bed, the howling insanity of the San Francisco wind. Cindy grinding down on top of him, her face in shadows—he still didn’t know what to make of that, and he wasn’t sure he ever would. He wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but that was okay. The meaning had been in the doing, and in the doing he was different now. Not an adult, maybe, but he was no longer pupal—no longer content to burrow into the comfortable darkness of his own lonely inertia—and no longer a pupil, either, of other people’s fictions. He was writing his own now, for better or worse.
Which, perhaps, was why what Richard had said niggled at him: Don’t you want to find out how this all winds up? Characteristically, Richard had meant himself and the tour—his own story—but he wasn’t wrong. Vance did want to see how it all turned out. It was only in aborting the trip, only in the prospect of not continuing on to New York, that he realized how much he’d been looking forward to seeing his father. “Looking forward to” wasn’t exactly right—you didn’t look forward to going to the dentist after five years, but you knew you should. You looked forward to getting it out of the way. And his father—or not so much his father as the father-shaped outline in his mind, the fact of his father’s perfect absence—was in Vance’s way, had been for as long as he could remember.