The Land of Steady Habits

by Ted Thompson

  He began setting the different pieces on a table, placing them in some sort of order, then he dropped a crumpled ball of tinfoil beside them.

  “So, Oleg, the old scientist? He hears the dog’s heartbeat out in space, right?”

  “What is all this stuff?”

  “Hang on—so he goes to Moscow and tries to convince them they have to go get her. But of course there’s no space program anymore and anyway nobody cares about a dog that symbolized the triumph of a country that no longer exists, right? So they laugh at him. Have a seat.” Charlie gestured to a leather chair.

  “So Oleg says screw you and starts building his own rocket, you know, out of whatever he can. But it’s basically a suicide mission because there’s no way he’ll be able to reenter the atmosphere—which, by the way, was what they knew would happen with Laika’s mission. She wasn’t supposed to make it back.”

  Charlie opened the crumpled aluminum and sprinkled a pinch of what looked like sea salt into the big bulbous end of his glass pipe.

  “So here he is,” he said, “crazy old Oleg and his junk rocket—and he does it, he shoots himself into space.” Charlie examined the stuff in the bulb, shook it. “And it’s not until he gets out there that he hears it.”

  “Hears what?”

  Charlie grinned. “The sound everything makes in orbit.” He raised his eyebrows. “You know what sound that is? Buh-bum, buh-bum, buh-bum. Like a heartbeat.” Charlie struck the trigger on a butane lighter and a blue flame appeared. “That’s actual science.”

  “Wait, I don’t get it.”

  “There was no Laika out there after all. He was just hearing his conscience. His broken heart or whatever. And without knowing it, he gave himself the exact same end as that beautiful animal. It’s irony. Or something. But I think how I draw it, you’ll know he also felt closer to her out there, or like released from his guilt.”

  He ran the flame along the bottom of the bulb.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I think it’s really sad.”

  “I thought it was pretty good.”

  “Charlie,” Anders said. “What is that?”

  “This? We call it Peruvian salt, but that’s just because the kid I know who makes it is from Peru.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Oh,” he said. The bulb had begun to sizzle, filling the boat with a terrible chemical smell along with the aroma of something sweet, like Glade. “I have no idea.”

  He leaned forward and inhaled from the end of the pipe, sucking the smoke in and holding it for what felt like an hour. The fumes were already making Anders woozy.

  “All right,” Charlie said when he exhaled. “It won’t take much. Usually one hit will do it. Also, I recommend removing your shoes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the carpet will basically feel like the greatest thing in the history of the world. Like kinda orgasmy.”

  “I’ll keep them on.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Charlie. “When this thing starts sizzling, put your mouth to the spout.”

  This one, it turned out, was a lot harsher than the last. At first it felt like sniffing the fumes from a bottle of bleach, but as soon as he tasted it, it permeated the roof of his mouth, passed through the gray folds of his brain, and exited directly through the top of his head.

  “Also,” said Charlie, already with that absent stoner’s glow, “I should warn you that it makes you really horny.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. That can be weird. But if you just surrender to it, it’s actually kinda nice.”

  Anders sat for a while in a state of joyful paralysis while Charlie talked, briefly holding forth on disjointed topics—wind farms, open-source code, a kind of lizard that could run on its hind legs across the surface of the water—until, exhausted, he fell back on the banquette and squinted up at the Christmas lights as though they were stars.

  “Helene’s tits are kind of weird,” said Anders.

  “Dude.”

  “But I mean I like them. They’re big now. And have these scars. A lot of scars.”

  “Seriously.”

  “And sometimes they’re all I can think about. Like for hours.”

  “Jesus. Stop it.”

  “It’s unusual.”

  “My mom has these veiny yoga arms,” said Charlie, as if finding a corollary. “Something about them totally makes me want to cry.”

  “I wish my son would call me,” said Anders. “I call him. Even though he never picks up. I don’t know. Maybe I just like hearing his voice on the message.”

  “Have you ever wondered what would happen if you disappeared?” said Charlie. “Not like died, where everyone cries at your funeral, but like an alien abduction or whatever—just poof? Gone?”

  “No.”

  “Like, what would change, you know?”

  “Probably more than you think.”

  “Like sometimes I have this vision of my life as this web, just this giant network of needs and wants and desires and dependence connecting me to other people, right? And I always thought the more threads I had coming to me and from me, the more, like, important I would be in the world. The harder it was to replace me. The people with like a million threads—you know, like a teacher who teaches a whole bunch of people to read or, I don’t know, maybe a minister who gives comfort to sick kids or whatever—they were the ones who mattered. They had like a million threads coming off them. It wasn’t about influence or power or any of that—it was about the web, you know?”

  “I think so.”

  “But the truth is that’s not really the case. The web is being remade every second of every day—it’s like constantly revising itself. It’s not this static thing. If you vanished, it’s just like other parts of it get stronger. The threads just remake the hole you left. Because the web is always there—it’s the threads, not the people, that are important.”

  “My feet feel incredibly weird.”

  “Dude,” said Charlie, looking back at him. “I’m telling you—take off your shoes.”

  Anders did as he was told, and the carpet became intensely interesting. He sat for a moment clenching and unclenching his toes with the sudden awareness of his own body. It felt tiny and fragile. It felt like a shell that he could discard. He thought about how nice it would be to just step out of it and leave it all behind, and as soon as he thought about that, he was overcome with sadness for himself and for his family and for all the people he would leave with it. He thought about his wife and his grandkids and the day his emaciated son had resurfaced on his doorstep in a tie, a Giacometti in a cheap suit, buzzcut and loafered with his hands clasped before him like a church person with bad news, and how all he wanted to do in that moment was hold him and tell him it was okay, how all of the anger and worry was nothing compared to his need to take him back in, and how this was always the great mystery, how his need to reject was surpassed only by his capacity to forgive.

  “Come on,” Anders said, putting his shoes back on. “I’m taking you home.”

  Charlie squinted at him. “You serious? Like, to my parents?”

  “Yeah, get your things.”

  “Dude, you’re blazed out of your mind right now.” Charlie reached into his sweatshirt pocket and tossed a prescription bottle at him. “Take the edge off.”

  “I’m not kidding. Come with me or I’ll call the police to come get you.”

  Charlie held up his hands. “Relax, all right? Just let me clean this crap up.”

  He started gathering his things, almost none of which they had used. “What was that for?” said Anders, pointing at the orange plastic barrel of what looked like a flare gun.

  “Oh,” said Charlie. “It was a stupid idea. I just thought we might want to shoot it off.”

  Anders shook his head. “I’ll be in the car.”

  Across the marina a halyard was pinging against its flagpole, a distant lonely music. The mist had passed and in its place was a clear, biting col
d. He started his car and cranked the heat, feeling the texture of his steering wheel with newfound appreciation. Eventually, he beeped the horn; Charlie was taking his time. He was probably running his hand along the cabinets and marveling at the many tiny cracks of its wood grain.

  Anders got out of the car and went back to the boat. It was dark in there, the air still burned with the medicinal smell from the pipe.

  “Charlie?” he said. He knocked on the bathroom door.

  He should have known there would be nobody there. When he opened the door, the hatch on the ceiling was popped open, and all that remained of Charlie was his turtle, sitting alone on the closed lid of the toilet.

  Anders ran out to the deck and shouted Charlie’s name, squinting into the dark, but there was nothing. He listened to the breeze, looking at the silhouetted eaves of silent homes, an entire town asleep, early risers and their productive rest, offspring tucked into warm beds, grandfather clocks and the hiss of radiators and dreams of security and comfort, until high above the rooftops, at the edge of the horizon, a magnificent orange streak flared across the sky.

  5

  Preston Simms Hill had debated, at nearly every stage of his life, getting in his car, pointing it west, and disappearing completely from the big judgmental eye of society. At first this was normal adolescent stuff—he’d grown up in a world so fiercely dedicated to maintaining its own privilege that it practically begged any thinking creature to disrupt it (or, in the case of his former best friend Addy, to torch the gymnasium of their country day school). But as his twenties had become his thirties and the injustices of prep school had receded into the background hum of the rest of childhood, he began to suspect that his desire to vanish from every situation that had expectations of him might be rooted in something other than rebellion. And now that he’d been booted, at thirty-three, from even his childhood home, he could finally understand what all those recovery speakers had been going on about: namely, that waking up for the third morning in a row in the igloo of your own uninsured car probably meant it was time to make a change.

  He’d been parked at the back of a gravel carpool lot off exit 18 with a handful of other rusted station cars that had been there since the nineties. He had told his mother, when she’d called to extend her guilt-assuaging invitation to Christmas Eve dinner, that he was crashing with a friend, a lie that was one hundred percent pride. The truth was that the last of his friends had left town after college, making the great migration to Brooklyn or Boulder, and he couldn’t bear to show up on Tommy’s doorstep and give his brother another reason to congratulate himself on his extraordinary responsibility. So that left him here, on a sort of road trip without a road, in a hometown without a home, ninety bucks to his name and no winter coat and the troubling sense that he had run out of people to blame.

  He sat up in his sleeping bag and felt the creak of his old car’s suspension. His breath had frosted the windows, bathing the car in blank white light. He cleared a patch with his palm and looked out at the train tracks and the dead marsh grass of the estuary beyond, where a flock of geese were waddling around, preening. His skin was hot with sleep. Three days without a shower was about the time you began to notice it. He pushed his sleeping bag into the foot well and stumbled into the harsh low light of the morning.

  Leaning against his front bumper, shivering in the cold, he Purelled his hands and forearms and brushed his teeth with what was left in his water bottle, trying not to concentrate on the fact that he was once again living out of his car. He could mark each incongruous section of his life with a period in which he had woken up in this car, on this backseat, one bare leg sticking out of his sleeping bag and a bruise on his ribs from the seat-belt buckle. Early on, all his unannounced nights away from home were a reaction to his parents’ insistence on squash and Latin and schools that required him to wear a navy blazer with big brass buttons, but by the time he disappeared from his first semester at BU (a school his father had to practically beg to get him into), his little tantrums of independence (his father’s words) had grown into something a bit more significant. What that was, at least at first, was a girl named Lizzie Greenleaf—the only good thing to come out of his stay at the expensive rehab in the Arizona desert—who was always going on about road-tripping and troubadouring and the wild freedoms underlying our national mythology. She was the smartest girl he had ever met and after rehab she had made it through only a week at Reed College before she shoved her belongings in a backpack and caught a lift to the Gorge, a field at the edge of a cliff in Washington State, where she camped alone until the Phish tour showed up and swept her down the West Coast to Santa Barbara. Which was when she called Preston from a pay phone and told him he should join her.

  Actually, what she had done was ask him about college, and when he said it was pretty cool, that he had a class about Heart of Darkness that traced the journeying-upriver theme from Dante all the way to that super eighties Robert Downey Jr. movie about strung-out rich kids in LA, she had seemed bored and quiet until he asked how she was doing and she went off about how she had realized that the greatest education was already living and breathing all around her and that the greatest teacher was already beating inside her ribs. “We happen to have been born at the most peaceful and prosperous time in the history of the world,” she said. “Do you really think the payoff for all that sacrifice is the privilege of choosing what cubicle to sit in? Preston, we’re beneficiaries of something that until now has only been a fantasy: We can do whatever we want.”

  It wasn’t like her arguments were particularly new, but they were passionate and peppered with references to writers he had never read, and, perhaps most persuasive, they were coming from her. They lived out of the back of his car and ran a small baked-goods business—shroom blondies and hash muffins and, when no oven was available (which turned out to be most of the time), uncooked lumps of dough and stems she carried around the parking lot on sheets of wax paper. Lizzie was from Indian Hill, Ohio, an enclave of Procter and Gamble executives that was a lot like his hometown except everyone there had gotten rich off toothpaste instead of something incomprehensible with stocks, and she was beautiful. She had a boyfriend back in Indian Hill to whom she was disappointingly loyal, which meant she referred to Preston as her friend or her best friend and often held his hand and draped her arm across his chest while they were sleeping, a position that made him feel safer than any seat belt in the world and that meant he frequently had to wait for his boner to chill before he climbed out of his sleeping bag in the morning. She had fine brown hair she had to re-dread every couple of weeks with surfboard wax and a stadium-light smile and a pair of cruelly perfect breasts that were perpetually braless and remained suspended by some miraculous force beneath the gossamer cotton of a vintage T-shirt. All this, no doubt, gave her a tremendous advantage in the baked-goods market, particularly with the backward-hat boys, and they were still to this day his go-to jack-off image, which was weird because he had never actually seen them, and also because she was dead.

  Looking back on it all, while it had lasted only a month and a half, it was still the most formative time of his life, despite being an easy joke for pretty much everyone else. Even now, when it came up, his older brother would swirl his hands in the air above his head in a caricature of a moronic noodle dance that Preston wished weren’t so accurate and say, “How’s the too-ur, bro?” in a sort of developmentally disabled Santa Barbara drawl, to which Preston would nod—Yes, yes, some people sounded like that—while his brother kept twirling and tucking his imaginary hair behind his ears. “It’s pretty sweet,” Preston would have to say eventually to get him to stop.

  Lizzie had died in a field. It was a bad dose that did it, which was ironic because she was always harping on about organics, how if it didn’t come from the earth, it didn’t go into her body, and she basically lived on these steel-cut-oat bars that you could find only at absurdly high-end health-food stores, but that’s what happened. And it’s not like
what followed was a logical progression—he hated that “if this, then that” shit, how it oversimplified everything. The one psychologist his mom had forced him to see had been obsessed with Lizzie—Why did he think he skipped her funeral? Why didn’t he go home? Why did he think he never told his parents? Why couldn’t he talk about what happened?—on and on, and it’s not like he had answers for her. It’s not like what happened answered anything. It was the third night at Alpine Valley and it was mid-October in Wisconsin, a little too chilly to be camping but people did anyway, so the grounds had swollen to the size of a medieval city. He and Lizzie had only one ticket that night, which they flipped for because the band had a reputation for playing insane, historically significant sets on the third night at Alpine, and she said he’d won, though Lizzie would never show the flip. She would keep the coin tight in her fist and look at it with one eye as though peering into a microscope, and she would come back with this huge smile, a smile that said You’re never going to believe this, which was basically her look all the time, like something enormous and wonderful had happened and she was about to share the news. This time she said he won so he went in alone, and the amazing thing was that it was a historically significant show. His ticket was for the lawn but he was able to push his way to the front so he was leaning against the guardrail and was close enough to the soles of Trey’s Pumas that he could have licked them, and though he was sober as a newborn he was directly under the storm of the band’s lights, which gave every movement of the set a kind of full-body experience, one that was topped only by the second set, which he spent on the back of the lawn under the green sky of an actual storm that had gathered and electrified everything down to the hair on his toes. He felt the dense warships of clouds collect above him, and during the soaring end of a song that had started some twenty minutes before, the sky opened into fat sheets of rain and thunder while people on the lawn went bananas dancing, and he lay there, sinking into the mud and having a semimystical experience that he could never find the words to explain.