Nevertheless, don’t forget to listen—to put your ear to the book at least once a page. Hear the hill-and-dales? There are different levels and layers to Volkswagen repair, and some of them can only be heard, the gap between each note (or each frequency within the note) experienced firstflight. I would transmute it for you if I could, but to do so I’d have to be in the same room with you, and to lean in close to you and hum the prayers into your ear.
PROCEDURE PRAYERS
Prayers, by the way, can be an invaluable reading tool. The roads will get dark, will detach, will fold over us, digest us, break us down, change us for good. You might get crossfaced and think about turning back. And that’s precisely what western Massachusetts wants you to do—it wants you to give up, to quit narrating and recording, to go home and let your father go.
But you can’t—you cannot. There is too much at stake. Instead of turning around and tracing your way back through the sentences (Good luck with that! Who can say if the route’ll still be there?), first try pulling over for a moment and saying a quick Volksie verse. Let that prayer spread across the page, into the paper, down through the pages below it and into the chapters that follow. Sooner or later your psong will be heard—by a friend or a family member, if you sent it to them, or by Volkswagen, who’ll send out a nomad if need be. See, every cul-de-sac here is a prayer—a crooked, ’71 plea to something bigger than itself (my father, his father, his father’s father), a know-how that these spareparts and sparethoughts (the battens of pre-mourning I’d collected, the gallons of Fear of Death I’d stacked in the basement) were worth something. When it was all over, I didn’t know what to do with all of this life! I had to put it somewhere, so I put it here, converted it into Volkswagen roads, father-to-sons and procedure-songs.
THE TIMING BELT
Keep in mind that every copy of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive works differently (and some not at all!), that every book has its own unique personality or point of view—a point of view that you decide on or shape. Thus, some versions of this book speak to the makeup of your particular car while others have nothing to do with it.*
Remember, too, that you’re not alone in the Volkswagen—that there are people next to you in the back seat, and that you need to be kind to them. The fact that you might not recognize them doesn’t mean anything; for all you know they might be your mother twenty years younger, or your future grandson, or an image of the clock in the first classroom you ever kissed. We are all connected—each copy of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is wired together using special Volkswagen technology, thereby making the experience one of true, measured sharing. One of the chief concerns of this project is the possibility that might exist for this new type of collective reading, and what happens to a story, say, when two hundred pairs of eyes are looking at it at the same time. Some words can stand that gaze, I’m sure, but others will spring leaks, will crack, will weep. In every case, the story itself will be changed.
We will see what happens! We won’t know, though, until the book is in everyone’s hands and everyone turns to the first page.
So go ahead. Do it—open the book. See? You see me, right? And I see you. See? I am reading your face, your eyes, your lips. I know the sufferdust on your brow. I can see you reading and I can tell, too, when you are here, when you’re absent, what you’ve read and how it affects you. There is no more hiding. I see your chords—your fractures, your cold gifts, where and when you’ve hurt people and why. It’s all right there—your stories are written right there on your face!
• • •
Sigh. All I have is now in your hands—the pieces and parts of manual and story, a collage of loss, that make up the VW Beetle. And even though he’s just a vehicle (a guffarian, a here-to-there), I always trusted him to carry us forward. The VW believed (even when I didn’t) that we were saving something—that just by reading and writing, shifting and steering, we were helping to keep something alive. And he was right—we were.
Oop—look at the money. It’s time to go.
Here—take this key. It’s called “How to Use This Book.” It starts the car, gets us going. Together, we will move forward through these were-cities and yester-hills and towards a deeper understanding of the art of loving and sustaining (at least for a time) the machine of parts and memories that is your Volkswagen Beetle.
INTRODUCTION
I wish I could take you to the China House on the Smith College campus.
I never knew much about the China House, except that it was a little covering about the size of a shed with a bench inside. You could sit on the bench and look out at Paradise Pond. The hut was old, and built off of an actual tree—the limbs ran right through the wood.
The first time I took the VW to the China House he thought it was his mother. “I swear to god that I was born here,” he told me as we sat on the bench. “I have distant memories of seeing this first.”
“Those Memories aren’t real—it just means that I need to clean the filter,” I said. “You know very well that you were born in our home on Crescent Street.”
“That’s your Volkswagen,” he said. “Mine is, I was born in these knotty arms.”
I was annoyed at his fibs. “VW—”
“This pond was the first thing I ever laid eyes on,” he said.
At one point or another I’ve taken everyone I ever cared about to the China House: my father, my brother, the Memory of My Father, the Two Sides of My Mother. I took most of my girlfriends there as well—the Lady from the Land of the Beans, the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, the Scientist.
The China House is supposed to be a place where you reflect back and meditate, but I tried meditating several times without result. My understanding was, you were supposed to be very still and something would come to you. But nothing like that ever happened to me. I closed my eyes and all I saw were flashes—a diner, its walls molting; a greenhouse blowing its nose into a hankie and straightening its tie.
Maybe the China House was his mother, the cut wood and the live tree cousins! Did I have faith and then forget?
Those trystips were years ago, though—one day in the fall of 2005, the China House submitted her resignation to the pond and moved away. I heard two conflicting stories explaining why: First, my friend the Chest of Drawers told me that she fell in love with a comedian and moved with him to Fall River, Massachusetts. Later, though, I heard that she was admitted to law school.
The Chest warned me about the China House’s departure a few weeks in advance, though, and when he told me I made a mental note, a score on my memory coil, to go sit with the House one more time before she left. But it was a busy time—I was working as a wire in order to keep my car on the road—and the idea slid down my spine and somewhere into my body where I didn’t even think to look for it.
It wasn’t until that winter, when the snow came, that the China House’s absence became my absence. One morning a few months after the Volkswagen’s death, Northampton woke up to a literary snow squall—eighteen inches of flakes of torn paper falling from the sky. The paper, as it settled, was so heavy that the plows couldn’t move it. No one could work or drive or think clearly—everyone stayed home in their kitchens.
But I was living as an angle-fish on Elm with a roommate I couldn’t stand—he read me his original librettos whenever I came out into the common rooms—so I bundled up and went out for a walk. Nursing a grapefruit of sadness in my belly, I made my way over to the Smith College campus. I was looking for the peace that only the China House could offer me. But when I walked down the hill towards the spot where the House had been, I remembered that she was gone—that she’d moved away to start a new life.
As I walked down the footpath, though, I peered through the falling paper and saw a new house standing in the China House’s place. This house wasn’t shed-like and quiet; it was red, with vinyl siding, and when I stepped closer it said, “Welcome to the Meditation Station!”
I was cold, so I stepped inside. It locke
d its doors.
“Want peace?” the voice asked. “Want the moment? Well you’ve come to the right place. Please wait,” the voice said, and I could feel it scanning me, sending signals through my legs to test the blood in my veins. I could hear it computing. Then it said, “Your peace level is a—” it paused, “three. Want more?” Then it named its price.
At that moment I really missed the old China House. Though I knew it wouldn’t—couldn’t—hear me, I told this new house that I just wanted to sit here quietly and listen to each piece of page, shuffling down from the sky, falling on the pile of brother-, mother-, and sister-pages and settling to rest.
KATYDIDS AT NOON
The Invisible Pickup Truck didn’t see the Tree’s attack on my father, but he did hear it—he told me later that he was parked at the far end of the lot, and reading a novel about trout, when he heard the sound of a window shattering. He said he also remembered the noise my father made—an unk, he said—as the Tree split open his chest. Atkin’s, caught off guard, began to rev and vibrate nervously, and employees came running from behind the deli counter. The Truck came running, too, and when he saw my father’s body dangling from the Tree he tried to tackle him, slamming his face right into the Tree’s knee.
I don’t think the starving Tree had planned on this—on any sort of struggle or commotion. He might just have been too hungry to have fully thought through what he’d do after pulling the stories, and the heart, from my father. Or maybe he panicked when he heard the sudden, faint barking in the distance—Amherst CityDogs, notified and rushing to the scene. The way the Truck tells it, the Tree grabbed him with his free hand, lifted him by his invisible hood and tossed him twenty feet into the street. The Tree must have considered his options for escape—he probably searched the road for cars, then assessed the Invisible Pickup Truck and decided he was too damaged to be driven. Then he must have heard the engine of Atkin’s Farm, that nervous country hum.
With my father’s body still stuck to his hand, the Tree trudged through the broken glass, into the store, behind the counter and into the kitchen. He shifted the farm into first gear and drove it away.
It’s unclear just what happened next—where the Tree went. It’s possible he turned the farm to the right and sped up 116, burying Atkin’s in the safe wilderness of Belchertown or Hadley. It’s just as likely, though, that he drove out to 47, slipped the farm down into the Connecticut River and laid low for a few days, resting at the river bottom and taking time to camouflage the farm so that it could no longer be identified—so that it resembled every other sadnews in western Massachusetts.
Wherever he went, the farm was not seen for several years; neither were the Cooley-Dickinson Hospital, the Conway Inn or the three Atkin’s employees that worked the bakery counter, all of whom were trapped inside when the Tree fifed the farm.
Five or ten minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot in my slow, rotten VeggieCar and found an empty patch of land, a bleeding hysterical Truck, a few Atkin’s employees huddled together and a pack of CityDogs pacing the ground with coffee mugs in their paws and cigarettes dangling from their lips.
I ran to the half-conscious Truck first and spoke with him as they loaded him into the ambulance. He mumbled a How to Use This Book of what had happened. I remember he just kept apologizing, over and over.
I held the Truck by his lapel. “Is he alive?” I begged.
“I did everything I could, _____,” the Truck forked.
“Is he alive,” I said again.
“His chest was … split,” said the Truck, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the street.
“Were there stories in his eyes? Any stories at all?”
The Truck wept. “I didn’t see any,” he said.
The ambulance took the Truck away and I approached the CityDogs, who were taking measurements of the soilpatch where the farm had been and interviewing an Atkin’s employee who’d sustained a deep, literary cut on the chin. I touched a Dog on the shoulder and he turned around, growling softly.
I was breathing so hard I could barely speak. “What about my father,” I gasped.
The CityDog read his report. “Heart Tree needed food—”
“Heart Attack Tree,” I said.
“Right,” the CityDog said, and he took a pen in his paw and made a correction.
“He attacked my father,” I said.
“I appreciate that,” the Dog said. “Trees of this variety, they get so hungry they go off their diet.”
I crossed my arms.
“They feed on hearts. Government gives them fake ones, but they’re expensive for the trees and sometimes they don’t work so good. Certainly not like the real thing.”
“Those are my Dad’s stories,” I said.
“I’m not saying it’s not a problem—it is,” the CityDog said, and he put his paw on my shoulder. “I’m just saying, we see it a lot.”
“Fuck the Tree,” I said. “My father—how do we find him?”
The Dog looked down at his clipboard. “Truck said … that his chest was almost in two pieces.”
“So we need to track them down quickly.”
The CityDog furrowed his brow. “Did you hear what I just said?”
By that time my family had arrived: My brother and the Promise of Colorado were holding each other off by the once-upon-a-pastures and the Two Sides of My Mother were talking to Cooley-Dickinson’s sister.
I told the CityDog that we could help if needed, that my family could be a part of the search party. The Dog looked down at his boots. Behind him, the other CityDogs were packing up their measuring tools.
I kept pressing. “Do you have an ID on that Tree—any record of where he lives?”
The Dog shook his head. “Those trees live up in the woods. Some of them don’t even have names.”
“I’m just asking where to go,” I said. “Did he pull over and hide or hit the road, do you think?”
“Sir, listen,” the Dog said. But that’s all he said. He looked into my face and his eyes told me the no-plan; to them, I realized, this was just another rideaway.
By then it was cold and growing dark, and most of the Dogs were gone. Eventually everyone left, even the Two Sides of My Mother.
“What about Dad?” I said to them as they piled into the Cadillac.
I knew their answer by the shape of their frowns, by the sound of the Cadillac’s engine as it rose, by the shade of their taillights.
I stood there in the fresh dirt. “What about my father,” I said to the night.
The night replied, “Your father is dead.”
• • •
Four days later, my ex-girlfriend—the Lady from the Land of the Beans, who’d come over to help, took pity on me and let me faith with her—gave birth to an electric-blue 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. A few months afterwards, horrified at what she’d made, she left Northampton and traveled back to her home (the Land of the Beans) for good. I was left to raise the child by myself.
The Beetle was one story at first, then two, then a series of atonal variations. As I soon realized, he was the gain from the covering, a car made in my father’s own image to titeflex his absence. I made promises to myself: I would raise this child, keep him running well. I would finally become an adult—run the 57 Crescent Street apartments, take care of the Two Sides of My Mother and my brother, have a family of my own, be the father for my Volkswagen that my father was for me.
I thought I could. I never, in a million dollars, dreamed that one road could have this many tolls.
* A fact that my son had a very hard time with. I told him, “You may drive the same routes as Muir’s cars, kiddo—that doesn’t mean you are one!”
II. HOW WORKS A VOLKSWAGEN
REAR DIFFERENTIAL
Sometimes it was me and the Memory of My Father in the 1971 VW Beetle, sometimes it was me and my girlfriend at the time, sometimes it was a stranger. There was always room for surprise. I might think that I was driving with the Memory of My Father t
hrough the Memory of Ludlow, turn the page/shift the clutch and find myself somewhere else (Pelham/Leeds) with someone new (the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, the Chest) or I might think I was with someone and turn and find that all this time I’d been alone, telling stories to myself only.
Once I was on my way towards Route 116 in Amherst when, in the middle of those cranberry turns, I looked over and found my passenger to be an old, creaky mechanical bull. This bull rode with a bottle of wine between his legs, and he wore a wide-collared shirt, and his face told me that he’d been forced over the course of his trip to say goodbye to people that he loved. He was holding in that love. It burned inside him like a soldier.
We rode in silence. I guessed that we’d been riding this way for hours, but I swear that I’d never seen him before, that I have no memory of picking him up.
Then, as automatic as his arrival, he pointed. “There,” he said. He was pointing down the road, at the entrance to Hampshire College. I took a right turn and went up the hill. “Take a right at the circle,” he said, and I did.
As we sunk deeper into the stomach of the campus, I felt a new approach to thinking and knowledge taking me over. “This drive is my education—I feel smarter already,” I said, and I laughed, but the bull didn’t seem to think that it was funny. He looked out the window with those bull’s eyes. Those eyes were like government checks, cold and blue.
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