BREAKS IN THE ACTION
Finally, fear is an important force in the Volkswagen—fear of failure, fear of the past. Sometimes it can stop us in our tracks, cause splits in the text or drive the VW to rash behavior. But we can also make it work for us. Your Volkswagen comes factory-cabled to stop when he feels apprehensive and afraid—if he sees a field of hairbrushes, for example, or feels the shadow of mooseclouds overhead.
I don’t know if it’s possible to list in any comprehensive way all of the things that frightened my VW (and thus, caused him to stop), but here’s a start:
Anything made of cheese. Cheese made the VW very nervous—the smell of it, its skin, its high, rich voice.
People or things that hurt me! The VW was very protective, and he fought for me (usually, at least—see “Engine Stops or Won’t Start” for fuel based on a rare exception), clenched his fists and went to war with me inside him—battled toll booths, railroad crossings, other cars.
Wheat
CityDogs
Anyone touching him or looking too closely in his windows
Needles
Trees. The VW was born with a natural fear of trees. I don’t know exactly how this works—whether his memory coil was permanently coded that way because of what happened to his grandfather, or what. Your VW experiences fear through the same channels described above—through stories, first, and through their vision and sound sensors as well. When the VW comes across a moment that he or she finds frightening, that moment is supposed to send a signal to one of five cylinders and cause the cylinders to begin to bleed. It is the bleeding—the blood in the lines—that causes a clamp in the wheel called the caliper to close, the car to stop (and in extreme cases, the VW to instinctively lock his doors, put up his hands or cover his head). Supposedly, the cylinders are triggered by your fear as well. If they don’t react, you can trigger them manually with pedals four through eight (more on this in Chapter Four).
• • •
I know all of this sounds mysterious, and that there is much we still don’t know. But we will learn as we go. That’s part of the excitement, I think—the joy of discovery, it seems to me, is necessary at all times, in all person-to-persons, stories, roads. As your Volkswagen ages and yearns for repair, you will find his one-of-a-kind hills, valleys and streams, and learn how best to harvest, care for and repair them.
ONE MORE NIGHT
Let me turn around, go back a few miles, finish the tune of the Tree Attack.
That Sunday night, I tripped home from Atkin’s in the VeggieCar and saw, as I drove down Crescent Street, the Lady from the Land of the Beans pedaling her beanbike towards the house as fast as she could. I pulled over in front of the house and the Lady from the Land of the Beans dropped her bike and opened her beanarms and I fell into them. She wrapped me in the way that only she could, and I don’t even remember the next moments—walking up to my apartment, laying down on the futon. What I remember is her shielding me as my clothes wept, as my house—my father’s house—moaned low tunes and the rooms filled with cream. She told me stories—her memories, moments she’d shared with my Dad (She and I already had pages and pages at that point—we’d dated seriously for about a year and stayed tightly wired in the three or four years since we’d broken up.).
I don’t own everything about the night, but I do remember one story leading to another, and that each one created a bit more might, and that soon there was enough belief that we were holding each other differently, yessing slightly and hinting at faith. It sounds cashew to say it, given what had happened that morning, but at the time it seemed right—I was retreating, she was sheltering me, we were muting the loss with the natural, mindless making of something new.
But then the Lady from the Land of the Beans stopped us. “Wait a second,” she whispered, taking my face in her hands. “What’s happening here?”
I tried to kiss her and she pulled back. “_____,” she said. “I’m here to help with what’s going on inside you—”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“The ship that can’t find land,” she said. “But this isn’t right.”
“But, we’re telling stories. Making something.”
She forced a smile. “No we aren’t,” she said.
“Wait,” I said. I moved in close, whispered to her. “Just wait.”
“What,” she said.
Suddenly it was clear—I’d always known it, and just had to say it. “You have a Volkswagen Promise inside you,” I told her.
Her eyes were deaconesses. “You don’t know that,” she said.
I nodded. “Look and see.”
“No,” she said.
“Please,” I said.
She seemed to think about it for a second. Then she looked down to her stomach and lifted her vest. We both studied her belly. The skin had gone momentarily clear, like a film. There, inside her womb, was a tiny Volkswagen ticket for the taking.
“See?” I said. “Everything has a price.”
Her face uncoiled. “I don’t know if this is the right story,” she said.
“It just feels wrong,” I told her. “It will feel as good as a writing shirt before you know it.” And with that I leaned forward and kissed her, sending my ideas for the Volkswagen into her mouth, down her throat, into her lungs. She resisted at first, but I slipped my hand onto her belly and it grew warm.
I withdrew just enough to speak. “The Volkswagen Promise,” I said.
Her eyes were a vice. “The Volkswagen threat,” she whispered into my mouth. Then she pressed against me, sending me all of her fear and questions.
And then, as if on cue, a Volkswagen Promise drove into the bedroom: a living, breathing oath to that new, unspeakable word, “home.”
• • •
We faithed, and as usual it took me a long time. At the end, though, something happened—it was easy, I was stealing from a bank and there were no alarms, no guns, no customers even.
When she lifted her body off of me I saw why.
“Shit,” I said. I sat up. “Look, look,” I said, checking for breath, for a pulse.
There was nothing. “I think it’s gone,” I said.
“What?” she said, and turned on the light.
“The condom. It’s dead. It’s not breathing.”
The Lady from the Land of the Beans saw. It had been a sheath but now it was just a ring.
I slipped it off. It was like a soldier that had been shot so many times that you couldn’t identify it. It didn’t look like any condom that I had ever seen.
We took a few minutes to collect ourselves. Then we put on our clothes and our coats and our boots and went out into the snow. It was amazingly, astoundingly cold.
I carried the condom in a little cardboard matchbox coffin and we walked through Smith College and up into the pasture behind the old closed-down mental hospital. I brought a shovel and dug a hole. The ground was cold so I could only get an inch or two down. I put the condom in and we bowed our heads and said a little prayer for god to take care of it. Then it was my job to push dirt over it.
But I couldn’t take it. I threw the first shovel of dirt and I just broke down. I sat down on the freezing earth and the Lady from the Land of the Beans sat next to me and leaned against me. When I could, I got up and finished the job. Then we walked home.
It was almost morning by that time, so we didn’t go to sleep. We just sat in my apartment, which was little and dirty and cold, and we got into this conversation about what happens when you die. I wanted to know: Why did it happen? What had the condom (or my father, for that matter) done wrong in its life? And where did it go? Was it somewhere on earth, or just sleeping forever?
The Lady from the Land of the Beans told me her theories.
I said, “So sadness can kill a thing?”
“Sure—there are stories like that all the time,” she said. “A spouse dies, the other follows right after. It’s like, the body responds to the mind or something.”
I looked up at her. “You think he’s looking down on us right now?”
“The condom?”
I nodded.
She took my hands in hers. “He’s free from pain now,” she said. “And he sees us and forgives us for what we’ve done.”
I was weeping. “I’m not sure. I don’t feel forgiven,” I said.
“You are. He won’t hold anything against you,” she said. In her eyes, a wave crashed against the shore and then rolled out, leaving something unidentifiable on the sand.
She wrapped her hands around her stomach. “Something’s happening,” she said.
I knew it was. “I know it is,” I said.
• • •
The next morning I went down to Starbucks for coffee and I got in a fight with the woman behind the counter over money. She wouldn’t give me my correct change.
“This isn’t right,” I told her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I mess up?”
I showed her how much change I had.
“No, I think it’s right,” she said.
“I should get four back,” I said.
“You gave me a five, right? The coffee’s a dollar fifty-eight, and I gave you back three forty-two.”
“That’s a one. The coffee’s one dollar. That means I should get four back.”
“It’s a dollar fifty-eight,” she said.
“You’re wrong, this isn’t right,” I said.
Her eyes were pounding, watery.
“I’m being cheated!” I said. I pitched my cup of coffee. It splashed all over the front window, and on other customers, sitting in chairs. I pointed at the woman. “You have no idea what it means to lose someone,” I said, “what that can do to you.”
A SCANNER DARKLY
And when did I get the writing removed from my blood? It was much later. I was, I don’t know, in my late thirties, early forties. I’d lost my job at the Wheel and the book of power had failed and started decomposing. My son was dead and his Memory wanted nothing to do with me. A symphony couldn’t save me.
Then I met a woman, an Emily. It was her suggestion to have the procedure, and it smelled to me like truth at the time. What I’m saying is, there were wires between us. Emily worked as a landscaper, drafting plans in the winter and planting in the summer. She was really good at it—she and her firm had single-handedly saved Forest Park, that old Springfield-ian sumner. When she took the account the bushes and trees were four months into a hunger strike. Through perseverance and kindness she made them understand the city’s point of view, though, and soon there was peace.
Emily had soft city skin and black, uncomplicated hair. She was energetic, upbeat, an optimist. Early on in our relationship she asked to see my words, my power, and she studied them carefully. When I asked her what she thought, I’d expected her to encourage me to restore the book. Instead, though, she asked if I’d ever considered going to a clinic and having the writing removed from my blood.
She wasn’t saying this to be selfish—even now I still believe that. Emily just thought that the writing, and all the power-maintenance, was more trouble than it was worth. “It’s affecting your health, for one thing,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to be able to walk around without feeling dizzy all the time?”
It was true—so many years of carrying the magnetized, satellited book on my shoulder, near my brain, had left me constantly dizzy and nauseous. I’d been to a few doctors about it, and no one had been able to pinpoint it—the closest a doctor had come to doing so was to suggest that my blood vessels were constricted in some way. The only time I wasn’t dizzy in those days, ironically, was when my hands were in the power itself.
“Look at the way the story spills out of it,” Emily said, gesturing to a page and its margins. “Do you realize what people would think of you if it was ever broadcast? And there are hardly any women in it, _____, any love.”
I grimaced—that word hurt my ears.
“Or, look at this!” she said, turning the page. “The story you wrote about your Dad’s—”
“That’s different,” I objected. “That one is a highway.”
“Even so,” she said. “This chemical—that’s all it is, by the way, a chemical in your blood—delivered you pages of loneliness. And death!”
“I was going for the exact opposite, though—”
“I know you were, sweetie,” she said.
“I was trying to write someone back to life—that’s not an easy thing to do!”
“But to even have to go there,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy things as they are right now?”
She was so window, so kind, and I still maintain that she had my best interests in mind—that she just wanted me to be happy. And I remember feeling anxious during that discussion because the stakes seemed so high. She was asking me to make a choice that would affect our relationship for years to come. And women like Emily were not easy to find or create.
So I made an appointment and we went in. It was on a Tuesday in the spring. Emily and I were planning a trip to Ireland that summer, and I remember that she brought a book on Galway to read in the waiting room. As we waited, she put her arm over my shoulder and we flipped through the pictures: bipolar castles, soggy streets, democratic fields of green.
Then a nurse called me in. As I stood up, Emily kissed me in the ear, which she did whenever she wanted to tell me something very good or very bad. “This is right,” she hissed. “I’m sure of it.”
“Me too,” I said.
I followed the nurse into a large room with a metal table attached to a ten-foot-long tube-shaped machine. The nurse had me take off my clothes and lay down on the table. Two needles came in and stood over me.
“Good morning—Mr. _____?” said the needle to my right. “Ready to go?”
“Will this hurt?” I said.
The needle made a guardrail face. “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,” he said.
I didn’t have a chance to ask him what that meant. The needles strapped my wrists and ankles in place, told me to brace myself, and drove small clusters of needles into my fingernails.
My mind went white, no-word, with pain. I screamed and wept. The needle chuckled. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Is it that bad?”
The other needle drove a cluster of needles into the bottom of my testicles. My white mind shuddered and turned. I pulled against the straps. “Easy, easy,” the needle to my right said. “Just imagine how you’ll feel when this is over. Like a new man, right?”
“Right,” I gasped.
“Just two more, OK?”
I nodded. He drove a lengthy needle into one of my ears and then the other.
Then he was leaning over me. “Mr. _____?” he said.
I opened my eyes.
“This table’s going to slide forward now, into this tube,” he said, and he put his hand on the machine behind my head.
“I can’t take any more needles,” I begged.
“No more needles,” he said, smiling. “This part’s easy—it’s just like a tanning salon.”
I nodded.
“OK, here we go.” He pressed a button and the tube slid forward.
Inside the chamber, the walls lit up and I was bathed in a strange-smelling light. I could feel that light communicating in some way with the needles that the needle had driven in; I felt a uniform pressure in my legs and chest and head, and a singing in my balls, hands and brain.
My breath began to slow down, and I became numb to the pressure. At some point I drifted off. I didn’t wake up until the table slid out of the tube. I opened my eyes and the needle was standing over me.
“I fell asleep,” I said.
“That happens,” the needle said, pulling the needles out of my hands. Then he held up a thick plastic bag. It was filled with an opaque, silvery liquid. “There it is.”
“That’s the writing?”
He nodded. “You’re all set, my friend. No more writing for you,” he said.
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“Not even checks?” I joked.
He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.
• • •
As it turns out, though, Emily wasn’t a real woman. I’d written her, compiled from women I’d seen and wished I could know, plus some that had been my friends or partners along the way. I walked out into the waiting room and there was no one there—no woman, no book on Ireland.
After a few months, though, I came to accept this. In fact, I filed it as further evidence to support the decision I’d made. I mean, I’d created a woman, just as I had a terrible tree and the death of a loved one.
But then, in the year that followed, my father really did die, of a second heart attack, while working on the Pachysandra Trail, and it split open my chest: I lost my job, stopped going outside, didn’t want contact with anyone. All I wanted to do was write, to make something, something wonderfully fake, a power made of dust and blood that I could turn on when I needed it and turn off when I’d had enough. If I could write myself away from my own life, get lost, even fucking better.
So I went back to the clinic, spoke again to the needle. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “It’s a one-way procedure—we discard the writing immediately. The state requires that we do so.”
“What about a transplant—someone else’s writing?”
He rubbed his head.
“There’s so much I haven’t done yet,” I told him. “My mother—I haven’t written about her, or any of the great friends I’ve had. I’ve loved so many people, and I want to power every one of them.
“There must be something you can do,” I said.
The needle leaned in. “There’s a very controversial nose in California who does writing transplants, but with various outcomes,” he said. “The procedure is possible in theory, but it’s pretty dangerous. Your body might reject the writing you’re given.”
“It’s worth a try,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Page 4