We were driving down 63 in Leverett when the VW slowed to a stop and I got out. “What’s the story?” I said.
“You tell me,” said the VW, coughing and shaking his head. “A syllabus?”
In those days my writing was dischordant, every note flat. I said, “So what?”
“A syllabus is not a story.”
“Well, it’s all I can come up with right now,” I said.
“But I can’t run on it.”
“You can if you scan it right,” I said.
“It’s just a list, Dad—there’s no Procedure, even! It’s just a bunch of cheap words—”
“These words work fine.”
“Not for me they don’t,” said the VW.
I threw my hands. “What do you want me to do?”
“Write!”
“Right here?” I said. “On the side of the road?”
The VW blinked.
“It’ll take hours,” I said.
“I don’t care how long it takes,” the VW said.
I custom-swore, grabbed my power from the front seat and sat down on the curb. “You like to make my life difficult, don’t you?”
“How hard is it to write fuel?” the VW said. “All I need is a freaking A-to-B. A character, something!”
I tried. I put my hands on the keys. After a minute or so I said, “I can’t think of anything!”
“Start with a conflict, how about,” the VW said.
“Like what?”
“A problem—any problem.”
“Here’s a problem—I want to go home, but my son won’t move.”
“Fine—start there, then!” the VW said.
PROCEDURE (II)
Then there was the time we were daytripping towards the Quabbin and the VW started complaining about being tired. “Can we stop and rest for a second?” he asked.
“We’re almost there—let’s stop when we get there, OK?”
“How about a quick nap?”
“We’re like five miles away!”
A mile or two later, though, the VW stalled. “What’s happening, kiddo?” I said.
The VW didn’t answer me.
“Hey!” I said. I hit the breaks, steered us into the breakdown lane and got out of the car.
The kid was fast asleep.
PROCEDURE (III)
Just a few miles past the Café Evolution, veeping onto Elm, the VW shouted a custom-made and coasted to a stop. I said, “Ey—what’s happening?”
He mumbled an answer.
“What?” I said.
He was speaking too quietly for me to hear him—all I heard was “wrong road.”
I got out of the car and went around to the front. The VW was studying the pavement. “What’s the problem?” I said.
“This is the wrong version,” he said. “There’s a history here.”
“A what?”
“Listen.” The VW put his ear to the asphalt. “There was a stadium right here—a huge baseball field with rows of seats. This is where Northampton’s team, the Words and Pictures, used to play.”
“It was?” I said.
“Right here! I was the shortstop.”
I put my hands on my hips, suddenly realizing what was happening. “VW—”
“We were the best team in western Massachusetts. I remember ol’ Glue Stevenson, who played third—”
“There wasn’t ever a stadium here, kiddo,” I said. “You’re having problems with your memory coil is all.”
“—was at the plate this one night, against a mean, cantered industrial grill—”
“This is all just a bad coil-wrap.”
“And that grill had the best continue-pitch in the league.”
“OK. You can tell me this story at home, alright?”
“You mean keep going? No way,” said the VW.
“What? Why not?”
“Dad, this spot is historical for me. How can you expect me to just drive over the field’s Memory as if it wasn’t ever here?”
“Because it wasn’t,” I said.
“It was—you just don’t remember it,” the VW said.
“Can we please go home now?”
The VW shook his head. “I’m staying right here.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said.
“I’m not kidding at all,” the VW said.
And he wasn’t. I pleaded with the VW to let the “memory” go, but he wouldn’t move. I had to call a tow truck to get us both home.
PROCEDURE (IV)
The VW would start to lurch and sputter, and then he’d stop running altogether. I’d get out of the car and open the engine compartment. When I did I’d find:
A landfill
A candy store
A factory of some sort
I don’t know, but something took my picture
An old woman, pointing her finger at me and shaking her head
“What do you see?” the VW’d say.
I’d tell him.
“Can you fix it?” he’d ask.
Hardly ever!
“Of course I can,” I’d say.
VALVE ADJUSTMENT
There was the half-faced woman and the Scientist, and then there was the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, who lived and worked at the Don Muller Gallery in Northampton. I really came close to loving this woman; she was bright and creative, an artist, and I could spend a good deal of money with her without feeling the draw of the power. She was also the one who told me about the village of Shelburne Falls, incidentally, because she was born there—forged by a mother (raw sand) and a father (a glass-blowing factory film) out on the scene of the body of glacier-pockmarked stone called the Potholes.
I met the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass at the Paradise City Arts Festival, where she was selling handmade moods. Each one was completely unique, and it came with its own case and certificate of authenticity. I was supposed to be there to write a story for the Wheel, but as we were browsing the tables the VW became fascinated by one of these moods—a new sort of skepticism—and he wouldn’t put it down.
“How did you get the happiness in there?” the VW asked the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, who stood behind her table in a simple black dress.
“I work with a microscope,” she explained. “I fused the happiness with a steady disbelief.”
“Jeez. It must have taken so much money,” the VW said.
“It did—”
“It’s beautiful,” the VW said. “It’s a beautiful mood.”
“Thanks, man,” she said. “It’s cool that you like it so much.”
I didn’t say anything. To be honest, I was intimidated by her beauty—by the way the light attached itself to her, passed through her multi-hued cheeks and neck and hair and sprang from it as if somehow stronger.
After a few minutes I told the VW to put the mood down. He begged me to buy it, but I said no. It wasn’t even an option for me—I just didn’t have the time with me.
“You know what?” the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass said. “This one’s on the house. Take it.”
The VW’s eyes brightened. “Really?”
“No,” I said to him. Then I turned to her. “That’s very kind. But I can’t let you—”
“I’m not giving it to you,” she said to me. “I’m giving it to him.”
“Yeah,” the VW said. He put the mood on and his face became very suspicious.
“Take that off,” I said to him. Then I turned back to her. “Really—”
“Too late—done deal,” she said. “He digs it too much for him not to have it.”
“Please,” I said. “That’s just too much. Can I at least give you something for it?” She continued to refuse, but as she did so I saw a very tiny wisp of interest in the glass housing behind her eyebrows. I had to stare at it for a few moments before I was even sure it was interest. But it was.
So I asked her if I could take her to dinner.
She held the question in her mind for a moment, and
then looked into her hands. “You don’t need to do that—it’s not that big of a deal.”
“Even so,” I said. “Dinner.”
“No,” she said, clouding.
“I’ll go too,” the VW said.
She stared at me.
“Dinner,” I said again.
The Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass and I went on a few dates—to dinner, to a play that the VW had worked on as an understudy—and then things grew folk; she started spending nights at my place, or I went to hers. I met her mother-of-sand; she came with me when I met the Two Sides of My Mother for breakfast one morning.
We had a lot of faith in each other, and sometimes when we did there was enough light—from the candles, from the moon—for the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass’s body to catch it, and then I could see myself inside her, see every aspect of that process, the soft and mysterious machine of her body as it moved against mine. It felt like a real relationship; the VW and I stopped going to the Castaway, even!
But these kind of stories—love stories, stories with faith—are apparently not the kind that I was built to book, either that or I haven’t yet learned how to book them. As it turned out, the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass was too fragile for me; every time we argued or our discussion warmed, her body grew cold and brittle. If she wasn’t careful, she told me, it could crack.
One night we had a very heated argument—she wanted me to move in with her, and I was reluctant to do so because I had to run the Crescent Street apartments—and we couldn’t resolve it. We went to bed angry—she on her side of the bed, me on mine.
That night I dreamt I had all the time in Northampton.
I woke up next to a pile of broken stained glass, and my legs were all cut and pleading. I did all the screaming—the pile of glass was completely silent.
Had I done that? Had I destroyed the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, because her glass was fragile and I rolled over in my sleep? Or had she been so cold that she shattered?
You see what I mean: The story fails, it has a heart attack, it needs something I can’t give it.
I never did get rid of that stained glass, though. A year later, when the VW was really ill, one of his eyes shattered and I used some of the stained glass to repair it. Every time I drove at night from that point on, colors from the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass’s skin—pinks, blues, greens—were broadcast onto the roads of Northampton.
Years and years later, though, after I’d left it all behind and moved away, I saw a woman who looked exactly like the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass. She was dressed in a blue uniform with an orange vest, standing in one of those wooden boxed platforms in the middle of a busy intersection, directing traffic outside a fair. I was so stunned when I saw her that I stepped out into the middle of the traffic and approached her.
She saw me and pointed. “Step back to the curb!” she yelled.
The cars coming towards me slowed down. I held up my hand. “It’s me,” I said.
She put her hands on her glass hips. “Sir, step back to the curb!” she said again.
I kept walking forward.
“Sir!” she bolted.
I smiled as I looked up at her. “I don’t know if I did something wrong that night, or if I just wasn’t able to tell the story right, or what,” I said.
Now we stood in the center of the road and the traffic moved around us. Her look was a fist. “You have me confused with someone else, sir,” she said. “Now, please—go back to the sidewalk.”
“The Volkswagen?” I said. “Northampton, Massachusetts? Remember?”
Her glass hair shone from beneath her blue hat. “Sir, I’m trying to do my job—”
“It is you,” I said.
Her arms were waving madly at the traffic. “I’m not the person you’re looking for,” she said.
But she was. I saw the Memory in her mind: my own image, the pink cloud of fear attached to it.
THE VOLKSWAGEN IS MUSIC II
Sometimes you can make the tune travel, even travel in it. I don’t know if this happened in the town where you grew up (Did it? Type or speak your answer into the power—or just think it, and the book will catch the thought.), but it happens all the time in western Massachusetts. Like I’ve said, these mirkins were everywhere, cupping every aspect of our lives—the weather, our financial status, collective mood and travel conditions. They were in the walls of our homes, our books, our clothes, even! I once had a hell of a pair of musical pants, for example—the notes fit me just right. An ex-girlfriend borrowed them from me, though, and that was the last I saw of them.
In the Volkswagen, incidentally, stories and songs were the exact same thing. I’ve received several deets about this, zoffers coasting keys and rhythm. Dizzyspeak aside, though, I think it’s clear that we’re all always instrumenting—either versing and chorusing, or “His name was Sneaker” and “Later that night I called Edna and asked if we could meet”ing.
Whether you’re esking, fisking or a little of both, though, the practice is only good for so much. Music’ll get you to the store, and maybe from Northampton to Amherst. But can we reach people with it—really reach them? No. How many times, after my father’s disappearance, did I send out songs for him? I can’t even give you a number. For a while there I would leave work in the afternoons, find a place where I could dean—the campus of the old abandoned mental hospital, the Prayer Wheel at UMass—and try and build distance from those old country tunes we once shared. I yelled as loud and as strong as I could in every direction. But what good did it do me? Every tune I sent came back empty and cold. At the end of every story my father was still gone, still dead.
But what did I expect? Songs don’t have hearts—they’re just mindless vessels of notes and beats. This is why 90, 91 and other multitunes are so frightening—they’re nothing but sheer force and character. Hell, most of the time you don’t even hear a melody until you’re in it—until you notice, after some money, that your surroundings have changed, that something has shifted. All of a sudden you look through the windshield and find yourself mid-chorus, or stopped inside a note or unresolved phrase.
There are positives and negatives with this kind of travel. Driving through music is exciting, first, because you can see things you’d never see on sidestreets: double-timed Veggienotes, racing codas, rests restocitating at sidestops on the shoulder. Plus, all money loses value—it must, by virtue of the fact that you’re traveling through a specific measure at a speed unique to you and your vehicle. In many ways that’s a good thing; you can relax, there’s no need to worry. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow you drive; you’ll get there when you get there!
For the very same reason, though, music is an inefficient way to travel. A big reason for this is the fact that notes/characters are finite—once they die, that is, you can’t go back through them. If you’ve gone more than a few measures it’s impossible to turn around. You have to see the story through, however long it takes. Plus, there are mistakes made all the time—tunes sent at random, or directed to one person and unknowingly read by another.
One time, for example, the VW and I were tracking a story for the Wheel when we picked up a storytune—a swooning dirge—that wasn’t meant for us. The maul was sent by a woman whose mother had died just minutes before. She’d intended to target her husband, a long-haul truck about a half-mile behind us, but in her grief she’d picked us up instead.
The VW and I didn’t know any of this at the time, of course—we picked up the song, realized we were on it, and followed it. After some time—it’s hard to say how long—we arrived at the ledge of a window on a high floor of a hospital; the final chord twisted right up to the glass.
The poor woman drifted over and opened up the window. Her face was a spiral staircase. Her eyes attacked mine. “You’re not Gary,” she said.
“No,” I said. I immediately understood what had happened. “I’m not.” I looked past the woman at the window. There was a dead body�
�that of an old woman, nearly bald—in the hospital bed.
I quickly turned the VW around and we drove back the way we came, passing the truck on our way out. By now I’d almost certainly missed my assignment. Plus, this trip had left the VW low on stories and we had a long way to go before we made it back. So I had to power on the spot, which I hated.
We raced back through the song, knowing full well that the first plot points were probably dead. We were able to make it back through the fourth chorus and the third verse, but then we hit traffic—VeggieCars, bioleggers and Volkswagens as far as I could see. I tried to look past them—was that the end of the chapter up there?
As we slowed to a crawl I grew anxious—I was gripping the wheel with my hands and custom-swearing.
“Dad,” the VW said. “What’s the problem?”
“My job is the problem,” I said. “I’m missing the story—who knows how much money is passing outside this tune?”
Soon we saw why the traffic was backed up: A VeggieCar had hit the edge of a note—trying, as we all were, to make it back. The car was crushed—there were bits of VeggieEngine all over the place—and two CityDogs were loading an older woman on a stretcher into an ambulance.
Past the crushed car was another CityDog, diverting traffic onto a detour tune—one set up to get the stranded passengers back to western Massachusetts via a different premise. We followed the detour until we could see the definite break in the sky where the fluorescent song ended and the looming Route 9 began again.
I didn’t get back to the Wheel until about four in the afternoon. When I walked into the office I saw Louise, standing at my desk with her arms crossed. “Where the hell have you been?” she cheesed.
“Wrong story,” I said. “We got lost.”
“For two weeks?” she said.
I held my hands out to her. “There was an accident,” I said.
RED LIGHT ON!
PROCEDURE
You have come to this chapter because the red light on the dashboard is burning—because the VW is asking for something and you need to know what. The red light is the Castaway Light; if it goes on, it’s time to get onto Route 5 and head out to Whately. You’ll know you’re close when you see a field of Troubadourians grazing in a field to your right and the Antiquarian on your left. Then the road will whistle low. About a mile down the road, you’ll see the pink and white moor of the Castaway.
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Page 12