How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

by Christopher Boucher

  I had to do something—the storypumps were no longer accepting my promises of false future-time—so I walked downtown one afternoon and went into the store called Faces. I told the VW that he could look around as long as he stayed close, and I went to the counter and spoke to an old kiosk with a beard. I told him that I wanted to sell my name, and he laid it out on the glass counter. I remember how much he liked it, how his eyes lit up as he ran his hands across it.

  I remember asking him, “If I do sell it to you, can I get it back?”

  He grimaced. “Hard to say. Some of these names sell the same day,” he said. “Others we can’t give away. Tricky business, naming.”

  “This is only temporary,” I told him. “Within a few weeks I should be finished with my new power, a road called—”

  “Boy—what a name,” he said. He wasn’t listening.

  “Anyway, I should be able to sell that route for a hundred-fifty, two hundred years,” I said. “And then I’ll be back for this.”

  Just then the VW spit up. I heard him retch and turned around to see him standing by a face-adjustment booth, his eyes receding in embarrassment. I went over and picked him up. “What happened, buddy?”

  “I think I threw up,” he said.

  I looked into the oil and its images, spreading out on the carpet. “You OK now?”

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  “OK. Just a few more minutes, alright?”

  He nodded.

  I went back to the counter. The kiosk was still studying the name—turning it over and over in his hands. “It’s long, so that might keep people away. But who can tell? It really depends on what people are looking for. I can’t make any promises,” he said.

  I nodded sadly. “I certainly understand the impossibility of promises,” I said.

  The kiosk paid me twenty-two hours, and then he took my name off the table and put it in the glass case. I remember looking through the glass and seeing it there, the sudden pang in my chest.

  This was my name—my father’s name, Old Forever’s too!

  “I’ll be back soon,” I told him.

  That was so long ago. For years I castawayed and faithed, believing that someday I would save enough hours to go back into that story and slap my time on the table. “When they give me my name back?” I used to say, “I’m going to wear it like a Saturday.”

  But I’m no longer the person I was, and I know for certain that I’ll never be that person again. I couldn’t find him/her if I wanted to, even if I had a map of words to go by. The booking has taken everything from me and left me an integer, an underline, a noface.

  There isn’t a word on the planet that I would want to be called by.

  VOLKSWAGEN DOESN’T STOP!

  I can’t say how far the four of us drove in that riff—how many chords or choruses, or how long it took—but I do remember that the night itself seemed to age. The starlit mountain-notes seemed to turn grey around the edges. The moon grew a beard.

  I aged, too. Sometime during that riff my hair started falling off my head, and the skin of my hands softened and took on language-lines. My back slumped and my vision blurred. Was this the cost of my worry? My Fear of Death, translated? This was a different kind of learning—the attainment of knowledge that can only be gained from crushing loss after crushing loss. That fucking highway took years of time of money off my life, during which all of my memories were executed. Several choruses later, I woke up and could no longer see the edges of letters. Further down the road, an old Bean Woman returned to Northampton to visit me as I soured in the Northampton State Hospital—she put her hand on my knee and said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?” I said.

  “For this,” she said, gesturing to the room around me. “For all that you’ve lost.”

  After she left, I looked out the window and I didn’t even remember that she’d visited, or how we knew each other. I didn’t remember any of the people that I loved—Emily, or the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, or my brother, or the Two Sides of My Mother.

  I forgot I ever even had a father.

  • • •

  I’m not sure how much time had passed—one hour or several—when the bioleggers and vegetables around us started slowing down, but soon the traffic was dirging and we were stuck in a noisejam. Inside the riff I was frantic, and I wondered aloud if it made sense for me to get out and run ahead on foot. The piano tried to calm me down. “I’m sure this will clear up soon,” he said. A minute or two later he pointed through the windshield. “See? The traffic’s speeding up over there.”

  It was true; in a distant moment, the bioleggers and vegetables were passing the obstruction and regaining speed.

  We eased towards the source of the jam. The bass said, “What is it—an accident?”

  “Fucking construction, probably,” said the drums.

  But I could see what it was: Something was stopped in the center of the highway—the cars were moving around it.

  “Someone broke down,” said the drums.

  When I leaned forward, I could see a blue and silver shape in the center of the song. It appeared to have both wheels and wings—silver wings.

  Tin wings.

  No.

  “What’s—” said the piano.

  No.

  Inside me, a wave crashed on the shore and carried everything away.

  “Holy shit,” said the drumset.

  “Is that—?” said the bass.

  “No,” I said. I said that word forever—I have never stopped saying it.

  “That’s a Volkswagen, isn’t it?” said the piano.

  “No,” I said again.

  “It is,” the bass said.

  It was.

  The 1971 Volkswagen sat in the middle of the highway. The riffs and bio’s that passed him were yelling at him to move and get off the song. But he wasn’t moving—his face was dusked and he was completely still.

  MASTER CYLINDER

  I got out of the riff and ran over to my son. I screamed his name. “No,” I sang, repeating the note over and over.

  The VW didn’t look like my son. He was retrofitted with tin language wings welded above the rear wheels, a shark-like fin fastened to the roof, and two external engines—one above each rear wheel. Smoke shouted from the engine compartment and my eyes whined from the smell of burnt words.

  I opened the driver’s side door and tried to start the car. There was no sign of life—the steering wheel was freezing cold, the dashboard completely dark. There were words everywhere. Every light and signal was at rest. I switched to another transmission and tried again to start it.

  Nothing.

  I checked his pulse. His engineheart was still beating.

  My mind was a siren. First, I opened my power and looked through it for stories. The only one I had was a fragment, a crumble about a sveltbelt in the Land of Spelt who runs for local office on a campaign of dancing, and dances his way right onto the Board of Selectmen, and goes on to turn Spelton into the steppiest, most dancingest town in the Middle Way.

  The story was flat and broken, but it was all I had and there wasn’t time to book a new one. And it didn’t matter anyway—I knew, even as I fed it to the VW, that his scanner wouldn’t work.

  “VW!” I screamed into the dark car. “Story!”

  Nothing.

  I grabbed a flashlight from the glovebox and got out of the car. The night roared in my ears and notes stung my face. I cut my shin on one of the tin wings as I sprinted around to the back of the car, and I shouted out into the song. Then I saw how complicated the new modifications were: He’d not only added engines, but two homemade translators as well. It was clear that one or both of them had overflowed or malfunctioned—the whole apparatus was covered with wordoil. And the wings and fin, I could see now, were connected to the new engines with flimsy midday cables. What was the VW thinking—that he could cut through musical resistance? Or that he’d fly? Did the VW expect less friction in the air of
the song?

  I opened the engine compartment. It was the inside of a diner now, but everyone inside the diner had been shot. The register drawer was hanging open and all of the blood from the victims’ bodies was running together.

  I closed the lid. The moon was dead, the mountain notes lying benignly on their sides and the stars sick to their stomachs, moaning and vomiting into the sky.

  There was nothing more I could do here—I had no stories, no ideas—so I picked the VW up like I had when he was a newborn. With his wings and three engines, he was terribly heavy. I struggled to carry him to the idling riff; as I approached, the bass got out to help me. We put the VW in the back seat and I jumped into the riff beside him and said, “Go.”

  The piano pulled the riff back onto the roadsong while the drums and bass leaned forward to look at my son. His eyes were empty, his mouth was wide open and his skin had started turning grey.

  “Is he—OK?” the bass said.

  “Are those wings?” said the piano.

  “Domino,” the drums said, “that car isn’t breathing.”

  “He has a pulse—his heart’s still beating,” I said. Then I tapped the piano on the shoulder. “Please just take us home,” I pleaded. “57 Crescent Street, Northampton.”

  “We’re on our way,” the piano said.

  I looked through the book of power, found a quick story, and tried again to scan it.

  “I’m sure he’s going to be OK,” the bass told me.

  “VW!” I shouted at him. “Story!”

  “Can you connect the power directly?” the piano asked.

  “Not without another morning cable,” I said.

  The drums sat back in his seat. “You know why he can’t scan the story?” he whispered to the bass. “Because he’s dead.”

  “No he isn’t,” I said.

  Then the night said something, so I rolled down my window. “What?” I yelled to the sky.

  “The percussion’s got it right,” said the night.

  “His heart’s still beating!” I yelled back.

  “So what?” she shot back.

  “So he can’t be dead!”

  “Would I lie to you about this?”

  “You’ve lied to me plenty of times before,” I sang.

  “That was different—I was kidding with you then,” said the night. “But your son is dead, _____. And your father, too.”

  IX. ENGINE OVERHAUL

  NINE-HEADED DRAGON RIVER

  The piano drove us off the song and towards home. When we hit King Street the drums told the piano to slow the riff down. “There’s an oil-changery up ahead,” he said. “Shouldn’t we stop there?”

  I shook my head. “That guy only works on bio’s,” I said. “I’m the only one who can save the Volkswagen.”

  “And why is that?” said the drums.

  “Because he runs on words,” I spat.

  The drums huffed and looked out the window.

  The piano steered the riff up Crescent Street and parked outside the house, and I got out of the car and picked the VW up. Then I stood beside the idling riff and I thanked the three of them for their help. “I’d still be running on the sidesong if it weren’t for you guys,” I told them.

  “You sure there isn’t anything else that we can do?” said the bass. “We can stay, and then if you decide you want to drive the VW to a mechanic—”

  “He just said no to that idea,” said the drums. Then he smiled at me curtly. “See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya.”

  I ignored him. “The only thing that’s going to save this car now is a good story,” I said. “And I’m the one who’s going to have to write it.” The VW was getting heavy. I said, “I’m sorry for all the trouble we caused you.”

  “It wasn’t any trouble at all,” said the piano.

  “Songs don’t end,” said the teary-eyed bass. “They don’t ever end.”

  “And you?” I said to the drums. “Can go fuck yourself. The Volkswagen will live.”

  “The last note has rung, my friend,” said the drums.

  The riff pulled away and I walked into the house. Then I put the VW down, dried off the noted power, and started looking through the pages for a relevant how-to. I flipped past “Custom Modifications,” “Runaway?” and “Word Breakaparts.” Then I found the story I was looking for.

  RESURRECTING YOUR VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE

  CONDITION

  The Volkswagen is dead.

  TOOLS

  One charged book of power

  Spare morning cables, fresh and tested

  At least three plots

  PROCEDURE

  A lot of masks will tell you that the secret to the Volkswagen Resurrection has to do with the engine—with draining the sufferoil, finding the heart and reigniting it. That autologic is backwards, in my opinion; stories don’t run on the heart, but vice versa. My theory on resurrections, therefore, is simple: You have to write your car back to life.

  Every component has to do with motion—with converting stillness to change. If your car is dead, it’s probably not a mechanical issue; it’s more likely that the car is overwhelmed by something—by age, by sadness, by the noise of the road or the shouting from the city. It’s this sense of being overwhelmed which leads to stasis.

  The solution, then, is to tell a story which somehow maps a way through those obstacles—which clears a mental/physical path for the Volkswagen, and encourages him to believe that there is life, and not death, ahead.

  This theory is speculative, of course, and it drives in the face of what most “mechanics” say about resurrections. But my theory is that belief—belief as propelled by story—is what will start the Volkswagen and make his or her wheels turn.

  Here’s the go forward:

  1. Design a resurrection story. In order for it to qualify, the story must include:

  A river or a bridge

  Something that seems dead, but is not

  Sunlight

  Frequent references to western Massachusetts

  2. Sing that song. For example: A river travels a promise to see a dead Hadley, only it turns out that the Hadley is not dead—just very, very relaxed on a chaise lounge in the sun. It doesn’t have to be complicated—it shouldn’t be, in fact, because the dead car may or may not be able to scan it. If the story won’t scan, try wiring the power directly to the dashboard. If that doesn’t work, read the story out loud.

  Several knots have written in to say that, heartbeat or no, a dead Volkswagen is a dead Volkswagen. But I don’t buy that bread. Volkswagens are not born to die; they’re born to speed through Northamptons with electric eyes.

  3. Once you read the resurrection story, something should happen—the Volkswagen should open its eyes or say something. If not, see “Jumpstarting the Volkswagen.”

  I began to write. First, I steered a story about the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls. The story was, the bridge seemed dead but was not—in the middle of winter it began to hum, the flowers chorusing and solving and sending messages. Then the sunlight began to harmonize with a song sung by flowers. Soon the entire story was a chorus.

  I wrote all afternoon, replacing scenes and adding dialogue. Early the next morning, I wired the power to the dashboard. When the story wouldn’t send I read it aloud, as dramatically as possible. “Soon the flowers began to sing in the snow,” I shouted to the VW, “and the snow, frightened by the chords, gathered its belongings and caught the next bus East.”

  Then I waited for something to happen—for some sign of life. But there was nothing—not only did the Volkswagen not respond, he seemed more and more dead each minute. The scanner wasn’t getting any power, the dashboard was quiet, and the wings had started turning a brownish-red.

  I didn’t give up. I wrote another story—this one about a bookstore in Montague, featuring books that are given new life and a healthy 1971 Volkswagen Beetle—and I read it to the VW. But there was no response to that one, either.

  I spent four days booki
ng—one story after another after another. I read each one aloud, and as dramatically as possible, but it just wasn’t working—it simply was not the right strategy for resurrecting a Volkswagen Beetle.

  In the end, I think the story of the 1971 Volkswagen Beetle would have been the same if I’d never written those stories at all—they didn’t change anything!

  And why, I wondered, had I expected a narrative resurrection to work in the first place? Just because I imagined that it would?

  THE SHAPE OF JAZZ TO COME

  If a montague won’t get the VW running, maybe a castaway will. Let me just power up the power and see what it’s sensing.

  How about the sorrytale of the Castaway’s mother, a wandering Sunderland diner?

  No—too sad.

  Here’s one: a final-gear about my brother’s homecoming.

  Ahem.

  That night I went home to my parents’ house. When the VW and I pulled into the driveway I saw the Memory of My Father standing outside, watering the lawn.

  “You see?” I said, stepping out of the car. “The color looks really good now.”

  “Not half bad, is it?” said the Memory of My Father, dressed in a too-small pink shirt that my father wore when I was a senior in high school.

  “It’s morbid,” said the One Side of My Mother, sitting on the steps and smoking her fingers. “Fear of Death. It looks like a contract!”

  I walked past her and went inside, where I found the Other Side of My Mother cooking in the kitchen and my brother watching television. He looked tired, and his hair was an apology shooting out in all directions. “What’s going on, kid?” I said.