The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  Wendy said, That’s what makes it so confusing. Jonjay goes missing once a month. But Sue, Sue is a whole other ball of wax. If Jonjay goes missing it’s because he wants to be missing. She pressed her hands flat against her eyes and let out a groan. I’m so tired my eyes feel two like loaves of bread soaked in iodine.

  Does anybody want any more coffee? we asked.

  You should be happy about the time he lived here, Wendy—it’s almost like you married him. I never expected to see him last for that long in one place. But he likes living here. He needs a space like this, where everybody loves him enough to let him live rent-free.

  What about Sue? Wendy said. What about Frank? Maybe Frank wanted them gone.

  Or maybe the two of them got caught up in a passionate love affair lately and concocted a plan. What do you know about Sue?

  Wendy got up and joined Biz at the longtable. I got the impression Sue is this beautiful ambient presence. We were walking and I started spilling the beans to her about my problems. I don’t know why, I couldn’t help myself. She’s not eating off your plate, but her plate seems very available.

  I slept all of an hour last night in that crazy cabin, Wendy said. I think Frank is in shock. His eyes were spinning in his head. His hair was on crooked. When we left him at his office, he smelled of sweat, a sort of oaky pine musk. He looked distraught. He might not recover.

  And he kissed you? Biz said. You kissed him back?

  Like I said, he was emotional. His emotions were all discombobulated.

  Maybe you planned this together, said Biz. Ever consider that?

  Yes, why not? said Wendy. I should have.

  The roommates smoked joints for a while more and in the meantime drew things absent-mindedly while considering whether to call the police and see if there’d been any new information. Wendy stretched her arms across the longtable and lay flat her hands and Biz decided to paint each of her nails white with a little purple question mark on each. Then she did her own the same style but with an exclamation mark on every second nail. Searching through our memories for what might have happened to Jonjay and Sue Fleecen, we were lost in thought, our minds lay empty, arid, waiting for the arrival of an answer. Biz got up to make a round of herbal tea before going to bed for the rest of the afternoon.

  I can’t cancel rehearsal tonight with the girls, said Biz. Otherwise I’d hang out here and watch Gilligan’s Island reruns with you. My Christmas bonanza this year is hella complex.

  Wendy said, The thought of working on a project … And my skin is so dry. If I don’t slide into a bubble bath soon I’m going to crumble.

  The bell on the Easy-Bake Oven went off and Mark Bread opened the door and pulled out the tray of steaming, semisolid cupcakes. He tasted one and grinned, then Wendy ate two and drank some tea to dilute the sugar spasms.

  Mark opened a window and left some cupcake on the sill for a seagull that flew by regularly and knew to check for his treats. He shouted, and the gull arrived moments later and devoured the sugary, mucilaginous bundle.

  You breed the chelidrids and jaculi, Mark said to the seagull in a high-pitched voice, phareans and cenchriads, and even two-headed amphisbands, but live it up like Vanni Fucci. There ain’t no tomorrow. You stumble upon that unknown, unlit unpath to fly again under the unstars. Past the broken gates and the unshriven. Zoom unzoom. Floating on your coracle blowing on your saxophone as you coast across serene or placid saccharine waters. Yippidy-doo-da-day. How speak you, transhumans? Pure experience or death.

  Okay, Wendy said and scratched where it all of a sudden tingled at the tip of her nose and then slapped her knees. I waste too much time thinking about my problems. I can’t believe Jonjay went missing. My brain can’t handle that. I’ve got to get in that bath.

  Over the days that followed, the search for the missing persons expanded. As news travels of the disappearance, volunteers have arrived at the Racetrack Playa from all over the tri-state area, including expert trackers and hunters with their bloodhounds and mystic horses, the desert survivalists and amateur sleuths in it for the cash, all of whom promise to find something if not someone, and bring closure to this terrible incident …

  Change the channel, said Wendy, yawning long and silently with fear. They fan out across the desert on foot and in helicopters looking for signs, any signs of the artist known as Jonjay, and Sue Fleecen, wife of the multimillionaire junk bond banker Frank Fleecen. It was his private jet they used to get to Death Valley. With them on board was Jonjay’s art dealer, Justine Witlaw, Quinn Kravis, in charge of a large private equity firm, and Piper Shepherd, president of Shepherd Media, best known for buying up cable affiliates in half the states in America. They were on an expedition to see the Racetrack Playa, famed for its sailing stones, when calamity occurred—

  I said change the channel, Wendy said.

  I did, said Biz. It’s on all the news. Only one going soft on the story is the Shepherd Media affiliate.

  Stick around for a look at the brand-new technology dominating Wall Street: from IBM data systems, to customized Microsoft brokerage boxes, to digital Rolodexes and the Apple’s mouse, we’ll show you the latest gadgets powering your investments.

  Police had questioned her twice, once at the airport in Death Valley and then again at the station on Mission Street. They’d asked her to come down that week and talk to them. The last time she was there it was to pick up Biz and Morphine Annie from the drunktank.

  You don’t remember anything else? said the lead detective with his notebook open and a pencil ready. His face seemed to be caving into the place where his moustache grew from, all his other features pointed to it, his downturned eyes, rosy cheeks, even his smile.

  Let’s go over the details of the afternoon one more time, he said.

  Feels like I’m in an episode of Dallas, or at least the Dallas comic strip.

  There’s a Dallas comic strip?

  There sure is, said Wendy.

  He wrote this down. With J.R. in it?

  Sure, the whole cast is in it, plus its own set of extras. I forget who draws it now, but Jim Lawrence, he writes it—he wrote the James Bond comic strip.

  Was this trip the first time you met Sue Fleecen?

  No, well, yes. I saw her once before at a reading she gave at Justine Witlaw’s gallery …

  Was Jonjay there, at the reading? the detective inquired.

  Yes, he was, Wendy said. She took a breath and said, … Do you think they’re alive?

  I don’t think anything, Miss Ashbubble.

  Wendy passed right by the headlines in the national papers. She didn’t want to read about the scandal or see her name. She didn’t socialize with the drop-ins and drifters; instead she kept to herself, working from her seat in the kitchen nook. The phone rang off the hook with journalists whose demands she ignored. For a moment there, practically all the papers and news stations followed the story of Hexen’s top financier’s wife and another man—a mystery man, artist—missing in Death Valley. Mojave rangers and authorities of the desert said there wasn’t much speculation among the searchers—the couple probably died of exposure. People vanished out there. It was history—the experts on TV, including the ranger Wendy and Frank spent the night with, warned that Death Valley was a miserably dangerous place to visit. It’s the night that gets you, said a volunteer on horseback. On Wednesday, the newspapers quoted a hapless middle-aged pharmacist and her husband, a gas jockey, in Daly City, who swore they saw the lovers come through wanting to gas up their car and buy a prescription for birth control pills at their filling station/drug mart as they were heading out of San Francisco the day before in a nondescript vehicle packed with camping stuff.

  Wendy’s ears perked up. Nondescript, was it? Hmm-mm, that does sound suspiciously Sue-like.

  Tabloids other than Shepherd Media speculated the couple were heading east. Thursday’s financial reporters questioned if Fleecen’s viselike grip of the derivatives market might weaken as a result of this personal loss. Al
l the coverage twinkled with the language of schadenfreude, but sources close to Frank told reporters the loss had plunged the financier deeper into his work: Frank was busier than ever, brokering hundreds of new deals and selling record numbers of bonds, ending days with fifteen to twenty percent gains above market.

  Friday’s New York Times carried a profile of Frank that made him out as a career-focused math-brain workaholic who loved his wife and could not come to grips with his grief. The article dramatized the disappearance as a tragic accident. While Sue Fleecen wrote literary fiction for university-funded quarterlies that paid measly honorariums, the journalist pointed out that Frank preferred to make high-stakes multimillion-dollar deals on the free market that included his favourite comic strip, Strays, in the package. In the end, for Susan Fleecen at least, the news anchors intimated, money did not buy happiness.

  Frank called that weekend to ask her how she was holding up.

  On my back in bed if you must know, she said. I saw your profile in the Times yesterday. Makes you look nice. How’d that happen?

  Oh, that’s called the PR department at an investment bank going into code red. You have to get in front of a story like this, I’m told. Find an amenable reporter pronto. Goose him with free dinners, drinks, and loose women. Then feed him the story he’s supposed to write. The coup for us was getting a Times guy to listen.

  What are we supposed to do now? she said.

  What else can we do but carry on.

  How can you say that?

  Because this is what I do. I work. There’s no other option. The sun rises every damn day. The markets open and close no matter how I feel.

  I heard that oysters can only reproduce under a full moon, she said apropos of nothing or everything.

  Direct moonlight or a full moon? he asked.

  A full moon. Maybe I should get going, you sound distracted, Wendy said.

  Don’t hang up, Frank said. I’m not at all distracted. My attention is always on you. I don’t want things to go back to the way they were between us.

  I didn’t know there was a way between us.

  That’s what I mean. You deny your feelings. Yes, you are. You can’t look at me. Can we see each other soon? Today?

  No, I’m going shopping.

  After a day driving around the Bay in her Gremlin browsing comic shops in the hopes she’d stop gnawing her molars, Wendy got back to the manor that evening to more bad news. Spending sixty cents here on a comic book and sixty cents there, eventually she amassed a large stack of new releases and back issues. The clerks in certain shops knew her. First they knew her as that gal coming in over the years buying what they referred to as kids’ comics, which were kept in the shelves with the used books. Have you got any comics by Fontaine Fox? she would ask them. Who? And then once they put it together she was the creator of Strays the clerks began to refer to her purchases as the work of syndicated strip artists. The clerk pointed her in the direction of some of the latest greatest releases on the shelves. The latest greatest were never Herman and Bloom County treasuries, they were always superhero comics. Browsing the humour section and the children’s section, she’d find ancient copies of The Mischiefs and Popeye to add to her pile. Then, noncommittally, her hands flipped through X-Men spinoffs, the clerks loved X-Men spinoffs, and the one about the blind man in a devil’s costume, she had to buy that, too. Politely studying the panels. Her eyes barely registered the muscles let alone the storylines, if any, as her brain kept hitting the snooze button. To wake up would mean she had to deal with the thought of Jonjay and Sue. She walked out the door and saw in her hands issues of superhero comics she wasn’t in the least bit interested in. Sometimes she even had books on hold at certain shops. Your Fontaine Fox came in, the clerk said. So you add to that pile of treasuries and kids’ comics she did want, and two hundred dollars later, make that more like six hundred dollars later, more material than she was ever going to get around to reading. Not that it mattered. A lot she’d flip through once and pass on to us. Something might spark a conversation. It was all tax deductible, too. With the wagonload came a sense of relief. Working the rounds of the comic shops was a kind of trapline. She opened each trap to find out what was in store. Her collector’s completist instinct was reassured by the gaps she’d filled in the manor’s overflowing library, a library that was always going to feel a little bit incomplete. She bought mountains of comics to unburden her inner self. She bought comics because she could afford to, not because she wanted to read them. What solace, this wealth. This time she went shopping because she wanted to find out if she still cared about anything that used to matter to her before Death Valley. Driving around shopping, was it fun. The hunt for comics and comic shops, was it spoiled.

  The same rust-brown Datsun followed her around all day, but again she didn’t notice. She got home that night to find us stoned out of our faces, weeping and drawing clowns. Mimes, circus, rodeo, theatre, all types of clowns. That day as we continued the labour of painting the moving parts in a scene onto hundreds of sheets of celluloid, we got a call from Biz Aziz to let us know Vaughn Staedtler had collapsed at his home late the night before unable to breathe. He was in hospital.

  Wendy took a joint out of our hands and sat down. She said, Look, I just bought one of Vaughn’s earliest treasuries.

  Dear Dr. Pazder,

  I shouldn’t write you any more letters after this … My situation has changed … I’ve made changes … I must give up on therapy as the answer and look elsewhere …

  23

  There was no more Farm under the freeway hairball to visit for lunch on the way to San Francisco General Hospital. We walked by a vacant lot instead, albeit a temporary one, while the city prepared to redesign what were vegetable, fruit, and flower gardens into sod with a small, shallow water feature the shape of a yin-yang. What was once a vacant wasteland of gravel surrounded by freeway overpasses had been turned into this thriving garden and a farm by local artist Bonnie Sherk, who tended its leaves for a decade. The Farm had provided food and a petting zoo to the community surrounding it, plus a stage for live performances. The stage would stay for now. The rest was too unruly for the parks board and needed to go.

  The hospital had grown and adapted as well in the face of another kind of demolition, a much worse one that required urgent attention. It was no longer so quaint in there. Now it was clean and tidy and reeked of cleaning supplies, the halls hummed along at the urgent pace of an automobile factory going around the clock, and none of the clerical nurses had a minute to look half-asleep-on-the-job anymore. No longer were its hallways decorated with the fingerpaintings of gradeschool kids; the walls were covered with health-wise posters featuring the latest facts surrounding the AIDS virus, which ended up being more than half-wrong. You cannot get AIDS from a blood transfusion or mother’s milk … You cannot get AIDS from an organ transplant … Condoms Save Lives … You can get AIDS from unprotected sex. We remember as we got off the elevator seeing a waiting room where five or six young men started to sob and wrapped their arms around each other, speechless. And shortly after that we saw four generations of a family suddenly come together in the same way as they wept, supporting one another. The intercom paged Dr. Dritz.

  We met Biz Aziz outside the door to Vaughn’s room, down a busy thoroughfare for doctors, nurses, and other staff hurrying to and fro with clipboards and equipment. That day Biz wore a pair of women’s Jordaches with Converse All Stars, hair cut to a shadow across her scalp, and those finely plucked eyebrows. She didn’t need lipstick or blush to be a goddess. She always was, on or off stage, in or out of drag. Or halfway in between, as she was today. She had her face in her hands, and when she lifted her head up and saw us coming, her eyes welled up again. Her face was red and her lips were swollen from crying.

  He’s asleep right now, she said. I just got back from the cafeteria.

  How is he?

  Doctors did some bloodwork and the first round came back pneumonia. Biz said the doctors tho
ught he had AIDS so they tested her, too. She was waiting for those results. Chances seemed good they both had it.

  No, not again, Wendy said. The group of us embraced there in the hallway. This terrible thing attacking the city, the country, and the world, that no one seemed to acknowledge, was winning a war against all of our bodies, regardless of our politics, predilections. The newspapers reported on a newborn baby with AIDS, so wake up! Blood transfusions or mother’s milk or both, my god. We trembled in horror. This thing, this AIDS monster was everywhere, possibly on everything we touched. We realized right away our group hug completed a wave of grief that started with the men we’d seen in the waiting room by the elevators, followed by the family, and now us. This was why the hospital staff seemed to travel at a different speed from the patients and visitors, a much faster speed, faster than people walked in silent films, because they worked relative to the pace of incoming patients—for the staff, the clock ran according to one collective embrace a week, one group hug a day, or every minute. These days hospital-time was moving very very very fast for staff, while for patients and guests, hospital-time always took forever. And maybe these days it was slower than ever before. Every second brought you closer to the wall, that deadly question mark made of solid brick. For patients and their visitors every second on the clock of hospital-time was a struggle to heal or to succumb. Every breath was a performance for the audience of visitors, family and friends who came to watch you and your body fight. A visiting hour took an emotional toll on everyone that was all out of proportion to the duration. Until hospital-time was suddenly over. Head-first for the brick wall—either it evaporates like a hologram or it crushes you. One way or another, you always leave the hospital.