The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  After a while, Isaac staggered inside and sat across from me at the kitchen table.

  “That’s one happy sonofabitch that got your four hundred dollars,” I said.

  “Yeah? Well, how am I supposed to get the money for anything better? I can’t even drive my tools around. Are you going to buy me an Aerostar? No? That’s what I thought. Everyone has a fucking minivan but me.”

  I asked all the obvious questions: how was he going to register it? Was he planning to just drive around without a license? Had he even looked at the engine before he forked over his money? But this was all beside the point. Isaac was sick of not having a minivan, so he’d called the guy, and now he had a minivan. And not only was I not happy for him, I was giving him crap about it. As for his driver’s license, as far as he was concerned, he was so thoroughly fucked that there was no point in thinking about that either.

  “Fine,” I said, “don’t call me when you get pulled over for driving around without a license plate.”

  Isaac let out a long, quarrelsome fart as he contemplated this, then disappeared into the basement and reemerged with a roll of duct tape and some scissors. He grabbed a box of Cheerios off the table, dumped its contents in the sink, and cut a license plate-sized rectangle out of the cardboard. I followed him outside to see what he would do next. He looked up the street, wrote three letters on the piece of cardboard with a sharpie, then looked down the other way and added four numbers. He taped the cardboard onto the Caravan’s license plate holder and got in. The engine turned over after several tries, and the minivan lurched to the end of the block and vanished around the corner.

  After a few hours of furious paging, I heard from him. He was at his friend Larry’s house. It sounded like there was a party going on.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he asked—as though there’d been no fight and no angry paging. “You’ll never guess what. You know that Silvertone Dan Electro I told you about? The one I saw at the junk shop at Frankford and York? Larry bought it. The same guitar.”

  “You drove that piece of shit van to West Philly? Without a plate?”

  “I have a plate. I make my own plates!”

  “Isaac, I’ll say it again. You don’t have an inspection sticker, insurance, you don’t even have a driver’s license.”

  “That stuff’s for chumps. Will you stop worrying? I’m telling you, nothing’s gonna happen. This is how we roll in Philly. Hey, if I’d had a minivan yesterday, I could have bought this Dan Electro. The case has a little amp in it. You just plug it right into the case. It’s totally adorable—right up your alley. You should come over here and check it out.”

  “And you’re drunk.”

  “Aw man, just come over or leave me alone,” he said and hung up.

  I got on my bike and headed over to Larry’s. Did I think I was going to talk Isaac into leaving the minivan there, or did I just feel like I was missing a good party? Who knows. I’d only been with Isaac a few months, and already I was tired of being the heavy.

  The ride was calming. I felt the bad mood slipping off as I rode across the Schuylkill, up Spruce, past the food trucks around the Penn campus. I coasted down Woodland Ave, sweetly dappled in the summer twilight. From the depths of Clark Park came the first cool breath of the evening. By the time I got to Larry’s, I wasn’t angry anymore. Someone handed me a cold bottle of beer. I found Isaac down in the basement, grinding away on Larry’s funny little Dan Electro. I drank my beer and threw my bike in the Caravan and we headed home. Isaac leaned his seat back and dangled one arm out the window, his profile bobbing to some inner soundtrack, and I put my feet up on the dashboard and rolled down the window. I let the night air wash over me. This felt good. But the transmission was definitely slipping a little.

  Isaac was out in front of the house every day working on the Caravan, and I was often out there keeping him company. Frank, a mechanic from the garage across the street, took pity on Isaac and let him borrow some tools. I would set up a lawn chair and read magazines while Isaac crawled around under the van. Occasionally I’d be called on to hold down some greasy flange while he listened to the engine, or sit in the van and tell him if a gauge moved or a light went on. He took the transmission out and had it rebuilt, which cost him six hundred and fifty dollars. The brakes were leaking fluid. He replaced the master cylinder, then the wheel cylinders, and finally the brake lines. Most of the exhaust was shot. The tailpipe, it turned out, was hanging by a rusty bracket, unconnected to anything. He was afraid the explosive noise was attracting too much attention, so he replaced the pipe all the way up to the manifold.

  I stopped keeping track of how much money Isaac poured into the Caravan. Still, he seemed pleased with it. “Look how tight the steering is,” he’d say, giving the wheel a jaunty wiggle.

  Sometimes I’d run into Frank and he’d ask, “How’s Isaac making out with that minivan?” and then he’d shake his head sadly.

  The inevitable happened: Isaac got pulled over making an illegal right on red and the Caravan was impounded. I thought that might be the end of the road, but Isaac was determined to get it back.

  We spent the next day in traffic court. When Isaac’s name was called, he stood before the judge, a black woman in her fifties with a maroon bob, while an official-looking group conferred around the bench, speaking in a low murmur for several minutes. The bailiff told Isaac to remove his baseball cap and continued to watch him suspiciously as the murmuring at the bench went on. Isaac put his cap back on, and the bailiff told him again to remove it. Finally, the judge addressed him:

  “Are you Isaac Baltimore?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is this your car? A . . .” She consulted a sheet of paper in front of her. “A 1983 Dodge Caravan?”

  “Can I say something?”

  “Is this your car, Mr. Baltimore?”

  “I was born in this country, and I work for a living,” he said, giving me a thumbs-up.

  The judge ignored this. “Please answer yes or no, Mr. Baltimore. Do you own a 1983 Dodge Caravan?”

  “Yes, that’s my minivan. Just tell me how much I’m gonna get raped for.”

  “And do you also own a 1992 Ford LTD?”

  “I wish!”

  “This . . . this Dodge Caravan is your only vehicle?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is your license plate number MAB1557?”

  “Well, I made that up,” Isaac said.

  “You made it up? I don’t understand.”

  In a tone of nearly exhausted patience, he explained. “I went outside and looked at one plate and wrote down three letters, and then I looked at another plate and wrote down four numbers, and that’s how I came up with that number.”

  There was another conference at the bench and then the judge addressed Isaac again.

  “I’m not sure how to handle this,” she said. “The license plate number you made up belongs to an individual in Harrisburg, the person who owns this 1992 LTD, which has accumulated $1,840 in parking violations in the City of Harrisburg and another $140 in Reading. You appear to have invented a new kind of violation for which there is no statute.”

  Isaac straightened a bit and puffed out his chest.

  “What are we going to do with you, Mr. Baltimore?”

  In the end, it seemed that the city would only release the Caravan to a licensed owner with proof of registration and insurance, and there was nothing the judge could or would do about it. Isaac would not be responsible for the parking tickets, but he would have to pay an $80 impound fee and $260 in fines for driving without a license, registration, or insurance. There would also be a six-month suspension on his driver’s license, beginning at such time as his medical suspension had been removed. He was advised to grow up and then dismissed.

  It was impossible not to feel sorry for Isaac. For weeks now, he had done nothing but come home from sanding floors all day to work on his minivan, sometimes long after dark. Every dollar he’d earned had gone into it. And now, beca
use he had no health insurance—and with his epilepsy, he was virtually uninsurable—his right to own or drive a car had been revoked indefinitely. I hardly considered myself part of the system; I didn’t have health insurance myself, and I hadn’t filed a tax return in years; but this, I thought, this was what it truly looked like to fall off the grid.

  I became obsessed with the idea of restoring Isaac to official personhood. I made appointments at the welfare office and filled out Medicare forms for him so he could see a neurologist and start the process of rebuilding his driving record. I dedicated myself to morale-boosting pep talks, but to him it was pointless. He’d just had another seizure after a boisterous night of drinking with Larry, which meant that, even assuming he saw a neurologist tomorrow, that would only be the beginning of the six seizure-free months he needed to resolve his medical suspension. After that he’d have to wait out the six months he’d racked up for his various legal offenses, which meant it would be a whole year before he could drive the Caravan. Which might as well be ten years. Just thinking about it made him feel like he was going to have a seizure.

  Though I knew it was a mistake, I registered the Caravan in my name. Even more stupidly, I let him drive it, and inevitably, he was pulled over for blowing a stoplight. The minivan got impounded again, and his suspension was extended another three months. After that, I started shuttling him and his floor sanding equipment around and taking him to Home Depot, or Bell Flooring, or Diamond Tool. Isaac was becoming a fulltime job. And unlike the housewives, I was also on duty weekends, nights and holidays: driving that hideous Caravan around with teeth clenched, hoping no essential engine parts fell off, and thinking wistfully about our bicycle days.

  By August we badly needed to get out of town. We were still pretending the Caravan wasn’t a disaster, so we decided to drive to Boston to visit my brother. We got a late start on the weekend. I’d filled in as Isaac’s helper on a thousand-square-foot buff-and-coat job, and it was well past dark when we headed out. Sometime after midnight, a mile or two east of the Tappan Zee bridge, we had a blowout. I pulled the minivan into a rest area, only to discover that we were traveling without a spare tire. Of course, it had begun to rain. The thought of venturing out into the Westchester County darkness was too awful, and for that matter, useless, so we made a nest on some drop cloths on the back and sank into exhausted sleep.

  When I woke up, Isaac was sitting in the wet grass beyond the parking area, staring at the flat tire. He jacked up the back end of the Caravan and took the wheel off, and we walked it back along the highway to the next exit, where we found a gas station at the bottom of the ramp. It was Sunday morning, so of course the garage was closed. We were sitting on a curb, not speaking or looking at each other, when, miraculously, a mid-’80s Dodge Caravan pulled up. It looked exactly like Isaac’s—even the same dull putty color—except that it had fake wood-grain paneling. An incongruously well-dressed man got out to pump gas, and Isaac approached him.

  It seemed the well-dressed man was on his way to pick up his grandmother and take her to church. After some haggling, he sold us a bald spare for seventy-five dollars. We humped it back up the highway and got going again. Then just outside Newton the engine overheated and blew a radiator hose. We made it to an Auto Zone parking lot and found a payphone and called my brother, who came to pick us up. As soon as we got to his apartment, Isaac started chug-a-lugging beer. He passed out at nine p.m. and had a seizure in his sleep.

  After a brief, stupefied visit, we got a ride back to the Auto Zone parking lot. Isaac replaced the radiator hose and we took off down 95. At the Mansfield town line, I noticed the temperature gauge creeping up again, and a mile later it was in the red. I pulled onto the shoulder and we got out. Steam was escaping from under the hood in wisps.

  “Ow,” Isaac said when he touched the metal.

  “Maybe we should let it cool off for a bit.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said. He wrapped a shop rag around his hand and lifted the hood. A steaming yellow-green geyser erupted from the radiator, sending us running for cover.

  From a safe distance we watched the flume die down. The loud hiss gave way to a series of sharp, surprisingly loud metallic groans and pops.

  “Fuck shit fucking fuck fuck fuck,” Isaac said. “I give up. This cocksucking van has kicked my ass for the last time. Let’s just go.”

  “We can’t leave it here, Isaac. They’ll trace it back to me.”

  We hitched into town to get a tow truck. Isaac was quiet all the way back to the garage, where the Caravan was pronounced dead on arrival. The engine had overheated definitively and fatally, cracking the block.

  The field around the garage was filled with parts cars. I noticed a familiar-looking grill poking out from the alley between the garage and a rusty trailer next door. I hoped, in vain, that we could get out of there before Isaac saw it.

  “Hey,” he asked the mechanic, “is that Aerostar running?”

  “Sure. Just needs a brake job and a new transmission.”

  “Can she put it on her credit card?”

  “No!” I said, “Isaac, I swear to you that I will do everything in my power to help you get your license back, but I will not register that minivan for you. I can’t go through it again.”

  “But it’s not a Caravan,” Isaac said. “It’s an Aerostar.”

  “Please don’t ask me to do this.”

  Isaac went dead-eyed. “I figured you wouldn’t help me. Why would anyone help me? I’m just some asshole without a car. Fuck me.”

  Stupid as it seems, we had each drawn a line around the Aerostar. I wouldn’t let him use my credit card to buy it, and he wouldn’t forgive me. I called my brother to pick us up, but Isaac wouldn’t wait. He headed off alone, and a few days later I took a Greyhound back to Philly.

  I turned the corner onto my block and saw Isaac in front of the house, loading the last of his things into a Ford Explorer with a Germantown Friends School sticker on the rear window. I ducked back around the corner and waited until the SUV pulled away from the curb. In the house, I found a milk crate on the kitchen table. He’d left three cut-glass doorknob sets, a woodcarving he’d made of a little black dog, and a commemorative Space Shuttle Challenger nightlight. There was also a note:

  Dear Kitty, Here is some stuff that you can have. Also I left you that industrial roller track in the basement, which I can’t take because my dad is a freak and he wont let me put anything in his garage. OK I’ll see you around I hope.

  Thank you Kitty.

  Love Isaac.

  Mothra

  When Isaac got home from work there was a man selling puppies out of a van parked in front of his house. A litter of five, all black, thirty dollars apiece. Isaac leaned into the van to check them out, and one squirmed out of the pile and pushed her snout up the sleeve of his jacket and sighed. He paid the guy and went inside with his new dog, and Kitty found them napping on the couch when she got home an hour later: man and pup sweetly entwined in the evanescing light.

  Isaac handed Kitty the puppy. She held it up and saw that it was a girl, with light brown eyes and one ear that stood up and one that fell forward at the tip. The puppy was a surprise but not exactly a shock. Isaac was nothing if not spontaneous. He lived in an eternal now, enjoying instant pleasures and experimenting with impulses. Give him your last few dollars for a quart of milk and he might come back from the store with a car magazine or a novelty keychain instead. He was a person who defrosted the freezer with a plumber’s torch. “Don’t worry about it,” he kept saying, “I know what I’m doing.” Sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t, and Kitty wasn’t always able to tell the difference before it was too late. She found that she was perpetually on guard against an oncoming disaster. Now, as she cradled the puppy, she told herself that it was Isaac’s dog—that they did not have a dog together—and she didn’t say anything later in the evening when he named the puppy Mothra.

  Mothra greeted Kitty at the door when she got home
the next day. From the vestibule, she saw Isaac sitting on the kitchen floor with his back to her, tools scattered around him. The floor was strewn with coffee grounds and chewed-up styrofoam. Isaac was absorbed in some job involving a spool of heavy-gauge wire and a red metal box about the size of a pound cake, which he was screwing to the inside of the sink cabinet.

  “Man, this dog is sneaky,” he said when he noticed Kitty. “Every time I leave her alone she comes in here and gets in the trash.” He began unspooling the wire.

  “What are you doing?” Kitty asked.

  “Mmmm.” He twisted the end of the wire around a screw on the side of the box.

  “Is that a battery? Wait. Are you putting up a cattle fence?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I know what I’m doing.”

  “You’ll electrocute her!”

  Isaac put down the screw gun. This was something that he could not stand: to be interrupted when he had a full head of steam. “I’m not gonna electrocute anyone,” he said patiently. “Look, see? It’s only two thousand volts—just enough to give her a snootful. It isn’t even for cattle. It’s for ponies. Or, I don’t know, sheep.”

  It was true that Isaac had a much better grasp of popular science than she did. Still. “No, that can’t be how you’re supposed to keep a dog out of the trash.”

  “Look, I know about dogs. How many dogs have you had? That’s right, none. And how many dogs have I had? Counting this one, I’ve had four dogs.”

  As it happened, Isaac got shocked by the electric fence before Mothra did—several times, in fact—and he decided on his own to take it down.