Out There: a novel

by Sarah Stark

  Looking back down now at the black-and-white photo, Jefferson guessed that after a decade of cancer and amber liquor and cigarettes, GGM would be even scarier-looking now. The photo must have been one of the writer’s better ones, seeing as he had agreed to have it printed on thousands of copies of his book. And it had been taken sometime before 1998—a long time ago. Jefferson’s mind rotated on its axis: not only was the guy more than ten years older and possibly scarier looking by now, he could die at any moment.

  Again, he tried to doze, but there was no reasoning with his anxiety. He envisioned meetings with García Márquez in his book-filled house in which the writer smiled vacantly, then just turned his back on Jefferson and walked away. He imagined García Márquez’s heavy door slamming in his face, like when Dorothy was refused entry to Oz. The motel ceiling had, he discovered, an intriguing swirling pattern. He wanted to sleep but could not fend off his fears, the back-and-forth inside his head. You are so anxious, Jefferson. Why are you so anxious, Jefferson? I’m not anxious.

  Finally, he turned to the method he’d relied upon for so long. Turning on the lamp, Jefferson retrieved the book from his backpack, opened it up to a slip of paper on which he’d written FEAR, and held it in his lap, remembering Gabriel’s lines, the lines that had helped him so many previous nights. Now he thought of Gabriel as he sang, with his own words and in his own voice:

  I do not need many words to explain

  because one is enough: FEAR.

  He repeated the sentence slowly, many times, until the words were engraved upon his mind. He did not think about the technical definition of the words. Rather he reflected upon how the words felt on his tongue and the ways in which the spirit of them filled his belly.

  I do not need many words to explain

  because one is enough: FEAR.

  I do not need many words to explain

  because one is enough: FEAR.

  With eyes closed, Jefferson wrapped the end of one line around until it tangled with the beginning of the next line, and his tongue became encircled by the sounds, and the softened sentiment began to hold him in its silky cocoon.

  Jefferson did not make peace with his fear that night, but he did face some of the bleakness, and in so doing he made peace with that bleakness and saw the chance to move beyond it. It was possible that Gabriel of the tangled eyebrows, whose words had saved him from war’s bleakest realities, would be dead by the time Jefferson arrived at his doorstep. That he might have traveled all this way, only to be disappointed.

  So on that hard bed on the second night of his journey to find García Márquez, Jefferson proclaimed the truth as he knew it. He sang in a new cadence to the imagined strut of a snare drum, attempting to prove to himself and to anyone who happened to be eavesdropping that he was not delusional.

  Gabriel García Márquez may be DEAD . . .

  Gabriel García Márquez may be DEAD . . .

  Gabriel García Márquez may be DEAD . . .

  Deaay—uuuud . . .

  Deaay—uuuud . . .

  Deaay—uuuud . . .

  DEAD.

  And finally he curled up with the pup, and slept.

  21

  In the morning Jefferson drove on toward a town named Jiménez, a place he knew nothing about beyond the fact that it marked the road he needed to travel, the road that was taking him farther away from his life as a soldier, the road that was helping him to remember what it felt like to just be himself, Jefferson Long Soldier. He did not know if it was possible, but he would try to live an entire day without thinking about Iraq. Or, if that proved impossible, at least an entire day without crying about it. Jefferson had always been taught that crying was a healthy response to intense emotions—Esco said she had learned this from her husband—but Jefferson felt he had reached the point of diminishing returns. Enough crying already. A day without sad tears was a day worth journeying for. So as he cruised his way past the isolated homesteads that became villages in the miles outside Jiménez, he found a new goal: a day without sad tears. A day without sad tears, Jefferson chanted aloud to himself and the wind, is a good reason for journeying!

  As was often the case, this outburst was followed by many miles of contemplation, which was followed by a memory. The memory of why he’d reached for the book in Iraq.

  He had been lying on his bunk, thinking about the Jemez Mountains, that oceanic blue-gray presence that for most of his life had beckoned out his bedroom window. He had been closing his eyes and imagining the hard, flat dirt surrounding his barracks to be that hard, flat homeland of New Mexico, the distant rises in that Iraqi landscape to be familiar. Because at one time a pulsing, rocking mass of water had connected this to that, because whales and fishes had once swum unfettered from Timbuktu to Albuquerque, because the wind still knew no bounds, Jefferson thought that none of this was impossible to imagine.

  The daydream had led in its way to his sweet grandmother, driving to Walmart to buy him those socks and underwear, the Jemez Mountains pulsing steady before her as she drove her Corolla down Cerrillos Road. Nothing, not even two miles of 1980s auto repair shops and fast food and bargain stores, could be ugly with the Jemez Mountains as a backdrop, she had always said. He saw Esco in his mind’s eye then, sitting among scrabbly chamisa and sage in her folding chair in the backyard, watching the sunset. He imagined her telling him to come outside with her, to come see the fire in the sky. Look at those orange flames, Jefferson! Look at those magenta cactus flowers! The hot palette of the New Mexico sky at dusk twisted and turned in his mind. Boys just like him from Kansas and New Jersey and Pennsylvania and, yes, New Mexico, sleeping and eating and waking and doing what they had to do.

  He’d curled himself up into a ball on his bed, his chest heaving, wet tears making a mess of his face, wishing that his grandmother were there to sit on the edge of his bed and tell him she was sorry and that it would all be okay. He’d cried for a while, and then he’d thought of the book. He’d gotten down off his bed, retrieved the novel from his T-shirt drawer, and begun to flip through the pages, reading scattered passages. He did not know why.

  God, was this land in Mexico beautiful. And all these simple people, natives most of them, living along this simple road. Jefferson was certain that if he could stay long enough in this sparse landscape, along a simple road such as this, if he could eliminate from his view any shopping malls and gigantic parking lots and television shows about people killing people, that he would get better. It was important to realize that it wasn’t just the shooting and the exploding in the war zone that made things so difficult. It was that when you came home, your kind grandmother was still making a decent tofu breakfast burrito, and that she was now sleeping at the foot of your bed.

  On the outskirts of towns, stray dogs and roosters ran alongside the motorbike, but the pup kept her nose to the sky, letting out only an occasional bay. And Jefferson began again to chant, once again imagining the monks. Simple, tonal syllables to begin with, and then word upon word until the combination of sounds became a line he’d written in his mind at some point, a line based on so much he’d learned from Gabriel.

  He became lost in fecund memories . . . in a sensuality he did not know he had experienced . . . in abundant rivers of forgiveness and hope . . .

  . . . of forgiveness and hope

  . . . of forgiveness and HO-ope.

  It seemed to him a reorienting sort of line, a line meant to turn him from discouragement. The idea of it, and then the chanting of it, led him to picture himself with Gabriel under that willow tree next to the Rio Grande, one of his favorite imagined moments. The writer was explaining in precise terms how it was that water could bring forgiveness and hope.

  “In little rivulets,” he told Jefferson, pointing a finger. “In the hop-skip-and-jump of a flat stone across the surface. See.”

  Jefferson and García Márquez skipped stones together in the vision after that, each searching along the shore for just the right stone among the multitudes. />
  In abundant rivers of forgiveness and hope . . .

  Jefferson lost himself on the final word, chanting it in two long deep syllables many times as he drove on down the road.

  Ho . . . ope . . .

  Ho . . . ope . . .

  Ho . . . ope . . .

  22

  Sometimes the reader’s love of a story is immediate and bright, jumping like a belly flop into his lap on page 1, basking until the beautiful end. Other times the love builds slowly and surely, like nostalgia. It hovers on the edge of recognition for many chapters, a suggestion waiting to be spoken, until that innocuous detail announces itself as a sort of secret communiqué to the reader, this particular reader, telling him that this story was written for him. Telling him that the writer, as unlikely as it might seem, has known the same people, has worried over the same small anxieties, has suffered the same meager disappointments, has been humiliated by precisely the same set of slights and calluses. Telling him that the writer’s hopes and dreams and celebrations have followed the same course as the reader’s. None of this makes logical sense, of course. The writer is much older than the reader, and he has lived his life on a different continent, in an earlier era, and yet the feeling is undeniable. The reader, jubilant with this discovery, runs to the edge of a great chasm and jumps. He can fly! He smiles and lets out an enormous sigh, a full mile of air below him and nothing but blue above. He approaches the other edge of the abyss. He stretches out his fingertips, reaches, grabs.

  That one small detail, the handhold on the other side, might not seem worthy of mention. It might not bear the weight of the literary world. It is ancillary to the theme. It might be read past by hundreds of other readers. And yet there it is, this one small something that offers this reader a grip, this one thing that moves this reader’s heart. Here it is! The detail that means he will love the story forever.

  For Jefferson it was the scorpions. From that first time Jefferson came upon a line about a scorpion in One Hundred Years—in this case the scorpion that stung Rebecca on her wedding night—he knew García Márquez was on his side. Almost every time he browsed the novel after that first sighting, there was another one! As if GGM had placed another of the little beasts there to keep him awake. To remind him of his family, to offer perspective. Jefferson was in a war zone, yes, but at least his cousin Nigel was not chasing him around the house with a scorpion on the end of a stick, like when they’d been kids. Yes, Jefferson was fighting in a war he didn’t understand, but at least he wasn’t being stung on the toe by one of the stealthy suckers in his sheets as he slept. At least his enemies were big enough to see. At least the Iraqi insurgency had not taken the form of giant bugs with pincers.

  More than stories about loss in war, about unexpected love, about perverted family dynamics, about the rich enslaving the poor, Gabriel García Márquez’s scorpions told Jefferson—in a secret communiqué—that the writer was real and alive, a human being walking the earth. He was living and breathing and loving, fearing the day he’d be stung, just like everyone else.

  23

  Somewhere after Jiménez, Jefferson, plenty tired and hot, not to mention hoarse from his own chanting of memorized lines and newly created poetry, ran the motorbike onto the wide sandy shoulder and parked. The sky was big here, not unlike the sky in New Mexico or Iraq, and in the sudden quiet he felt the presence of Nigel, of each person who had helped him. A few cars passed by, a raven cawed from high up in a thirsty tree, Remedios sniffed around beneath a nearby clump of brush. He was not alone. And in the presence of those few drivers and that one bird and his dog, as well as the many unseen spirits who he imagined to be traveling along with him, taking it upon themselves to help, Jefferson dropped down on his knees and kissed the sandy earth. He closed his eyes, saying a prayer of thanksgiving for his good cousin Nigel, so generous and patient and funny, and then filled his lungs with the brilliant Mexican air and bellowed in a southerly direction, “Here I come, Gabriel! Here I come!”

  How far Jefferson had come, to now be calling the famous writer by his first name as he stood on this sandy shoulder of Autopista 49, on his way to see the great man. It was a journey that had begun so unexpectedly, so unconsciously, in that distant-seeming classroom, Honors English 4. Jefferson thought now of those tears in Ms. Tolan’s eyes that first day she’d spoken of GGM. He’d not forgotten those tears, shed for García Márquez as well as a handful of other writers she referred to as literary geniuses. The tears had been a mystery to him. He had no doubt that they were stirred by something real, and yet intangible. What had his teacher found in the words of these particular writers?

  The mistiness in her eyes and the crackle in her voice usually came when she spoke about a particular writer’s journey toward creating what she called “a great work of literature.” She had told the story of GGM’s struggle to find just the right way to tell the story we now know as One Hundred Years of Solitude. Just the right voice. How he had struggled for many years with the ghosts of the story inhabiting the catacombs of his skull, trying to coax it out, and that he had not given up until he had heard his own grandmother narrating the story inside his head. Ms. Tolan had spoken with the same crackle in her voice about a woman writer, a woman from England, Jefferson thought, but he could not remember her name. She’d been depressed, had drowned herself. He would never forget that, because they had watched a film in class—fictional, of course—about the woman’s walk down to the river, the way she tied rocks into her skirt. Jefferson would never forget the sad beauty of that writer as she breathed her last breaths among the rocks and the fishes, looking up to the blue sky. Ms. Tolan had most definitely had red eyes when she told that woman’s story—how brilliant her writing, how troubled her mind. There had been a few others who had summoned his teacher’s tears but he could not remember any names.

  The reading in that last year of English had been hard, and most of the time he’d gotten too drowsy to finish his assignments, staying up late, drinking coffee, but his curiosity had been enough to keep him working and wondering. What was it that kept a woman like Ms. Tolan—and English teachers everywhere—reading books and talking to students about stories and making them write papers about those stories? Something deep within him did not want to disappoint his teacher. She truly seemed to believe that a book could make a difference in her students’ lives. And something deeper still told him there must be magic hidden within the text.

  So he had compensated. Every day at lunch, just before fourth-period English, Jefferson got out his copy of whatever novel they were reading at the time and flipped through the pages that had been assigned that day, back and forth randomly, using his thumbs. He’d close his eyes and stop when he felt like stopping, and he’d point randomly to a sentence on the open page. He’d read the sentence, and maybe another one that followed if the first one was short, and then he’d begin to see the sentence floating in his mind, like a translucent jellyfish, its tentacles swaying to the sound of a beautiful lullaby. In this way the sentences began to live in his mind, and he walked into class, eager to share what was now a part of him. Every day Ms. Tolan asked some version of, “So, what did you guys think about the reading last night?” and every day Jefferson popped his hand in the air and recited.

  The results were several: Ms. Tolan came to love Jefferson, and would often stop him after class and tell him what a pleasure it was to have a student like him contributing so much to class discussions, and a few times she suggested that he think about studying literature in college. At the end of the year, she told him to keep his copy of One Hundred Years, because, she said, he would probably want to have it at some point in the future. In the end, Jefferson made an A in her class both fall and spring semesters without ever having really read one of those novels Ms. Tolan loved so much.

  In Iraq he turned to the novel as a comfort, a distinct memory from home, not because he expected any real help from the book. But it proved to be a good distraction from reality and, in all honesty,
he had never forgotten the mystery of Ms. Tolan’s tears. Within a week he had slipped back into the routine of the flipping back and forth of pages, and the rote memorization of a line or two. He did this every night after dinner, as he pulled his mind away from Ramon and Adams and Dudzinski. As he pulled his mind away from the three little girls’ scared eyes asking him for help out the back of their father’s Toyota. Not in an attempt to bury anything, but rather as a way to help him breathe as he remembered. He’d had an infected plantar wart on his heel as a middle-schooler, a festering sore that prevented him from running in the district track meet his eighth-grade year, so he knew the dangers of ignoring and pretending something bad would disappear.

  Each evening he sat on his bed, back against the wall, and reviewed as many details of the day as he could. He never lingered too long on any single memory, and eventually he made it to the end of the day, to dinner in the dining hall, an event that became a natural segue to thinking about dinner at home with Esco, wondering what she had eaten that evening. Jefferson often thought about how it must have been simpler for her, a sort of bonus for having him gone, that she could eat what she wanted without worrying about his vegetarianism. Had she eaten carne asada with fresh tortillas? A hamburger with green chile?

  After he thought about green chile for a while, Jefferson closed his eyes and held the novel in his lap. He pretended he was sitting on his bed at home, or at one of the outdoor lunch tables at Santa Fe High. He crossed his ankles because that was a natural position for him, and Jefferson believed the point was to be as relaxed as possible. He breathed slowly in and out for a few minutes, trying to remember who he was: a nineteen-year-old from Santa Fe, three-quarters Lakota, one-eighth Mexican, one-sixteenth German, and one-sixteenth Scots-Irish, who had a whole body with a jittery heart and a bleeding soul. Though sometimes the sound of heavy trucks and an occasional explosion encroached upon him, in those moments Iraq seemed for the most part to be a dream.