The Long Accomplishment

by Rick Moody

  In any event, on the way out of the baths, I ran into a guy I knew from recovery circles, and from having jointly participated in a student film twenty-five years ago. I ran into this guy in the locker room, and he was lying on a bench with some hot towels on him, apparently mummified, or so it seemed, and groaning loudly in a way that was somewhere between torture and erotic release, and for a moment I thought: I wonder if this guy is a plant, if Abe has somehow arranged to have this guy here at this moment. Except that I couldn’t even remember his name (his name is Gary, though I couldn’t think of it right then), and I didn’t know him well, and, in a way, kind of steered around him some.

  Next, Abe and I went down St. Mark’s Place for a burrito. It felt strange to eat in this tiny burrito joint with someone I didn’t know that well. It felt like an earlier epoch of life, when I had sufficient time at hand to just go out to dinner with a stranger and get to know him. What I noticed about Abe was that he had incredibly involved dietary needs, and in the course of our eating together he did explain that he had an aggrieved case of Crohn’s disease, and that he was trying to eat very simple things (he was on a modified paleo diet) to keep himself from having an outbreak of Crohn’s. When he talked about this stuff, he looked both wise and crestfallen, and I felt bad for the guy. Just when I felt like I was getting to know him, though, he laid out a few calendar issues he needed to go through with me. He’d need me to set aside a weekend in September, and also some time in the midsummer, a day or two, for odyssey-related performances, which, because these dates were a long way away (it was May), didn’t sound difficult, and then he abruptly got up as though about to leave, which in fact he was doing, and said, “I’m going to leave now, and, by the way, the piece has now begun.” And then he was gone.

  What happened, thereafter, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing frequency, was that I would have these experiences in my life with strangers that had an eerie quality to them. Often I didn’t understand at first that there was something off about the interaction, and I wouldn’t really feel the reverberations of it until later, but then it would hit me, with the force of epiphany, that the interaction had been part of Abe’s magic. For example, coming out of a reading in Saratoga Springs in 2013, there was a woman in red doing a sort of a modern dance piece outdoors, and she turned out to be a plant. And once I was having lunch with my friend Randy Polumbo, when a guy sort of busted in on us at Pain Quotidien in Tribeca and said he knew Randy from Burning Man, and soon we were having a long conversation with him about his grandmother, and her loneliness, even though I had never seen the guy before. It took me a couple of days to figure out that he too was part of the piece.

  There were many more of these picayune but oddly numinous coincidences, and amassing them here is less important than simply putting my finger on the effect of the odyssey on my person, namely that it caused me to look at everything in my life as though it had narrative value. That is, if you start to think that every interaction in your life is part of a performance piece of some kind, with a resultant emotional purpose, then it stands to reason that all of your life has thematic weight. You begin to read your life as though everything in it is important, not something simply to be sped through (this checkout line sucks!) to get to the other more high-impact sections.

  There was a big culmination of all of this, which lasted for three days in the end of August or beginning of September, and which partly involved a house party in Prospect Heights, clown training, a dance performance for me on the Brooklyn Bridge, a story written especially for the odyssey by Amy Hempel,1 and many other choice bits, but all of this was reiteration of the core principle of the odyssey, which I have just expressed above, namely that life, experientially, is a thing you can value generally, rather than episodically.

  However, I do want to preserve one particular episode of the odyssey for the marital import of it from both Laurel’s point of view (time consuming) and mine (profound), namely the day on which I was kidnapped by Abe Burickson and flown out of the country.

  For a time just before this kidnapping, Abe had asked me to go to a certain empty storefront in Brooklyn and hang around for a little while, for a couple of hours at a stretch. In this storefront, there would be clues about things that were going to happen to me, as well as ethereal drone-based music (with a bit of Morton Feldman around the edges) playable on a boom box there, and costumes that I was supposed to wear. I really did not like it in the storefront. If loneliness is a problem for me, if being alone is contrary to good mental health (as they always told me back when I was in the psychiatric hospital in 1986), then the storefront was a bad spot for me to be awakened to my odyssey. Nevertheless, on the day of the kidnapping I went there for an hour or so, per instructions, and I brought a backpack, and a change of clothes, because I was told to, and I took leave of my wife and child.

  I had on my street clothes by the time I met Abe and a driver (a young woman) out front. He told me to get in the car. I got in the car. I asked where we were going. Abe said to the airport. He’d told me to bring my passport, so I’d brought my passport. He wouldn’t tell me where I was going other than the airport. I didn’t even know which airport, though the route indicated JFK. I was flying somewhere internationally, apparently, but where? Wherever it was it wouldn’t be for long, because I hadn’t set aside much time. I was personally hoping (and this is where the odyssey process is odd, in that it somehow encourages really ridiculous fantasizing) Greenland, or maybe Prince Edward Island, or maybe Iceland again. I think I had told Abe about my outsized love of Iceland. What made it reasonable to think such things? Maybe the isolation of being in a hardware store by myself, listening to incredibly bleak music, and wearing the clothes of a Samuel Beckett character.

  We got out at the curb at JFK, Abe and I, and he told me he was just walking me to the check-in console, and then I was on my own. I swiped my passport as usual, and then I waited. An itinerary came up. It was for a ticket to Regina, Saskatchewan.

  I had sort of been interested in Saskatchewan as a kid, because of how interesting the word was. Canada, to me as a child, was peculiar, because it had many superficial differences from the United States, but was reliably similar, too. I thought of the northern prairie of Canada as being remarkable and strange, similar and dissimilar, totally empty, totally impressive in scale, and different from the United States of America. And now I was going to get to go—for about thirty-six hours.

  Yes, I had very little with me, and this is important for the story. Since I was only asked to prepare for one night, I had packed light. It was easy moving around the airport. But it’s strange getting on a plane when you have no idea where you’ll be staying, so everything about the trip was mildly stressful, ominous. I assumed that there were other people on the plane associated with the odyssey, but I couldn’t identify them at all. The trip had meaning, resonance, even though, in a way, it was precisely banal. I was flying to a place that most people, most North Americans, would avoid just on principle. Flying to Regina is sort of like flying to Billings or Fargo, or Omaha, an economically relevant city, surrounded by great undeveloped expanses. As with the cities of the American prairie, the city is a little bit rundown and has a criminal aspect (it’s Canada’s most crime-afflicted city, I believe), but I didn’t know any of this at the time.

  Owing to my experience with traveling for readings and public events, I have a sort of a space that I can get myself into for flights and trips where the unexpected is a regular fixture. I suppose I would describe it like this: I completely stop forecasting about my circumstances, and I just deal with what is directly in front of me. Abe Burickson told me to bring a copy of Moby Dick with me on my trip, and so I had Moby Dick on my tray table, and a movie to watch, and I wasn’t thinking about Saskatchewan at all.

  As night descended on the jet, just when I’d settled down into some kind of reasonable compartmentalization about the nature of my trip, I heard a guy coming up the aisle behind me, saying, Sir, sir, sir, I
think you dropped this! And before I knew it, he had dropped a manuscript in my lap. There was one other person in my aisle, and he didn’t pay any attention, and I was, initially, so focused on the strangeness of something being dropped in my lap, and on the fact of it being a manuscript, that I didn’t have time to give my liaison a look. I really should have, but I didn’t. I thought I got a quick glimpse, but no matter how I tried to find him later on, on a stroll to the back of the jet and the restrooms, I couldn’t find him again. It was a classic bit of Odyssey Works dodge and feint. I just had this manuscript, which turned out to be a musical score.

  A musical score of an unusual kind. Instead of written out in staves, as might have been done in a conventionally classical piece of music, this score was a flow chart, with small boxes indicating bits of melody, and spots where instruments were free to improvise, or to react to things happening elsewhere in the piece. It was a thoroughly postmodern score. And it could have been a map for the odyssey itself, where the possibility of static interactions with performers, with a reversal of performer and audience, such that I was performing for an audience of my cast—seemed possible somehow. I read the score for a while, and found its blankness at once appealing and daunting. I didn’t know what to make of it (or the suggestion that I bring Moby Dick), except that these forecasted future events in the very way that an infant’s face does: it tells you exactly what a person is going to look like, except that you don’t know yet how it does so.

  I was filling out my landing card, later on, when I realized that I had a real shortage of information available to me about my plans in Canada. There was an unspoken agreement between Abe Burickson and myself that I wouldn’t use my phone to text home about stuff unless there was an emergency, but I could sort of feel the itch to text at that point (I was still using a flip phone in those days, in my intense desire not to capitulate to the checking-mail-twenty-four-seven culture), to ask Laurel what I should do about my lack of information about where I was staying in Canada. I tried to maintain a studied commitment to the art of it all. This was the point of the project—to be off-balance, to be seeing the world as an adventure, a voyage of discovery.

  The airport was tiny, as I recall. Did I change planes? I did, in Minneapolis, which gave me a chance to walk around a bit, and by comparison, arriving at Regina’s airport was like flying into a tiny regional landing strip. The customs area was tiny, just a couple of lanes, one for Canadians, and one for the rest of us. Though in the old days, I had flown into Canada having forgotten my passport and somehow talked my way in and out, it was no longer the old days, and when I told the guy at passport control that I didn’t really know where I was staying in Regina, nor what I was doing there, he gave me a curious look and told me to go wait by a certain door. I waited there, it seems now, for a long time, until they had cleared everyone out, the entire flight.

  Except for one pretty and self-possessed blond woman in her thirties (my guess), who was carrying a tote bag from the New Museum, or some similar arts institution. She too seemed to have none of the requisite information, or that was my guess. She took no interest in me, at all, and seemed utterly assured about her fate, and they worked her over first. I could see her in an office lined with windows, and she sat in the corner, as animated as if she were discussing stock futures, or annual crop yields for the Saskatchewan provincial government. Unperturbed! However, I was getting more unsettled as I waited. I texted Abe and told him that it didn’t seem to be going so great with the immigration people. Indeed, eventually, a functionary called me into his cubicle. He said: What are you doing in Canada?

  I said, I am part of a performance by an avant-garde theater company, and as part of this performance, I am going to be in Regina tonight and tomorrow.

  He said, Where is this performance taking place?

  I said, I’m afraid I don’t know that.

  And where are you staying?

  I’m afraid I don’t know that either.

  And with whom are you doing the performance?

  Well, it’s in the nature of this theater company that I don’t exactly know that part either.

  I tried to leave out the part about it being a performance for an audience of one, because that just sounded preposterous.

  So you’re doing a performance in Regina with a theater group except you don’t know where it is, where you’re staying, or who’s involved?

  Then we went through it all a second time and a third time, and he asked me my profession, and why I didn’t have any luggage, and the more I talked the more indefensible the whole thing sounded to me. I kept looking over at the blonde in the other office, and I could tell that she was having a similar discussion.

  While the functionary was talking to me, he was typing a lot into the computer, and at some point I surmised that he was feeding me into the Interpol databases of known terrorists and outlaw types. Now and then in my life I have really disliked the fact that my first name, Hiram (of Hiram Frederick Moody III), is often assumed by the less informed to be a Muslim name, and this was one of those times. While I look about as much like a Muslim terrorist as your average Irish pub hound, I did and do have a name that is Turkish, or maybe Lebanese (look it up!), and it’s only natural that it would give a constabulary person something to inquire into.

  At one point, I said, Look, I’m pretty well-known in my business, you can just look me up. I would give you one of my books, but I don’t have any with me, but if you go on Wikipedia you’ll see my photo and my bibliography.

  To which the functionary said, Wikipedia pages are easily falsified.

  He had me there.

  I texted Abe: What’s the plan if I get sent back to the US?

  I texted Laurel: Abe didn’t consider what was going to happen at the border. I’m thinking I might get sent home.

  Her text back featured a lot of cursing.

  I’m thinking I sat there for half an hour, maybe, and it just got worse and worse as far as my faith that I would ever see Saskatchewan. But just when I was convinced the blonde and I were getting back on the plane, the guy said, Okay, you’re free to go, have a nice stay in Canada.

  And with slightly shaky knees, I walked out through customs, and looked for the person with the sign that said “Rick Moody.”

  The guy who picked me up was chatty, but I had little appetite for conversation at that point at all. It was night, and the outskirts of Regina were like the outskirts of anywhere, and they had picked a decent enough hotel, because they knew I’d be exhausted, and the art in the hotel was these etchings that made little pictures out of the word dream. I doubt that Abe Burickson ever got to see this feature of the establishment, but it was sort of what the odyssey felt like, of course, to the adventurer, like a dream that kept inserting itself unpredictably into the here and now.

  In the morning, the landscape revealed that Saskatchewan is flat. Per its reputation. Flatter than just about anywhere else, and flat in all directions, and as far as you can see. I recognize that its flatness is part of the same flatness that gives us the Great Plains of the United States, which I have also seen and admired, and I recognize that there are other flat places (like the interior of the Netherlands) that have a similar effect. I am sure if I ever see the Mongolian steppe I will be impressed. But the landscape of Saskatchewan was at the limit of what I have seen, in terms of flatness. I was driven out about an hour or so into the great expanses beyond Regina by another driver in the employ of Odyssey Works, and I was told nothing, just driven out in fairly abstracted silence punctuated by a few polite words here and there, and upon parking I was shown a certain footpath, and directed to follow this footpath, through a waving field of grain, out about half a mile to a small adobe hut out in the middle of nowhere. Then the driver left.

  To restate: I was to walk out into the middle of the grasslands in a foreign country, into an apparently uninterrupted agrarian landscape, mostly unperceived, or so it seemed, and wait. If the Odyssey Works people, for some reason,
wanted to take my life and dispose of my body where it might be undisturbed for a long while, in a ditch in Saskatchewan, they had found a really good way to do it. I was now an hour from Regina, my last known address, and even that one was a stretch, being 2,000 miles from home and across the northern border. Nevertheless, it wasn’t that I felt worried about my kidnapping. The Odyssey Works people didn’t summon up feelings of endangerment. It’s just that I felt really lonely. At every turn, in the process, given the opportunity to pause and reflect, I felt most cut off from the nourishing part of my life, which was just being around people whom I knew or cared about, like my soon-to-be wife, for example. In this way the odyssey they had constructed for me was very Odyssean, the more so the more I experienced it. But I wouldn’t know what it meant until I was done.

  At a certain point, as I walked through the field of waving grain, I could hear cello music coming from the small adobe structure to which I was bound. That is, as I marched through this racket of crickets, across waving fields of fallow scrub, I could hear a cello. That sublime sound. And indeed when I finally made it to the structure, which was rounded on the inside, with an opening into the ceiling, some windows that looked from the edge of an escarpment into a valley (about the only disturbance in the plains of Saskatchewan that I had seen since I got there), there was a cellist present, alone, with some sheet music, which I could see now was either the exact sheet music that had landed in my lap during the flight the night before, or cut from the same larger composition as that piece, with the same cells and open-ended passages.

  I also noticed that the escarpment, the steep sloping down into the valley out the window, had been in the photograph that I had seen at the hardware store the day before.