by Paul Theroux
Feeling sentimental, I took pity on her. I said, "The woman in the suitcase. I was lying. It was not you."
"Should I thank you?"
"No. That's just the way it was. The victim was a jogger in her twenties, blond, a divorcée from somewhere on the South Shore."
She said nothing. She was no longer interested in the details of my dreams. "You have to help yourself."
"By reading?"
"Or writing."
"That's ridiculous."
"Just read for pleasure."
"I always find it harrowing, I'm sorry to say."
"That might not be a bad thing. When I can't do any more for them, I always send my patients away with a book list."
It annoyed me that she had the list so near to hand. It was as though, long before I had told her, she knew that this was going to be my last session. She gave me a four-page list, and I could see something foreign in her typing—the machine, the spacing, the punctuation. The list had its own order, its own clumsiness, like a bad translation.
I saw my name at once, near the bottom of the third page, four of my novels.
"Paul Theroux."
"You should read him."
I looked her straight in the eye: did she know whom she was talking to?
"And what will I see?"
"You will see whatever you want to see," she said. "But you might look closely at the way he deals with marriage, the complexities of freedom and dependence."
"You think he's put my marriage in his books?"
"Oh, no. They are all totally different. I want you to see how different it can be for each person. But his characters have hope, they are resourceful, imaginative. He might have answers for you."
"There are no answers. You've just proved it to me."
"I am speaking of suggestions. His writing will show you possibilities. Half an answer," she said. "You supply the other half."
Perhaps she knew who I was—perhaps she was telling me to look at my own writing and see the work that I had already done; that I had to understand that the only way out of my dilemma was to write, as I had before, and then I would recover my missing half.
A month later, the suitcase was found in a locker at South Station. It had begun to smell, because it contained the dismembered body of a twenty-two-year-old woman, recently divorced, from Plymouth, who had been abducted while out jogging.
FOURTEEN
Medford—Next 3 Exits
I
THREE DAYS AFTER I stopped seeing my psychiatrist, I got into my car and drove to Boston, as though it were a habit I could not break. It wasn't the session with Dr. Mylchreest but the drive I needed. I had come to depend on the twice-a-week routine, and I wanted to be out of the house—playing the radio, being busy, counting the miles, eating afterwards. The transition from afternoon to evening, light to dark, especially that ambiguous hour in winter when it is neither and both, was the hardest part of the day. And today it was snowing again—light dusty flakes as insubstantial as ashes and as aimless, not white but bluish gray and sifting from the low seamless sky of the dark city and melting on the pavement and making the small stones beside the road damp and black like dog noses. But the distant hills that were visible from the psychiatrist's window had been white.
I was thinking, as I passed Mylchreest's Storrow Drive exit, that the sessions themselves, which I had expected to resemble a spell in a confessional, were more like visiting my tutor, presenting homework—my dreams, my fears—having it graded, and repeating this same business three days later. It was a monotony of effort made into an elaborate ritual, another secret. And what for? It did not help me to live any better. It was like school, the most hateful aspect of school, in that it was not life but a dated rehearsal for living. I stopped seeing the shrink because I was holding back—the way I stopped writing a daily diary long ago when I realized there were things I did that I did not write down. If you did not tell the whole truth, there was no point at all in anything you did.
There was something still wrong with me, but the thing that was wrong had made me a writer, and maybe I would write again. Never mind that I did no writing now; at least I was fully awake, and my alertness and my fragile state made me remember everything. The drive, though, the sense of having something to do on a particular day at a specific time—that helped me plan my week. It gave me a sense of anticipation; then the day itself, which was dominated by the session and excited my mind; and on the day after I felt slightly behind and busy, and that gave me a sense that I was working.
Most of all on this drive I was experiencing American roads again—the size of them, the speed, the way the highway signs were full of choices and reminders. I listened to the call-in shows on the radio as only solitary people do, and I understood the confusion and anger. I listened to the lyrics of country music, the way they described my own feelings. And the expressway through Boston, Route 93, was not a corridor leading through a ribbon of land—no great American road is. It is a highway in every sense, signposted for places, some of which were very distant, because that was another feature of the great highway, and showing Kennedy Library and then Chinatown and To Providence and New York, and past For New Hampshire and Maine a green sign just as large reading Medford—Next 3 Exits.
At each session I had talked about Medford more, something to do with the signs on the highway, the sight of snow, and at the end of the twenty-odd sessions, when I gave up on it all, Medford was on my mind. I puzzled over the thought that I had not gone there from somewhere else; I had been born there, and I had left. So I associated the word Medford with departure.
I went there this winter afternoon like a dog, agitated by being near something he doesn't understand, just to sniff at it. Medford Square was the intersection of five wide streets, Main, Forest, Salem, High, and Riverside Avenue. The city square was shabbier than I remembered, but the river beside it had kept it the same shape. Medford was distinguished by the Mystic River. It was pretty but sluggish as it had always been—dark, silent, still. The river had made the place rich. Ships built on it sailed to Boston and the world. In grade school we all talked about Medford ships and Medford rum. The last Medford ship was built in 1873 and there had been no rum for years—you had to go to Somerville to buy liquor.
The main library—the old Magoun mansion—was gone; a supermarket-style library was in its place. And now the interstate, Route 93, roared past Medford and above it, a thoroughfare as lofty and large as a Roman viaduct. It had slashed the town in two and obliterated my childhood home: 76 Webster Street and my doghouse were now gone, replaced by the ramp at exit 33, and Water Street was gone too, where we used to go coasting, our word for sledding. It was late and dark. I was surprised by the snow, its whiteness here.
The next time I went to Medford, three days later, I took my cross-country skis.
You revisit your past and it looks very small, people say—your house, your school, your old street, that fence, that park. But no, Medford looked larger, broader, more shadowy. Was it the snow? Certainly the snow simplified it. The trees I remembered as small were enormous and the steep lawns were piled with snowdrifts. The river was half frozen, long green ribbons of weed pressed against the underside of the ice and all streaming in the same direction.
Its businesses were faltering, Medford looked unlucky. The deli now a convenience store, Star Market an auto-parts franchise, the diner a fast-food joint, the movie house derelict. Discounters flourished where once had been locally owned stores staffed by the owner and his children. The old men's clothing store, the only place you could buy expensive shoes or a cashmere coat or be measured for a suit, was now a franchise hiring out cheap tuxedos. Returning, I was reminded of what the place had been and who I had been. At last, separated, broke, and unemployed, I belonged in Medford. My sense of strangeness matched the strangeness of the place. It would have been worse for me to have to return penniless to a sneering, prosperous city. I felt the way that this place looked. The town was older, run
-down, seedier, a bit lost. Like me.
But nothing had changed in the woods to the north. The charge of snow, this volume filling the bridle paths of the Fells, was exactly as I had remembered. I parked on South Border Road and skied through the softness of it in the early darkness, and all that was different was, at the margin of the woods, the sound of traffic on the interstate like an endless train of freight cars. I skied in a large loop, taking in all the places I knew from South Border Road, past the bouldery hillside we called Panther's Cave, to the Wright Tower and the Sheepfold and small, dangerous Doleful Pond, where we skated in the winter but avoided in the summer because of its reputation for quicksand.
Forty years ago I had skied here as a boy, my dog Samson plunging ahead, up to his chin in snow, and snowflakes all over his tongue. Then, it was wooden skis and leather bindings and bamboo poles, but in this same darkness and freezing air that was faintly dusty with frost and the pinched odor of dead leaves and the dried needles of pitch pines, a sharpness on the wind of frost crystals, the cold that drops on you when darkness falls in winter. Apart from that distant traffic and Samson's gasps, there was a silence in the woods, the same woods with the same snow, the woods I had always known. This was the first sense that I had had of a return home, because I had spent so much time here plinking beer bottles with my .22 rifle and building fires and climbing the rocks and doing what I was doing now, tramping on cold, squeaking snow, suddenly overtaken by darkness on a winter afternoon, feeling my way along and then blinded by headlights as I reached the road.
With my skis on the roof rack I drove back into Medford Square and, thirsting for a beer, down Mystic Avenue. Once there had been a big wooden roller-skating rink here, the Bal-A-Rue, that was also a hangout for sailors from Boston on shore leave, and now it was a body shop surrounded by junked cars, and beyond it, just over the Somerville line, a bar, the Mystic Lounge.
It was dark inside, the booths lit by dim red bulbs, and it stank of cigarette smoke and stale beer. I bought myself a glass of draft and on my way to a booth I passed by the jukebox. I fed some quarters into the slot and punched in three old songs. And then I sat and sipped my beer and listened to Ray Charles's "Born to Lose," and Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place to Go," and the last one, Jim Morrison's haunting lilt "People Are Strange."
And I smiled, tasting my misery with a little jolt of alcohol, and took a self-pitying satisfaction in our mutual ruin, Medford's and mine.
A teasing voice from behind me said, "Hey, you got a problem, guy?"
I turned to see a plump girl and her tattooed friend—tattoos on her neck and arms—smiling knowingly at me from the next booth, as though I had described my mood by my choice of songs.
"No problem," I said, and I laughed because I was so pleased that someone had noticed me. For two months I had been a wraith, invisible, silent, nameless, walking through walls.
"You actually been skiing?" the tattooed friend asked, seeing my ski jacket and the goggles and gloves I was holding.
I got up and joined them, saying, "Oh, yes," grateful to them for speaking to me, but I hesitated when I saw that there were two young men with them. They were pale, sour-faced, sulking on the seat opposite, their hair in their eyes, and one of them was very drunk, with cracked lips and his dirty white fingers gripping a glass, an inch of liquor in it. He jiggled the glass as he raised it to his mouth, shaking the scum of spittle on its surface. None of them sat straight—they curled, with their feet up, like dogs in a small room.
"I've been cross-country skiing up the Fells."
"Where's that?"
"The Fellsway," I said, and began to elaborate, but the girl had no idea of the place I was describing and the others looked bored, and so I stopped.
"Get me another drink," the drunken man said.
"I'll get it," I said, and called the waitress over and ordered five beers, and was at once self-conscious, slightly embarrassed that I was buying a round in the English way, so that the others would be part of it, and would buy their rounds in turn, obligated in a little ritual of mock comradeship.
But one of the young men said in a slurred voice, "It must be cool to have a job," and I saw that I had been impulsive and overly friendly, and that they had no money and no one would be buying me a drink.
"My name is Paul," I said, raising the bottle, and clinking their bottles with mine, they told me their names. The young woman who had spoken to me was Vickie—her friends called her Weechie. The other woman was Bun-Bun: a small tattoo on the side of her neck, another—a bluebird—on the back of her hand. The young drunk was Mundo. His sulky friend stared at me, and Weechie said, "That's Blaine. He's toasted. He's smoking a bone."
With a smile of hatred, Blaine palmed the roach and snorted.
"I know where he means," Mundo said. "The Fellsway is where I like totaled a car and they had to like cut me out of it with a blowtorch that took like a week."
"He gets drunk and goes up 93 and closes his eyes and counts," Blaine said. "Just to see what will happen."
"What happens is he crashes into the guardrail," Bun-Bun said.
"I like got up to forty-eight once," Mundo said. Mundo had an asymmetrical head, one eye higher than the other, cheekbones out of alignment, and his speaking of car crashes called attention to his lopsided face. "Then I got wrecked."
"What is it about counting?" I said, remembering how I had spent the past two months counting everything in my life—minutes, pounds, meals, telephone poles.
"Counting is just nuts," Bun-Bun said. "If you're obsessing, you count. There was this bitch in the consignment shop where I work and she counted everything about a hundred times and then touched all the doorknobs before she left. She finally went nuts."
Her deliberate way of speaking, as though she had a morsel in her mouth, made me very attentive, wondering why she didn't swallow. I waited for her to smile and then I saw a glint, a flash of bright silver on her tongue.
"What are you eating?"
"Show him, Bun-Bun," Weechie said.
"It's a stud," Bun-Bun said, and stuck out her tongue and showed me the silver ball fastened near the tip of her tongue. When she clicked it against her teeth, I saw there was another on the bottom. "A barbell, like."
"Didn't it hurt?"
Bun-Bun frowned at this obvious question and said, "I liked it."
"Body piercing," Weechie said.
"What's it for?"
"He wants to know what it's for!"
"Where'd you get your tattoos?" I asked Weechie.
"Tattoo party."
"How does that work?"
"Everyone goes, and you pay about fifty bucks and you drink and hang out, and the man just does one after the other. It's cool. There's one tomorrow night on Riverside Ave. We're probably going."
"I used to deliver newspapers on Riverside Ave. It was on my paper route," I said. They stared at me. I said to Weechie, "So what do you do?"
"I work at a pet shop in Wellington Mall."
"Near the drive-in movie?"
"That closed about a thousand years ago," Weechie said.
"How about you?" I said to Blaine.
In an angry, defiant way, staring hard at me, his eyes blazing in his flat white face, he said, "Does this dude ask a million questions or what?"
"He's wired," Weechie said.
It was my old instinctive interrogation, and curiosity, all the piercing qualities of loneliness that filled my head with details and made me restless until I found some kind of order for them. This intensity preceded my writing, and although I was awkward being noticed in my questions, I felt there was hope for my writing something. Perhaps my being with these people, and risking the questions, meant that I was emerging from my depression.
"I used to live in Medford," I said, to give them some information. "I was born here."
"About six hundred years ago," Blaine said.
"Don't pay any attention to him, mister," Bun-Bun said, and I was sorry she said it that way, becau
se hadn't I just told her my name?
"I went to Medford High."
"My old man went there," Weechie said. "Eddie Faganti? Maybe you know him."
"What year did he graduate?"
"Somewhere in the sixties," Weechie said.
I nodded and said the name rang a bell, because I was afraid I would lose her if I told her that her father was younger than I was. And to change the subject, I turned my attention to the plastic bag on the table next to Weechie and asked her whether she had been shopping.
"What's with the questions, man!" Blaine said, sounding fierce. "Does this guy suck or what?"
"Behave yourself," Bun-Bun said with a motherly sort of strength and authority that impressed me. And it worked—Blaine sulked but he shut up, looking chastened. "Hey, excuse me," Bun-Bun said, "I've got to take a wicked leak."
"It's just videos," Weechie said as I moved to Bun-Bun's seat in the booth. She showed me the two videocassettes in the bag, Die Hard and Half Moon Street.
I felt a rush, my blood whipping through my body, and I said in a stammering way, "I wrote that one. It's Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine. See, my name's probably on it."
But there was nothing on the plastic cassette except a smudged and torn label and a hand-scrawled number.
"There's this cool scene where she's on an exercise bike, all sweaty," Weechie said. "Bun and I love her. She was great in Alien. She like blows this drooling space lizard away. Working Girl. That was pretty good too."
Mundo said, "It like sucked."
I said as clearly as I could, "I wrote the story that they made this from," and showed them the cassette of Half Moon Street.
But though they heard me, they said nothing. It was as though I had spoken to them in another language, something so ridiculous and opaque they could only hear it as a noise but not translate it. Weechie had turned away laughing, and even Blaine was smiling, because Mundo had farted loudly and was saying, "I like stepped on a duck."
