A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  I could taste bitter anger in my mouth. Manipulate us—like me not following his rules made me an inherently shitty person. Pity—as if he was some kind of all-star dad for feeling bad for me. Inconsiderate—like my life was required to be lived in accordance with his wishes.

  “Well, Dad, be my guest. Because I’m not in Truckee.” I took a deep breath. “And I haven’t been for three days. I’m in Denver.”

  I pulled the phone back from my ear, but he didn’t explode. “Denver? You’re in Denver?” He sounded angry, but strangely only half surprised, like he was pretending to be. “Arthur, what the hell do you think you’re doing in Denver?”

  “I told you, I’m trying to figure out some stuff about Grandpa.”

  “And you think you’re going to somehow find that in Denver? And you think the best way—”

  Mara was getting directions from a man in a navy-blue suit across the station. She was laughing as he pointed at a map and I felt a familiar burn in my chest. The same burn I’d felt when I saw Kaitlin with the guys in her AP History class, teachers that helped her, even her cousins. I should have believed her when she said they didn’t really like her and been okay with it, but I had hated it. I saw Mason in the navy-blue suit, mouthing “I’m sorry, Arthur” as he giggled with Mara over the map. I wanted to run across the station and slap the map out of his hand and the grin off his face.

  My dad was still shouting. “—some bullshit about your grandfather—”

  “Yeah,” I cut him off. “I think I’m going to find out some more about his life here. The last week.”

  “And you think that’s in Denver?”

  “I know it is.”

  “Arthur,” he spat. “Let me save you some trouble. He died. That’s what happened. That’s what always happens.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Arthur, please. I don’t know what you know, or what you think you know, about my father, but it’s not worth it. I spent years, years trying, and you know what I found? Nothing. A shitload of angry, soulless nothing. Until I realized there was nothing to find. He wasn’t a tortured genius, and he wasn’t hiding some elaborate secret. He was a cynical, demented old man. And he died. And that’s all.”

  As my father spoke, I unfolded the photo from my pocket. It was starting to crease in the center, directly down the middle of my grandfather’s face, splitting him into two halves. On one side, my father, his brother, and his brother’s wife, all tired faces and sunken shoulders. On the other was me, for whatever reason alive with energy, and behind me, the train.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry that you had to convince yourself he was a shitty person just so that you would feel okay exploiting him because you never did anything worthwhile in your own life.”

  “Arthur—”

  “But just because you gave up on him doesn’t mean I’m going to.”

  “Arthur!”

  “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “You know that if you do, we’re going to have to do a full search, right?” I couldn’t tell if he was warning me or threatening me. “We’ll make you a missing person. Police and everything, across the country. And they’ll have to find you and bring you home, kicking and screaming.”

  I wanted to scream, but I held myself to spitting. “Really? Because it seems like the last time someone in this family ran away—”

  “Don’t do this to me, Arthur. Not you, too.”

  “—no one went looking for him! No police, I doubt he even got this fucking lip-service phone call.”

  “He was an adult—”

  “So am I!”

  “No, you’re not! And my father was out of his mind—”

  “Not good enough.” I slammed my finger down on the screen to end the call.

  Mara looked only partially interested in my rage as she danced back toward me, a postcard in her hands.

  “Dear Dad,” she pretended to write on the back with her gloves. “Hello from Denver. Met the grandson of a literary legend today.” She smiled up at me. “Not quite as cool as it sounds. All the same, thanks for never bothering me with angry phone calls or tracing my cell phone or anything.”

  I laughed. “Tracing your cell phone?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Your dad’s probably doing it right now.”

  I almost laughed again, but choked on it, remembering how casual my father had been when I told him how far I was from where I was supposed to be. He should have screamed, but he had to force himself to be surprised.

  “You’ve got, like, six different kinds of GPS on that thing. You could get walking directions to the nearest strip club in fifteen seconds, you think they can’t figure out where you are?”

  I spun my cell phone end over end in my hand. She was right. The search would be over before it even started. It might be almost over.

  “If you’re going to make a daring getaway from your parents,” she said, “you might as well do it properly.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “How?”

  “You can’t turn it off, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  Her face lit up. Without a word, she snatched my phone out of my hand and strolled casually across the platform to a line of people waiting to board a bus labeled Express Arrow. She snuck in behind a man with a plaid backpack and, without drawing any attention to herself, slipped it into his backpack pocket and walked away, whistling.

  “See, life is better untethered,” she said, close enough to almost kiss me, before turning to check the train counter. “Your parents will be looking for you in . . . Billings, Montana.”

  I stood in stunned silence, watching the man with my phone board the Express Arrow. I thought about running after him, begging for my phone back, apologizing and explaining the miscommunication. But as I turned, Mara smiled at me, and it seemed like a good idea, if only because it was her idea.

  “Come on now,” she whispered, and she grabbed my hand and pulled me down a Denver side street and into the cold, snow-blown afternoon.

  5.

  IN THE LAST hour of the train ride, I had briefed Mara on every step of the journey so far, from finding the first clue in Birds of Tahoe to Sue Kopek’s abandoned mansion. By the time I finished, she had already pulled out her own small Moleskine journal and made the following chart:

  WHAT WE KNOW

  - APRIL 27 TRUCKEE, CA TO STAY WITH TIM, HIS SON

  - APRIL 28 ELKO, NV TO SEE SUE KOPEK(?)

  - APRIL 29 GREEN RIVER, UT TO VISIT BIG RAY’S SALOON / TO MOVE SUE?

  - APRIL 30 DENVER, CO TO STAY AT THE MELBOURNE?

  - MAY 1 ??????

  - MAY 2 ??????

  - MAY 3 ??????

  - MAY 4 OHIO???

  She’d noticed that the stops so far were about equal distances apart, which at the very least lent some consistency to the confusion. If the timeline and train schedule held, that would place him at the end of the train route, Chicago, the day before his death. But there were no trains from Chicago directly to the part of Ohio where he had died, so the theory wasn’t without flaw.

  We’d talked tirelessly through the earlier journals, testing them against her impressive knowledge of the sixties and seventies. We agreed that chaos in the cold, wet veins of ch— was likely about Chicago; she said Lou and Sal’s tribute sounded like a statue she was familiar with.

  “It’s not like we know nothing,” she said as we cut across a parking lot. Outside the station, it was already dark, the faint snowfall only visible in the small radius of light surrounding the streetlamps and windows. “It seems to me that the most crucial bit would be to figure why he went to these places, if there is a reason.”

  “I mean, we do know why. Kind of.”

  “Do we?”

  “Because he’d done it before. He’s probably taking the exact trip he used to take all the time.”

  She didn’t look at me, her eyes fixed forward on the street sig
ns ahead of us. “Right, so we need to figure out why he decided to repeat the trip, in his old age.”

  “And that starts,” I said, “with why he used to make it in the first place.”

  “And perhaps the most important question of all,” she added. “Why he stopped.”

  Mara walked briskly, her feet never leaving the ground for long, her head down as if it was pulling her forward. Her beanie was still flirting dangerously with the possibility of falling off the back of her skull, but never did.

  “Something else is bothering me,” I said without thinking. “You know Sue, the woman in the mansion—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “When she was talking to me, she talked directly to me. Like, ‘you,’ ‘Oh, Arthur, it’s just you.’ But then when she was talking about my grandfather’s napkin, or poem or whatever, she called it ‘his napkin’.”

  “So?”

  “So, if she thought we were the same person, shouldn’t it have been ‘your napkin’?”

  Mara considered it for a moment. “She also thought it was a napkin, not a poem, and couldn’t get past five sentences with you. So I don’t think you’re going to get very far trying to derive some sort of meaning from this woman’s syntax.”

  I nodded. “Well, then hopefully, you’re not wrong about this place.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then hopefully his clue is easy to find.”

  Mara drew a sharp, noticeably frustrated breath.

  “What?”

  “It’s just, that word you use, clue.”

  “What about it?”

  She didn’t answer right away, and we continued walking, fewer and fewer cars passing us as we got farther from downtown Denver.

  “Let me ask you a question.” She interrupted the silence. “Do you think there’s something at the end of this? Some prize or musical number or . . . something?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, eyes fixed on my feet.

  “And what do you think it is?” she asked.

  Light snow crunched beneath our feet. “Answers,” I said with a small nod, but she didn’t respond, so I added, “I don’t know. Something.”

  She inhaled slowly. “Have you entertained the possibility that maybe—I don’t know—there’s not?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “I think that perhaps you should.” She spoke slower than usual. I could tell she was being careful about offending me. “It’s spectacular, either way, finding these journals. But I think it might help to consider that maybe this isn’t . . . intentional. If he had Alzheimer’s, he might have . . .”

  “Have what?” I tried to listen, to imagine that there wasn’t a purpose to the writing my grandfather was leaving behind, but it didn’t make sense. “He might have accidentally stumbled back to a bunch of places he’d been before?” I could feel the temperature of my voice rising without trying.

  “Yes, accidentally.”

  “And left clues behind, at every single place, that told me where to go next? That would be an insane coincidence.”

  “Or”—Mara matched my volume—“a behavior pattern that’s consistent with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and dementia.”

  “Look.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re trying to play—”

  “Game?”

  “Yeah, your angle or—”

  “There it is again! Stop doing that!”

  “Doing what?”

  “Assuming you know everything about me! Assuming everything everyone does is conniving or self-interested or something. Not everyone’s got a motive. I just—” She stopped herself again. “I just want you to be careful.”

  “Of what?”

  “I just don’t want you to get lost in believing there’s going to be something there for you, or to be heartbroken if there’s not. I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret.”

  I winced. “Then what are you doing here?”

  Mara walked for a block without saying anything. “Your grandpa’s book was very important to my sister, and to me, and to all of the people around us. She built a whole life around his ideas, so if there’s more writing to be found—regardless of whether he knew what he was writing or not—that’s the answer, to me.” She didn’t look at me. “It’s just important, that’s all.” With that, she decided the conversation was over.

  We walked without talking for several minutes. On the corner of two streets that looked exactly like the streets we’d just passed, she pulled out another joint and lit it. I stopped as we passed a bookstore, the large glass window in front covered with images of bright red birds.

  “Why are you stopping?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, studying the birds. “Tanagers.”

  I watched her for a few moments. She smoked quickly, nervously, barely exhaling in time for the paper to hit her lips again. She kept shooting glances left and right without slowing her motion, like she wasn’t checking where to go so much as checking to make sure she noticed everything.

  “Why are you walking so fast?”

  She stopped and nodded across the street. “Because I know where to go.”

  The buildings on the other side of Larimer Street were all attached, a series of redbrick storefronts, battered and decaying from snowfall. The windows of the shops were either boarded up or displaying mannequins, abandoned and naked in empty stores. We’d been walking for so long that we were outside the city center and into abandoned Denver, where there were no signs of life other than parking lots; old, industrial factories; and an old, black awning, on which white stenciled letters now read:

  THE M LBOURNE YO TH HOSTE

  “Quick, here first,” Mara whispered, and before I could protest, she was flicking her joint onto the street and pulling me through a door behind us.

  I turned into an old mini-mart that had clearly missed its last few shipments of—everything. A man sat behind the counter, flipping through a magazine. He barely looked up as we entered and the bell on the door chimed.

  Mara pulled a crumpled ten-dollar bill from her pocket. “Alright, go buy something,” she said, and nodded toward the register. I reached my hand for the cash, but she didn’t give it to me.

  “Buy what?”

  “Anything. Buy yourself some cigarettes. It’ll help.” Before I could ask what it would help with, she had disappeared behind a display of Hostess snack cakes.

  I approached the counter and the man didn’t move, his face still buried in what looked like a Maxim magazine.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah,” he said without looking up.

  “Um, can I get . . .” I scanned behind the register. “A pack of those orange . . . cigarettes. American . . . Splits? Spirits? And a lighter, I guess.”

  “Ten dollars,” he said without pushing any buttons on the register. I handed him cash and he tossed them to me. I picked a plain black lighter and I walked out.

  Kaitlin would’ve killed me if she’d seen me smoking. Both of her grandparents had been lifelong smokers, and both had paid the price for it. Once, she saw Mason with a cigarette and almost tackled it out of his mouth. I guess she’d always cared about him like that, too.

  Mara was waiting outside, a smug smile on her face. She opened her jacket, and under it was a bottle of Fireball Whisky.

  “You stole that?”

  “No! I paid for it. I left the money on the shelf where the whiskey used to live.”

  I laughed.

  “Look, I’m already breaking one law in this country. I’m not about to add theft as well. Besides, we’ll need this.”

  “For what?”

  She noticed my cigarettes and smiled. “Oh, nice. American Spirits. Now you can smoke cigarettes and look like a douche, all at the same time.”

  “I mean, I just picked the, the one with the, the most colorful box they had, but now, now that I see they’re”—on the box—“‘made with one hundred percent organic tobacco,’ I’m feeling good about my selection.”r />
  “I always thought that name—American Spirit—was delightfully ironic.” I didn’t feed her fire but she continued on her own. “Taking something notoriously deadly, dressing it up with adjectives so it doesn’t look so bad, giving it a perky, patriotic name—that is kind of the American spirit, isn’t it?”

  I tried to think of a joke to respond with as we reached the hostel, but I couldn’t think of any British insults that weren’t three hundred years too late. “I’ve gotta say,” I tried, “your anti-Americanism is—”

  “Kinda getting you riled up a bit, is it?” She winked and pushed open the door.

  The inside of the Melbourne International Youth Hostel was about as impressive as the outside. The entryway was an all-white room containing nothing but an IKEA floor lamp and a desk in the center. Behind it sat an old man with bright white hair clinging to the sides of his head, and a collection of keys, all hanging from screws in the wall.

  “We’d like a private room for the evening, please,” Mara said. My ears perked when I heard the words private room, but it was followed quickly by a smack in the back of the head, Kaitlin reminding me that she was still there and was still watching and that I was still expected to be faithful.

  “Only got one bed in there, that okay?” He looked past her to me, as if I was the one that would have a problem with it.

  “We’ll make it work,” Mara chimed.

  We watched as the old man pulled out a giant, leather-bound book labeled “MELBOURNE 2001–2014 LOG.” I felt bad for him as I tried to work out the math of how few customers he would have to have in order to make thirteen years fit into a single book. His log system was almost hilariously simple, like a guest book at a funeral. Date of visit, name, birth date, phone number, room number, and a box for checkout.

  “Name and birth date,” he grunted.

  “Arthur Pullman,” I told him, and he stared down at the log, wrinkles across his face creased. “Arthur Pullman,” I repeated, louder, and he began writing.