A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

by John Gregory Brown

  And now Henry had become an expert on that as well. He had lost everything, yes, just as Latangi had said, but as he’d tried to tell her, it hadn’t been the hurricane that had done it. He’d lost everything months ago—nearly a year now, in fact.

  Everything, Henry thought, hearing Latangi’s lilting voice as he sat on the motel-room bed, still transfixed by the images on the TV.

  He had squandered not only his job and his marriage but his entire life, reinventing himself by means of erasure, summoning thin air, as it were, from substance. He’d had everything and then, poof, in a magician’s cloud of manufactured smoke, he had nothing. He hadn’t exactly understood at first that this was what he was up to, couldn’t have explained it even to himself. But the hurricane had merely completed the job, had hurled him forward so that finally, lo and behold, he no longer recognized a single thing about his life.

  Lone behold, one of his students had once written in a paper, and Henry had loved the mistake. Lone behold. He’d added it to the list of delightful errors he kept on an index card in his desk drawer, a list he no longer had because he hadn’t bothered to return to pick up anything from school when he quit. Quit or was fired? Well, it didn’t matter. Lone behold, hammy-downs, boneified, tale-gating, butt naked, asp burger, peach-tree dish, udder silence. He remembered all of that, remembered precisely where the index card was in the drawer, remembered which kid had made which mistake, remembered whether or not he had cringed or winced or laughed or felt a profound compassion for all that was good and kind and true and dumb in this world.

  Udder silence. That’s what he needed. For a long time now—he couldn’t remember how long—there’d been a strange clatter in his head; he felt as though his brain had been scrambled, pithed, the way he’d been forced to do to the frogs in his high-school biology class when Father Ferguson, skeletal and arthritic, his vestments reeking of formaldehyde and cherry pipe smoke, rattled from table to table to make sure none of the boys were engaged in extracurricular acts of torture. “Your problem, Garrett,” Father Ferguson had once scolded him, knocking his pipe against Henry’s desk, “is that you can’t think straight.”

  It was true, Henry knew. And it was still true. He could not think straight. He had never been able to. But now it was worse. Now, in addition to his own crooked, winding, aimless thoughts, he heard, not voices exactly, but clatter—he didn’t have a better word for it; he’d tried but couldn’t come up with anything else that accurately captured the sensation. It wasn’t static or interference or noise; it wasn’t feedback or reverb or echoing; it was clatter. He was besieged by snatches of song lyrics, by lines from poems, by commercial jingles, by actors’ stentorian recitations, by bits of conversation from years ago, from childhood, all of it looped and overlapping, endlessly repeated until, for no reason he understood, it suddenly stopped, his brain going quiet.

  The clatter, despite the annoyance of it, despite the cacophony, made Henry feel oddly ecstatic, transported, brilliantly alive, as if his brain were finally letting go, bit by bit, of all the useless information he had acquired his whole life. He had never remembered his dreams until the clatter began, but now he woke up with long, intricately convoluted stories spilling through his thoughts, unable to distinguish sometimes what he had simply imagined from what he had actually seen or heard or done. The world—the very fact of his being alive in the world—seemed in these moments incredible to Henry, as if any minute now light would burst forth from his fingertips.

  Then the clatter—the ecstasy of the clatter—disappeared, and he was left feeling despondent, shaken, utterly and unalterably alone. His right eye—just the one eye, not the other—began watering for no reason, as if half of his face, half of him, had set about weeping.

  Amy, of course, had told him to get help, to talk to someone about what was going on—she’d told him this from the very beginning, in fact, from the first dream he’d had about his father—but Henry hadn’t listened. Why should he listen? He already knew what was happening. He was merely following in his father’s footsteps. He was gradually but inexorably losing his mind.

  Going crazy, as Amy knew, as he’d told her a hundred times, was the most distinctive and persistent of the Garrett traits, the deep dark cleft in their familial chin. He’d explained it to her when they first met—not a warning exactly but, well, information, he’d said, just something he figured she ought to know. He’d made it sound as though he were joking. He hadn’t been, of course. He’d described for her the generations of Garretts who had made the ascent to the rickety, toppling edge of sanity only to peer down into the great abyss below. Most of the stories were mundanely sad ones, stories of quiet disappearances and grim sanatoriums and lonely suicides. Some were so strange, though, that they were almost funny. Before the turn of the century, in the 1880s or 1890s, one of Henry’s paternal ancestors had famously leaped from a bank building on Canal Street, his pockets stuffed with cash. Snooks Eaglin, a local musician, a blind man, had written a song about the incident, a song Henry once heard him sing at the Mid-City bowling alley where he performed on Thursday nights, the crowd shouting out requests while dancing on the waxed wooden floor in bowling shoes or sock feet, the thump and rumble of the balls and the crack and echo of the tumbling pins creating the sensation that a mighty thunderstorm was raging outside.

  Angel’s left his wings behind, Eaglin sang in a comical stage whisper, as if he were imparting a secret he was worried might be overheard. He leaned near the microphone and flashed a smile directly to a young woman in the audience as if he could see her, as if he weren’t really blind.

  Angel’s left his wings behind.

  Figures he’ll put them to use some other time.

  Standing at the edge of that windowsill,

  he’s betting heaven’s got change for them hundred-dollar bills.

  Henry had meant to approach Eaglin sometime and ask where he’d heard the story and when exactly he’d written the song, but he never did. He lacked his father’s fervor for historical detail. All around, in every way, Henry knew, what he lacked was fervor. Instead he possessed torpor; he embraced turbidity; he welcomed languor. He was a woolgatherer. A coward. A squanderer. A louse.

  Oh, the sweet, sad lamentations of one Henry Archer Garrett, he heard in the radio preacher’s singsong voice, the woeful likes of which this world might be well and goodly blessed to never see hide nor hair of again.

  Amen.

  Henry had also told Amy how as a child he’d watched as his great-uncle William Rainey Garrett, his grandfather’s only brother, became completely undone.

  “Undone?” Amy had said.

  “You know what I mean,” Henry had answered.

  “You mean crazy?” Amy said, and he’d nodded, but what seemed more interesting to Henry was the manner in which that craziness expressed itself. His great-uncle had been a municipal court judge who, after his wife died from breast cancer, began handing down increasingly bizarre sentences to defendants. He’d ordered a landlord convicted of beating up tenants late with the rent to leave the state and not return until he’d gotten Willie Mays’s signature on a baseball glove, and he’d told a French Quarter stripper convicted on morals charges that she had to adopt three dogs from the SPCA by the end of the week or he’d send her to jail. Finally, his great-uncle ordered a man who’d been convicted of stealing a few hundred dollars and a Doberge cake from Gambino’s Bakery to scale the Robert E. Lee monument and scrub the pigeon droppings from the Confederate general’s hat; the monument was sixty feet high, and while drunkenly attempting to comply with the order, the man had fallen, breaking his left arm and cracking his hip. He’d made it only about five feet up the column. At that point, Judge Garrett had been quietly removed from the bench.

  It had all begun, Henry told Amy, with his great-uncle’s wife’s death. So maybe it had been sorrow that fueled the madness.

  “At least sparked it,” Amy said.

  “At least sparked it,” Henry agreed.

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nbsp; Henry had gone with his father to visit his great-uncle a few months before the old man died. The navy-blue Lincoln Town Car in his garage had four flat tires, and Henry and his father listened as his great-uncle, sitting at the kitchen table, repeated the same story over and over—how he’d once stood with his wife, Maudellena, at the top of Mount McKinley when the wind was so strong it blew pebbles across their feet until they were covered up to their ankles.

  “You already told us that one, Uncle Will,” Henry’s father said each time the story was done, smiling conspiratorially at Henry and patting the old man’s arm.

  “Did I?” he said, shaking his head, a strange vacant look of horror imprinted on his face, as if each moment contained for the old man some component of recognition of the clarity and reason that had been stolen from him.

  Henry’s father, before he disappeared, had told Henry, though Henry was too young to understand exactly what his father meant, that this penchant for madness was like a fascinating but exquisitely grotesque family heirloom, one that remained tucked away inside a drawer for years and years until it was finally pulled out for inspection on some appropriately dire occasion.

  “No matter how badly you want to see it, don’t go looking for it,” his father had told him. “Maybe you won’t stumble upon it.”

  Henry had just nodded, thoroughly confused. Who would want to go looking for madness? And what should he be doing, what should he be looking for instead?

  It was as if his father were talking to himself, though, rather than his son, and yet his father had indeed stumbled upon this grotesque family heirloom. “Carried off by the blues,” his mother had once said of his father’s disappearance, as if it were something charmingly romantic, deserving of its own musical homage. She had never once acknowledged, despite Henry’s and Mary’s anguish and confusion, that their father had—cruelly, unforgivably—abandoned them, had simply left behind everything, the only apparent clue to his disappearance the words scribbled on a sheet of paper on his office desk at Tulane. They were, Henry eventually learned, the first three lines of a Charley Patton song:

  I’m goin’ away, to a world unknown

  I’m goin’ away, to a world unknown

  I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long…

  His father probably hadn’t meant anything by writing out these words and leaving them on his desk. They probably were not a suicide note or a final cryptic fuck-you flourish. His father was always scribbling lyrics in the black notebook he kept in his pocket. When he was little, Henry hadn’t understood that his father wasn’t making up these words, that he was simply transcribing what he’d heard.

  Now Henry had done exactly what his father had done. He had disappeared. He had driven aimlessly until he wound up precisely in the middle of nowhere, in a motel with lampshades printed with the image of Ganesh, the Hindus’ crazy deity, a royal elephant astride a rat. Wasn’t there anywhere else he could have gone, any friends who would have welcomed him, who would have embraced him and offered a meal and a bed?

  Friends. They were already part of the everything that he had managed to lose. Wife, home, job, friends.

  The art of losing. That was part of the first line of a poem he used to teach, a poet losing door keys, handkerchiefs. Even a continent, she said. A lover? A father? Had she lost a father? He couldn’t remember. So many things, the poem had asserted, seem filled with the intent to be lost.

  He had lost them all, lost everything. He had swallowed ruin and wreckage and despair. He was alone, fully alone, and he could not even bring himself to weep, could not summon that awful cry of loss and longing and regret that would at least announce that he was alive.

  Well, he needed to sleep. But he could not stop watching, in silence, the devastation on TV. Even the commercials that interrupted the news—the shiny cars and complicated exercise equipment and scowling attorneys—seemed part of the whole ordeal, a scripted morality play whose message, like that of the hysterical preachers on the radio, was inscrutable to Henry. At first he tried to guess what the reporters must be saying as they stood on wet and dark French Quarter corners—at St. Peter and Royal, at Chartres and St. Louis—or rode through the flooded streets in narrow boats with outboard motors, but as the hours passed he realized that, to counteract the silence, to fend off his exhaustion, he had begun making up their words. They mouthed the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” which he’d once proposed to Amy they adopt as their theme song, a suggestion for which she’d only half jokingly slapped him, hard enough to sting. The reporters recited ingredients that Amy used to read aloud to him from the recipes she’d concocted. They counted to one hundred in French and then Spanish—Henry had memorized these words as a kid without bothering to learn the languages—and they sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Latangi’s lilting Indian accent. He saw the masses huddled outside the Superdome and the convention center, some of them shouting angrily at the cameras, most merely hanging their heads, defeated and grim, and he heard in his head the swelling strings of that endless Gavin Bryars composition, the one that for nearly an hour looped the sad, sweet voice of a bum in a London tube station, the bum singing over and over: Jesus’s blood never failed me yet.

  Udder silence. Lone behold. None of this can be real, Henry told himself, and it was as if he were constructing for his students some complex exercise in grammar and mechanics: none of this can be, could be, will be, has been, has ever been, will ever be, will ever have been real.

  But it was real, Henry knew. He knew that much, at least. He was not that far gone. He kept recognizing the neighborhoods and buildings that popped up on the screen: an antiques store on Royal Street where he once bought Amy a mirror, the plywood covering the store’s windows ripped away, the glass shattered; Lawrence’s Bakery on the corner of Filmore and Elysian Fields, its metal roof twisted grotesquely, like the recently shed skin of a giant snake; the Robert E. Lee theater, the floodwaters nearly reaching its marquee; the Bucktown shrimp boats pitched up against the side of an elementary-school gym like broken and abandoned toys. In high school Henry had dated a girl from Bucktown, a Mount Carmel Academy girl named Lacey Gaudet whose father had single-handedly built a new house in the backyard of their old one, transferring the bricks one by one from the old house to the new. When he was just about done, Henry had asked him what he planned to do with the foundation of the old house, and Mr. Gaudet said he was going to turn it into a giant indoor swimming pool, each room a different pool but all of them connected by narrow channels of water. “Just like the bayous,” he’d told Henry, smiling. “What do you think?”

  Henry had believed him, hadn’t realized that Mr. Gaudet was pulling his leg. But then he had slapped Henry on the back and said, with a bitterness that caught Henry by surprise, “It’s all coming down, son. It’s good for nothing.”

  Henry had liked Mr. Gaudet. He had been a riverboat pilot but retired early when his wife died. Lacey had once proposed setting up her father and Henry’s mother. When Henry said he didn’t think so, Lacey said, “It might be cool, you know. He’s kind of lonely.”

  “My mother doesn’t go out on dates,” Henry told her. “You’ve met her. She doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “Well, maybe she would,” Lacey said. “Maybe if he called her and asked her.”

  “No,” Henry said, uncomfortable. How could he explain to Lacey without hurting her feelings that her father and his mother inhabited separate worlds, that they were about as different as two people could possibly be? His mother was—what? An intellectual? An artist? A bohemian? What word would she have used? An eccentric? A recluse? A hermit? A loon?

  Henry could still hear his mother’s voice, the silly wordplay in which she and Henry’s sister had engaged, a kind of game requiring the construction of nonsensical phrases: Unilateral eclipse. Ecclesiastical ellipsis. Liturgical itinerancy. Truncated vice. There were rules, but Henry hadn’t understood them. He’d sensed that they didn’t want him to understand.<
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  When he and Lacey had first started dating, Henry had offered to help her father with the house. “What can you do, Henry?” Mr. Gaudet had asked. “Masonry? Roofing? Tile work?” Henry had been forced to admit that he didn’t know how to do anything. Mr. Gaudet had wrapped his arm around Henry’s shoulder as if to suggest that he felt bad that Henry didn’t have a father to teach him such skills. But Henry’s father, of course, hadn’t known how to do any of those things either. He was a professor, Henry had wanted to say, figuring that would provide sufficient explanation. Even before his father left, nothing in their house—leaking faucets, broken tiles, warped window screens, peeling plaster—had ever gotten fixed.

  Breaking things. Breaking down. Those, too, like losing, were the arts that Henry—and so many Garretts before him—had mastered.

  Lacey was the one, though, who had broken up with Henry. It was during senior year, after a dance at Mount Carmel, one in which they’d argued the whole time about something—he couldn’t remember what—the two of them sitting at the top of the gym’s bleachers and shouting at each other over the music.

  “This isn’t exactly what I’d call fun,” Lacey had told him once they’d finally gone outside, and she’d left him there, leaning against his car, an old mud-colored Chevy Impala with torn red vinyl seats, a car that still smelled, a year later, of the skunk he’d run over one night on Pontchartrain Boulevard. After that night Lacey had made a face every single time she got into the car, but Henry had grown to like the smell, the strange acrid sweetness of it.

  It had been the very night he’d hit the skunk—in fact, precisely because he’d hit the skunk—that Henry and Lacey had first had sex, in a thick grove of magnolia trees in a small park near the lakefront. Earlier, they’d stopped at the 7-Eleven near Lacey’s house, and they’d poured a pint of rum into Coca-Cola Icees, their usual concoction. They were driving around listening to the radio and trying to finish their drinks before heading to a party. But when they hit the skunk—they’d thought for a second that it was a squirrel, which was awful enough, but then they were instantly assaulted by the smell, their eyes watering, Lacey suddenly coughing and gagging—Henry pulled over as soon as he could. They scrambled from the car into the magnolia grove only to discover that the smell was still there, that it was on their clothes. So they peeled off their shirts and jeans, but Lacey smelled her hair and then her hands and started gagging again. She started cursing in a way he’d never heard her curse, using the foulest of language, choking it out—Jesus motherfucking Christ! Goddamned motherfucking sonofamotherfuckingbitch!—but she was laughing even as she cursed, and Henry was laughing too but also worried someone would hear Lacey, would come running and think he was assaulting her, so he tried to put his hand over her mouth. She snapped at his fingers as if she meant to bite him, but then she licked his palm and said, Ugh, I can taste it, I can, I swear it’s fucking everywhere, so he started licking her hand and then her arm and then her neck, just to tease her, to make her laugh, and he kept saying I like it or Mmmm or something stupid like that, and that’s how they’d wound up actually doing it, both of them a little drunk, or at least tipsy enough to fend off the shyness and the cringing embarrassment and the ignorance and fear. And it was okay; it was. They both felt fine about it and in the months that followed they got a bit better and managed a kind of patient, fumbling grace, but they never quite overcame the new weight that somehow descended upon their time together, and it was probably that weight, the drag of it, more than any big argument or suspected infidelity, that finally caused Lacey to break up with him.