A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

by John Gregory Brown

  All in one piece, he could tell her. Their house, believe it or not, actually floated. And he knew he could manage an appropriately detailed description, lace curtains fluttering inside the green-shuttered windows, the house bobbing through the worst of the storm until the wind quieted and then drifting peacefully across the flooded banks of Bayou St. John and out into Lake Pontchartrain, a children’s-book miracle, a fairy-tale finale.

  And that would do it. Mary would be delighted by Henry’s invention—not nearly as imaginative as what Mary used to tell their mother—but of course it would also remind them both that their mother’s house, their childhood home, was underwater, had been utterly destroyed. That house could not float; no real house could.

  Mary still had friends in New Orleans, he was sure—girls in the neighborhood she’d grown up with, ones who’d married guys who, like Henry, had gone to Jesuit High School and then Tulane and then never left the city, women who couldn’t imagine a better place to live. Where were these women and their husbands and their children now? Huddled in hotel lobbies, Henry figured, or sleeping in their relatives’ guest rooms or on their friends’ basement floors. How many had slept on church pews or park benches or, like Henry that first night, in their cars? How many, Henry wondered, were, like him, unaccounted for, alone?

  He needed to see Mary. He needed to get to Baltimore, show up at Mary’s door, let her know that he was okay.

  Or he could stay here in Virginia. He could stay here and look for Amy. That was his other option. He could find out exactly where she was living, Lexington or Lowesville or Laurel, some place that began with an L. She’d told him when she left. She’d given him the address—an old farmhouse or bungalow that belonged to her editor’s parents or cousins or someone else who knew someone who knew her editor, he couldn’t remember. But she would be staying there, she said, until she finished the Central America book, then she’d decide.

  “Decide what?” he’d asked her.

  “What to do, Henry,” she’d said. “You know. What? Where? Who?”

  Who? Oh God.

  “You’ll come back?” he’d said, meaning to sound hopeful, meaning to let her know that was what he wanted her to do.

  “I don’t know, Henry,” she’d said, her voice flat, uninflected. “I don’t know.”

  One night he’d found the town on an old U.S. road atlas someone had left at the store, a giant book with front and back covers that were somehow cushioned, as if they’d been filled with air. But now he couldn’t remember what the town was. Maybe she’d gone to the Lucky Caverns, a candlelit cathedral beneath the mountains, walls of limestone shimmering with specks of mica. He imagined the endless echo of her laughter, her delight at having found such a perfect place to hide from her lunatic, dream-damaged excuse for a husband.

  No, that was another of his idiotic delusions. Amy wasn’t hiding. She had told him exactly where she was going; it was just that he couldn’t remember what she’d said. But he could find out where it was, couldn’t he? Or he could somehow make himself remember. And once he did, he knew he could just show up there. Like Mary, Amy must be worried about how he’d fared in the hurricane. No matter what he had done to her, how much he had hurt her, she would want to know that he was okay. She’d want to hear his story, learn what he knew about their friends, about who had decided to leave and who hadn’t. He’d have to tell her that he knew nothing, that he had spoken to no one. And then she’d look at him and try to discern how much more unhinged this new circumstance had left him.

  Well, I’m not living in a grocery store anymore, he could say, hoping she’d laugh, but the truth, of course, was much worse: he wasn’t living anywhere; he had nowhere to go. And she wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t find anything he had to say amusing or endearing. He had hurt her—that’s what she said, and he had tried to understand what she meant. He did understand it. But he couldn’t seem to process this understanding, couldn’t unscramble it from all the chaos and clatter in his head.

  She loved him. She’d said that again and again. She loved his generosity, his gentleness, his hangdog wit. You’ve won my heart, she’d told him, as if he’d accomplished an improbable feat in a rigged carnival game that you were expected to lose.

  Hunting the Palm’s Heart. That was the name of her next book, but now it felt like some sort of coded message. Whose palm? Whose heart? Whose hunting? The palm, the heart. Love itself. He loved her. He did love her.

  He left the road atlas on the bed and took a shower, then he rifled through his bag for a clean shirt, a clean pair of jeans. He needed more clothes. He needed underwear and a razor. He needed to find a phone he could use to call Mary, tell her that he was safe. First, though, he needed to eat something. He grabbed the atlas and stepped outside. Latangi was on her way into one of the other rooms, holding a stack of towels. Henry waved, and she stopped. “Mr. Garrett,” she said, smiling. “You slept well?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good,” Latangi said. “You will stay again tonight?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, shrugging, holding up the road atlas to suggest that he had somewhere to get to.

  “I hope you will stay,” Latangi said, and she nodded significantly. She didn’t believe he had someplace to go, Henry could tell. Maybe she possessed some mystical Eastern clairvoyance, or perhaps she was simply astute enough to know that anyone fleeing New Orleans with somewhere to go wouldn’t have wound up, three days later, on this highway, at this dingy motel, five or six states away.

  “Is there somewhere to get lunch?” Henry asked.

  “You go into town,” Latangi said, adjusting the stack of towels. She looked for a moment at Henry. “You turn left on the highway. There is a restaurant. What a Blessing.”

  She saw that Henry was confused, and she walked toward him. “This is the restaurant’s name, Mr. Garrett. What a Blessing.” Latangi smiled, then laughed. “They are Christians. Christian Baptists, I believe. Black Americans. You will see. Many jagannath, many little statues everywhere, and biblical passages along the wall. The Lord is my shepherd so I lie down in the green fields.” She laughed again. “But they are a good and kind family. Very kind.”

  “The town?” Henry said. “What town is it?”

  “Marimore,” Latangi said, and she spelled it out for Henry just as she had spelled out her name, her voice like musical notes, like a plucked mbira. “Just a few miles down the road. You will be back, Mr. Garrett.”

  Henry wasn’t sure if this was a question. He thought about what he’d said to Amy: You’ll come back? A question. He nodded.

  “Good, Mr. Garrett,” she said. “I would like the opportunity to speak with you later, if I may.” She was wearing a different sari today, Henry noticed, this one a pale blue, the same color as her nails, and Henry wondered how she had come to be living so far from her own home, what sort of misfortune had propelled her here. Perhaps that was why she wanted to speak to him—to recount, like Tomas Otxoa at Endly’s, her own sad tale of desperation and loss. People always wanted to tell him such stories, to unburden themselves. Why they would do so to such a man as him, Henry did not understand. Did they sense that they were in the presence of a kind of human sponge?

  “Thank you,” Henry said. “I don’t know—”

  But Latangi smiled, walked away, and disappeared into the room. As Henry headed across the parking lot, he could hear her singing inside, her voice faint but sharp, almost metallic. The mist had evaporated and the mountains had appeared again over the motel, a gray-blue silhouette against the sky. It was hot outside, and even hotter in the car. Henry put the windows down, then he pulled out onto Route 29 and headed north. Lining the highway were the same kinds of ramshackle buildings he had seen throughout his drive—used-car dealerships and body shops and beauty salons alongside tiny brick churches and clapboard houses and narrow trailers ringed by overturned plastic furniture and children’s toys. Everywhere there were portable signs facing the road, black plastic letters arranged i
n rows announcing sales and specials, births and deaths, ice cream flavors and fire-station pancake breakfasts. Even the churches had these signs, offering witty teasers for Sunday sermons or snippets of scripture. Except the Lord build the house…one of these signs declared, and Henry wondered, as clearly one was intended to, what the rest of the verse might be. And another church sign left him puzzled. Eternity, it read, is to long to wait for redemption. How exactly, he wondered, did one “long to wait for redemption”? Then he realized that the sign was, of course, supposed to say too long, that eternity is too long to wait for redemption. It was the sort of spelling error that, a year ago, he would have told his students about, one that would have made them laugh.

  He drove now past a John Deere dealership with spectacular green-and-yellow farm equipment lined up in a row like gigantic children’s toys. Just beyond the dealership, parked on the highway’s shoulder, was a light blue bus, and beyond that stood a ragged line of men in orange reflector vests carrying garbage bags. These were prisoners, Henry quickly realized, because farther ahead, walking backward and smoking a cigarette, was a guard with a rifle resting on his shoulder. The guard nodded sternly as Henry drove past as if to point out that he hadn’t missed a thing, that he had taken note of the Louisiana license plates on Henry’s car and all the mud and dust the car had gathered from the back roads in Georgia and South Carolina. Henry thought again about Lacey Gaudet, about the skunk and his old car, about peeling her underwear down across her hips, the frightening thrill of it, and the fallen magnolia blossom she reached for and brought to her nose to fight the stench of skunk or maybe, he realized later, to hide the fact that she was crying. It was her first time, and it must have hurt. He heard Amy’s voice: You hurt me, Henry.

  He had not ever wanted to be cruel, to hurt. Was that not enough?

  He turned on the car radio, still tuned to a religious station, a man with a thick Appalachian twang asking listeners to pray for Mrs. Audrey Henderson, a shut-in living over in Monroe. Music started, a bluegrass song about a great mansion in the sky, and Henry followed the sign for Marimore.

  The restaurant was in a small aluminum-and-glass strip shopping center with a fitness and tanning salon, a florist, a state-run liquor store, and a doctor’s office. The restaurant’s sign was a wooden block, cut and painted in the shape of a red-tasseled Bible, the words What a Blessing scrolling across it in gold letters.

  Inside, the restaurant was decorated precisely as Latangi had described, with embroidered Bible verses framed on the wall, display shelves of ceramic statues of praying hands and twig-bearing doves and Baby Jesuses lying in miniature mangers and Ten Commandments tablets shaped like matching tombstones. But the music—coming from a boom box positioned behind the register—was not at all what Henry would have expected. Instead of gospel—or even pop or R&B—the music playing was Miles Davis, a live version of “If I Were a Bell,” Davis’s fluttering trumpet speeding through the melody, somehow managing to suggest both uncertainty and resolve. A young girl, a teenager, her hair pulled tight behind her head, smiled at Henry, picked up a laminated menu, and led him to an open table.

  “The music?” Henry said as he sat down.

  “Not me.” The girl laughed, shaking her head. “That’s my grandfather. He’s crazy for this stuff.”

  “You don’t like it?” Henry said.

  The girl glanced behind her and shook her head again. “No words to it.”

  “It’s Miles Davis,” Henry said, and the girl looked at him as though trying to figure out something, whether he was dangerous, maybe, or what kind of accent he had. “I like it,” Henry said.

  “Most people don’t. They just want it turned down,” the girl said. “Papa can’t hear so well, so all day he turns it up bit by bit until it’s blaring.”

  “It’s meant to be loud,” Henry said.

  “Well, I’ll tell Papa someone finally likes it.”

  “Wait,” Henry said as the girl started to go. “Listen,” he said, and he was surprised by the pleading tone in his voice. The girl stopped and turned her head to the side as though she was indeed listening. She had a small scar on the bottom of her chin, a thin pale line against the brown skin, and she raised a hand to cover it. Maybe she had noticed Henry looking. And that moment, as if Henry had orchestrated it, the trumpet fell away just as the tenor sax took over, a spiraling line of exquisite power and grace. “That’s Wayne Shorter,” Henry said, surprised that he knew this. “In 1965,” he said. “Live at the Plugged Nickel.” He shook his head. “It’s a crazy thing to know,” he said. “It’s just—”

  The girl looked at him, her hand still at her chin.

  What was he trying to say? He couldn’t explain that it was this kind of thing—insignificant, useless—that always popped into his head.

  “Well, you sound just like Papa,” the girl said, stepping away now, hurrying toward a table where a man was holding his check in the air.

  What he truly sounded like, Henry knew, was his own father, leaning near their old Philips stereo, the receiver’s tubes casting a faint green light onto the wall behind the stereo’s wooden cabinet. Henry sat and listened now, in this crowded restaurant, as he had sat next to his father, both of them absolutely still, Henry standing up only when one record ended and the next one dropped into place. He’d liked to watch the records spinning around, liked to try to decipher the label as the disk spun and spun. “Listen,” his father would tell him, a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Listen to this.” And now, though for the life of him he couldn’t say why, Henry felt as though he were hearing this music, truly hearing it, for the very first time, as though he could finally detect what he had never been able to before—the distinct pattern that all the instruments, weaving this way and that, had stitched together.

  Though Henry had listened, through the years, to nearly all of the music his father had left behind, he’d never understood it the way his father had. Henry had made his way through his father’s reel-to-reel and cassette tapes and dusty 78s, through the recordings of Algerian rai and Ethiopian jazz, Cuban son and Congolese rumba and Andalusian flamenco, Caribbean gospel and Texas and Delta and Memphis blues. He tried to listen to the scratchy Folkways’ recordings of slaves’ sorrow songs and Baptist hymns and prison chants and sea chanteys and Appalachian ballads. Henry could usually distinguish one style from another, could sometimes name the particular artist who was playing, but he lacked whatever talent his father possessed that allowed him to perceive the way all of the world’s music was, as his father had explained it, a single song.

  Henry could even remember how once, on a world map laid out across the kitchen table, his father had shown him the routes that music took as it spread through the centuries from one continent to another, from one region to the next, from city to city and town to town, transforming each time into something new that nevertheless contained vestiges of what it had once been. Henry had been too young—he had always been too young—to really follow what he was saying, to even care enough to try to understand. But he did understand, when his father spoke, that this subject mattered to him more than anything else in the world. It mattered in a way that was unsettling, even frightening, to Henry, as if his father were a swimmer kept afloat in the ocean not by his body’s natural buoyancy or by the careful movement of his arms and legs but by something much more mysterious and terrifying—something just like the painting he’d once seen that depicted beautiful Sirens perched on jagged rocks, sharks and stingrays and other deadly fish swirling around them, the Sirens calling out in strange, piercing cries that Henry imagined he could hear just from the way the Sirens were drawn, their heads thrown back, their mouths wide open.

  “Music speaks what otherwise cannot be spoken,” his father liked to declare when someone asked him why he studied what he did. “Each melody, each song, is like a dream,” he’d say, and though Henry knew his father was just speaking the way professors spoke, he somehow also sensed that there was desperation as well as comfo
rt in this pronouncement.

  Yes, Henry understood that songs were like dreams—even though throughout his childhood, throughout his whole life, in fact, up until his father’s ghost appeared at the foot of his bed, Henry didn’t dream.

  Everyone, of course, insisted that Henry did dream, that he simply didn’t remember these dreams. Amy had told him that he was lucky. She’d often felt besieged by her dreams, which were so astonishingly vivid, so rich with detail, that Henry once joked that she spent more time recounting them than she’d spent sleeping.

  What Amy could not do, though—and what Henry, oddly enough, did quite well—was interpret these dreams. Henry seemed to unravel their mysteries with such effortless confidence that Amy would not, even when Henry begged her to, stop telling him every detail. She did not understand that his skill was simply the result of his having loved her, of having watched her so closely for so many years, of sensing that her life was somehow decidedly more real than his own, as if her every footstep left a permanent mark while his were far too ephemeral to leave even the slightest trace. He remembered everything Amy had ever told him about her life—the boys and books and college classes and pets she had adored, the places she and her brother had visited with their globe-trotting parents, all of them floating down the Nile on a wooden raft, riding leathery, mud-caked elephants in India, climbing the trash-strewn path to Machu Picchu, sailing to England on the QE2, kneeling in a bamboo cage above the scorpion-infested floor of a Buddhist temple on an island in the East China Sea. He remembered every meal she had cooked, every outfit she had worn, every present she had given him. He was certain he could remember, if he tried, every time they’d had sex—or not remember, exactly, because he did not need to remember, his body imprinted with her touch. Amy was so calm and rational in her commerce with the world that he had been shocked and embarrassed by how imaginative and daring and vocal she became in bed, her hair unleashed from the complicated knot into which she wound it each morning, like the demure librarian who, in the final pages of a romance novel, abandons her painfully prim demeanor and whispers Take me now into her hero’s ear. Henry, though, was the one who always felt taken.