A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

by John Gregory Brown

  Henry went back into his room and then over into the adjoining room to begin sorting through everything he’d been given. Most of it he didn’t need, of course, and he began to separate those items from the rest—the toaster oven and teddy bear and fishing rod and beach chairs and card table—figuring there must be a Goodwill store nearby that would take them. He pictured the neon Endly’s sign magically transported here to Virginia. But what if the folks who had given him these items saw them at the Goodwill and realized what he’d done, saw that he’d quickly discarded what they’d meant as heartfelt gifts? He’d have to keep everything for now, he realized, and he sat down on the bed and turned on the television. Unlike the one in his room, this TV started up immediately. Henry turned up the volume and punched the channel button until he found what he was looking for. At first a female reporter was interviewing a government official or soldier, a large balding man in khaki fatigues whose skin had been burned bright red, both the reporter and the official dirty and drenched in sweat as they stood on what appeared to be a runway, but as the man spoke about efforts to get drinking water and food to those who were dehydrated and starving, the same sorts of images Henry had seen earlier began to appear on the screen: the sea of people crowded outside the Superdome, everyone now sitting or lying down, boxes and trash strewn everywhere around them; a small flat-bottom boat motoring through a ravaged neighborhood, the men on board calling out to those who might still be trapped in their homes; a barefoot woman kneeling outside the convention center, her hands clasped together and her eyes closed, her face anguished as she cried out that her baby needed her medicine; armed officers patrolling somewhere downtown where the streets were dry—it looked to Henry like Poydras or maybe even Canal—the officers wielding rifles, pistols holstered at their waists. Another picture showed rows and rows of men and women lying on narrow brown cots at the airport’s baggage claim, some of them with their hands weakly raised in the air as if trying to summon help, and then the scene switched to a helicopter hovering above the blacktop of a school playground, boxes of bottled water lowered from the helicopter into the arms of those gathered below.

  When the scene cut back to the female reporter, she was speaking to a police officer, who explained that he’d been at work in New Orleans East when his mother was trapped in her house just two blocks from the London Avenue canal. “I told her,” the officer said quietly, “but she was some stubborn. She refused to go.”

  “What did she say?” the reporter asked.

  “She said she’d owned that home forty-three years and wasn’t leaving. When we saw what was going on, I tried to get a unit out there but there was no way.” He paused and then began to sob. “The levee was already gone. There was no way.”

  Oh God, Henry thought, and watching this officer sob, watching the reporter raise her hand and place it on the officer’s shoulder, which shook and shook from his weeping, he now understood that his failure to call Mary, to let her know he was okay, had been unspeakably cruel. And Amy too. He’d failed them both, failed everyone. He turned the TV off and went outside. Latangi wasn’t back, and the office was locked, so he couldn’t get to the phone there. He knocked on the doors of other rooms, hoping he’d find someone with a cell phone he could borrow. But there was no one around. He went back to his room and hunted around until he found the rolls of quarters he’d been given. He figured he’d drive into town, locate a pay phone somewhere, use 411 to get Mary’s number. And Amy? He didn’t know exactly how he’d find her, but he knew he would. He thought about the description at the end of Mohit’s poem of a ketaki tree, its leaves as sharp as swords but its white blossoms delicate and richly scented. Nectar from the tree’s flowers, the poem asserted, would always relieve the prick of its leaves, just as life’s salves would always assuage its sorrows. He was not sure he was prepared to believe this, but now he would at least try to see if it was true. He could do that, he figured. He could find out for himself.

  Ten

  HE FOUND Amy. Of course he found her. She had not, after all, been hiding, had not done what he had done—disappear. First, though, he spoke to his sister, Mary, who told him that she had been in touch with Amy ever since Amy returned home from Central America to discover that Henry had moved out. He didn’t know what those conversations had been like, what Amy and Mary had found to say to each other, but he could imagine now, as he could not before, their shared confusion, the frustration and anger they both must have felt. And the sorrow, the despair, the sense of betrayal—he understood all of that as well. She weeps at the feet of the lotus, a river of unseen tears, he had read in Mohit’s poem, a forsaken maiden crying for her beloved, the dark wind thrashing in her tresses and the trellised branches overhead. How had he not attended to Amy’s tears, not felt the awful pain he had caused?

  It was all related, he knew, to the clatter, to the endless wandering in his dreams, to the girl he’d conjured up in his head, but he didn’t know why or how—just as this end to it, the silence and peace, the calm in which he suddenly felt himself immersed, was somehow related to reading Mohit’s beautiful poem, of his living inside it from beginning to end. What a strange place the world had become, Mohit’s words now woven into his thoughts as though they had been spun there in golden thread, a blooming pipal tree and a bright moon painted against an ink-strewn sky.

  Even so, the old man Hughes was dead, his widow and grandson left alone, and the city of New Orleans, Henry’s home, gone now, washed away, thousands left behind, dying. At what cost was such redemption as he now felt?

  And he was still, as he had been before, alone.

  He had spoken to Mary, called her, because, finally, he simply remembered her number, the ten digits appearing to float into view in the air before his eyes, as familiar and obvious as the simplest mathematical equation. He walked down to the motel office, quarters in his pocket, and looked inside. Latangi sat there behind the front desk, peering at the computer monitor. He stepped in and asked if there was a phone somewhere he could use.

  “Yes, yes, Mr. Garrett, no problem, no problem,” she said, lifting an old black phone and placing it on the counter next to the Ganesh lamp and the basket of green mints. “Some privacy,” she said then, and she walked toward the door that led to her apartment.

  “Latangi,” he said. She turned before stepping through the door. He wanted to tell her that he’d spent the night reading Mohit’s poem, that he believed it a work of great genius, a masterpiece that must be shared with the world. But was this what she longed to hear—of the work’s greatness? Of Henry’s admiration? Of his conviction that others would recognize that greatness as well? Or might it matter more to her to know that reading the poem had somehow cured him? What an absurd notion that was, though—the idea that one could be cured by a poem, that confusion and despair could be swept away simply by holding those delicate pages in one’s hand and reading the words written on them. Was such a claim not further evidence of his lunacy? He thought again about the end of The Awakening, when Edna Pontellier strips off her bathing suit and stands naked beside the sea, absolutely alone, feeling the strange deliciousness of her own body beneath the blindingly bright sky. In that moment, perhaps for the first time in her life, she is free—but then, of course, immediately afterward, she is gone, swimming herself out from the shore, delirious and exhausted, hearing the barking of an old dog and the humming of bees, smelling the scent not of briny water but of flowers.

  What could he possibly say to Latangi? That Mohit’s poem had stripped his soul bare? How ridiculous, how absurd. That the words had washed over him like a pastor’s sermon over an enthralled congregation? Sit at His feet and be blessed! Expect to be landed upon the shore!

  “It’s Henry, please,” he said to Latangi. “Won’t you please call me Henry?”

  “Yes, yes, Mr. Henry,” she said, just as she had the last time. “So sorry.” And she left him there, quietly closing the door behind her.

  He dialed the number, heard the phone ringi
ng, heard the ringing stop. “Mary?” he said.

  As soon as she heard his voice, she knew. She began crying.

  “No, no,” Henry said, listening to her cry, then he thought to say, “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

  He heard the crying stop, heard Mary catch her breath, sniffle. “Henry,” she said, barely a whisper. “Where are you? Not New Orleans?”

  “Not New Orleans, no,” he said. “In Virginia. I’m—” He was going to say I’m nowhere, but he understood how he would sound: lost, adrift, unmoored.

  “I’m in Virginia, not far from Lynchburg. A town called Marimore.”

  Henry heard Mary take a deep breath; he held his own breath in against the silence, the empty crackle of the line.

  “I’m sure you can imagine,” Mary said quietly, “what I thought, Henry, what I’ve been sick with worry about.”

  He waited, listened for what she would say next.

  “You can imagine,” she said, and he heard the anger now. “You can imagine, right?”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “But things—” How was he going to explain it? Well, he needed to do it. He needed to get it all said. “Listen,” he began, “there was an accident. I was in an accident.”

  Mary listened. Then he heard her saying “Oh God, oh God,” but he kept talking. He wanted to tell her the whole story, as much of it as he understood how to tell, the three days of wandering north in his car, stopping at this motel in Virginia, maybe—probably—because he knew Amy was somewhere nearby though he couldn’t remember where, and then the prisoners on the side of the highway and then, out of nowhere, one of them, an old man named Hughes, crossing the yellow line and stepping right in front of his car, throwing his arms out.

  Only at this point, after telling her how the old man had died, right there on the highway, did he find himself unable to go on, despair rushing back over him. He saw the old man’s body on the highway, arms thrown out at his sides the way he’d seen people, on TV, in New Orleans, in the water. “I just don’t know,” he said into the phone, and now he was the one sobbing. “I just don’t know, Mary.”

  “Oh, Henry,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

  He didn’t know what else to say. The line crackled again.

  “It wasn’t your fault, right?” he heard Mary say. “There wasn’t anything you could have done?”

  “No,” he said. And whatever else might not be true, whatever doubts he harbored, he understood that this was not one of them—there was nothing he could have done.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. You want to come here, stay with me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  “You need to do that, Henry. I think you do.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “My car. It’s—”

  “No, of course, of course. I’ll come get you.”

  “I don’t know. I’m—” What could he say to her? That he thought he might stay here awhile, that there were things he needed to do? Of course, he didn’t know what those things were, had no fucking idea. Finally, he just said her name. Amy.

  “You called her, right?” Mary said. “She knows?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Oh God, Henry,” Mary said. “Listen to me. You need to call her now. Hang up and call her. I don’t know if she’ll talk to you. But she’s your wife, Henry. Or she was. She needs to know you’re alive. She doesn’t even fucking know you’re alive. Oh God, you can be a real shit, Henry.”

  “I know, I know,” he said. He thought about the card Mary had sent with the inheritance check, the Fuck you she’d written on it, then he thought again about the Broussards. Why was it that this story, this thing that was not even real, this secret they had kept between them—they’d never, even as adults, told their mother that the Broussards were a fabrication—had lived so long in their imaginations? Did it have something to do with—everything to do with—what had been wrong with them, not their father leaving, but the silence about it afterward, how nobody seemed to think this truth was something that needed to be talked about? Art, literature, music, his mother’s paintings, Mary’s singing—all of this was fine. But the abandonment? The loss and grief? Why had no one—not Mary, not him, not their mother—talked about it?

  “I don’t know where she is,” he said now to Mary. He meant Amy, of course, but in his own head it sounded like he was talking about their mother, as if she were the one he’d lost. “I don’t have her number.”

  “Oh Jesus, Henry,” Mary said. “Her number? You don’t know her number?”

  “I can’t remember it. I’ve had trouble remembering.”

  “I’ve got her number, Henry. She’s in a place called Lovingston. I don’t know exactly where that is, but it’s somewhere around Lynchburg. It’s near Charlottesville too, I think.”

  “In Lovingston? You’ve talked to her?” He looked out at the motel parking lot. A man and a woman in a tiny black sports car had pulled up in front of the office. They squinted as if trying to see inside. Henry raised his hand to wave, and they drove away.

  “That’s what people do, Henry,” Mary was saying. “Family and all that. They talk to one another.”

  Did we? he wanted to say but didn’t, knew he should not. We didn’t.

  “Get something to write with, Henry,” Mary said, and Henry leaned over the counter, found a pen with a blue plastic flower taped to it.

  “Okay,” he said, and Mary gave Henry Amy’s number, speaking slowly as if to a child. Henry looked for something to write on. He grabbed one of the Lucky Caverns brochures, but the waxy paper wouldn’t absorb the ink. So he did what he’d seen his students do countless times: he wrote the number on the back of his hand. He looked at the digits. Yes, of course. He remembered it now.

  “You’ve got it?” Mary said.

  “Yes.”

  “Right now, Henry. Call her right now. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  He understood that he deserved this, her talking to him this way. He deserved much worse than this. Even so—

  “Call her right now, Henry,” Mary said. “Then call me back. I’ll come get you, you can stay with me, but you need to call Amy first.”

  He looked at his left hand, at the number there. “Listen, Mary,” he said. “I want you to know something. I’m better. Or I’m getting better.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, Henry. Really. Amy will be glad to hear it too. Call her.”

  “I will,” Henry said. “It’s just—”

  “What, Henry? What is it just? It’s always just something.”

  He wondered what he could say that would make any sense. He thought about the scene in Mohit’s poem in which an old man reaches down and touches the soft brow of the newborn baby calf he has rescued from a thorny thicket. The old man discovers that simply from this touch, his youth is returned to him. The man is overjoyed until he looks down at a basin of water and doesn’t recognize himself. Now he feels unsettled, unsure that this transformation has been a welcome one. Then a girl—a young princess or goddess—appears and beckons to him. Come with me into the dark trees, she says, where we will invite trembling raptures and crystalline tears. The man doesn’t know whether or not he should follow her, take her hand. He doesn’t know if ecstasy or anguish awaits him in the dark woods.

  Should he tell Mary about Mohit’s poem? He pictured Mary and their mother sitting up in bed, poring through the books with the images of Saint Sebastian, arms raised above his head, the beautiful arced torso impaled by arrows. Again he wanted to say to Mary, Do you remember the Broussards? And what would that accomplish? Anything at all? Maybe he was the only one who remembered this story; maybe even Mary had forgotten it. “I’ll call her, Mary,” he said quietly. “I will.”

  “And you’ll call me back?”

  Henry nodded as if Mary could actually see him, as if he didn’t need to speak.

  “Call me back, Henry,” he heard her say again—a warning? a plea?—and then she hung up. He could tell that she�
��d spoken with hope, with trust, but also with only a small measure of faith. She didn’t fully believe that he would call her back.

  He deserved such doubt, he knew. He deserved much worse—a hundred arrows, a thousand, impaling his ribs and thighs, his shoulders and neck, piercing his chest, piercing his bloody, bloody heart. He looked down at the telephone as if it were something unrecognizable.

  He did not call Amy—not immediately. He didn’t know exactly why, but it had something to do with wanting to make sure first that he was, as he’d claimed to Mary, getting better. He knocked on the door to Latangi’s apartment to say that he was finished with his call.

  He planned to tell her now that he had read the poem, but when she stepped back out into the office, she was holding a teetering stack of small rugs, each the size of a doormat, the stack awkwardly cradled against her chest, held in place at the top by her chin. “Perhaps, Mr. Henry,” she managed to say, “you could lend me some assistance?” The rugs nearly slipped from her hands as she spoke.

  “Here,” Henry said, taking the rugs from her.

  She turned and walked back to her apartment and emerged with another stack of rugs. “Would you follow me, Mr. Henry?” she said, and she led him out to the parking lot and over to the blue truck Marge had delivered. She dropped the stack in the cab of the truck, then she looked at Henry and signaled that he should do so as well.

  “Now,” she said, raising her hand to her chest as if she were having trouble breathing. Henry looked at her, waited.

  “So sorry, Mr. Henry. A moment, please.” She smiled. “Perhaps I should have mentioned another request for assistance?”

  “Yes, of course,” Henry said. “Anything. You’ve been so kind.”

  “No, no, Mr. Henry. Only what is necessary.”

  Necessary. Henry remembered how he’d used that word, all the things he’d believed were necessary.