by Green, John
I smirked. “Naked but for our robes,” I said.
“Yes!” Ben sipped a Dr Pepper.
“I’m not even bringing clothes, so I don’t wuss out,” Radar said.
“Me neither! Q, swear not to bring clothes.”
I smiled. “Duly sworn,” I said.
“I’m in!” said our friend Frank. And then more and more of the guys got behind the idea. The girls, for some reason, were resistant.
Radar said to Angela, “Your refusal to do this makes me question the whole foundation of our love.”
“You don’t get it,” Lacey said. “It’s not that we’re afraid. It’s just that we already have our dresses picked out.”
Angela pointed at Lacey. “Exactly.” Angela added, “Y’all better hope it’s not windy.”
“I hope it is windy,” Ben said. “The world’s largest balls benefit from fresh air.”
Lacey put a hand to her face, ashamed. “You’re a challenging boyfriend,” she said. “Rewarding, but challenging.” We laughed.
This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened—the stories on my mind weren’t that funny.
I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them—it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.
I left just before midnight. Some people were staying later, but it was my curfew, and plus I didn’t feel like staying. Mom was half asleep on the couch, but she perked up when she saw me. “Did you have fun?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was pretty chill.”
“Just like you,” she said, smiling. This sentiment struck me as hilarious, but I didn’t say anything. She stood up and pulled me into her, kissing me on the cheek. “I really like being your mom,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said.
I went to bed with the Whitman, flipping to the part I’d liked before, where he spends all the time hearing the opera and the people.
After all that hearing, he writes, “I am exposed . . . . cut by bitter and poisoned hail.” That was perfect, I thought: you listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you’re trying to listen to.
Walking through pseudovisions and trying to listen to her does not crack the Margo Roth Spiegelman case so much as it cracks me. Pages later—hearing and exposed—Whitman starts to write about all the travel he can do by imagining, and lists all the places he can visit while loafing on the grass. “My palms cover continents,” he writes.
I kept thinking about maps, like the way sometimes when I was a kid I would look at atlases, and just the looking was kind of like being somewhere else. This is what I had to do. I had to hear and imagine my way into her map.
But hadn’t I been trying to do that? I looked up at the maps above my computer. I had tried to plot her possible travels, but just as the grass stood for too much, so Margo stood for too much. It seemed impossible to pin her down with maps. She was too small and the space covered by the maps too big. They were more than a waste of time—they were the physical representation of the total fruitlessness of all of it, my absolute inability to develop the kinds of palms that cover continents, to have the kind of mind that correctly imagines.
I got up and walked over to the maps and tore them off the wall, the pins and tacks flying out with the paper and falling to the ground. I balled up the maps and threw them in the garbage can. On my way back to bed I stepped on a tack, like an idiot, and even though I was annoyed and exhausted and out of pseudovisions and ideas, I had to pick up all the thumbtacks scattered around the carpet so I didn’t step on them later. I just wanted to punch the wall, but I had to pick up those stupid goddamned thumbtacks. When I finished, I got back into bed and socked my pillow, my teeth clenched.
I started trying to read the Whitman again, but between it and thinking of Margo, I felt exposed enough for this night. So finally I put the book down. I couldn’t be bothered to get up and turn off the light. I just stared at the wall, my blinks growing longer. And every time I opened my eyes, I saw where each map had been—the four holes marking the rectangle, and the pinholes seemingly randomly distributed inside the rectangle. I’d seen a similar pattern before. In the empty room above the rolled-up carpet.
A map. With plotted points.
18.
I woke up with the sunlight just before seven on Saturday morning. Amazingly, Radar was online.
QTHERESURRECTION: I thought you’d be sleeping for sure.
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Nah, man. I’ve been up since six, expanding the article on this Malaysian pop singer. Angela’s still in bed, though.
QTHERESURRECTION: Ooh she stayed over?
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Yeah but my purity is still intact. Graduation night, though . . . I think maybe.
QTHERESURRECTION: Hey, I thought of something last night. The little holes in that wall in the strip mall—maybe a map that plotted points with thumbtacks?
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Like a route.
QTHERESURRECTION: Exactly.
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Wanna go over? I have to wait till Ange gets up, though.
QTHERESURRECTION: Sounds good.
He called at ten. I picked him up in the minivan and then we drove to Ben’s house, figuring that a surprise attack would be the only way to wake him up. But even singing “You Are My Sunshine” outside his window only resulted in him opening the window and spitting at us. “I’m not doing anything until noon,” he said authoritatively.
So it was just Radar and me on the drive out. He talked a little about Angela and how much he liked her and how weird it was to fall in love just a few months before they would leave for different colleges, but I found it hard to listen very well. I wanted that map. I wanted to see the places she’d pinpointed. I wanted to get those tacks back into the wall.
We walked in through the office, hustled through the library, paused briefly to examine the holes in the bedroom wall, and entered the souvenir shop. The place didn’t scare me at all anymore. Once we’d been in each room and established we were alone, I felt as safe as I did at home. Beneath a display counter, I found the box of maps and brochures I’d rifled through on prom night. I lifted it out and balanced it on the corners of a broken glass counter. Radar sorted through them initially, looking for anything with a map, and then I unfolded them, scanning for pinholes.
We were getting near the bottom of the box when Radar pulled out a black-and-white brochure entitled FIVE THOUSAND AMERICAN CITIES. It was copyrighted 1972 by the Esso company. As I carefully unfolded the map, trying to smooth the creases, I saw a pinhole in a corner. “This is it,” I said, my voice rising. There was a small rip around the pinhole, like it’d been torn off the wall. It was a yellowing, brittle, classroom-size map of the United States printed thick with potential destinations. The rips in the map told me that she had not intended this as a clue—Margo was too precise and assured with her clues to muddy the waters. Somehow or another, we’d stumbled into something she hadn’t planned, and in seeing what she hadn’t planned, I thought again of how much she had planned. And maybe, I thought, that’s what she did in the quiet dark here. Traveling while loafing, like Whitman had, as she prepared for the real thing.
I ran all the way back to the office and found a bunch of thumbtacks in a desk adjacent to Margo’s, before Radar and I carefully carried the unfurled map back to Margo’s room. I held it up against the wall while Radar tried to get the tacks into the corners, but three of the four corners had ripped, as had three of the five locations, presumably when the map was taken off the wall. “Higher and to the l
eft,” he said. “No, down. Yeah. Don’t move.” Finally we got the map on the wall, and then we started lining up the holes in the map with the ones on the wall. We got all five pins in pretty easily. But some of these pinholes were also ripped, so it was impossible to tell their EXACT location. And exact location mattered in a map blackened with the names of five thousand places. The lettering was so small and exact that I had to stand up on the carpet and put my bare eyeballs inches away from the map even to guess each location. As I suggested town names, Radar pulled out his handheld and looked them up on Omnictionary.
There were two unripped dots: one looked like Los Angeles, although there were a bunch of towns clustered so close together in Southern California that the type overlapped. The other unripped hole was over Chicago. There was a ripped one in New York that, judging from the location of the hole in the wall, was one of the five boroughs of New York City.
“That makes sense with what we know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But God, where in New York? That’s the question.”
“We’re missing something,” he says. “Some locational hint. What’re the other dots?”
“There’s another in New York State, but not near the city. I mean, look, all the towns are tiny. It might be Poughkeepsie or Woodstock or the Catskill Park.”
“Woodstock,” Radar said. “That’d be interesting. She’s not much of a hippie, but she has that whole free-spirit vibe.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The last one is either Washington, D.C., or else maybe Annapolis or Chesapeake Bay. That one could be a bunch of things, actually.”
“It’d be helpful if there was only one point on the map,” Radar said sullenly.
“But she’s probably going from place to place,” I said. Tramping her perpetual journey.
I sat on the carpet for a while as Radar read to me more about New York, about the Catskill Mountains, about the nation’s capital, about the concert at Woodstock in 1969. Nothing seemed to help. I felt as if we’d played out the string and found nothing.
After I dropped Radar off that afternoon, I sat around the house reading “Song of Myself” and halfheartedly studying for finals. I had calc and Latin on Monday, probably my two toughest subjects, and I couldn’t afford to ignore them completely. I studied most of Saturday night and throughout the day Sunday, but then a Margo idea popped into my head just after dinner, so I took a break from practicing Ovid translations and logged onto IM. I saw Lacey online. I’d only just gotten her screen name from Ben, but I figured I knew her well enough to IM her.
QTHERESURRECTION: Hey, it’s Q.
SACKCLOTHANDASHES: Hi!
QTHERESURRECTION: Did you ever think about how much time Margo must have spent planning everything?
SACKCLOTHANDASHES: Yeah, like leaving the letters in the alphabet soup before Mississippi and leading you to the minimall, you mean?
QTHERESURRECTION: Yeah, these aren’t things you think up in ten minutes.
SACKCLOTHANDASHES: Maybe the notebook.
QTHERESURRECTION: Exactly.
SACKCLOTHANDASHES: Yeah. I was thinking about it today because I remembered one time when we were shopping, she kept sticking the notebook into purses she liked, to make sure it fit.
QTHERESURRECTION: I wish I had that notebook.
SACKCLOTHANDASHES: Yeah, probably with her, though.
QTHERESURRECTION: Yeah. It wasn’t in her locker?
SACKCLOTHANDASHES: No, just textbooks, stacked neat like they always were.
I studied at my desk and waited for other people to come online. Ben did after a while, and I invited him into a chat room with me and Lacey. They did most of the talking—I was still sort of translating—until Radar logged in and joined the room. Then I put down my pencil for the night.
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Someone from New York City searched Omnictionary for Margo Roth Spiegelman today.
ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Can you tell where in New York City?
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Unfortunately, no.
SACKCLOTHANDASHES: Also there are still some posters up in record stores there. It was probably just someone trying to find out about her.
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Oh, right. I forgot about that. Suck.
QTHERESURRECTION: Hey, I’m in and out because I’m using that site Radar showed me to map routes between the places she pinholed.
ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Link?
QTHERESURRECTION: thelongwayround.com
OMNICTIONARIAN96: I have a new theory. She’s going to show up for graduation, sitting in the audience.
ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: I have an old theory, that she is somewhere in Orlando, screwing with us and making sure that she’s the center of our universe.
SACKCLOTHANDASHES: Ben!
ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Sorry, but I’m totally right.
They went on like that, talking about their Margos, as I tried to map her route. If she hadn’t intended the map as a clue—and the ripped tack holes told me she hadn’t—I figured we’d gotten all the clues she’d intended for us and now much more. Surely I had what I needed, then. But I still felt very far away from her.
19.
After three long hours alone with eight hundred words from Ovid on Monday morning, I walked through the halls feeling as if my brain might drip out of my ears. But I’d done okay. We had an hour and a half for lunch, to give our minds time to firm back up before the second exam period of the day. Radar was waiting for me at my locker.
“I just bombed me some Spanish,” Radar said.
“I’m sure you did okay.” He was going to Dartmouth on a huge scholarship. He was plenty smart.
“Dude, I don’t know. I kept falling asleep during the oral part. But listen, I was up half the night building this program. It’s so awesome. What it does is it allows you to enter a category—it can be a geographical area or like a family in the animal kingdom—and then you can read the first sentences of up to a hundred Omnictionary articles about your topic on a single page. So, like, say you are trying to find a particular kind of rabbit but can’t remember its name. You can read an introduction to all twenty-one species of rabbits on the same page in, like, three minutes.”
“You did this the night before finals?” I asked.
“Yeah, I know, right? Anyway I’ll e-mail it to you. It’s nerdtastic.”
Ben showed up then. “I swear to God, Q, Lacey and I were up on IM until two o’clock in the morning playing on that site, the-longwayround? And having now plotted every single possible trip that Margo could have taken between Orlando and those five points, I realize I was wrong all this time. She’s not in Orlando. Radar’s right. She’s coming back here for graduation day.”
“Why?”
“The timing is perfect. To drive from Orlando to New York to the mountains to Chicago to Los Angeles back to Orlando is like exactly a twenty-three-day trip. Plus, it’s a totally retarded joke, but it’s a Margo joke. You make everyone think you offed yourself. Surround yourself with an air of mystery so that everyone pays attention. And then right as all the attention starts to go away, you show up at graduation.”
“No,” I said. “No way.” I knew Margo better than that by now. She did want attention. I believed that. But Margo didn’t play life for laughs. She didn’t get off on mere trickery.
“I’m telling you, bro. Look for her at graduation. She’s gonna be there.” I just shook my head. Since everyone had the same lunch period, the cafeteria was beyond packed, so we exercised our rights as seniors and drove to Wendy’s. I tried to stay focused on my coming calc exam, but I was starting to feel like maybe there was more string to the story. If Ben was right about the twenty-three-day trip, that was very interesting, indeed. Maybe that’s what she’d been planning in her black notebook, a long and lonesome road trip. It didn’t explain everything, but it did fit with Margo as a planner. Not that this brought me closer to her. As hard as it is to pinpoint a dot inside a ripped segment of a map, it only becomes harder when the dot is moving.
/> After a long day of finals, returning to the comfortable impenetrability of “Song of Myself” was almost a relief. I had reached a weird part of the poem—after all this time listening and hearing people, and then traveling alongside them, Whitman stops hearing and he stops visiting, and he starts to become other people. Like, actually inhabit them. He tells the story of a ship’s captain who saved everyone on his boat except himself. The poet can tell the story, he argues, because he has become the captain. As he writes, “I am the man . . . . I suffered . . . . I was there.” A few lines later, it becomes even more clear that Whitman no longer needs to listen to become another: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person.”
I put the book down and lay on my side, staring out the window that had always been between us. It is not enough just to see her or hear her. To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman.
And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.
I limped through my physics and government finals the next day and then stayed up till 2 A.M. on Tuesday finishing my final reaction paper for English about Moby Dick. Ahab was a hero, I decided. I had no particular reason for having decided this—particularly given that I hadn’t read the book—but I decided it and reacted thusly.
