“You want to go on a road trip?”
“Where?”
“A bunch of places I’ve been writing about. Going there will help me to get them right. And, eventually, California.”
“You sure you can still drive?”
“I can drive.”
“No, I’m not sure you can still drive.”
“Then you drive.”
“You’ll let me do the driving?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. Road trip.”
“We have to go rent a Chevy Cruze.”
* * *
—
HE HAD NOT TOLD Son about the heart trouble. He had decided there was no need. He felt stronger by the day, and the murmurs he heard in his sleepless nights were just an old man’s fears running wild. He was a little grayer, a little thinner, but children barely noticed such variations in their parents. And he felt more energetic than he had for a long time. Anyway, telling Son about the surgery would ruin the adventure, putting the child in the caring slash parenting role. Let the chips fall where they may, he thought. He wanted to find a better ending for himself and Son than he had been able to make for Sancho and Quichotte. In his case the Question of Sancho was inverted. The question was not, who was Son without him, but who was he without his son, and the answer was, really not very much.
Son was the stranger behind the wheel whose father he had to become again. In the town he had reimagined as Berenger, New Jersey, he told the young man about the mastodons, and his indebtedness to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. “So many great writers have guided me along the way,” he said, and mentioned, further, Cervantes and Arthur C. Clarke. “Is that okay to do?” Son asked. “That kind of borrowing?” He had replied by quoting Newton, who said he had been able to see further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Son looked doubtful. “Yeah, but Newton wound up discovering gravity,” he said, unkindly. “You haven’t gotten anywhere close to that.”
He tried to explain the picaresque tradition, its episodic nature, and how the episodes of such a work could encompass many manners, high and low, fabulist and commonplace, how it could be at once parodic and original, and so through its metamorphic roguery it could demonstrate and seek to encompass the multiplicity of human life. He stood on the high street of this ur-Berenger which felt less real to him than the township in his pages, and said, of the Absurd in general, that it both mocked and celebrated our inability to give life a truly coherent meaning, and of his mastodons in particular that maybe they said something about our growing dehumanization, about how as a species we, or some of us, might be losing our moral compass and becoming, simultaneously, creatures out of a barbaric, prehuman, long-toothed past, and also monsters tormenting the human present.
“Is that what you believe,” Son asked him, “that life is meaningless and we are turning into animals without morality?”
“I think it’s legitimate for a work of art made in the present time to say, we are being crippled by the culture we have made, by its most popular elements above all,” he replied. “And by stupidity and ignorance and bigotry, yes.”
“So what have you done about it?” Son demanded. “What’s your contribution? What sort of mark do you think you’re leaving on the world?”
“I did my work, and then there’s you,” he said, hearing as he spoke the weakness of his reply.
Son shrugged and headed for the car. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move on.”
Your son, your grand inquisitor.
* * *
—
THEY HEADED INTO THE WEST to the places of his fancy whose streets he most wanted to walk, and Son was happy driving long hours, listening to the radio, snoozing for an hour in a mall parking lot, then arrowing on into the night, watching the roadside nowheres spool by. As it unfurled, America—with its calm green signage, its garish billboards featuring men with large, excellent teeth who were trying to sell him their legal services, its Howard Johnsons and Days Inns—began to feel progressively less real to the Author than the versions he had invented and lived in and with for a year and more. The imagined took precedence over the actual. Quichotte and Sancho were traveling with them, in the car which was also their car, and his and his son’s journey felt more and more like theirs, run backwards, like a film, in the days when there was film. Ghost-Quichotte sat with him in his seat, ghost-Sancho helped Son to drive the car, and gradually their phantom forms merged with and were absorbed by his own and his child’s. He genuinely felt as if he had entered the world of his fiction and began to look nervously up at the sky as they drove through the cold night to arrive by daylight in the Kansas town he had renamed Beautiful, and he half expected—more than half expected—to see ruptures in reality up there, holes in space-time, and panic in the streets below.
But all was peaceful. And here was a quiet street, and here just as he had imagined it, shocking in its exact mirroring of his make-believe, was a cream-colored two-story house with the word WELCOME sprayed in white paint on a red ground in the small forecourt, below a small OM sign. She’s in there, he thought, mourning her murdered relative, and just maybe pining for the strange boy who once came to her door and called her Beautiful like the town and promised to return. Time running backwards. Any moment Sancho would walk backwards to the front door and make himself known. The Author sat watching the door with his heart in his mouth.
Nothing happened. The ghosts did not walk by day.
On East 151st Street they walked into the Powers Bar & Grill, not called Powers, not (or not yet) destroyed by a space-time hole. They used the restroom and sat together at the bar and ordered a little food. This was when the streams merged and fiction became fact, as if they had stepped onto a theater stage during the intermission and then the second act had begun, its characters swirling in around them and treating them as members of the cast. A drunk man started shouting at them, calling them “fucking Iranians,” and “terrorists,” asking them if their status was legal, and screaming, “Get out of my country.” Quichotte and Sancho had reacted by backing away and standing in the shadows, allowing other (white) men to bring the drunk under control. The Author, to his surprise, reacted differently, standing up to the drunk and defying him—control yourself, back off, the only person terrorizing anyone around here is you—until the abusive individual was escorted off the premises to general relief.
They were unharmed, and went ahead and finished their meal, but Son still had his guard up. “I don’t think that’s the end of it,” he said, watching the door, and the Author realized he was right, the drunk would come back with a gun to kill them. He found himself saying, “He’s coming for us,” said it a couple of moments before the man did come back with the gun, and what then followed happened so fast, and at the same time so slowly, that it intensified the Author’s feeling of being in a waking dream. When the man entered the Bar & Grill, Son was right there to meet him, and the Author heard his own voice slowed down to a growl, begging no, no, and then Son made a series of moves, leaning his head and upper body out of the line of fire and at the same instant grasping and twisting the gunman’s gun hand with his own left hand while, with his right hand, striking the gunman’s wrist with a violent karate chop, and then Son was holding the gun and the gunman was facing him, wetting his pants. Literally wetting his pants, no longer killer but just a maudlin drunk, begging don’t shoot me, I got kids, as time speeded up again and the noise of the room returned to normal and then the hee-haw of law enforcement vehicles and the drunk man being cuffed and taken away.
“I need a drink,” Son said, and sat back down at the bar.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” his father asked him.
“Out at Anthill,” Son replied, “there isn’t a whole lot to do. There’s a gym, and there’s TV, and there are YouTube videos. I watched like ten videos on how to disarm a man with a gun—if it’s a handgun, i
f he’s holding it with one hand, if he’s holding it with two hands, if it’s a rifle, whatever—and then I got my gym instructor to work with me on it, just for kicks.”
“You could have been killed.”
“Not really. I knew I could take him. He was so inebriated his reaction times were way down. It wasn’t even that hard.”
The Author let it go. “Thank you,” he said.
“I’m curious about one thing,” Son said. “When you said ‘He’s coming for us,’ nobody had seen him coming. That really helped me be in position, ready and waiting, but how did you know?”
“It’s in my story,” the Author said, and saw his son’s eyes widen. That was maybe the first time the young man had looked impressed.
“What happened to us in your story?” he asked.
“We got killed,” the Author replied. “That’s the part where having you here really made quite a difference.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
They drank in silence for a moment, then the Author had to ask, “Do you watch a lot of TV out there?”
“I told you. TV, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, that’s about what there is to do. That and the gym. So, yeah. I like to watch things on TV. Why?”
“Nothing,” the Author said. “I guess there are some good things about TV as well as bad.”
“Videos just saved your life,” Son pointed out. “So you could say that, yes.”
Another time of silent drinking.
“In your story,” Son asked, “when the guy started with his racist abuse, how did we react?”
“I’m ashamed to say that we backed away from him,” the Author answered. “Maybe I should rewrite that part.”
“Yeah,” Son said. “Because you didn’t back away. You totally confronted that asshole and you had everyone on your side.”
“Maybe that was a dumb thing to do.”
“No,” said Son. “It was fucking heroic.”
* * *
—
IN THE CRUZE AGAIN. “Is there any more stuff like that in your story?” Son wanted to know.
“There’s a diner in Tulsa.”
“Let’s go there,” he said.
“No need to go looking for trouble,” the Author said. “You could have been killed.”
“Not really,” Son said.
“On the whole it’s better to walk away from violence. Plus for people like us…”
“I’m not buying it,” Son said. “I’m done with meek and mild. If someone comes at me, Imma go at him, double.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk that way.”
“Dad, please. Don’t start with your peace and love. Back there in that Bar & Grill, that was the truth.”
They went to the place in Tulsa he had renamed the Billy Diner, Tulsa’s go-to. Nothing happened. They ate green eggs and ham and huevos rancheros and left. Nobody looked, nobody cared. It felt to the Author like reclaiming a space from which Quichotte and Sancho had been expelled; another kind of victory.
“Two more stops,” he said to Son. “Then we drop the car at Hertz at SFO and go home.”
There was news on the radio. The Chevy Cruze was being discontinued along with the Impala and Volt as part of General Motors’ cost-cutting drive. There were endings all around him, the Author thought. He wasn’t the only one on his last lap.
* * *
—
SNAPSHOT ONE, TAKEN AFTER a fifteen-hour drive: Devils Tower, Wyoming, at night, massive and powerful and overwhelming. They sat and looked at its ominous silhouette. They couldn’t even get out of the car.
“I saw that movie,” Son said finally, in a small voice.
“We’re not here because of the movie,” the Author said.
“Why are we here then? Is it in your story?”
“Yes. But it’s in your story too.”
“My story?”
“I’ve been here once before,” the Author said. “Long ago. With your mother.”
“Oh.”
“There was a meteor shower that night, and we prayed for a child. We hadn’t found it easy to have kids.”
“Oh.”
“And then we got you. You were our star child. You were our answered prayer.”
With that confession, withheld for so long, the Author finally made the story of Sancho and Quichotte his own story, and his child’s. He took Son’s hand, and they sat in the car, and looked. There was no meteor shower that night, but it was a clear sky, the great misty highway of the galaxy blazed across it, and they saw a couple of bright shooting stars.
Snapshot two, twenty-something driving hours later, with three nights at motels en route, after they left Devils Tower and drove west and south, through Rock Springs, Purple Sage, and Little America (pops. 23,036, 535, and 68), past Lake Tahoe into California, through Sacramento (pop. 501,901) and San Jose (pop. 1,035,000). They were at last in Sonoma (pop. 11,108), in a parking lot at the corner of Broadway and Napa Road. Along one side of the parking lot ran a low white building bearing the sign SALSA TRADING COMPANY.
“There’s nothing here,” said Son. “This is what we drove halfway across America to see?”
“This is where, in the future, they will build Cyberdyne,” the Author said, reverentially.
“Cyberdyne, like in the movies?”
“Cyberdyne the corporation that built Skynet which built the Terminators. This is the correct address. They tell you it’s in Sunnyvale, but I reckon that’s wrong, or, in other words, it’s fictional. This is the precise location right here.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
“Anyway, in my story,” the Author said, “this is where I’m building CentCorp.”
“And that is?”
“The place where Evel Cent builds the NEXT portal Mayflower that will connect our world to neighbor Earths and allow my Quichotte and his Salma to escape this dying planet to make a new life in a newfound land.”
“How does that work? I guess you’d better tell me the whole story now.”
“I’m not sure about this part,” the Author said. “I haven’t written it yet.”
“Dad,” said Son, “let’s go home.”
* * *
—
HE LOOKED OUT OF the airplane window in the awkward darkness of a redeye flight and saw the Northern Lights hanging there, rippling, a majestic green curtain in the sky. It was rare for the aurora to be visible in these latitudes, only a handful of such manifestations in a decade, so it felt like a privilege to be granted such a vision. He wanted Beethoven on his headphones to accompany such grandeur, the Choral Symphony thundering in his ears while the aurora thundered in his sight. The ripples raced across the sky, there and back again, their beauty bringing tears to his eyes. Deine Zauber binden wieder / Was die Mode streng geteilt. “Thy enchantments bind together / what custom sternly did divide.” He saw the vision of the aurora as the final proof that the worlds were conjoined, bound together, that the world within him, the world he dreamed up, was now forever merged with the world outside himself, and he imagined that the Lights were themselves the portals that might transport men and women to a brave new world.
It was the time of miracles. A miracle was sleeping beside him: his son restored to him, their broken love remade. If that could be true then everything was possible. It was, as Quichotte reminded him, the Age of Anything-Can-Happen. And his heart? It was very full, but it had not burst. He would have time to finish his story.
He closed his eyes, and slept.
The growing catastrophe was not limited to the damaged and disintegrating physical fabric of everything that was. The laws of science themselves appeared to be bending and breaking, like steel girders melting under the pressure of an unimaginable force. Events preceded their causes, so that a large hole appeared at the intersection of Forty-Second Street an
d Lexington Avenue, a hole into which cars tumbled, some time before the explosion of the gas main that was the reason for the hole’s appearance. In the city, time passed more rapidly down the avenues than on the cross streets, where it often seemed to be permanently jammed. It was possible that the great second law of thermodynamics had fallen, and entropy had in fact begun to decrease. People who knew nothing of science nevertheless felt themselves possessed by dread. When the sun shone the day grew colder and the moon exuded a tropical heat. The rain, when it fell, burned your skin, and the snow, too, sizzled when it hit the ground.
The seventh valley, Quichotte reminded himself, is the Valley of Annihilation, where the self disappears into the universe.
His room at the Blue Yorker was a monk’s cell at the heart of a whorehouse, and in the little microcosm of the motel nothing had changed. Human needs were being amply and vocally fulfilled by night and day on the far sides of his thin walls. In that dark time the continuity of desire brought Quichotte a measure of comfort. Human nature at least was unchanged, and remained the great constant at the root of things. He himself had no desire to participate. Nor in the solitude of his room did he use television for pornographic arousal. Pornography embarrassed him. In fact, all sexual behavior on television embarrassed him. He averted his eyes from the screen even when people kissed. He had no need for such proxy gratifications.
He was waiting with folded hands for love to find a way.
* * *
—
IN THE END THE ADDICT will always call the dealer. Even if the dealer is in love with the addict, obsessed by the addict, consumed by the need to be with the addict and to keep her safe from all the world’s dangers, the addict’s need for what he has is still greater than his need for her. So in the end she called him. Time had passed, it was hard to know how much time, because time was strange now, stretching, compressing, unreliable. A week could be a month long. A lifetime could pass in a day. The world was falling apart, a great roaring maw of nothingness had appeared in midair near the storied secular spire of the Empire State Building, and the city was full of screaming mouths and running feet and fallen figures being trampled in the stampede. And in the midst of chaos a calm man in a sleazy motel waited for the phone to ring, and it rang, and all she wanted was him. At the heart of a nightmare, a dream come true.
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