Merde Happens

by Stephen Clarke

7

  Next morning, I was all for leaving before the eight-fifteen coffeepot deadline. We'd already paid, and it would avoid an uncomfortable conversation about who had slept well. Or not.

  Alexa, however, reminded me that the sisters were going to switch on their computer for us. "You tiiink there is another place to read your e-mails in this dead winter town?"

  At eight fifteen exactly we tiptoed down into the hall. A tall black flask and a pair of plastic cups were standing on the top level of a drink cart. We pumped out two coffees and went to knock at the living room door.

  One light tap did the job. It was as if the two sisters were permanently lurking behind doors. Or under bedrooms. The woman who opened up was obviously the second sister—her cheeks were splashed bright pink with blusher and her high-necked cardigan was purple, the second color on the facade of the house. The two women were like part of the building.

  "How'd you like my coffee?" she asked.

  "It's great," I said, though so far it had been much too hot to taste. American coffee and tea are always way too hot for at least twenty minutes after you buy them. It's the only country in the world where water can be heated beyond boiling point.

  "Oh good. Her!" It was the cough. This was the woman who'd had to put up with two sessions of bedspring-twanging the night before.

  "Could we use your computer to look at our e-mails?" I asked her.

  "Oh sure, come in. I'll turn it on. Her!"

  She ushered us into a square room that had more unnecessary furnishings than anywhere I'd ever seen. It wasn't only that there were three cushions for every seating place. The easy chairs had arm covers, cushion covers, headrests, headrest covers, and even some of the covers had covers, all in different colors, like slices of cheese, tomato, and onion on a hamburger. And below all the superficial covering, the chairs and sofas were swathed in woolen rugs, throws, and wraps, so that the sisters themselves probably had no idea of the original shape of their furniture. In fact, there might well have been a third sister under there somewhere, a lost sibling who'd got in die way of a throw or wrap one day and had never been seen since.

  "We crochet a lot," the sister said. "Her!" Perhaps, I thought, she was allergic to wool and didn't know it. She pointed to a laptop that was folded shut, with an apricot-orange doily on top of it. "Well, you help yourself, I'm sure you know how it works." She motioned Alexa toward the desk. "You can sit and drink your coffee and watch TV while you wait for your wife to finish," she told me.

  The TV was tuned in to the public channel, and was showing a documentary about studying the effects of global warming via the analysis of moose droppings. I dug a hole for myself in a mound of cushions and sat down.

  "No," Alexa said. "Paul, you look first. You can read your e-mails then go and get us some breakfast, eh, cheri?" she said.

  "OK." I switched the computer on and hooked up to my mail. Apart from an offer to extend my "Penis" by three inches, a security warning about my account from a bank I'd never heard of, and an anti-French joke from a friend of mine, there were only two new messages. I opened the one from Benoit first, praying as I typed that he wasn't going to give me bad news about my legal worries. Perhaps he'd omitted an acute accent from one of his labels and the inspector had doubled the fine,

  But no, he simply reassured me that the inspection had gone OK, and that the fine was still fixed at its previous— albeit heartbreaking—amount. I thanked him for his good news and begged him not to forget to translate the sandwich du jour on the blackboard every day. Maybe, I suggested, he should even do away with the free English newspapers. The Ministry might demand that he translate those, too.

  The second e-mail was from Jack Tyler in London. A personal, direct message, no less, cutting out Suraya the middle woman for once. It was headed "Imperative!"

  Oh no, I thought, don't tell me he needs more photos of me in a busby or a kilt.

  Actually, I was pretty close. It said, and I quote, "Imperative you convince chair of Miami Scottish Dancing Society that your campaign will have knock-on effect for Dunfermline."

  "What the fur?" This was a combination of me starting to swear and the sister in her armchair cutting me off with a cough. It was a pretty accurate description of how I felt, though. What the fur was he on about?

  8

  The morning was bright, but judging by the way the air dived down my throat and tried to anesthetize my tonsils, I didn't think there had been enough of a thaw to clear the way for the ferry. Even so, I could tell we'd come south since Boston. It was the damp chill of a dungeon rather than the bite of a freezer cabinet.

  In daylight, of course, the houses looked much less ghostly than they had at night. They ranged in size from dark, squat cottages to sprawling mansions. Even the biggest houses had a temporary feel, as if they might get suddenly washed away. They were made of painted planks, with dainty columns holding up the porches, and the woodwork under the eaves looked as though it had been crocheted from colored wool by my two landladies. They were painted in soft but often startling combinations— spinach and custard, sunflower and gunmetal, crimson and blue. In the summer, full of vacationers, the town must feel like an immense doll's house store.

  I found a sunny, sheltered street corner and phoned Suraya. She listened to my question about Dunfermline and burst into tears.

  What the fur?

  "I am doing my best," she sobbed when she'd caBfted down enough to be coherent. "Everything is late, everything is difficult, and then they tell me everything is—" she lowered her voice "—fucked." We gasped together at her swearing. "I don't care if they do record it," she snapped at someone. An admonishing colleague at the call center, I guessed.

  "Calm down, Suraya, and tell me exactly what the problem is." Amazingly, I actually felt as if I was the one in control.

  She sniffed and, to a certain extent, explained. I still knew considerably less about my job than about moose droppings, but I finally managed to piece things together from her long, jagged sentences.

  My contact in Miami was to be a guy from City Hall called Jesus (pronounced "Hay-zooss," she stressed) Rodriguez. We were due to meet at eleven a.m., just over forty-eight hours away. There was no exact venue, though. I'd fix that up with him. And then there was the Dunfermline stuff.

  My next gig was a dancing show organized by the Miami Scottish-American Society, or MSAS. I didn't have to organize anything—I just needed to latch myself on as a sponsor and scatter our tourist literature about. However, the previous day, the MSAS had sent an e-mail threatening to pull out because they had discovered that the Visitor Resources: Britain campaign was publicizing only one Scottish city, Edinburgh. They had said, Add in Glasgow, Stirling, Skye, and Dunfermline or you can stick your Scottish dancing show in your sporran and smoke it.

  "Why Dunfermline?" I asked.

  "It's stupid," Suraya said. Apparently, Dunfermline— which was just northwest of Edinburgh, she told me—had been included in the demand because it was the birthplace of the current MSAS chairman's grandfather.

  "Stupid's not the word for it," I said. "It's deranged," and Suraya burst into tears again.

  "It's not fair," she sobbed. "My scooter was stolen, and my father won't lend me the money for a new one, and I have to walk three miles to work because he won't let me ride with my neighbor—you know, the guy who suggested the restaurant for us—and I get hassled by the taxi drivers and nearly die of heat exhaustion every day."

  "Heat exhaustion? It must be awful." After ten minutes phoning in the open air, my fingers and nose were all in danger of dropping off onto the glistening sidewalk. "Sorry, but I've got to go, Suraya, I've got to go. To Miami, remember?" I interrupted another outburst of sobs with a prod of my last movable finger.

  I found a store, waited for two bagels to be sliced open and slathered with cream cheese, then took a wrong turn and found myself down on the oceanfront, a blond beach that was being slapped by dark, frothy surf. There were flecks of ice along the tide mark, a
nd the waves were moving sluggishly, as if carrying a weight on their backs.

  I called the ferry company and got a recorded message that sounded almost as grief-stricken as Suraya.

  "We apologize that all ferries are out of service until further notice," it moaned.

  The numb-looking seagulls began a chorus of heckling laughter. In league with Alexa, obviously.

  9

  "One thing I can do," Alexa said, "is read manuals."

  "Next left up ahead. You should see a sign for the 49," I told her.

  "Maybe it is more prestigious to read atlases, but it is very practical to read manuals."

  "It might tell you to head for Millville," I added.

  "And even more practical to look at the writing on your—what do you call it?"

  "Stick shift. Don't take 47. It's 49 we want," I warned.

  "Yes, stick shift. If we'd done that, maybe we could have continued to Philadelphia last night."

  "Last night was fun, though, wasn't it?"

  "Oui." She took her hand off the stick shift to stroke my arm.

  Alexa had figured out that the car could be switched over from automatic to manual, and now she was driving us toward highway 95 and, ultimately, Florida. Her right hand was constantly clamped on the stick shift. Except, of course, when she needed to stroke my arm. And she did occasionally steer as well.

  She wasn't what I would call a smooth driver—she'd learned in Paris, after all, where there are traffic lights every fifty yards or so, and where the longest stretch of straight acceleration is along the Champs-Elysees if you're lucky enough to get a series of greens. But Paris driving had made her a fearless lane changer, so with me reciting the road numbers and telling her to aim right or left, we successfully skirted Philadelphia, and suddenly we had crossed all of Delaware (not difficult) and made a major dent in Maryland. We were heading seriously south.

  "You've really bonded with Thelma," I said as she cut off a dawdling luxury sedan.

  "Yes, she is Thelma, I am Louise," she said. She waved at the driver of the sedan, who had sped up and was pulling level with us again.

  I was amazed. If I'd cut him off like that, he'd have been trying to run me off the road, but now he was grinning and nodding approvingly at the combination of beautiful woman driver and funky red car. Alexa replied with a smile that would have had him following her to Miami if she'd been alone.

  An hour later, Alexa's smile of enjoyment had turned into full-blown hilarity.

  She thought it was "sooo funny" that I, the master of the map, the atlas artist, had directed us down the wrong highway.

  "You are Supermap," she said. "Batmap."

  The thing was, I'd foolishly decided that we might as well leave highway 95 and take a slighdy more direct route between Baltimore and Washington, and then get back on 95 just north of DC. But when we hit the relevant junction, I saw a combined sign for 95 and another highway, and—

  I tried to explain, but Alexa simply shook her head and accused me of trying to blind her with numbers. The inescapable fact was that I'd sent her straight into downtown Washington.

  "No, I know. You're Spidermap." She enjoyed that one, engrossed as I was in the web of roads leading us into—and I hoped out of—Washington.

  "Have you ever seen the White House?" I asked her. "We can drive right past it." And although the French love of puns could have kept her adding the word map to the names of superheroes for several hours, this set her thinking.

  America's capital is—appropriately enough—the perfect drive-through city.

  "How clairvoyant of the original George W. to plan it like that," I said as we cruised past the White House, getting an admittedly distant view of the famous railings.

  "No, it was designed by a French architect," Alexa said.

  "Well that explains why you supported them in the War of Independence. It was another of your engineering deals. You help them out, but only if they give you a building contract afterward. It's like the whole Big Dig stitch-up in Boston. France hasn't changed much in two hundred years."

  Alexa smiled, proud of her country's talent for engineering-based diplomacy.

  We passed some gray administrative buildings and a few groups of shivering tourists, and then we were out in the open, gazing up at the immense white needle of the Washington Monument. Although it's more of a six-inch nail than a needle. Despite France's close links with revolutionary America, the monument seemed to be an attempt to tell Paris, "OK, you've got that little Egyptian obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, but this is the real deal. This is an American obelisk. A megalisk."

  "Oh, the buildings have disappeared," Alexa said. She was right. Although we were now, theoretically, in the epicenter of Washington, we were also in the middle of an enormous park. Lawns, lakes, and wintry trees undulated away as far as we could see. It was as if Paris had demolished every building between the Sacré Coeur and the Arc de Triomphe and turned the Champs-Elysées into a pond.

  In the distance we could see the immense white Capitol Building, like a caricature of St. Paul's Cathedral. We turned toward it, driving past the museums of history, natural history, and art, and it kept on growing to increasingly mammoth proportions. When we finally got right up in front of it, it was almost freakish. The gigantic dome was big enough to be a parliament building on its own, and the facade was like Buckingham Palace after a course of steroids. One thing was for sure—the colossal Capitol was sending out an explicit message to the world. This was a government that took itself very seriously indeed.

  We doubled back and went to see Abraham Lincoln. His memorial was the only monument that had not been designed for the drive-through or drive-past visitor. We couldn't see him at all from the street, especially through the small windshield of a Mini. So we were obliged to stop and feign engine trouble while we took turns to puff up the steps and visit the white giant on his cubical armchair.

  Despite the cold, Lincoln had quite a few fans milling around, taking in the murals and the Gettysburg Address, or just standing expectandy at his feet, observing him through camera lenses. I understood why they wanted to gaze at him. With his hands on the arms of his seat, big Abe looked as if he might suddenly lift himself up and sprint across die lawns to the Capitol. He'd heard that it was built for giants.

  10

  It was when we hit North Carolina that Alexa gave me the bad news.

  Ever since the daylight had begun to fade, she'd been in the navigator's seat, poring over the mileage map at the end of the atlas and doing mental arithmetic.

  It sounds pretty sexist, but I almost wished I'd left her to languish in her ignorance of everything map related. Now all she seemed to do was use the atlas to batter me with unwelcome facts. She was a like a born-again New Ager who discovers Feng Shui and can't stop rearranging the furniture.

  "If we drive nonstop and respect the times on the map, we will arrive in Miami at six fifty in the morning. Your meeting is at eleven, no? So either you call and—what do you call it?—push off the meeting."

  "Put it back. No, not a good idea. Things are disorganized enough as it is."

  "Or we drive nonstop and if we arrive early, we have time for a rest in the hotel. Or a swim on the beach."

  I took all this in. Dusk, I find, is the most tiring time to drive. I can't judge distances, and the dimming light seems to lull my senses to sleep. In any case, interstate 95 was turning out to be one of the most soporific roads in the world. With its anonymous white surface, paved in blocks so that our tires drummed out an endless, hypnotic badum-badum, badum-badum rhythm, and its nonstop fringe of woodland, it was like an infinite driveway to a chateau that never appears.

  Only the changing registration plates gave us any idea where we were—the thinning out of Virginians, the growing mass of Carolinians, the rising number of migrating Quebecois, and the increasing urgency of the speeding Floridians as they got closer to home.

  The radio had also lost some of its appeal. I'd now heard every singl
e rock record made between 1963 and 1980, and after the fourth or fifth play of "Hotel California" I could sing every note of the guitar solo. Even the local ad segments had begun to drag. When you drive right through a state, you end up knowing all its best places to buy paint, and who to contact to get great new deals on car insurance.

  You start to talk along with the ads as well as singing the hits.

  This was why the idea of another twelve straight hours on the road was even less of a turn-on than our coughing landlady of the night before.

  "What will we do? Divide it up into two-hour stretches?" I said.

  "Hmm, I am not sure. The problem is, Paul, you are certain that if I drive alone, I will get lost and take us to Canada."

  "That's not true."

  She held up the atlas to silence me, as if it contained the proof of her allegation.

  "I am also very tired, like you," she said. "I have done half the driving today. Or more. And it is, after all, because of you, because you took us to Cape Moose—"

  "Cape May."

  "Whatever. You took us there without having consulted me, and made us stop there for fourteen hours. And then you took us to visit Washington."

  "I thought you enjoyed that."

  The atlas was solemnly raised again.

  "OK, but it put on two hours to the trip."

  "So?" I could feel there was a major "so" coming up.

  "So, even if I am prepared to do some driving tonight, I think it is not fair if I do half. If you fall asleep and I turn the wrong way—"

  "You can't turn the wrong way, it's just straight south on the same road."

  "Ah, no." This time the atlas was actually opened for me at chapter and verse. "I have understood the numbers written next to the roads. The little blue ones are the sorties, the exits. And the numbers start again in every state. And from the moment we enter Florida, there are 380 exits before Miami. Three hundred and eighty possibilities for me to go wrong."

  Bloody atlas, I thought. I should never have bought the stupid thing.