I dropped my bookbag on the seat beside me, pulled out my notebook, laid it on the tabletop. Flipped open the faded green cover to reveal the first page of hand-scrawled annotations. They were four months old, according to the date scratched into the corner of the page.
I leafed through the pages of disjointed anarchy, bits of thought that I barely remembered scribbling. Words and phrases were crossed-out, struck-through, written above and below. Never torn out; never discarded. Addendums and appendices had been stapled to pages, folded over to fit within the dimensions of the covers.
I flicked through that collection of clippings, picked up pieces along the way until I reached a blank sheet that screamed with untold promise. Then I unclipped the pen from the spiral binding, scratched the date into the corner of the page, and leaned back against my seat.
I closed my eyes, sighed, enjoyed the pungent bouquet of tobacco and grease. A few minutes later, the smell of coffee broke through the haze, and I opened my eyes as the woman arrived with my plate. As she set it and a cup on the table, I asked her, "could you leave the pot?"
She looked at me, then glanced at my notebook, and flashed that mercurial smile again. "Long night?"
"Looking like it," I said. She left the pot. I thanked her, sat forward, poured a cup. Steam merged into the thin fogbank clinging to the ceiling. I set the pot down, fished a pair of creamers from the caddy, emptied each into the coffee to turn it a gentle russet color. I thought of Amber, just for a moment. My thoughts would surely return to her again before all was said and done, but not now.
I had other matters to consider first.
I tossed away the plastic shells, snatched a dozen sugar packets, tore them open, emptied them into the coffee. I dipped my spoon, swirled it. My eyes turned back to that notebook that promised everything and nothing and did not apologize. I stirred my coffee for thirty seconds like a latter-day alchemist, then tapped the spoon against the rim to produce a musical chime. Not one else noticed.
I drank the coffee, winced as it burned a trail down my throat. Warmth radiated out from my gut, creeping into my dark hollows, driving out the last of the Angry Sea's icy aftereffects. The smog of exhaustion blurring my senses broke open in the sweetness of that heat, burned away like a nightfog by the unforgiving light of dawn.
I launched a vigorous incursion on my plate, leaving no quarter unscathed. I ravaged villages of hashbrowns, eggs, and eggs, laid waste to the outlying regions of bacon and toast. Then I doused the smoldering wreckage of my hunger with the scalding Snake Eyes house brew.
A bitter breeze sliced through my head and threw my mind open, my brain crackling like a livewire near an open flame. So I set down my cup, raised my pen. Wrote.
This story is true, but this book is a lie.
I looked at the line, scratched out across the page in a cramped handwriting that I almost didn't recognize. It was honest, and that was the only truth that mattered. So I continued. Stories don't have beginnings or endings. Books do. Books bend over backward to impose meaning where none exists. To make sense of the absurd and the arbitrary. Life is absurd; life is arbitrary. A good book may be neither, because the more a book is like life, the less it is like a book.
Even the best book is a lie. Because life is all middle.
I finished the pot of coffee. I had stopped adding cream and sugar. I drank it straight black, sent it straight to the source. Even before I got around to flagging down the woman with the strategic t-shirt, she visited my table and traded out my empty coffee pot for a fresh one. I blinked up at her, and she flashed that mercurial smile of hers.
I gave her a small grin of my own as she headed back behind the empty counter. Then I poured another cup of coffee without thinking too precisely on the event. My pen was already wending its way across the page again when I turned my eyes back to the materializing words.
A good book progresses logically, resolves organically. Life does not. A good book is populated with characters who grow, and change, and learn about themselves. Life is not.
I haven't grown because of what happened. It hasn't changed who I am. I'm still a liar, and a cheater, and a thief. And even my best intentions are more likely to make things worse. `Cause that's who I am. What I am. And people don't change.
This story may not have happened the way I've told it, but this is how I remember it, and what I couldn't remember, I made up. If you remember differently, write your own version.
Because this story is true. But this book is a lie.
I emptied out the second pot of coffee, and worked my way steadily toward the bottom of the last cup.
I wrote out my own story, just as Ethan had written out his on 716 sheets of neon-orange paper, scratching out the alien letters of an undiscovered alphabet over and around and through the disjointed collection of scribblings until I reached the final page of my notebook.
My right hand faltered once, again, slashed a torturous curve that veered off into nothingness, then came to rest. I followed that slashing line back to the last line on the page, found the words of a dead man who believed that he was destined to be someone else's tragedy. I shivered.
I considered those words, and all that I had written so far. It wasn't the whole story, but it was a start, and that was good enough for now. I looked up, searched the hazy diner, found the analog clock with the cracked face on the wall opposite the kitchen, and nearly laughed.
Five o'clock had come and gone, and no one had mourned its passing. The gilded light of dawn filtered through the grimy windows on each side of the door. I blinked, and smiled against the rising of the day.
I drained the last of my coffee, closed my notebook, clipped my pen back into the spiral binding. I clenched my right hand into a fist, shook it my hand, flexed my fingers. My knuckles felt full of hot sand. I had spent an hour scribbling into this notebook in longhand, hardly pausing. But it was a price I would pay gladly, a suffering I would willingly endure for my truth and my art. If there had ever been any difference between the two.
The diner had brightened around me, and half-a-dozen patrons had joined me. Creatures of these young hours, all eating, drinking, reading. Settling into the rhythm of the day. I grinned at that, dug my wallet out of the pocket of my bookbag. I slipped out a twenty-dollar bill, returned my wallet and notebook, zipped up the bag.
It was time to move on. This was a populated place now, and while the time may come for me to recognize my own humanity once more, that time was not now. Not yet. I had other matters to consider first. I climbed out of my booth and crossed the dining room to the counter.
I saw a spindly man working in the kitchen through the window. A moment later, the woman in the strategic t-shirt returned to the counter. She stepped to the register, slid a ticket out from under the drawer. "Late Nighter," she read off the slip, turning to me. "$5.34."
I hiked the bookbag up my shoulder, felt the currency between my fingertips. I thought briefly about the bill in my hand, then flashed the woman a lopsided smile. I set the money down on top of my receipt. "Keep it."
She glanced down at the bill. If she reacted, I didn't catch it. I almost fell in love with her for that. Then she looked back at me, and said, "Thanks, hun."
I nodded, certain that I had accomplished something. Or maybe not. It didn't matter. I looked her in the eye and told her, "You guys should sell those t-shirts."
The woman coughed out a laugh, looking down at her own chest and shaking her head. I turned away from the register, started for the door. When I pressed my hand to the glass, I heard her say behind me, "good luck, kid."
I paused. I considered turning back to the woman, wanted to, nearly did, then realized that I had nothing to say. I didn't think she wanted me to turn back anyway.
So I didn't. I just pushed through the door, stepped out into the smudged morning.
3.
I angled my face into the sun, squinted against the glare.
The Wagoneer and the Bronco stood side-by-side just outside the door, a pair of
old friends trading war stories in front of a battered diner in the fringes of Atlantic City. I climbed into the Jeep, tossed my bag into the passenger's seat, started the car. I grinned as I spotted the woman with the strategic t-shirt through the door again, carrying two plates of food in one hand and her trusty pot of coffee in the other. They really ought to sell those t-shirts.
I reversed, turned around, pulled to the lot's exit. A first generation Lincoln Town Car, all gleaming chrome and dented quarter panels, rolled east toward the City. I watched the car until it disappeared into the distance, and considered heading back toward Atlantic Avenue.
But even as I entertained the notion of returning to the tawdry sideshows and lurid showpieces and kinetic spires, I knew that I wouldn't. I had been down that road already. I had taken all I was going to get from the City by the Sea, and for that I counted myself luckier than most.
So I pulled out into the street, turning right, heading west. Driving back in the direction that I had come, only faintly aware in my exhaustion that I had chosen the route that would lead me back to the beginning of my own story. Because my life was never had never been a straight line from beginning to middle to end, or even some unplottable helix woven across the patchwork of history.
My life curved. It would bend and bend, so subtly that I would never even notice, taking me forever back to the places I had been. And when that curve closed, I felt sure that my past and my future would collide, and it would be beyond my abilities to predict the outcome.
George Webber once told me that you can't go home again. But he lied. He's a writer, and that's what they do. Because the truth is that home is the one place you can't escape. No matter how far I go, home is the memory that haunts me, consoles me, looms over me, and rises up to swallow me like shrill madness in a nightmare.
The place where the truth inside me lives. The only truth that matters. That has ever mattered.
So I drove west, away from the Angry Sea, toward the town of Pleasantville. I had no idea where I was going or what I meant to do there. I had less than a thousand dollars at my disposal to finance this dubious endeavor. Those assets currently resided in a CoreStates checking account back home, but my grandfather had gotten me a debit card to teach me some financial responsibility.
I had tucked the card into a fold of my wallet. Now I passed a Kerbeck Buick GMC dealership, and I knew that my grandfather had known long in advance how my story would unfold. Perhaps not the particulars, but certainly the broader strokes of the tale. And he had set about the task of giving me the tools I would need to survive.
If my mother had given me her creeping darkness, then her father had given me his light.
I drove on until I spotted a decrepit Exxon gas station.
I pulled into the lot on the corner just as the Wagoneer's low-fuel indicator lit up. I rolled the car in next to a pump, climbed out, discovered the gas tank on the wrong side, and piled back in to reorient the vehicle. The entirety of my master plan now consisted of refueling the Jeep.
It was the obvious step to take. The rest would come.
I crossed the macadam to the tiny convenience store, pushed through the door, cut down an aisle toward the back of the building. Down a short half that ran behind the drink case I found a door marked REST-ROOM in black marker. I pushed into the bathroom, relieved myself, washed my hands, then headed back out into the store.
A rotary rack of maps stood next to the counter. I glanced it over while a scrawny girl paid for a carton of Lucky Strikes and a 24-ounce coffee in front of me. Her stringy hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. She might have been in her forties, or she might have been eighteen. She wore a pink tube top half-a-size too small, a faded pair of boy-shorts, and tattered flipflops.
Her ribs rippled like a xylophone through her back, distorting an elaborate set of angel wing tattoos that would have looked incredibly sexy on another woman. She took her change and headed for the door, and I resolved for no real reason at all to make her a character in a novel. I stepped to the register, dug a bill out of my pocket.
"Twenty on pump four," I told the lanky kid behind the counter. He took the cash and slid it into the till, reached to a second terminal, and tapped a couple of keys. Then he turned to me long enough to nod before leaning back in his seat with a seven-month old issue of Blender.
"Thanks," I said, nodding back. He didn't look up. I emptied back out of the store, and caught a glimpse of Angel Wings climbing into the passenger's side of a beat-up Cadillac Cimarron at the pump opposite the Wagoneer. The car pulled out of the lot as soon as the girl was inside, and as it merged back into the current of the Black Horse Pike, I spotted a payphone at the corner.
I paused there on the concrete, staring across the lot at that small graffitied booth. Then I crossed the macadam to the Jeep, pulled the nozzle from the gaspump, flipped up the handle and hit the button for unleaded fuel. A mental itch nagged at the bottom of my mind, as if two pieces of information were squinting at each other from across a crowded room, trying to decide if it recognized each other. They did, I was sure of that, but it was a big room, and I couldn't get through the throng to introduce them.
The dollar and gallon counters on the gaspump ticked steady upward at about the same rate. A-buck-six for a gallon of gas wasn't the worst price I'd found, but it was more than I paid in the Creek. With summer approaching, costs would probably top a dollar-a-gallon soon, and they might not ever come all the way back down again.
I glanced to my bookbag lying on the passenger's seat of the Jeep. I thought of my faded-green notebook, lying on top of the orange pages of Ethan's manuscript. The notebook in which I'd written the beginning of my story, and collected the scraps and fragments of so many others. Scraps like business cards and sticky notes and flyers and receipts. Like bits of paper attached to the margins and folded over to fit within the dimensions of the covers.
Scraps like a sheet torn from a small spiral-bound pocket notebook and stapled to the bottom of a page of notes for Cyrano. My own postmodern reimagination of that iconic balcony scene. The complicated staging that I had choreographed with Charlie and Blake in advance. But Blake had been running late getting back from his cousin's quinceañera, so the production team had waited. And Amber had received a dark phone call.
The gaspump clicked off at twenty dollars, buying me almost nineteen gallons of gas. I did a quick bit of math, came up with a range of 377 miles. The trip from Prophecy Creek to Atlantic City had been just over eighty miles. A freshly filled tank could get me all the way to Pittsburgh before I'd have to bother stopping. I didn't know anyone in Pittsburgh. I was not terribly concerned by that.
Perhaps I could just ride the Atlantic City Expressway back into Philadelphia. A big city so close to home that no one would ever think to look there. The kind of place where a kid could disappear into the teeming crowd if that was what he really wanted to do. I could lock up the Jeep in the parking garage of Commerce Square, then hike up Market Street on foot, across the Schuylkill River, to 30th Street Station. I could put the keys into a manila envelope, with a note explaining the vehicle's location.
I could mail it to Prophecy Creek. To Regina, maybe. Just for fun. Then I could relax in an Amtrak railcar, soak in my thoughts, ride into my own personal undiscovered country. I could improvise the next chapter of my story, making up the words on the page as I traveled that long and curving path. I could become the author of my own life. I smiled, laughed, shook my head at myself.
The idea was enticing, but it was not a plan. Not if I meant to run for the cheap thrill of running. I flipped the handle down on the gaspump, hung up the nozzle, and stepped to the passenger's side door, pulling it open and leaning in. I unzipped my bag and yanked out the faded-green notebook. I felt that mental itch at the bottom of my mind, stronger this time, as I thought of the expression on Amber's face just before she answered that phone call.
What the fuck do you want? she had demanded. That was all it had taken. I had followed her
, eavesdropped on her, peered into the creeping darkness of her monolithic anger. I opened my notebook, my hands frantic, and laid it on the seat. I had committed an unforgivable intrusion that night, secretly collecting scraps and fragments of Amber's story, and I recalled them now in the parking lot of an Exxon gas station in Pleasantville.
Hank, she had called him. I swiped through the pages, eyes flickering over the disjointed anarchy. She had mentioned a horn and a chain; they had belonged to her grandmother; her grandmother, at the center of the picture in the hallway. At Veterans Stadium, with her daughter and granddaughter, all wearing Phillies jerseys. And she, the oldest of the three, wearing a thin steel chain with a blue jasper cornicello. The Italian horn.
I flipped three pages at once, almost kept going, and stopped. The phrase bifurcated man caught my eye. In the lower corner at the bottom of the page, a small slip of paper had been folded over and stapled so that it could not be opened, could not be read. I tore that slip free, taking the lower corner of the page out of the book with it, and considered the consequences of opening it. I glanced to the payphone, and made my decision in a moment.
I had come too far down my long and curving path. I couldn't think of a reason to change direction. I unfolded that slip of paper, found the phone number that had been jotted there by another Michael Everett, in another lifetime, on another plane of reality. In the world-from-before.
Then those two pieces of information finally recognized each other from opposite sides of that crowded room in my mind. And they knew one another very well.
4.
I looked back across the parking lot to the payphone.
Then I stuffed the notebook back into my bag, dropped it into the footwell. I reached into the Jeep's ashtray below the dashboard, scooped a handful of change out of it, leaned out of the car, threw the passenger's side door closed. Crossed the macadam. I arrived at the payphone too soon, pulled up short, stared at the graffitied booth. Then I took the last step, reached for the phone, careening unto the breach with no plan.
The Danger of Being Me Page 22
