by Jaime Clarke
By sunrise, they were well into Ohio. Charlie had stopped to relieve himself and fill the tank, waving the Speedpass on Vernon’s key chain at the Exxon station off I-80 as Vernon slept in the passenger seat. When he finally awoke, just past Springfield, he said, “Take I-75 South,” and they veered off the exit, headed for Cincinnati. Without inquiry, Vernon gave a thumbnail account of the reason for their detour: that his ex-wife, Jayne, and nine-year-old son, Robby, lived in Blue Ash, a suburb just outside Cincinnati. Charlie absorbed the facts, that Vernon had met Jayne when she was a model in New York, right after he’d published Scavengers, that they had had a long, protracted battle involving private detectives over Vernon’s paternity—“We kept calling each other John and Jane Doe after it was finally resolved,” Vernon said—followed by a quick marriage that lasted a mere three months. After a quiet divorce, Jayne had moved to Blue Ash and made Vernon swear not to utter a word about them as he went on with his life. “Not for their own privacy,” he said, “but because I’m an embarrassment as a father and ex-husband.” The story staggered Charlie, as did Vernon’s ability to keep it out of his official biography.
The modest white and blue ranch house on Laurel Avenue was shrouded behind clouds of hydrangeas. A red Jeep Cherokee sat in the driveway, the back passenger door inexplicably left open. Vernon stared uneasily at the open car door, perhaps sensing the visit was a mistake, the signs of apology troubling his brow. He fortified himself with the last of the cigarettes that had substituted for his breakfast. A golden retriever bounded across the lawn toward the Cherokee. “Victor,” Vernon said. “That dog hates me.” Charlie braced for Vernon to make the connection between the golden retriever and Oscar—Vernon had amnesia about the missing dog—but Oscar had apparently been consigned to the past, just as Jessica predicted.
A slender woman in blue jeans and a yellow sheer chiffon button-front blouse appeared in the driveway, shading her eyes. Her long black hair fluttered in the morning breeze. Vernon stepped out of the BMW and waved. The woman lowered her hands and retreated inside. Vernon leaned into the car. “Come back tomorrow,” he said, shutting the door and sauntering across the thick grass. The golden retriever ran aimlessly toward him and then pulled up, changing direction and jogging ahead of Vernon toward the front door.
The separation caused Charlie a moment of panic, which quickly converted to anger at being abandoned. Regardless of his intellectual preparedness, it was always a wonderment, that first prick of panic and then the wall of anger that rendered him powerless until he could hack through his emotions to take inventory of his new circumstances, which would reveal what would be required of him to survive. In the case of Vernon’s precipitous exit, the primary concern was that he’d be obliged to sleep in the BMW, his funds mostly depleted from his summer in Manhattan. As he cruised the quiet suburban streets, idly guessing at what it would be like to grow up in the bucolic heaven that was Blue Ash, he scouted for camouflage, which would only need to hold until tomorrow morning, when he could legitimately go for breakfast, or find a bookstore to satisfy his curiosity about whether the good citizens of Middle America read Vernon Downs. But after unsuccessfully trolling the local radio station for a soundtrack to his latest dilemma, Charlie fished for a CD in the leather armrest and discovered a stash of twenties he hoped Vernon wouldn’t remember. A quick alibi—that he’d used the money to gas up in Pennsylvania—would be believable until Vernon received the bill for his Speedpass, at which point Charlie guessed it wouldn’t be an issue. His cover story thus salted away, he rented an antiseptic room at a Motel 6 and fell on the blue and green checkered comforter in his clothes, staring at the television to dull his mind of all that had transpired.
He awoke after midnight, restless. The Motel 6 complex was a hulking ghost ship in a sea of suburban sprawl. The warm August night draped the landscape in a purple bloom, specks of headlights roving in the distance. The vending machine in the concrete courtyard swallowed Charlie’s quarters without reciprocation. He pummeled the glass, but the Hostess cupcakes slumbered behind their wire guard. He unsuccessfully rummaged the BMW for more change, though his hunger ebbed when he discovered a cardboard box stashed under Vernon’s luggage containing typewritten pages, the new novel. Charlie turned the pages carefully, sprawled out on the sheets back in his room. The novel was without a title page but involved several characters from Vernon’s second novel, Scavengers, many of whom had gone on to become models. The narrator shared the same name as the golden retriever, and he chuckled at the connection. As he read, the narrative became a hybrid of satire and thriller, involving models as terrorists, the overt thesis intimating the tyranny of beauty.
Charlie set the pages aside. The myth of Vernon Downs—even after it had been punctured by the madness that had them scampering across the country—was so ingrained in his mind, so saturated in association to bygone days with Olivia in Phoenix, that he was incapable of judging if the book was any good. Were reviewers right about Vernon? Was he a hack, a sensationalist, a writer more famous for being famous than for being a writer? He recalled a scurrilous accusation he’d read somewhere—that if not for the controversy surrounding The Vegetable King, Vernon would still be published by his original publisher, whose reputation as a purveyor of celebrity biographies and gimmicky books had been cemented in recent years. Regardless, however the new novel turned out, it would be published, a record of Vernon’s particular interests and thoughts at a certain time in his life. The book would be a written record, a permanence in an otherwise transitory existence, and Charlie traced his attraction to writing back through his want for a little attention to this lust for immortality. If only he could bead his experiences on a chain, not just to memorialize them in print for posterity, but to search them for threads of meaning or instructive themes.
The sun ascended in the milky sky, the beginning of another humid summer day. Charlie checked out, too early to arrive at Vernon’s ex-wife’s place. His restlessness from the night before had ripened into a full-blown anxiety, a wariness that Vernon’s visit with his ex would have them reversing course, back to New York. He slowly drove the streets of Blue Ash while its residents awoke. Without any concrete evidence to support his theory, he surmised that Blue Ash closely paralleled the neighborhood in Modesto where he’d lived with his parents, who had, over the years, become little more than a fact. He’d had parents, like everyone. But because both his mother and father had been substantially younger than their siblings, and had never been close with the kin who tended him, Charlie had left his biological family without any memento or recollection of them. His features were too ordinary and symmetrical to provide a sketch of familial resemblance, and without that mental purchase, he was helpless to speculate about what kind of people they were, if they subscribed to the tenets of religion and politics that most employed to define themselves, if they were college educated, if they were employed, if they were liked by their neighbors, if they saw people socially, if they were involved in neighborhood concerns, if they ate regularly at local restaurants, liked spicy food or unusual pizza toppings, if others recognized and regarded them when they walked down the street, if they were more likely to dispense wisdom or seek advice, if they paid their bills on time or pleaded for extensions, if they happily agreed with taxes for community improvement or resented the governmental intrusion on their personal finances, if they were progressive or given to bouts of racism and sexism, if they were inclined to help someone in need or pass by quickly, pretending not to see, if they liked pop music, if they went to the movies regularly, followed sports, if they had the newspaper delivered to the house or bought it occasionally, if they read books, listened to talk radio, if they drove a new car or a used one, if they rented or owned their home, if they had planned to save money for his college education, if they showered him with kisses or treated him like they would an adult, if they assiduously researched the quality of the local school system or not, if they harbored secret crushes on neighbors or coworkers, if t
hey drank coffee or tea, if they were vegetarians, if they smoked, if they were afraid to fly, if they had a history of cancer, if they feared technology, or nuclear war, if they would’ve been the kind of parents he was proud or ashamed of, if he would’ve forsaken them for adventure or stayed close as he grew older, if he would’ve been closer to his mother or father, if he would’ve begged them for a sibling or basked in the attention of being an only child, if he would have made them proud or been the cause of disappointment, if they would’ve boasted about him to friends and neighbors or been bound to shake their head with chagrin, if they would’ve been a close-knit family that took vacations together, celebrated all the important holidays, and been devastated when one of them was grievously injured or gravely ill, rendered inconsolable by death.
He wished he could know.
Vernon appeared rejuvenated by his overnight visit. His clothes had been laundered, and a shower had all but resurrected his previously beleaguered form. But Charlie noted that neither his ex nor the boy accompanied him to the car. Vernon motioned that he wanted to drive, so Charlie dutifully crawled into the passenger seat. They slipped back onto the freeway in silence, Vernon making lane changes without utilizing any mirrors or looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t concerned about where Charlie had spent the night, or how he’d occupied himself during the gulf of time he’d been abandoned, and so Charlie stared out the window until he nodded off.
Vernon insisted on driving the rest of the way, darting off the freeway somewhere in Illinois, telling Charlie to stay in the car as they pulled up to a white clapboard house perched on a hill. The name carved in relief on the wooden sign in the shape of a tractor posted in the small garden out front—McInnis—was that of Vernon’s onetime mentor at Camden. Vernon shook hands with the tall, gray-haired Harrison McInnis, who invited him in. Charlie reclined the seat, the BMW’s air-conditioning vanquishing the first signs of heat. The cool, quiet chamber was broken moments later as Vernon climbed in, sweat on his forehead, his hair tousled and a sunburst-patterned red mark on his right cheek.
“We’re off,” he said, making a U-turn for the freeway.
“What happened?” Charlie asked.
“Just saying hello to an old friend,” he answered.
Somewhere between the two Kansas Cities, Vernon fished a pill bottle out of his luggage and intermittently chewed small white tablets as they screamed across the Kansas plain, the darkness as pure as any Charlie had ever witnessed. The lone incandescent lights from gas stations and forlorn strip malls flashed by at metronomic intervals and Charlie fought sleep. Vernon cracked his window and increased the volume on the Stone Roses CD they’d listened to three times through. Conversation had been sparse, constrained to where to stop for fast food and gas, Vernon preoccupied with a point somewhere far along the horizon. Along a particularly endless expanse of pavement, the trance was snapped and the BMW eased to the shoulder.
“Christ,” Vernon exhaled. He leaned his forehead on the steering wheel, completely deflated.
“I can get us to Denver,” Charlie volunteered, and they wordlessly switched places, a tractor trailer blowing a torrid exhaust giving them a wide berth.
Charlie was so consumed by an intricate design whereby he might ditch Vernon at the hotel in Denver to surprise the Kepharts, the grandparents he hadn’t seen or heard from in years, that he couldn’t fathom the maze of one-way streets that would bring them to the towering chain hotel Vernon had pointed to, demanding sleep. The hotel mocked him as it drew near and then receded, none of the streets seemingly the answer to the riddle. “I thought you said you used to live here,” Vernon said. Just when frustration threatened to flow like lava between them, the hotel’s portico appeared. Vernon heaved his bag and disappeared through the electronic sliding doors while Charlie parked. Vernon’s mental state made it impossible to predict how he’d react to the idea of borrowing money for a hotel room, so Charlie used the pay phone in the hotel lobby to call American Express to ask for a limit increase. He’d prepared a spurious anecdote about how he was starting a new job soon that would significantly boost his previously insubstantial income. The joyless voice denied the request, so Charlie climbed into the backseat of the BMW and rested his weary body on the leather seat. His head buzzed with thoughts of the Kepharts, replaced with a worry that they’d be disappointed to see him now, to know anything about what had happened to him since he left. He preferred they remember him as the little boy they’d briefly known so long ago.
Vernon appeared to believe the staged drama in the lobby about how Charlie had already checked out and was impatient to light out, and so the road trip recommenced, Vernon behind the wheel and Charlie the passenger. Charlie tongued the hole in his back tooth where the temporary filling had been. He must’ve swallowed it in his sleep. The tooth would likely weaken from infection before he could manage a way to fix it, he thought.
The blue snowcapped mountains disappeared as they crossed into Utah, plunging into valleys of red rock, the arid landscape reminding Charlie of his proximity to Arizona, a place he was sure he’d left for good. The overnight stop in Denver and the sojourn through the desert southwest confirmed that the geographical backdrops of his personal history continued to exist into the future, even though for Charlie they were frozen in amber, the glass bottles glinting in the sunshine of his mind. A secondary thought, about the historical supposition about heading west in search of a better life, or to make something of yourself, appeared as false as anything.
As they skirted Las Vegas, Vernon regaled Charlie with the amusing anecdote about how when he was in high school, his parents discovered drugs in his room—“My sisters ratted me out!” —and they sent him to work in his uncle’s casino outside Vegas, forgetting that he’d mentioned it previously in the interview, their first encounter, which seemed to Charlie like several lifetimes ago.
A calmness descended on Vernon as they merged off the I-15 and onto the I-10, passing signs for Pomona, West Covina, El Monte, and Monterey Park, the locales sounding to Charlie as exotic as foreign countries. A bronze minivan and a blue Camaro, both with Michigan plates, tried not to lose each other in traffic. A silver pickup truck changed lanes, momentarily separating the two vehicles. Charlie watched with interest as the minivan slowed to force the pickup truck to pass, reuniting the van with the Camaro. He thought about the drivers planning for just such a problem, devising the stratagem to protect each other all the way from Michigan.
“I was born in Modesto,” Charlie said between songs on the radio.
“Northern California is a whole different thing,” Vernon said. “It’s Oregon, basically.” His mood brightened as they broached the Los Angeles city limits. “I haven’t been back in forever,” he admitted. “Everyone out here calls me Dave. Harrison McInnis made me put my full name on the manuscript of Minus Numbers before he sent it to his agent. But I’m known to my real friends and family as Dave. I guess that punctures any remaining fiction about Vernon David Downs,” he laughed. He stopped for a red light. “The myth is useful for a whole bunch of things, but it’s a bummer when people buy into it too heavily. Like you did.” He turned and looked at Charlie, who was processing the revelation, counting up the myths he’d adhered to for so long, a life with Olivia as rescue from his life of spirals overshadowing the rest of the list. “Hopefully you’ll find something that means more to you than my literary facade.” The light changed to green and the BMW rolled forward. “Unfortunately for me, I’m addicted to the fictional me,” he added. Charlie took the admission to be Vernon’s way of saying that he would ultimately return to New York and resume the life he’d fled a few days earlier. Charlie envied him the easy cover his image provided, in spite of its hazards and occasional nuisances.
They exited the freeway near Century City and headed toward Beverly Hills. “My father had an office in Century City,” Vernon said. He spun a narrative about his previous life in Los Angeles, growing up in a pink stucco house on Valley Vista in Sherman Oaks, ha
nging out in Westwood at a Fatburger, the restaurant on Melrose where he used to have drinks with his mother, mobbing the twenty-four-hour Du-par’s in Studio City, or Pages in Encino if Du-par’s was packed. Vernon made a sequence of turns and noted how he used to wait patiently at the bar at La Scala Boutique, eating chopped salad and bribing the waitress to bring him red wine while his sisters shopped with their father’s platinum AmEx card. “You used to go to La Scala Boutique to dodge the people who went to La Scala,” he laughed, “which is impossible now, I’m sure.” They passed a restaurant called Chasen’s and Vernon said, “Christmas with the family there every year.” Charlie admired the recitation, the parsing of Vernon’s personal narrative, indifferent to the landmarks, which meant nothing to him. Only the Hollywood sign was familiar, but they motored under it without comment. “There used to be a yellow train on Sunset,” Vernon lamented. In the middle of a story told with incredulity about how his parents had taken him to a place called Sambo’s in Westwood when he was a kid, he broke off to ask, “Is today Sunday?”
Charlie wasn’t sure, and said so, but Vernon became convinced and they drifted through the streets. The sky had been darkening all afternoon, the sun fighting through at intervals, the momentary brightness fouled by the thunderclouds approaching from the west. The Santa Monica Pier came into view, lit green and yellow and red against the black sky.
