Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  But before I caught that bus over the border there were a few final pieces of business to which I needed to attend. So I showered and changed into clean clothes and found a housekeeper doing the room next to mine and asked her for a large plastic bag. Then I went back to my room and opened my suitcase and dumped every item of clothing I owned into the bag. I also added the three pairs of shoes I’d thrown in and the extra coat that I’d grabbed as I fled my Somerville apartment.

  If you’re going to purge the past, everything connected with it must go.

  Then I called a cab. When it arrived I told the driver to take me downtown. He looked warily at the large plastic bag I was toting with me.

  ‘Know of a charity shop in town?’ I asked. ‘I want to make a donation.’

  He dropped me in front of an American Cancer Society storefront. I paid him off and went inside and handed the bag to the large cheery woman behind the counter.

  ‘Well, gosh . . . this is most generous of you,’ she said.

  Being a university town Mountain Falls had plenty of clothing shops. Within two hours I had bought two corduroy skirts, three pairs of jeans, three sweaters, half a dozen T-shirts, a pair of winter boots, a parka, a week’s worth of underwear and socks, a duffel bag with wheels, and a new leather jacket which was on sale for ninety-five dollars. In all I dropped around seven hundred bucks – but I was now outfitted for the rest of the winter.

  The saleswoman who helped buy the jacket told me that there was a ‘real fine hairdresser named January’ at a salon called Fine Cuts just two streets away. The woman even insisted on phoning January for me and telling her that I was en route to her: ‘You look after my new friend and be real nice to her.’

  Though I was touched by her neighborliness, all the questions she bombarded me with – ‘New in Mountain Falls?’, ‘What do you do for a living?’, ‘Got a fella?’ – re-emphasized all the reasons why I couldn’t inflict a small town on myself. Before I had unpacked my small suitcase, they’d be on to me. Google tells all – and they would know all. Granted, they might be on to me in a big city as well, but at least there I could choose anonymity.

  January turned out to be twenty-two or thereabouts. She was short and hyper-thin. She snapped gum and had a stud in the left side of her nose and purple painted nails. As I sat down in her chair and she mussed my straight brown hair that fell somewhere south of my shoulders and asked: ‘So what are we going to do with this?’, my reply caused her to smile.

  ‘Cut it all off.’

  ‘You want me to, like, shave your head?’

  ‘Nothing so radical. But I would like it short.’

  ‘Like short and spiky?’

  ‘Like Joan of Arc short.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Have you ever seen an Audrey Hepburn movie?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pageboy style?’

  Working at the next chair was a hairdresser in her mid-fifties. This was Estelle – who owned the place. She heard our little exchange and nudged January.

  ‘Winona Ryder.’

  The penny dropped and January said: ‘Oh, right, yeah, cool.’

  An hour or so later I was most definitely the owner of a new look. January hadn’t gone so extreme as to give me short back and sides, but my hair was now tightly cut around my head, though not to the point of rendering me androgynous.

  ‘Didn’t want to make it too mannish,’ January said as she gave me the final blowdry. ‘But didn’t want it to be too girlie either. You cool with it?’

  I looked at myself in the mirror. The lips were still marked. Ditto the forehead. But January’s handiwork had, indeed, altered my appearance. I had lost the severe New England professor look. I now seemed . . . well, different.

  ‘You’ve just lost five years – not that you looked that old to begin with.’

  My eyes – hooded, ringed with dark circles – said otherwise.

  ‘Mind me asking, but were you in some kind of accident?’ January asked, as she brushed out my hair, her left hand touching the still-bruised forehead.

  ‘Yes. I had an accident.’

  ‘At least you walked away from it.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘And at least it wasn’t some guy who did that to you.’

  After handing over $50 – and giving January another $10 for herself (she was genuinely chuffed by such a large tip) – I thanked her and left. There was a bookshop a few doors down from the salon. It had a café, a good selection of magazines and a very well-stocked literature section. I picked up several long books: Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Thomas Pynchon’s V (which I had always meant to read), the collected stories of John Cheever and assorted magazines. Then I found a small diner that did stylish food. I had a plate of pasta and a glass of wine. I was back at the Holiday Inn by three. I read my magazines. Afternoon passed into evening. I listened to a Chicago Symphony concert on the local NPR station. I read one of the Cheever stories, marveling at his ability to find the elegiac amidst all that suburban sadness and frustration. The Mirtazapine did its chemical magic. The radio alarm woke me at seven. I showered and changed into a new pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a black turtleneck sweater.

  Forward momentum, forward momentum. It was the only solution.

  So I balled up the last of my old clothes and put them in the trash can by the desk. I picked up my laptop and went outside. The maid – a Hispanic woman in her mid-thirties – was pushing her housekeeping cart between units.

  ‘Hi there,’ I said.

  The maid looked up at me with a questioning look on her face.

  ‘You want something?’ she asked.

  ‘I was just wondering . . . might you need a computer?’

  The questioning look now turned to downright puzzlement as I explained that I wanted to get rid of this laptop and was wondering if she’d like to take it off my hands.

  ‘You want to sell it to me?’

  ‘No, it’s a gift.’

  ‘Something wrong with it?’

  ‘Not at all – and I’ve even stripped the hard disk of all old files, so it will be like a new computer for you.’

  ‘Something bad inside it?’

  ‘Like I said, I just don’t need it anymore.’

  ‘Everyone needs a computer.’

  ‘I agree. However . . .’

  I realized some fast thinking was necessary to convince her I wasn’t a crank or dangerous or a combination thereof.

  ‘I’m starting a new job next week and they’re giving me a new computer so I won’t have a use for this one. If you’d like it . . .’

  ‘You trying to stick me with something?’

  ‘Tell you what. Take it off me now. Bring it home. Open it up. Check it out. You’ll see there’s nothing dark or dangerous contained within. But if you still don’t want it, take it to a pawn shop and get some money for it.’

  Again she sized me up with suspicious eyes.

  ‘You crazy, lady?’

  ‘I’m just offering you something for nothing.’

  ‘That makes you totally crazy.’

  I held out the computer. The maid hesitated, but then reached out and accepted the laptop.

  ‘You do this often?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a first for me. I hope you get some use out of it.’

  That was the last vestige of my past. I returned to my room, zipped up my new duffel on wheels, rolled it over to the reception area and settled my bill for three nights. The receptionist looked at me quizzically.

  ‘You get a haircut or something?’

  She called me a cab. Ten minutes later I was at the bus depot. Half an hour after that, I was on a Trailways bus heading towards the border. I read another couple of Cheever stories on the way north, trying not to look out the window. The sight of such wild beauty was too much to bear. It spoke of natural splendor, of the pantheistic belief that God is the universe. But I knew better than to buy into that absurd notion of God being everywhere . . . and,
as such, very busy. If the past few weeks had taught me anything, it was that we were all alone in a hostile universe – and that destiny had no logic, no plan, no grand intelligent design.

  So I kept my head down and in my book as we traversed the edge of Glacier National Park and then headed into bleak open prairies. I was one of the few non-Native Americans on the bus. I looked up once to see that we had crossed into a First People’s Reservation. Everything here was frozen and empty, the roads narrow and switchbacked, the terrain what I imagined the steppes of Central Asia to be: a bleak, ever-wintery void.

  Most of the passengers got off at the town of Jefferson, a dispiriting collection of fast-food joints and a huge jerry-built casino that was undoubtedly owned and operated by the First People’s Tribe, but was still a testament to all-American bad taste. There were only four of us left for the drive into Canada. The road to the customs post was even more treacherous than the one we had already negotiated, as the winds suddenly began to gust and the bus was enveloped in thick blowing snow. The driver was doing his best to manage the hairpin turns, the torturous steep descents, the complete lack of visibility. I put my book down as it began to dawn on me that I might be heading for another accident. But then I raised it again with the thought: So what?

  The driver was a total pro and somehow managed to get us out of this slalom course and land us in Canada. The last few hundred yards were a lesson in modern Realpolitik – signs informing all comers that they were about to leave the United States (as if this was akin to falling off the edge of the world), then concrete bollards narrowing the road as you passed by the American customs post and continued right on into Canadian terrain.

  The bus pulled up in front of a squat institutional building with a large maple-leaf flag blowing in the wind.

  ‘All off, please,’ the driver said.

  It was minus something outside, and we had to wait as the lone immigration inspector in the glass booth interviewed each of the four passengers. I was last off the bus and last to be questioned. I handed over my Canadian passport.

  ‘How long have you been out of Canada?’ the officer asked me.

  Here we go again, I thought.

  ‘I’ve never lived here, but I did visit Nova Scotia a couple of years ago.’

  That was the truthful answer, but not the smart one as it led to him bombarding me with questions about how I claimed my Canadian citizenship, why I hadn’t resided in the country before now, why I was returning, blah, blah, blah. Rule number one with officialdom: give them simple answers. Had I said I’d been out of the country for a week he would have waved me through. As it turned out he still waved me through – but only after a pointless third degree that (I sensed) had more to do with his general sense of boredom than his worries that I might be a subversive traveling on false papers.

  Once approved for entry I reboarded the bus, fell back into my seat, tried to read, surrendered to sleep, and only woke when we jolted to a halt and the driver announced that we had, indeed, arrived in Calgary.

  I opened my eyes – and within half an hour wished that I hadn’t.

  Maybe it was the paucity of the light, the gray tire-treaded snow everywhere, or the reinforced concrete that seemed to characterize every corner of the cityscape. But from the moment I first laid eyes on Calgary I loathed it. Loathed it on sight.

  In that initial first half-hour when I left the bus depot and got into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the nearest hotel, I kept telling myself: It will have to get better. This corner of the city – with its faceless tower blocks, its wide nondescript streets, its strip malls, its brutalist style of architecture that seemed to be lifted right out of some Polish Communist-era film – all conspired to make me wonder what had possessed me to decide on Calgary as a destination . . . and to simultaneously consider it apt for my current state of affairs. Just when you thought you couldn’t travel further down into the abyss, you landed yourself here.

  The driver – a Sikh, wrapped up against the chill – asked me what sort of hotel I was after.

  ‘Something cheap.’

  Another bad mistake. He brought me to a place on what seemed to be the edge of the city – an in-town motel of the sort used by working girls and pensioners very much down on their luck. A room was just forty five Canadian dollars a night – and it lived up to its price. A dump. Painted breezeblock walls, yellowing linoleum floors, a double bed with a stained bedspread and a mattress that sagged everywhere, a kitchenette with rust stains, a toilet which hadn’t been properly cleaned in . . .

  I wanted to leave immediately. But a snowstorm inconveniently began to kick up right after I checked in. I was tired and disorientated and veering into that shaky realm which always hinted that I was heading into the ‘It’s all unmanageable’ zone. So I did what I had taken to doing whenever I felt myself tipping over the edge. I went to bed – this time taking double the dose of Mirtazapine to make certain that consciousness did not arrive for at least twelve hours.

  As it turned out I managed eleven, and woke at six in the morning, stuporous and confused. The world rushed in. The grief hit – and, just to augment things, I was in the most joyless of surroundings.

  I had checked out by six forty-five, stepping out into the snow-bound streets, a boreal wind howling down the empty boulevard. According to a street sign I was on 16th Avenue NW – and in a place called Motel Village. There were ugly motels to the north, south, east and west of me, a 7-Eleven, a Red Lobster, a McDonald’s and a Tim Horton’s doughnut joint. The sky was the color of cold porridge. The cold was so pronounced and severe that the skin on my face felt grated within a minute of leaving the motel. I passed by a newspaper box. Taking off my gloves to dig out a couple of quarters risked frostbite – but I still managed to buy a copy of the Calgary Herald before dashing into the safety of the Tim Horton’s.

  Inside, the atmosphere was fast-food depressing. Truckers and sanitation workers (judging by the vehicles parked outside) and the urban poor all eating thick clumps of frosted dough, washed down with indifferent coffee. You Ivy League snob. You’re no longer in Cambridge. You’re in a High North shithole.

  I ordered two maple-glazed doughnuts and a cappuccino. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t eaten in over sixteen hours, but they all tasted pretty damn good. I opened the newspaper, turned to the property pages and scanned the Apartments for Rent ads. One of the fundamental problems of coming into a city about which you know absolutely nothing is that street coordinates and neighborhood references make absolutely no sense: Eau Claire: superb 1-bed exec with magnificent Bow River views. Or: Best of 17th SW – stylishly furn 2-bed unit, walk to CBD, $1750. References. Or: Magnolia Heights – sparkling clean home in the friendly neighborhood of Saddle Ridge!

  Even though I knew nothing at this point about Calgary I still sensed that any area named Saddle Ridge was probably stuck out in the ’burbs.

  I checked my watch. It was seven-thirty. There were a couple of beefy guys at an adjoining table.

  ‘Morning,’ I said. ‘I just arrived in town last night . . .’

  ‘And you ended up here?’ one of them said, causing the other two to laugh. ‘Lady, you’ve got a nose for the wrong side of the tracks.’

  ‘It’s a mistake I won’t make again. But listen, what’s a decent hotel in Calgary?’

  ‘A decent hotel in Calgary?’ the same guy said again, repeating my question with a certain mordancy. ‘You really think we know stuff like that?’

  ‘Sorry to have troubled you.’

  ‘Hey,’ one of his colleagues said to the guy, ‘show the lady some respect.’

  ‘I wasn’t being disrespectful.’

  ‘The Palliser,’ the third man said. ‘Was in there once when there was a fire in the kitchen.’

  ‘Was that back in 1934?’ the first guy asked.

  ‘You got to excuse our friend here,’ the third man said. ‘He thinks he’s a comedian, but no one at the station house ever laughs at his jokes. You want a g
ood hotel, you go to the Palliser. But it’ll cost ya.’

  I did a very fast calculation of the money in my jacket pocket – between my cash and my traveler’s checks I had not far off $4,000 Canadian. I could afford a few nights in a decent hotel. Check that: I needed to be in reasonable surroundings while I got my bearings.

  ‘Do you know if there’s a phone around here?’ I asked him.

  ‘Who you wanna call?’

  ‘A taxi.’

  He pulled out a cellphone.

  ‘Consider it done.’

  The cab arrived in minutes. It took nearly half an hour to reach the Palliser.

  ‘I didn’t realize I was so far from downtown,’ I said to the driver.

  ‘Calgary’s a sprawl.’

  Calgary was also a non-stop construction site: condos, bedroom communities, new developments, new strip malls. There were few extant historic buildings . . . bar the Palliser. It was located on 8th Avenue in what appeared to be the downtown. From all my years teaching the literature of America’s Gilded Age, I immediately responded to the Palliser. Its facade was Robber Baron. Its interior was updated faded glitz – an accurate oxymoron (which, in itself, is an oxymoron). It was an old railroad hotel which a century ago catered to the leisured class who had somehow managed to find themselves in this isolated outpost – arriving by the Canadian Pacific from the East, laden down with steamer trunks that were carried by a manservant who probably slept in cramped downstairs quarters while his oil-magnate master and his overfed wife retired to a vast suite on a higher floor.

  All right, all right – I was mentally riffing. But it was rare to come across such a relic from the era in which (academically speaking) I had lived for so long. This was a hotel out of a novel by Dreiser or Frank Norris. It was also exactly the sort of place about which my father spoke so often back in the days when he spoke about such things – waxing lyrical about his long-vanished Canadian childhood when his father once brought his then ten-year-old son on a trans-Canadian trip, during which Granddad was drunk from eleven in the morning onwards. I’m certain he once mentioned staying in ‘some big old pile’ in Calgary, how it was right after Christmas and he’d never been colder in his life . . . until, a couple of days later, they ended up in Edmonton.