by Kit Reed
What, he wonders. His life is so dull and so simple that there aren’t very many things about it. What have I got that I don’t want anybody to know?
He taps the Nokia. “It’s me. I’m on the train.” He is still trying to reach Sandra even though they don’t like each other very much. The unspoken part of the message is, Aren’t you glad?
It doesn’t matter what he says to the bright plastic instrument. It won’t matter what the woman on the other end is saying, if indeed she is saying anything. The phone is just as dead.
This is more or less how Dave Travers finds himself getting off Metro North somewhere outside Greens Farms, Connecticut, and disappearing from the face of the earth. He isn’t there yet, but he will be soon.
Greens Farms is one of those station stops that annoys New York–New Haven/New Haven–New York commuters because it is just one more delay on a trip that already has too many stops. To Metro North longtimers anxious to get where they are going, it’s a place there’s no point in stopping; nobody gets on and nobody gets off at Greens Farms because as far as they know, there’s nothing there. Coming out after a hard day in the city, Greens Farms is the definition of eternity. All this time on the train and we’re only at Greens Farms. At the Greens Farms stop most travelers raise their newspapers and refuse to look out the window—even Travers, the few times he’s been this way. To look is to acknowledge the length of the trip and the size of the chunk it is gnawing out of their lives. Like the regulars, Travers has never read or heard anything about Greens Farms and he’s certainly never been there, which as much as anything explains why he has drawn a picture of it in his head.
Even the conductor sounds weary as he reports that they are approaching Greens Farms. Again.
In his head Travers sees the field where he whirled in the long dream he was having before the conductor woke him. It was so green! Scary, but he’d like to get back to that place. There he was free, dislocated as he was. Startled, he jumps to attention. It’s as though some great voice out there has just invited him to jump off the edge of the world.
That might not be such a bad idea.
“Did I say that?”
He doesn’t know. Around him, passengers glare; why is the idiot shouting when he’s holstered his phone?
It’s important to pretend that wasn’t him they heard, or that he wasn’t really yelling. Travers spreads both his hands with a foolish grin. Look folks, you’ve got me wrong, it was somebody else. To confuse them Travers hums: Show me how to get out of this world ’cause that’s where everything is.
He isn’t depressed, exactly, just interested in voids and what it would be like to be suspended in one—no demands, no expectations, no humiliations—just the restful dark and silence that should come with the long-awaited and by no means certain-to-show-up-for-the-concert personal appearance of the last big thing, the cataclysm guaranteed to get top billing in this circus, the End of the World.
Something happens outside Rowayton and all the train doors pop open. Travers feels his heart hit a bump and soar like a racer bouncing into a crash. The doors to the car are only open for a moment but he sees his opportunity. For all he knows, everything lies beyond. Abandoning his briefcase, he gets up and slips out. He hits hard, rolling in the gravel as he lands. He doesn’t remember which station was last or what’s next but he imagines this must be Greens Farms.
He gets up gasping. He won’t remember running across the tracks or scuttling under a fence and taking off with his arms flapping and his breath coming fast. He has to come to a stop before he can come to his senses at all. By the time his breathing and his heart rate return to normal, Travers is in the middle of a late-summer field flanked by thick and smelly Ailanthus, the rank, ambiguous growth that is neither weed nor tree. The deep grass in the field where Travers is standing sways in the breeze coming up from water he can not see. The late summer sun is bright but the air is cool and sharp, hinting at fall. It isn’t perfect but in his present frame of mind, it’ll do. If Travers can’t reach the edge of the world from here, he can certainly go someplace he’s never been. If he likes it, he thinks with his heart lifting, he’ll never go back. Nobody who smells escape wants to go back to being what he was.
Now, he thinks for no reason in particular. He never really intended to disappear, but now he has a chance.
Yep. Now. All I have to do is find the road. If I keep walking I can walk out of Greens Farms and out of Connecticut and out of my life in New Haven, where I was doing OK but not well. Tomorrow I can wake up in some new big town or small city and start fresh. You read about this kind of thing all the time. Man disappears and years later they find him, upstanding pillar of some new community and surrounded by a fresh batch of loved ones, happy and prosperous, maybe even successful, as somebody else. Amnesia, he can tell the people who catch up with him, unless he is hunted for some crime, in which case he says, Witness protection. Listen, he could develop amnesia at any time. When you get right down to it, who’s to know? Travers sees himself idealized in a Realtor’s photo, a happy homeowner in a neat shirt and a tiny moustache, standing with his nice new family in front of his shiny black car, showing off his high ticket nouveau Colonial house.
It would solve a lot of problems, he thinks.
The field seems to stretch in all directions without boundaries. It’s harder going than he thought. Once he starts moving the sawgrass whips his trousers and the ground is uneven and spongy under his feet. He walks for longer than seems right for a guy who wants simply to get to the nearest road so he can hitch a ride to some more exciting place.
At the moment the field seems endless. Travers has read enough French writers to think: I suppose this is symbolic. Existential whatever. It’s probably about where I am in life.
But it isn’t. He is really standing in a field, but where? In fact, he isn’t much of anywhere, but he has no way of knowing. To the east there’s a shape that may turn out to be a house. If it is a house and he goes inside, will he find a trap door in the living room and stairs leading to an underground universe, like the one in the computer game he used to play? No. This kind of experience doesn’t play itself out like Zork or any other interactive game, although Zork is the perfect model for what’s happening here. At the moment there is just Dave Travers, truly alone for the first time since he can remember, alone and standing in a field.
He doesn’t know it but the geography isn’t the only thing that eludes him. He’s going to sit down to rest in a minute and when he gets up he’ll know where he is. He will be less certain when it is. More: he won’t know who he is.
Strangely, even though he forgets who he is, Travers will remember Zork1, the text-based computer game he played obsessively the summer when he was twelve.
Zork1: The Great Underground Empire
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
You were standing in the field but even there at the beginning with only three lines on your screen, you had options; you could open the mailbox and hope there was some usable scrap of information on the note inside (there wasn’t) or you could go west toward the woods and mountains or you could go east and try to get into the house. Each time you made a choice you were presented with a new set of decisions, and it is this that Travers used to love—the sense of infinitely unfolding options and the knowledge that he could thwart the roving thief and bring back treasures if only he chose the right ones.
Everything rushes out of him in a sigh. He knows that so far, at least up to the moment when the train stopped, all his choices have been wrong. Why else would the details of his life slip away from him?
When he gets to his feet again he is still standing in a field, but it has changed. There is a mailbox here, and to the east he definitely sees a white house. From here he can see the front door is boarded up but he knows he will find a window open if he walks around the house. He is st
anding in a field, but who he is in the game and what he’s doing here eludes him. Kind of like life, he thinks, although he has no idea what his life is supposed to be like right now. I wonder what I’m supposed to do next.
Travers already knows there’s nothing substantive in the note in the mailbox so he turns, wondering exactly how many moves he has coming before the inevitable thief pounces and takes everything, which he’s programmed to do when a player collects one too many treasures. When Travers reaches the house the windows are boarded up too, as in Zork, but he understands this is nothing like Zork. The back door stands open and even though it’s nowhere near time for the thief to show up, there are people inside.
In the kitchen, three men sit around the table. He hears other men mumbling upstairs and men moving around in the living room. Travers should be afraid but he isn’t, probably because they are well dressed and obviously middle class and in this light they look sweetly bemused.
He says the first thing he can think of: “I’m new around here.” He’s afraid to ask where are we? so he says, “Who are you?”
The first stands with a polite smile. “Dave Isham.”
“Dave Caverness,” the second says pleasantly.
“Dave Blount.” The third of them says, “And who are you?”
Here it comes: the astonishment. “I don’t know.” Travers thinks for a minute. “Dave,” he says. He doesn’t want to remember, but he does. “Dave Travers.”
Dave Blount grins. “Just goes to show, the nicest guys are always named Dave.”
“Or the biggest losers.” Dave Winters wanders in from the living room where there are other men on sofas and kicked back in Barcaloungers, muttering pleasantly over beers. “Welcome to the Island of Lost Boys.”
Dave Isham says, “Don’t scare him.”
“Kidding!”
“Is that where I am?” Travers means, is that what I am? Lost?
Dave Blount shrugs. “Give or take. One way or another we’re all taking a time out. You go along and you go along and then one day you just get sick of it, you know?”
The shrug ripples through the room like a wave. In another minute the others will begin to tell their stories and since he has lost any sense of what his story might be, Travers doesn’t really want to be expected to pay back in kind. “Who pays the rent, and how?”
“It comes from somewhere,” Dave Winters says.
Intent on making him feel welcome, Blount says, “We all kick in, but don’t worry. It doesn’t amount to much.”
Travers pats his pockets. Wallet in place. He can’t remember where he was going on the train but he remembers the train now. He remembers that in spite of Sandra’s protests that he was cutting into the paycheck he banked to cover their monthly expenses, he took an extra hundred dollars to spend. OK, he remembers Sandra too. He remembers trying to talk to her and he remembers hearing her breathing into the phone. He asks, “Where does the money come from?”
One of the Daves says, “Odd jobs. We come and go as we like here and feed the kitty with money we pick up doing odd jobs.”
So this is not like Zork, he understands, there is no trap door under the rug in the living room and no trophy case for storing captured treasures because there aren’t going to be any treasures. There is no rich subterranean chamber waiting at the bottom of the stairs and there may not even be any stairs leading down. This isn’t a game, it’s a mundane setting, in which … what? The wild hubbies hide out? The Daves sitting in the kitchen and in the living room and the Daves collecting in the doorway are all smiling pleasantly; they seem happy enough, but when the doors popped open and Travers skipped the train—OK, he remembers skipping the train—he expected something more or better to come from his escape. This is too much like a kids’ clubhouse, snug but shabby and overcrowded. Squinting, Travers tries to make it make sense. “I don’t get it. This is a real place and I’m really in it?”
“Pretty much.”
That shrug again. Dave Blount repeats, “Give or take. Listen, Dave, we’re all on the run from something, one way and another. This works for us and if you like it, you’re welcome to join us here.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have to like it,” Dave Winters says.
“Don’t worry.” Dave Blount will not stop smiling. “We’ll do everything we can to make it pleasant for you here.”
Travers looks around warily. “This isn’t one of those places where when you try to leave they won’t let you, is it.”
The Daves shake their heads.
“Certainly not.”
“No way.”
“We’re easy here.”
“It’s sauve qui peut,” Dave Isham says with a look that tells Travers he isn’t exactly sure what that means. “We were just about to eat. Grab a bowl and pull up a chair.”
“Mi casa su casa.”
“Thanks.”
The chairs are comfortable. The soup they serve him is good. As if Travers has asked, they take turns explaining what they’re doing here. In its own way the talk that surrounds him is as empty as the field he woke up in. The various Daves all got sick of their lives one day in different ways for various reasons but all more or less at the age Travers is now, which is thirty-five. One way or another they all woke up one morning to the sameold sameold and simply maxd out, but all on a different lover or a different line of work or a different family situation in a completely different place from all the others, although the stories seem interchangeable. Each presents the circumstances as brand-new. Each of them knows there are a million stories like the one he tells and every one of them insists that his story is different. This is what every man honestly believes. The Daves all got sick of their lives and started looking for ways out: the faked death so the survivors would get the insurance money to see them through; the explained runaway, with farewell note (DON’T LOOK FOR ME) pinned to the pillow or neatly folded on the kitchen table; the simple disappearance, although with fingerprints on file online and Missing Persons divisions in abundance, no disappearance is simple. Escaping the sameold sameold, the Daves all seem the same.
How long have they been here? The answers vary. How long are they going to stay and what do they want to do next? No one can say.
“We’re cool,” Dave Isham says, “who wants to do anything next?”
Travers feels his head jerk. Was he nodding off or did something sneak up behind him and smack him with a rolled-up newspaper? He isn’t sure. He stands abruptly. “I can’t be here.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“What are you going to do?”
Too soon to tell. “I need to think.” He sticks his head back in the door and tells the polite lie. “Back soon.”
“Take your time,” Dave Blount says genially.
Somebody else calls after him, “It’s the one thing we’ve got plenty of.”
The surrounding field is even emptier than before. It is like surfacing in a vacuum. When Travers skims the horizon looking for landmarks to ground himself, the banked Ailanthus look dauntingly the same. No tree stands out from any other tree. If he doesn’t start walking, he’ll never find the road out of here, but he’s reluctant to push off. If he turns his back on the house and starts walking he may never find it again. The changing light is so gradual that he is surprised to see that it’s getting dark. When he looks back, there is smoke curling enchantingly out of the chimney and there are lights glowing in every window, although he remembers them as boarded up. It makes him think of long walks after supper on December nights in New London. When he was old enough to go out alone he used to leave the house as soon as it got dark and roam the neighborhood, waiting for lights to pop on in other people’s windows. He knows now that he was window-shopping for other lives, checking out the displays in his neighbors’ brightly lighted houses as though what he saw could be his, any time he was willing to pay the price. Did he want to live here, where a high school boy sits over his comput
er in his very own room or over there, where a couple with a flock of children bend their heads over grace before meals at the kitchen table or does he want to be like this old, old man in the orange stucco and live in silence in a place where nobody comes?
He needs to get moving but nostalgia hobbles him. The lives he used to spy on fuse with the life he thinks he and Sandra were living, bending their heads over nuked chicken dinners on the few nights when they ate together, slouching together on the sofa to watch TV while they emptied the identical foil trays, down to the bake-in-place apple cobbler. Sweet, he thinks. From the outside other people’s lives usually look sweet.
OK, time to decide. Travers has three choices here. He can go back into the house and settle down with the Daves for as long as it takes. He can look for the road and head out into a more productive disappearance or he can do what he already knows he has to do—head back for the tracks—that way, he thinks. The morning train is long gone but if he can find the tracks he can get another train. Head for the tracks and follow them to the next station where, he thinks, his ticket is probably still good. After all, he bought a fare from New Haven to New York and didn’t get the good of it because he jumped off somewhere around halfway. Worst case scenario, he can forget about the city and use his return ticket. He checks. Yep, he’s still holding his return.
OK. Right. Time to pull up his socks and go back. He thinks: I owe it to my boss and my students, even though none of them ever gets anything above a C. I owe it to Sandra. After all, he thinks, not necessarily correctly, Sandra needs me. Get home, he thinks, walk in and she’ll be so glad to see me that everything will be better for us. He should call ahead, but his phone isn’t necessarily working and he doesn’t want to find out for sure. Besides, he wants it to be a surprise. Things will change if she was really worried and she’s really glad to see him.
If this field was really like the field in Zork, Dave’s return would involve a measured number of trials and errors, ordeals and decisions, but it isn’t. If this disconnected state Travers is in was in fact an ordinary crisis, his decision to go back would certainly resolve it. All this would turn out to be one of those dreams that evaporates as soon as the sleeper wakes up.
