The tavern was too busy, he already knew it. The parking lot was choked with haphazardly arranged F-150s and a smattering of rusted out sedans. In the windows, round like portholes, silhouettes of men and women outlined in green neon. Outside, under the bar’s aluminium awning, cliques of smokers milled around like crows, trying to keep their blood moving. Beyond the smokers, the gravel lot petering out to nothing in the darkness. Beyond could be a field, or a forest, or just more darkness.
“About another day to Phoenix,” he was saying. He wasn’t sure why. Just to speak. He didn’t think the guy next to him at the long polyurethane-sealed bar was listening. He was indifferent either way. The guy was young, maybe twenty-five, flannel, ball cap. His friend was looming behind him, waiting for a stool to open up, scrolling.
Friday night. He’d forgot. Too busy, and his beer was empty. The lone bartender had disappeared somewhere for a long time.
His neighbor glanced at him, nodded absently. He was craning his neck back to his friend. His friend was pointing to something on the phone.
“It’s the moon. That’s why.”
“What?”
“The tilt of the moon. It’s off, or something. That’s what Jess was saying.” He turned to look for Jess and the impulsive movement sent beer down his front.
“Fuck! That’s what I’m saying, man.”
Back on the road, the thin crescent moon was directly in front of him, yellow and low on the horizon. He squinted. Maybe it did look wrong, somehow. How are there so many people, even out here. Probably the only place open for fifty miles. And it’s cold. Too cold to sleep in the cab.
The crescent was high and white out the lobby window when he checked into the motel. The night attendant padded out from the back room in stocking feet. “One room left,” he said. “Two queen beds.”
“That’s fine.”
The gas station was the only light in town. He filled his tank and studied his reflection in the dark gleam of the bank window across the street. He knew how the beard made him look.
He drove around a while but there were no more bars. On the side streets, vaulted under handsome oaks, maybe a century old, no lights were lit. Not a single sign of human life. He drove on and felt the houses steadily shrink, from colonials with wrap-around porches to ranches with ratty dirt yards and chain-link fences. Then it was just his headlights in the dark. Out past the beams could be the desert or it could be Mars or it could be nothing. On a slight rise outside of town he pulled off, tore open the case, and cracked a beer.
It was cold and the air was clear and sharp. As his eyes adjusted, the land that had seemed a nothingness rose up before him, a sudden apparition of huge mass, purple-gray undulations unrolling out forever, and halfway to the horizon a few shards of moonlight tracing the river. He had only his thin Louisiana jacket and he was glad for the warmth of the drink. Behind him in the extended cab Solomon muttered and whined. He tried to remember when he would have been this way before. Before Solomon, certainly. He reached back and patted the dog’s head.
It wasn’t like it was then. He was blacked out most of those years but what he remembered was good. Even when it went bad, it started off good. Good was what the thing was, bad was a wrong turn. A sort of parasite. Now the good was—not an accident, exactly. He could hear Mom chiding him not to blaspheme. But hard not to notice how thin it was. Weaker and weaker. An echo of an echo.
The dark was barely dark now. Even with the thin moon he could see that what he had taken to be alien emptiness was alive with the plans and schemes of men. Down to his left, the strip of road he had come up on, blue-black on dusky magenta, leading south to town and then the tiny white smear of the gas station. To his right across the sweep of land rising from the riverbank there were trailers scattered and gently glowing with a light that seemed to come from nowhere, and amid them the hunched shoulders of fracking rigs at rest like elephantine sentries keeping watch, and further, much further out along the ridge, the slightest soundless twinkle of headlights creeping along the interstate.
It’s not empty, but that doesn’t mean its alive. Maybe it’s not really there at all.
He realized he was talking to the dog. He sipped his beer.
Lacking valence. That’s the word. The right word. Right buddy? He looked at Solomon. His tail wagged.
You don’t say much, but then again, you’re not just waiting for your turn, are you.
He liked finding the right word. It put his mind at ease. Valence. The poles are dead. Good and bad have both been drained away. It’s moved beyond them, or maybe fallen under them. Is that good or bad, he wondered. His eyes followed the line of boulders where the road ahead turned and started climbing along the slope of the escarpment. I guess it’s just geology, he concluded. Just matter changing form. Real slow. Then too fast.
On his way back he sat at the red light for what seemed like ten minutes. The one stoplight in town and it’s broke, he thought. Just my luck.
He meant to leave first thing but he woke up hungover and run down and decided to take a day off the road. There was no hurry. He lay in bed a while and flipped through his notebook. Tried to decipher his scratches from last night in the dark. Finally he got up and took Solomon out. They had to walk a quarter mile down the side of the highway before he could cut over onto an access road and out into the scrub brush where he could let the dog off the leash. Facing away from the road he unzipped his fly and watched his breath rise in the lavender morning light.
There were cold bagels out on the folding table in the lobby. The coffee machine had been unplugged but the coffee was still warm. From the office behind the front desk he heard the same attendant from the night before talking on the phone. He sunk into one of the stained brown lobby armchairs and pulled out his phone. Three missed calls.
“Can I pet him?”
The little blond boy was already petting Solomon, who beamed. In his overlarge blue hooded parka the boy’s arms stuck out nearly straight at his sides and he brought his arm down to stroke the lab’s head with some difficulty.
“Sure. He’s friendly.”
“Do you live here?”
He looked at the boy. “No, I don’t live here. Do you?”
“Mom says we don’t know how long we’ll be here.”
“Well, this is Solomon. He likes you. He likes everybody.”
He slept most of the afternoon. When he woke it was not quite day and not quite night and a blue fog pressed up close against the windows. The light from the television hurt his eyes and he got up to turn it off. He reached down and pulled a beer from the dwindling case. With one eye Solomon watched his movements. There was a knock at the door.
“Yes?”
The woman was short and thin, and her close-cropped brown hair accentuated her boyishness. She hugged a white cardigan around her. She looked him up and down, his boxers and shirtless torso and matted beard.
“Oh dear. Did I wake you?”
“I’ve been up.”
“Oh honey, I’m sorry. You work nights?”
“Sometimes. Can I help you?”
“I think you met my son. Derek. I’m Jean.”
“Paul.”
“Well, I hope he didn’t bother you none.”
“Not at all.”
“Thing is, we’ve been here a while and they feel they have run of the place.”
“That’s okay.”
“Well, we’re having some people over tonight and so I’m going around.” She smiled up at him. “Shirts aren’t optional, I’m afraid. Not that kind of party.”
He took a sip of his beer. “Well, thank you, Jean. Listen. Can’t tonight. But thank you.” He was closing the door. “Early morning.”
At the lobby desk, the same man. Now a woman was beside him, checking someone in. He told the man he was looking for dinner and the man told him about the diner next to the bank and he thanked him. In his truck he took out his phone and pulled up a bar instead, twenty miles to the next town.
At the broken light he waited again for several long minutes, then put on his signal and turned right and then cut left through the gas station lot and turned right again and followed the town road as it widened into the state highway. He traveled the distance in the fog, green now over the reddish ground, without seeing another car.
The town was something of a real town and the bar was one of three or four that lined the downtown strip between a smattering of salons and furniture shops. There was a pool table in the back and a group of men and one woman were playing. On the television above the bar grave men in ill-fitting suits gesticulated wildly while images of burned bodies paraded behind them. He wanted baseball but the bartender shook his head. The World Series was two weeks ago.
“Oh.”
“I can turn it off.”
“Just a burger.”
He ate too quickly and paid. At the bar next door he sat a stool away from two women. Girls, really. One was in a pink halter top and white hoodie, and shivering. The other, a tall girl with black hair, had on a nice dress and leather jacket, also far too thin for the weather. She gazed into her gin and tonic unhappily while her friend narrated a long story. The monologue was repeatedly paused to attend to pinging phones.
He sat for a while and got drunk. There was no TV. The place was high concept, with stainless steel tables and exposed bulb chandeliers hanging low overhead and at the shiny tables groups of friends shared little platters of fastidiously arranged tacos. He liked the tall girl. Her sarcastic commentary came as a relief in this atmosphere. When she got up from the bar, he leaned over to her friend.
“You guys on a date?”
The girl looked at him startled as if noticing for the first time another person in her vicinity. He felt her eyes go up and down. He had smoothed the beard and his t-shirt was a little wrinkled but he knew his jacket looked expensive. Presentable enough, he thought. Sarah always said he had a nice dimple on his chin and wasn’t it a shame to keep it covered up. He took a drink and did his best imitation of a smile.
“She was.”
“Didn’t go so well?”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?”
She blushed. “Please don’t listen to our conversation.” She glanced at the notebook on the bar in front of him.
“Was a little hard not to.”
The tall girl had returned from the bathroom. She looked at him, then at her friend.
“You planning to stay?” The tall girl asked her.
“No. I’m ready.”
He wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know what. He was drunk. She caught his eye again as they brushed past, and he waited for her to slow, and turn, and position herself just right to recieve whatever he was going to give her, which he hadn’t quite worked out. But she didn’t stop.
He could tell he was weaving a bit on the road but again he saw no one else. It was dark and the fog had lifted except in patches like bits of fuzz grasped onto by the stunted and malevolent trees and yearning to be set free to drift back up to heaven. He reached over and pulled his phone from where it had fallen between the passenger seat and the cupholder. When he looked up he was in the other lane. He cracked the window for some air and played the voicemail again.
He wasn’t sure why. If someone had asked him, his mom or the tall girl at the bar, he would say he missed her voice. But in fact he had never liked her voice. High and slangy and then dropping down with a scolding tone as if youth were the mirage and only chastisement was the true purpose to communication. Nor did he ever forget anything that once passed through his head. He could hear and see it all perfectly. In school they called it a gift, and it was, and if he was smart enough to let it give him a decent life he was too stupid to know it meant he didn’t have to join the Army. No one he knew knew enough to tell him that.
Mostly it was a curse. Every wrong word, every hurt inflection, every minute of every night misspent. He thought it must be how God must feel, seeing everything forever as in a single instant. On Earth God drank wine but we can assume not to forget, he thought. Or maybe we can’t assume.
Maybe that was why he always had this feeling like he was being watched. Not that it made him any good. Very probably it made him worse. Look what you make me do. He was trying to get into good habits. Like his little notebook. That was Sarah’s idea. He told her he didn’t need to write anything down to remember but she said it could still help him, make him see patterns. He didn’t think seeing patterns would change anything but he did it anyway. He told himself he was writing for her, writing her letters and trying to explain how it was, how everything had come to where it was now, and maybe even though she would never read them she would hear somehow and understand.
But it was all wrong. Dishonest. He didn’t want to have to hide anything from her, but he did anyway. Yes, he reveled in his bad habits, the gas station coffee cups rotting with chew and liaisons in bar bathrooms and general selfishness and aimlessness and rottenness. This was maybe just hoping to shock her. To hear that scolding voice, fraying at the edges with exasperation, with incomprehensible love, one more time. But he had learned how to exaggerate the bad stuff to hide the worse stuff. He had learned a lot in his time. Above all he had learned how to hide in plain sight, and it had become such a part of him he didn’t know how to turn it off, even for the dead.
He realized he was sitting at the red light again. He didn’t know for how long. He looked right, and then left. The land was utterly empty and dark and silent. He sighed, put on his blinker, turned right and then a block down left and then left again until he came to the motel. You think maybe God will see it when you do something right, for once, out there in the vacant dark. He saw the big stuff and hasn’t yet struck you dead, so maybe He notes down the little stuff and maybe that somehow matters more because holding to the little stuff is what takes a real act of faith. Can you be true when it can no longer make a bit of difference?
The lights were on in the room two doors down from his and from the walkway he could hear the music. Beach Boys. He thought it must be late but in the placeless night with the already weak moon walled away behind the low clouds it could have been any time or no time. He reached his door and with the key card in his hand he could make out Wilson’s croon, and if you knew how much I loved you, baby, nothing could go wrong with you. He put the card back in his wallet.
Jean was a little tipsy and, he noticed, unable to fully cover her nervousness with joviality. Her cardigan had been replaced with a black blouse and black slacks, which gave the impression of an upscale waiter or perhaps a member of a jazz ensemble. A red paisely kerchief held her bangs back off her forehead. He again tried to place her age. She might have been forty or twenty-two.
“Paul,” she smiled. “Well look what the cat drug in.”
“I hope I’m not too late.”
He remained in the doorway, fearing he was indeed too late. The coffee table and the kitchenette counter were littered with beer bottles and bowls crusted with nacho dip and plastic cups streaked burgundy with leavings. A bed in the alcove was piled with laundry. At the foot of the bed were two large hardbacked suitcases thrown open to expose their contents, a muddle of socks and toys and brassieres. The doorway to the adjoining room was cracked and through it he could dimly see child-sized legs curled up on the bed. No one else was there.
“Nonsense. I’m just cleaning up. Takes me about three hours to wind down from these things. Come on, have a drink. Keep me company.”
He hesitated, swaying a bit. In her loosely buttoned blouse she no longer looked very boyish. He realized her hand was on his arm.
“Come on, Paul, loosen up. It’s Saturday.”
From the couch he sipped his beer while she paced the room, ostensibly to tidy up but mostly she was just moving things from one pile to another. She talked nonstop, but he could only catch about half of it. The rest was buffered into a shapeless buzz by the sunny oblivion of the Sixties mix still booming from the cheap portable stereo. He came vaguely to understand that her house had burned to the ground in what appeared to be an unfortunate space heater incident. Along with two cats and a dog. But at least the kids made it. She came off her narrative with a sudden jolt to the opening chords of the Mamas & the Papas, theatrically mouthing the call and response.
All the leaves are broooooown…
She was swaying her hips in a corny two-step that only partially matched the beat. She twirled in an unbalanced-looking pirouette with her bare feet on the carpet. I’d be safe and warm, if I was in LA.
“Come dance with me, Paul.”
He just smiled and raised his bottle in salute. He would finish it and go.
“You’re just like them. People in this place are so boring.”
She collapsed into the thinly-padded armchair with an exaggerated huff. She took a glass pipe from the table, hit it, and motioned it to him. He waved it off.
“Figures. Time for something stronger anyway.” She popped up from the chair and he heard clinking from the kitchenette. “Hope you don’t mind gin. It’s all that’s left.”
They drank their gin with flat Sprite and listened to the music. Jean was leaning back with her eyes closed and he wondered if she was asleep but her little bare foot with purple nail polish was still keeping time. When she opened her eyes again they were heavy lidded and her voice was low and thick.
“God I love this stuff.”
“Cheap gin?”
She threw her kerchief at him. “The Sixties. Mom played it constantly. She grew up out there. Actress.”
“Is that what you are? An actress?”
She laughed, and then coughed. “Hairdresser. If you must know.” Her eyes ascended from the spot on the carpet they had been studying. “And what are you, Paul?”
“Me? I’m nobody.”
She pouted at that. Though he was bleary with the particular bleariness of sobering up too early, some vestigial sense of propriety informed him that a further contribution was required of him by way of conversation.
“My mom wouldn’t let most of this stuff in the house. Very pious. We really only had classical around, those box sets you order from the Greats of Music History or whatever. And baseball. Dad listened to the Braves and worked on the car. Or broke it worse.” He looked at her. “Might have been 1953.”
“Sounds like a real family.”
“For a while.”
She had taken his hand, into which her own almost disappeared. His first thought with her on top of him was how light she was. Almost insubstantial. Hollow bones, like a bird. His second thought was annoyance. He was trying not to. Wasn’t he? She had been angling him from the start but really he knew it was he who had done the maneuvering, his maneuvering the more Machiavellian compared with her straightforward lonesomeness and guileless pursuit. The maneuvering of his whole life, from the beginning leading up to this very moment, in such a devious way that others, in this case a youngish homeless mother named Jean, Jean of the failed actress mother and the frustrated absent father, would be compelled into his designs and, what’s more, consider them to be her idea, and thus also feel she must bear the responsibility for them. His third thought was maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe neither time nor consequences exist out here, anymore. Time being just dumb matter changing form. What it started as and what it ended as was all the same to time. On later reflection, scribbling to Sarah in his little notebook, he would be ashamed that not his fourth thought, nor his fifth, was about the boy and girl in the next room, not ten feet away. But that thought did eventually occur to him.
“Wait,” he said.
“What’s wrong, darling?” She was kissing his neck and the black blouse was crumpled on the floor like another bag of tortilla chips.
He picked her up and set her beside him on the couch. It was effortless, like lifting up a beach ball and letting it drift down to earth. Like a punctured ball she suddenly deflated, all her nervously-sexed extroversion collapsing in on itself. She was even smaller than before, cold and shivering. Retreated to the corner of the couch she was hugging herself, covering her naked torso, humiliated.
“Got enough, did you. You’re a fucking piece of work, Paul.”
In the morning he was up early. The clouds had not cleared but had thinned and ascended to a higher level in the firmament, casting a directionless whiteness over the scraped brown earth. Solomon had his run and he was ready to leave but he could not make himself go. Go where. He had his destination, his orders, orders not unlike all the others he had dutifully followed, but he could not make himself believe that all destinations were not the same, equally meaningless. He wondered if all duty eventually led to perdition or if somehow he had been tricked from some direction he had not foreseen. Why had there not been someone to warn him. His species had mastered the Earth and the stars, lately aided by his own modest contribution, and still it could not produce one person in six billion who could tell him the important thing. Sarah if you’re there I need your help. He sat with his long limbs uncomfortably wedged in the poorly upholstered chair in the corner of his room and stared out the window. He reached for his phone on the desk where it was charging and played the voicemail again.
At breakfast Derek was sitting at one of the rickety cafe tables, slathering cream cheese on a bagel with a plastic knife. “Solomon!” he cried. Solomon jogged ahead and sat happily at attention at the boy’s side, politely eyeing the bagel and dry bacon. At the next table was the elderly couple Paul had earlier watched slowly teeter their RV through the narrow main lot and into the dirt field beyond.
Jean turned from where she stood at the breakfast station, helping a little girl pour a glass of orange juice. The girl had her mother’s brown hair but it was long and unkempt. Jean ushered her daughter to the table, whispered in her ear, smoothed her hair, and came to meet Paul in the entryway.
“Leaving?”
“That was the plan.”
“Listen,” she said. “I know I came on strong. I know I have kids and don’t got a house. I know a man can’t help but think what a woman like that is going to want from him. But I didn’t want anything from you. Really. Except…”
“Except.”
She suppressed a sheepish grin. “Yeah. Except.”
“That’s not mine to take. From anyone. Not anymore.” He had come to hate lying. Not because he was good or true, but because he knew he would be forced to remember every single one.
Over her shoulder he watched the boy and girl petting Solomon. The girl had taken command of the situation and like any good sister was instructing her brother on proper form, swatting his hand when he yanked too hard on the dog’s ear. He thought of Sarah lecturing him on how to hold his fork at a wedding, in a place not too far from this one on another day not too unlike this one.
“Then why did you knock down my door at one in the morning.”
“I don’t know.” He looked out past her to the field across the highway where a horse barn and a little stone house had once stood. “Jean, I really don’t know.” He couldn’t decide if this was a lie or how big of one.
Surreptitiously she took his free hand. His other held his single bag. “Then why don’t you wait around a bit and figure it out. You don’t seem like a man in any great hurry.”
He supposed that was true, anymore. He supposed that he had once been a man in a great hurry, and everything he went hurrying after ended up being either much faster than him, or much slower. He supposed that what was gone, was gone. Anyway he didn’t believe it was Sarah there where everyone said she would be, not really. The phone buzzed again in his pocket.
By the state border the sun overhead had battered through what wisps remained of the cloud cover and it was suddenly very warm in the cab. He rolled the window halfway. The air was still cool from morning and it felt good. It was noontime and there were no shadows on the blasted ochre hardscrabble that stretched away from the interstate in all directions. In all the universe no place the light didn’t reach, no more place to hide. He was a day behind but it didn’t matter anymore. He was making good time now. Time was moving slow again. It wasn’t going anywhere and there was nowhere for it to be. There was all the time in the world, and he had it all to himself.