Driver's Education (29 page)

I was folding clothes on Finn's bed, in his new room. From a small window next to his closet I watched cars thread through the arches in the Golden Gate's south tower.

“Oh, God,” I said, sitting, and the bed shifted. “That's terrible.”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news.” In the background there was that familiar machine-gun crack of popcorn exploding.

“No, I'm glad you called. It's better than reading about it in the papers or something.”

“Oh,” she laughed, but it was sad, quiet. “Oh, I doubt it'll make the papers.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do.”

I fingered a hole in one of Finn's shirts, pushing through the frayed fabric.

I asked, “Why's it closing?”

She sighed. “The same reason everyone else is closing—we just can't keep up anymore.” The popping began to slow, the individual combustions more spaced out. “Two years ago they opened up that megaplex farther down on Saw Mill, the one with nine projectors. We were struggling before, but at least getting by. Breaking even, you could say, at least most weeks. The megaplex, though—that killed us. For about fourteen months we tried to switch it up with a bunch of independent and art-house films. But there are only so many people who can tolerate movies like that.
My Life as a Geranium
or something. The audience just wasn't there.” There was a crunch, the sound of her eating, and I realized that
she hadn't prepared the popcorn for someone else, a customer, but had made it for herself. She added, “It's the same thing that's happening everywhere.”

I'd pushed my finger through so the shirt hung around my second knuckle. The hole stretched.

“Anyway,” she continued. “I wanted to let you know that there's going to be a final showing this Friday night. Before we shut down for good.
The Tender Trap
—that's what we'll be screening. It's the first movie the Avalon showed.”

“I know.”

“I'm going through all these records and trying to get hold of everyone who worked at the theater to let them know about it.”

“That's nice of you.”

“It's a lot harder than it sounds.”

“I think it sounds pretty difficult.”

“I started last Thursday, and today is Tuesday. So that means I've been at it for more than four days and I've still got about seventy-five people left to call.”

“I don't envy you.”

“Which actually brings me to a question.”

“Yes?”

“You don't happen to have the phone numbers of anyone you worked with, do you? Or maybe even the cities they're living in? Some sort of lead?”

She began listing a series of names, people who'd slipped from my memory completely: the girl who worked four days a week in the box office; the guy who cleaned the bathrooms each weekend.
No,
I told her each time.
I haven't heard from them in years
.

“All right.” She sighed again. “I mean, I figured as much. No one seems to know what happened to anyone else.” Then: “What about Clare Murkowski?”

I said, “Who?”

“Clare Murkowski? It says you worked every shift with her for more than two years?”

I stood. I walked to a Spiderman trash can in a corner of the room. I balled up the shirt and tossed it into the bin. I looked down at my bare toes spread on the uneven floor. “She passed away,” I said. Then, more forcefully, “She died.”

“Oh, that's awful.” Helen stopped eating; the muffled chewing stopped.

“I heard it was a car accident on the Ventura Freeway.”

Quietly, I began to loathe myself, but still I couldn't stop from spinning the story. “A seven-car pileup, with a sixteen-wheeler at the end. She was thrown through the back windshield of the car in front of her. It wasn't instant. Thirty-six hours in the ICU. A lot of pain. That's what I heard, anyway.”

“Jesus. I'm so sorry.”

“It's fine,” I said. I picked the shirt from the bin in which I'd thrown it. I found a hanger, hung it up instead. “I didn't really know her anymore.”

I heard the front door creak three times, which meant it was opening, then creak once more, which meant it was shut. Finn's heavy heels were percussions on the stairs.

•  •  •

We arrived at my childhood home at midnight on the next Thursday, and even though it was mid-August everywhere else, it was still winter in Sleepy Hollow. Frigid rain bounced off ankle-deep puddles on the sidewalk; the wind ripped leaves from branches and painted them against car windows. As we stood in the crowded entryway, we shook the water from our heads.

I tightened my bag across my shoulder; Finn dropped his pack to the floor.

“Look at what you've done to the sun!”

My father took my son's face in his hands. He kissed each wet cheek, his cold forehead.

They'd met a handful of times, the last of which was a year earlier. My father had been breezing through Los Angeles during one of his drives, and Finn and I had traveled back down south to meet him for an
afternoon at the Long Beach aquarium. I remember how I had walked a few paces behind the two of them, and how I'd watched as Finn reached up to take two of my father's bony fingers. He led him through the mazes of tubes and tanks, past walls of alien creatures swirling in explosive reds, yellows, blues. In a separate room, giant hammerheads swam above them and around them, their sleek, muscled bodies throwing shadows that darkened our faces. Finn coaxed my father to the glass, and they both pressed their palms against it. A shark whipped its arrowed tail, and I slipped over to an adjoining exhibit on jellyfish.

I stood with my face pressed close to the tube's wall and I watched a moon jellyfish sway in the current. As it bloomed, the surface light shined blue-white through its waxy membrane. It barely had control over its movements: as larger bodies passed it, it was carried along their course; when the current was at rest, so was it.

Jellyfish have no central nervous system. I read that on a green illustrated placard. Instead, their nerves are diffused—like a net—throughout their epidermal layer. There, sensors pick up certain stimuli—mostly touch, as I understand it—which is then translated to the rest of the net. But, again—there's no brain. There's no processing center. Stimuli aren't gathered, analyzed, categorized, remembered.

I felt a drop of rain trickle down the grooves in my neck, across the bumps on my spine.

“Only one more show,” my father said, his hands still holding Finn's head.

“Only one more show.”

“But the Avalon! What a run it's had!”

“What a run.” I put my hands on my son's shoulders and pulled him into me. “We should get to bed,” I said. “It's late.”

By the next morning, the day of the showing, the storm had broken. The grass on the street's ancient lawns still sagged, and the gutters still flooded, but the clouds had ruptured and the sun dazzled in prisms. I awoke early, when the rest of the house was quiet, still. I'd given up my childhood room to my son and had slept on a couch in the living room that my mother had purchased before she died. Since then, either it had
outgrown me or I had outgrown it: Throughout the night I switched between feeling as if I were being swallowed or strangled by its cushions. The whole house had that feeling. I don't know how much time had passed since I'd last been there, but in those years or decades, this place and I had become strangers to each other; we didn't know how to fit.

So—I drank half a cup of coffee. I left a note that said
Meet me at the theater.
And as the dawn skated across the Hudson, I left.

The Avalon was closed when I got there, but I snuck in the same way that I did when I was a boy. I have forgotten so many things, and I've lied about so many others, but this I remember. There was an alley on the east side of the building that separated the theater from a tailor's shop, which had since become a bank. I dragged a large steel trash can into the middle of the alley and then, bracing myself against the ancient brick walls, mounted it. There were a few precarious moments. I'd lost my childhood fearlessness, so each time my makeshift ladder wobbled or swayed I held my breath; I clenched my eyes shut and stiffened my spine, preparing for a fall. But then, somehow I'd steady myself. I'd press my palms against the wall harder, learning how to compensate for my age, my weight.

There was a small window on the theater's second floor. It opened into a darkened corner of the lobby's balcony where the staff occasionally stored old, forgotten movie posters that should've been thrown away years ago. When the Avalon was built, the latch that locked the window hadn't been secured properly; the screws that held it in place were loose and threadbare, so that even the lightest shove could send it swinging open on its hinges. There'd always been talk of having it fixed—at least when I worked there.
We've got to call someone,
Earl would say.
And this time, I mean it
. No one ever did call someone, though. The window's latch became a leaky faucet or a door that creaked; eventually, it was universally deemed easier just to accept the damn thing than to go through the minor trouble of having it repaired.

I landed on a 27-inch by 39-inch movie poster of
True Lies
. A pillar of blue light shone in from the open window, and in this half shadow I cursed my clumsiness and the blooming ache in my legs and then, when it began to subside, I stood and took stock of my surroundings.

Or, no—I didn't take stock. Rather, I stood expectantly. I stood like a man anxious to be reunited with a lover from whom he's been too long separated, whose face he's memorized and drawn and redrawn from scratch. And if that was the case, which it was, imagine this man's disappointment when—once his eyes had adjusted to the near dark—he found that his lover wasn't his lover at all, but rather someone else entirely. Someone harder, and coarser, and generally more disappointed in life.

The crimson carpet, which was just starting to fray when I left, was now almost completely torn up. Large swaths of it were either stained or missing. As I walked down the lobby's staircase, the carpet shifted beneath my feet, revealing the cold slabs of concrete beneath it. On the ground floor, I looked for the urn that I used to hide behind and watch the theater's audiences flow in and out. It wasn't there, though. There was a carved out ring in the floor where it once stood, but that was all.

So this was what had happened. The Avalon had fallen apart.

•  •  •

I'd wanted to sit in the balcony, but the doors were locked, so I selected a seat in the back row of the orchestra, and I stayed there all day. I counted how many tears there were on the screen's heavy curtain; I read the names that had been carved into the seat back in front of me at least a hundred times. I folded my knees into my chest, like I used to do when I was a boy, and I kept them there, even when the muscles screamed and burned. At two o'clock in the afternoon, when the custodial staff began cleaning the house, I waited for them to tell me to move, to get out, but they didn't. They nodded at me and as they swept beneath my lifted feet, they had conversations inches above my head. No one at the Avalon worried about who had snuck in anymore, because as of tomorrow there wouldn't be anything to sneak in to.

The film was scheduled to start at seven, and so the audience began arriving at six thirty. I scanned the faces as they entered the theater: there was the brief cringe of disappointment when someone saw the shape of things, the confusion while another person thought,
I remember it being so much bigger.
When I saw my father and my son pushing through the crowds, I flagged them over.

“This place is a dump,” Finn said.

“Knock it off. It's just been around a long time. Now, sit.”

I'd been sitting along the aisle, but I moved one seat in, expecting them to sit on either side of me. Instead, my father awkwardly slipped past my knees and Finn clambered over me. They sat next to each other and the seat to my left remained empty.

I asked, “Do either of you want anything to drink? Maybe some popcorn or something?”

“Sure,” Finn said. He pulled his knees up so he was folded in the same position that I'd been in for so many hours. Then he turned to my father. “Keep going, Granddad.”

My father tapped his chin. “Where was I?”

“The store was about to be knocked down, and you were inside in the house of records.”

“Oh Christ, Dad,” I said. “Don't get him started on all those stories.” I stood and I shook my legs, charging blood back into their veins. “Or God forbid one of these days he actually starts believing you.”

Finn

In Nebraska, we can't drive fast enough. The road taunts us with its wide-open expanses and the state itself seems to stretch at its ends, its borders pulled in all directions until crossing it becomes a Sisyphean task. There's grass that looks broken and windswept: it lies scissored and flat against the earth for thousands and thousands of miles, and when we think we've reached the edge of the horizon, where the grass will stop and something else will begin, it doesn't. It just keeps going on, forever. We can see the weather coming, and the weather leaving: near noon, the sun—which has been a brilliant, bleached white—becomes shrouded by a veil of gauzy clouds that have been crawling in from the south since dawn. For an hour it rains—torrentially, biblically: the air sneaks in through Lucy's vents, and with it brings the scent of waterlogged earth and cow shit. But then it stops. The rain weans down to a trickle, leaving muddy spots on the car's windshield. We watch from Randal's window as the clouds continue their march north into Nebraska's infinity.

I say, “I wish we could go faster.”