Now what?
Frowning, trying to remember why she’d been so convinced she had to fly when getting a cab to the house and her father would make the most sense, Madison noticed a guy standing ten feet away having a cigarette. He was looking at her as if he were wondering what she was doing here by herself. He seemed like a nice man and the kind who might ask her if she was okay, and Madison wasn’t sure what the answer to that was. She wasn’t sure she trusted herself to speak either; she’d been almost rude to the man in the airport, which was not like her at all. Maddy was very polite, always, especially to grown-ups.
She crossed the street quickly and went into the multistory parking lot, as if that’s where she’d been going all along. Seeing the smoking man stirred a memory from the blank period earlier in the day. Another man had looked at her, she thought, after she had…of course.
That’s how she’d gotten to the city.
By bus, duh. She’d arrived at the Greyhound station on NW Sixth Avenue. Then she’d walked for a long time, she remembered, looking for an address. It was in a place she knew, but somehow she didn’t know where that place actually was. The area wasn’t very nice. A lot of the store-fronts were boarded over and had letters above them that didn’t make words in English. There were cardboard boxes all over and the smell of rotting fruit in gutters. The parked cars looked old. It had been different also from the parts of Portland that Madison knew in that it seemed to be a place where only men lived. Men, standing in dirty grocery stores. Men leaning in doorways, by themselves or with someone just like them, not talking to each other but watching everyone who went past. Men, on street corners, shivering. There were white men and black men and Asian men, but they all looked more or less the same and like they all knew about the same things. Maybe this was what her mom meant when she said the color of someone’s skin made no difference. At some point there’d been a man in particular, two men, in fact. They had a dog on a chain. They’d come toward her purposefully, looking all around as they got closer, but then their dog suddenly started going nuts and they crossed the street instead.
Did she find the place she was looking for? She still couldn’t remember that part. But she knew she didn’t have the small notebook when she left the house that morning. So maybe that’s where it had come from. Good. Call that squared away. She got to Portland by bus.
Once she’d filled in every one of these little gaps, everything would be back to normal.
Inside the parking lot, it was dark and cool. People walked back and forth with suitcases that made clackety sounds. Cars pulled out of spaces and went swishing out onto the road. Big white and yellow and red buses with sliding doors and hotel names on them let people off or picked them up. It was a place full of people who didn’t know each other. That was good. Madison decided she would find somewhere she could sit and think in quiet. She walked down the center of one of the aisles. Everyone was talking or laughing or paying cabdrivers or keeping track of their own children. It was like they couldn’t see her at all. This reminded her of something, though she couldn’t remember what.
She was approaching a car that was parked halfway along the aisle, when she found herself slowing down. The car was yellow, and the driver’s side door was open. She diverted her course to the other side of the aisle.
As she passed the car, she glanced across. A man was sitting inside. He was pretty old and had gray hair. His hands were on the steering wheel, though the engine was not running. He was staring through the windshield and looked like he’d been there a while. Madison was wondering what the man was looking at, when he seemed to wake up. He turned his head and saw her. She had time to notice that there was something weird about his face, and then he backed out of the space like he was in a car chase. He went screeching out of the lot before she really had time to absorb what was happening.
But now the last gap was filling, like water running back up through the drain into a bathtub. Something about when she was walking through town…a Chinese woman. Yes. She had given Madison the notebook. After she left the woman’s house and was walking again, a man had pulled over to the curb, offered her a lift in his car. Maddy had lived all her life with very clear instructions about not getting into the cars of strangers, and yet that’s what she’d done. The man had been very nice to her at first; he just happened to be heading to the airport, and he’d be happy to help out. Then he became nervous and like a little boy and kept laughing even though neither of them had said anything funny. He said stuff about how pretty she looked, which she liked when Dad said it but not when this man did.
Then they’d been together at the airline ticket desk, and she’d pretended he was her daddy, and he had bought the ticket with money she’d given him. But after that he’d wanted to come out here to the parking lot and had tried to get her to get into the car with him again. He said he’d done what she wanted, and now she had to be nice, too. He put his hand on her arm.
She still could not remember what happened then, but when he’d looked at her before driving away, the thing she remembered about his face was that there’d been a long scratch on it. Madison knew she hadn’t gotten back into his car. Instead she had run back into the terminal, and tried to fly.
She pulled the ticket out of her pocket. She had never been to Seattle. Why did she want to go now? She didn’t know. She did want to, though, and right away. Being kept away from Seattle felt bad. She would have to find—as Dad sometimes said, when on the phone to office people—“some other more workable solution.”
Belatedly realizing that her coat felt bulky in the chest, she put her hand in the inside pocket. It came out holding an envelope. It was dusty. Inside were hundred-dollar bills. A lot of them. They couldn’t be Mom’s—she had credit cards. At the bottom of the envelope was a small metal ring, with two keys on it.
Madison put the envelope back into her pocket, mentally filing it among the things to be thought about later. She was smart. Everybody said so. She would get to the bottom of this.
Now, in the meantime, back in the parking garage, she noticed a woman standing a few cars down, loading a small suitcase into the back of her car. Madison walked toward her and stopped a few feet away.
The woman turned. She was younger than Madison’s mom. “Hello,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Madison. What’s yours?”
The woman said her name was Karen. She was nice, and friendly, and within a couple of minutes Madison began to believe she had found a more workable solution.
When Karen drove the car out of the lot, Madison was sitting in the passenger seat. The woman seemed disconcerted by all the road choices, as Maddy’s mom sometimes did, and so, to let her get on with it without an audience, Madison reached into her pocket and pulled out the notebook once more.
She opened it to the first page and read what came after the first line:
And the people looked, and they saw that Death sucked, but they assumed this is what God wanted—because our God was a harsh god, and hated us. They believed Death to be His final punishment, at the end of our short spans of bloody sorrow: that He drops us on this dark and brutal plane to scurry from cold shelter to poor food and back, in endless rain, all the while bowed under the knowledge that at some time, at any time, a heel dipped in gore could drop like thunder and smear us broken across stony ground. We see the people we love taken from us, turned sick and rotten in front of our eyes, and we eat and fuck and dream our febrile lives away, because we understand that this will be our fate, too—and that afterward comes an eternity lying silent and blind in a dark, soft cloud: this prospect sugared only by the lies we learned to tell ourselves as soon as we could speak, the promise of an imprisoned life everlasting, in the lofty attic of Heaven, or the basement corridors of Hell.
But, and here you must listen…
The lie is not quite a lie.
These places do exist, but close by. People realized this slowly, started to make plans. Some did. The very few. Those who possessed the will and strength of purpose. The self-chosen ones. Those who learned that the doors to prisons could be unlocked in the night, that we could venture back. And who in time came to realize that they could inhabit the daylight hours, too, become the householder once again.
People like us.
People like you, my dear.
“What’s that you’re reading?” the woman asked as she turned with evident relief onto a big road.
“I have no idea,” Madison said.
The bar I’d been in had been okay but staid, and after a while they put the game on and everyone watched with the sound off. Not my kind of place. So I migrated to somewhere along the street called Tillie’s, which was more scuffed up and played loud rock and roll. That didn’t mean it was a great environment for me to be in, however. The good and bad thing about bars and alcohol is that they blur social bonds. Sometimes this can be a plus—a lonely person finding solace in the company of strangers, the temporary tribal warmth of sitting around the same campfire. But it can also be that one individual begins to seem as relevant as the next, that the person you love is suddenly too annoying to bear and complete unknowns become your best friends. As a result you end up having conversations you probably shouldn’t. I do anyhow. I’d been talking to one guy in particular, and the discussion was going downhill. This person had shadows under his eyes, his hair needed a trim, and his jacket was decent but looked like something he’d bought during better times and now inhabited in the way polite men of reduced circumstances spend winter afternoons sitting on benches in well-tended parks.
“Jack Whalen,” I repeated, loudly, leaning forward to get right in his face. “You might have to order it or get it off Amazon, but it exists.”
The guy did not seem impressed. If anything, he looked like he thought I was even more of an asshole than before. Evidently he hadn’t heard me correctly. Or hadn’t understood. His eyes said he was as drunk as I was. That was pretty drunk. I opened my mouth to start snarling in earnest but noticed something in his eyes that stopped me in my tracks. I realized it wasn’t just contempt I was dealing with, but a kind of weary hate.
There was a sound behind me, and I straightened up.
A guy in a pale gray suit strolled into the john with his hands already at his fly, barely getting to a urinal before pissing like a racehorse.
“Whoa!” he hooted, turning to grin at me, obviously impressed with his own voiding skills.
“Right,” I said. It felt weak, but I’m not sure what else I could have contributed. I dried my hands primly on my pants and stumbled back out of the restroom, feeling cold along the back of my neck.
The music in the bar sounded flat and old now, and the room was brighter than I remembered. And yes of course I had sort of known I was in the men’s room, talking to myself in the mirror over the sinks. It’s happened before, when I’ve been exceptionally fried. I glance at my face, and for a moment the reflection there looks like a complete stranger. At first the encounter is convivial, but sometimes it gets personal, a “pull your socks up, shithead” routine. This time I knew that for a second I’d really forgotten I was talking to myself. That could not be good. Not when it was only eight in the evening and I could see no likelihood I’d be going home anytime soon.
Or tonight, for that matter. I suddenly remembered I was a hundred miles from where I lived. That I’d told the Zimmermans I’d be back hours before now. That I was long past driving and had nowhere to stay, and that I’d still had no contact with my wife, whose cell phone contained messages I did not like the look of.
Then I remembered I’d been thinking these things on the way to the restroom and had made no progress toward resolving them then either.
I was relieved to see I had most of a Mack & Jack’s left, and I tried to lock back into the scene. One of the waitresses was pretty cute. She was slim and good-natured, with carefully unkempt hair, and wore her apron well. My appreciation of her was generic, like that of a woman registering a pair of nice shoes she neither wants, needs, nor can afford. Other patrons were more directly appreciative. Half an hour earlier, one guy had hoisted himself off his stool and gone regretfully into the night. I’d overheard the waitress saying good-bye as he went, adding, “You do have rights as a father, you know.”
Right, I’d thought, but do you really not get that he was recounting his problems with his bitch ex-wife, dwelling on how much he loves his kids, in expectation not of useful legal advice but rather in the vague hope of getting into your pants? The more I drank, you see, the wiser I was becoming. It is often that way with me.
That guy’s spot had been taken by a young semi-couple. The girl had dressed nicely and applied makeup with enthusiasm and yet remained irrevocably homely. Her stubbled companion had good cheekbones and olive skin and was dressed in denim and a battered red leather jacket, with sideburns that came to a sharp point. He was wearing a red bandanna, too. I’d hated him on sight, naturally.
“I could never be angry with you,” the girl was saying. He nodded with the randomness that comes from possessing a significantly lower comprehension of the language than you’ve led everyone to believe.
The conversation meandered on, the girl doing all the talking, the guy occasionally speaking with a clumsy deliberation that conferred half-assed profundity to gnomic gems along the lines of “Yes, I think that is so.” The fact that he was harmless and possibly even almost charming simply made him all the more punchable. The girl leaned toward him often and covertly moved her stool a couple of inches his way. He endured this stoically, and suddenly I understood their situation as if I were perched outside their reality and watching it critically, some drunken god assigned to monitor their progress. In the end I was leaning so far in their direction that she noticed and turned to look at me.