The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (62 page)

“Oh, Sandra.” He presses his open mouth to the Nokia as though he can inhale her response and save it to examine later.

The phone is dead empty.

He says anyway, “I’m on the train.”

If that’s all he is, why won’t the mallet stop thumping behind his frontal bone?

I’m only on the train, going to the city. Then why does it feel like a trip to the end of the world?

Then Travers thinks, What if I just got off at Greens Farms and ran away? Sandra wouldn’t miss me, I don’t think, and I know the students wouldn’t. I could cut out for the high country and start over in some new place where nobody knows.

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 standing 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.