Out There: a novel (15 page)

“In little rivulets,” he told Jefferson, pointing a finger. “In the hop-skip-and-jump of a flat stone across the surface. See.”

Jefferson and García Márquez skipped stones together in the vision after that, each searching along the shore for just the right stone among the multitudes.

In abundant rivers of forgiveness and hope . . .

Jefferson lost himself on the final word, chanting it in two long deep syllables many times as he drove on down the road.

Ho . . . ope . . .

Ho
 . . . ope . . .

Ho
 . . . ope . . .

Sometimes
the reader’s love of a story is immediate and bright, jumping like a belly flop into his lap on page 1, basking until the beautiful end. Other times the love builds slowly and surely, like nostalgia. It hovers on the edge of recognition for many chapters, a suggestion waiting to be spoken, until that innocuous detail announces itself as a sort of secret communiqué to the reader, this particular reader, telling him that this story was written for him. Telling him that the writer, as unlikely as it might seem, has known the same people, has worried over the same small anxieties, has suffered the same meager disappointments, has been humiliated by precisely the same set of slights and calluses. Telling him that the writer’s hopes and dreams and celebrations have followed the same course as the reader’s. None of this makes logical sense, of course. The writer is much older than the reader, and he has lived his life on a different continent, in an earlier era, and yet the feeling is undeniable. The reader, jubilant with this discovery, runs to the edge of a great chasm and jumps. He can fly! He smiles and lets out an enormous sigh, a full mile of air below him and nothing but blue above. He approaches the other edge of the abyss. He stretches out his fingertips, reaches, grabs.

That one small detail, the handhold on the other side, might not seem worthy of mention. It might not bear the weight of the literary world. It is ancillary to the theme. It might be read past by hundreds of other readers. And yet there it is, this one small something that offers this reader a grip, this one thing that moves this reader’s heart. Here it is! The detail that means he will love the story forever.

For Jefferson it was the scorpions. From that first time Jefferson came upon a line about a scorpion in
One Hundred Years
—in this case the scorpion that stung Rebecca on her wedding night—he knew García Márquez was on his side. Almost every time he browsed the novel after that first sighting, there was another one! As if GGM had placed another of the little beasts there to keep him awake. To remind him of his family, to offer perspective. Jefferson was in a war zone, yes, but at least his cousin Nigel was not chasing him around the house with a scorpion on the end of a stick, like when they’d been kids. Yes, Jefferson was fighting in a war he didn’t understand, but at least he wasn’t being stung on the toe by one of the stealthy suckers in his sheets as he slept. At least his enemies were big enough to see. At least the Iraqi insurgency had not taken the form of giant bugs with pincers.

More than stories about loss in war, about unexpected love, about perverted family dynamics, about the rich enslaving the poor, Gabriel García Márquez’s scorpions told Jefferson—in a secret communiqué—that the writer was real and alive, a human being walking the earth. He was living and breathing and loving, fearing the day he’d be stung, just like everyone else.

Somewhere
after Jiménez, Jefferson, plenty tired and hot, not to mention hoarse from his own chanting of memorized lines and newly created poetry, ran the motorbike onto the wide sandy shoulder and parked. The sky was big here, not unlike the sky in New Mexico or Iraq, and in the sudden quiet he felt the presence of Nigel, of each person who had helped him. A few cars passed by, a raven cawed from high up in a thirsty tree, Remedios sniffed around beneath a nearby clump of brush. He was not alone. And in the presence of those few drivers and that one bird and his dog, as well as the many unseen spirits who he imagined to be traveling along with him, taking it upon themselves to help, Jefferson dropped down on his knees and kissed the sandy earth. He closed his eyes, saying a prayer of thanksgiving for his good cousin Nigel, so generous and patient and funny, and then filled his lungs with the brilliant Mexican air and bellowed in a southerly direction, “Here I come, Gabriel! Here I come!”

How far Jefferson had come, to now be calling the famous writer by his first name as he stood on this sandy shoulder of Autopista 49, on his way to see the great man. It was a journey that had begun so unexpectedly, so unconsciously, in that distant-seeming classroom, Honors English 4. Jefferson thought now of those tears in Ms. Tolan’s eyes that first day she’d spoken of GGM. He’d not forgotten those tears, shed for García Márquez as well as a handful of other writers she referred to as literary geniuses. The tears had been a mystery to him. He had no doubt that they were stirred by something real, and yet intangible. What had his teacher found in the words of these particular writers?

The mistiness in her eyes and the crackle in her voice usually came when she spoke about a particular writer’s journey toward creating what she called “a great work of literature.” She had told the story of GGM’s struggle to find just the right way to tell the story we now know as
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. Just the right voice. How he had struggled for many years with the ghosts of the story inhabiting the catacombs of his skull, trying to coax it out, and that he had not given up until he had heard his own grandmother narrating the story inside his head. Ms. Tolan had spoken with the same crackle in her voice about a woman writer, a woman from England, Jefferson thought, but he could not remember her name. She’d been depressed, had drowned herself. He would never forget that, because they had watched a film in class—fictional, of course—about the woman’s walk down to the river, the way she tied rocks into her skirt. Jefferson would never forget the sad beauty of that writer as she breathed her last breaths among the rocks and the fishes, looking up to the blue sky. Ms. Tolan had most definitely had red eyes when she told that woman’s story—how brilliant her writing, how troubled her mind. There had been a few others who had summoned his teacher’s tears but he could not remember any names.

The reading in that last year of English had been hard, and most of the time he’d gotten too drowsy to finish his assignments, staying up late, drinking coffee, but his curiosity had been enough to keep him working and wondering. What was it that kept a woman like Ms. Tolan—and English teachers everywhere—reading books and talking to students about stories and making them write papers about those stories? Something deep within him did not want to disappoint his teacher. She truly seemed to believe that a book could make a difference in her students’ lives. And something deeper still told him there must be magic hidden within the text.

So he had compensated. Every day at lunch, just before fourth-period English, Jefferson got out his copy of whatever novel they were reading at the time and flipped through the pages that had been assigned that day, back and forth randomly, using his thumbs. He’d close his eyes and stop when he felt like stopping, and he’d point randomly to a sentence on the open page. He’d read the sentence, and maybe another one that followed if the first one was short, and then he’d begin to see the sentence floating in his mind, like a translucent jellyfish, its tentacles swaying to the sound of a beautiful lullaby. In this way the sentences began to live in his mind, and he walked into class, eager to share what was now a part of him. Every day Ms. Tolan asked some version of, “So, what did you guys think about the reading last night?” and every day Jefferson popped his hand in the air and recited.

The results were several: Ms. Tolan came to love Jefferson, and would often stop him after class and tell him what a pleasure it was to have a student like him contributing so much to class discussions, and a few times she suggested that he think about studying literature in college. At the end of the year, she told him to keep his copy of
One Hundred Years
, because, she said, he would probably want to have it at some point in the future. In the end, Jefferson made an A in her class both fall and spring semesters without ever having really read one of those novels Ms. Tolan loved so much.

In Iraq he turned to the novel as a comfort, a distinct memory from home, not because he expected any real help from the book. But it proved to be a good distraction from reality and, in all honesty, he had never forgotten the mystery of Ms. Tolan’s tears. Within a week he had slipped back into the routine of the flipping back and forth of pages, and the rote memorization of a line or two. He did this every night after dinner, as he pulled his mind away from Ramon and Adams and Dudzinski. As he pulled his mind away from the three little girls’ scared eyes asking him for help out the back of their father’s Toyota. Not in an attempt to bury anything, but rather as a way to help him breathe as he remembered. He’d had an infected plantar wart on his heel as a middle-schooler, a festering sore that prevented him from running in the district track meet his eighth-grade year, so he knew the dangers of ignoring and pretending something bad would disappear.

Each evening he sat on his bed, back against the wall, and reviewed as many details of the day as he could. He never lingered too long on any single memory, and eventually he made it to the end of the day, to dinner in the dining hall, an event that became a natural segue to thinking about dinner at home with Esco, wondering what she had eaten that evening. Jefferson often thought about how it must have been simpler for her, a sort of bonus for having him gone, that she could eat what she wanted without worrying about his vegetarianism. Had she eaten carne asada with fresh tortillas? A hamburger with green chile?

After he thought about green chile for a while, Jefferson closed his eyes and held the novel in his lap. He pretended he was sitting on his bed at home, or at one of the outdoor lunch tables at Santa Fe High. He crossed his ankles because that was a natural position for him, and Jefferson believed the point was to be as relaxed as possible. He breathed slowly in and out for a few minutes, trying to remember who he was: a nineteen-year-old from Santa Fe, three-quarters Lakota, one-eighth Mexican, one-sixteenth German, and one-sixteenth Scots-Irish, who had a whole body with a jittery heart and a bleeding soul. Though sometimes the sound of heavy trucks and an occasional explosion encroached upon him, in those moments Iraq seemed for the most part to be a dream.

He flipped through the pages, back and forth with his thumbs, just like in high school, and the pages fell open naturally, and a particular spot on the page called to him, and he would read.

Jefferson would remember forever the feeling the sentence his finger had found that very first night gave him.  It was the sentence about new gypsies and oily skins and parrots painted many colors and a hen laying a hundred golden eggs.  It was the sentence about a monkey who could read minds and a device that could both sew on buttons and reduce fevers.  It was the line that mentioned the machine that could take away one’s bad memories.  How could anyone ever forget the feeling brought on by a sentence like that? When Jefferson had read the last bit, the muscles of his face had formed into a smile, and a feeling of measured joy had entered his heart. He had imagined on that night what Gabriel García Márquez might have meant by an “uproarious joy,” and how the writer had envisioned a machine that could eliminate bad memories. What an idea. Jefferson needed that machine, he thought as he sat on his bunk that night, and he began to imagine all the other soldiers who needed it as well.

He kept his eyes closed a bit longer, picturing the great writer in the barracks with him, that unforgettable face from the back cover. This was Gabriel, the angelic writer who had brought tears to Ms. Tolan’s eyes, a man who seemed both human and otherworldly and who, in that moment, was right there in Jefferson’s head with him, laughing. It was if the old man had known Jefferson and the entirety of his life long before any of it had begun. And for the moment, on that first of many nights, the writer reached out and grabbed Jefferson, telling him it would all be okay.

Jefferson knew that the novel had not literally been written for him. He was not stupid. He remembered enough from English class to know that
One Hundred Years of Solitude
did not take place in Iraq, and that it was not about a young soldier from Santa Fe. It was a South American story. It was about several generations of a large family—two brothers with similar names, and all their descendants, one of them, a soldier, though not a soldier like Jefferson. More like a commanding officer, a general.

Still, Jefferson had slept that night with a little less nervousness in his stomach, just knowing the writer was out there somewhere, living and breathing, and most likely aware of the war in Iraq. In that intangible but very real way, Jefferson felt Gabriel was with him, and that he was a little less alone. Jefferson began to call him GGM on that night, and sometimes simply Gabriel, because the whole thing—Gabriel García Márquez—took too much energy. Besides, that was what everyone else in the world called him. Gabriel García Márquez—yes, that was his name. But to Jefferson he became GGM, his very own Gabriel.

The next night Jefferson did it again. He flipped through the novel with his thumbs until a group of words caught his eye. He memorized the words. He adapted the words.  He made them his own.  And he repeated the practice the following night. Again and again, night after night, until it became his religion. And like any true faith, it began to help. In the restless hours between midnight and dawn, Gabriel’s words resurrected Jefferson’s hope.