The Fugitives (4 page)

In Cherry City, I could see that this wouldn’t do. Now the virtual terrain I escaped to from my life became the accustomed thing; reality no longer provided a familiar frame of reference. It was too scary: the love of an invented voice became the coddling of a fragmented self; to play the self-righteous crank in the night—Cade the long-haul trucker or Bruce the midnight movie enthusiast or Hector the community activist—was to actually experience his piercing evangelical desire to persuade others. That was when I began taking my walks, when work no longer interested me or began driving me nuts with frustration. I needed to show myself that I was someplace real.

And it was hard not to believe that I was, strolling down these streets in those mellow late-summer days; hard not to believe that the greatest minds in all of the United States lived here, it was so neat, so logical, so convenient, so beautiful as a perfectly realized ideal; hard not to believe that this was the genius of American life right here in its jejune excellence: surely the flag that people had died for had, in their minds, snapped in the wind over a place like this—not some medieval capital like New York, not some vast and agitated conurbation like Los Angeles, and certainly not over the kingdom of placeless enfranchisement, the Internet. Just walking, no one around. Occasionally a car door would shut and I’d turn my head to meet another’s gaze, visible over the roof of the car, and thrill to the familiarity of the feeling as I reflexively raised my hand, saluting a stranger. Rae and I had sometimes passed through places like this, fantasizing, deciding which house looked like it could be ours. The nice thing about a house was the way it let you project an entire imaginary existence onto its visible architectural features, as if the house had thought about your life for you. You sat out here at twilight with a cold bottle of beer, you held the birthday parties back here, this was where you read in the evenings, this snug room with the dormer window and the sloped ceiling was just right for working in all day. I’ve never met a person living in a house who’s confused in the slightest about what purpose, ceremonial or otherwise, each room should serve, whereas in New York everybody shares the same neurotic habit of pushing the furniture against the walls, muscling past each other in the cleared space.

You want to find a peg to hang the damage from—could it have been the city, remaining enmeshed in all the staticky hassle, the maneuvering? In New York we’d all been swindled by the promise of something
better,
or at least
realer,
that justified the expense and the crush, only to be told a hundred times what it was that we’d arrived too late for. I didn’t even have any genuinely hair-raising stories from my years in Brooklyn, only anecdotes of improperly paced gentrification. Would Rae and I have been happy or miserable in a place like this? Felt marooned or settled? Would fame have had more value, or less? Susannah wouldn’t have happened, of course, but would there have been something sadder and more tawdry, noontide adventures in one of the Grandview motel rooms?

IF IT MAKES
a kind of heavily literary sense to abandon the shallow omniscience of the Internet and follow a meandering but inevitable line to that deep archive of the passé, the public library, what first guided me inside the library’s double-hung panic-barred security doors and through its sophisticated metal-detection equipment (What did I expect? The smells of stamp-pad ink and poster paint? Tall arched windows admitting dusty shafts of sunlight?) was no more than routine infirmity, the slightly enlarged prostate that is time’s gift to men my age, and after finding the john I browsed around, as a sort of courtesy to the spirit of home-cooked civic mindedness that provided public restrooms as well as books. The place has made all the usual concessions to the chain-store merchandising sensibility—ranks of bestsellers given pride of place, stacks of “media,” popular periodicals whose covers tracked the separations and reunions of the same two or three celebrity couples, an extensive section given over to Local Interest—but it’s still unmistakably a library (it’s amazing how many contemporary pursuits are completely shut out by the prohibition of noise). It was acceptable: it was real. It was, as I’ve said, a good mid-point place to stop during these morning walks, usually to piss, but sometimes to leaf through the pages of the latest Big Book to touch down here, stripped of the fabulous shimmer lent by its having been the cynosure of all nine hundred people in New York paid to be attentive to these things; the author’s gaze in the photo on the flap looking out not at those commoners arrayed around the scarred tables here in the heartland but at steeples of light in distant cities, the xenon flash of distinction.

I take a certain satisfaction in noting that my own books are not part of the local collection.

EVERYTHING IS “SMART”
now. The library cataloging system is smart, classification and indexing information entered into a uniform online database. People wept and lamented the loss of the old cards, then forgot them. They pretty much forget everything they weep over and lament. Clop-clop of hooves on the street. The humble art of carrying a block of ice up the stairs, pincered by a pair of tongs. Rotary phones and 33 rpm records. Stamp-pad ink and poster paint.

The books themselves are smart; terminologically accurate expositions of systems, grouped data, specialized knowledge, inhabited by ghosts chanting the facts. And that’s just the fiction. Who even knows why there are still books? Odd, strange, falseheartedly mandarin; amazing that someone who would never dream of adding something up on an abacus or even of sending a letter by U.S. Mail demands his yearly hardcover, his vacation page-turner. But they’re here, the books, and so are the people who do read them. And it makes sense, too, that it was in the library that an attempt would be made to reach back further, to the oral tradition (I literally thought these words, “the oral tradition”). A museum for this, too: why not? The old foxed reference texts, the framed display of typewritten and hand-annotated cards from the original library (a Victorian brick building now boarded up and awaiting renovation), and John Salteau.

SOMETIMES I WONDER
if it’s primarily envy that draws me to Salteau. It seems, not easy, but natural, what he has; a tap drawing from deep in the lizard brain. He speaks and the encrustations upon the world fall away as he brings a more essential one into being. It’s like watching the glass from which you are about to drink being blown, annealed, cooled; emerging brimming and beaded with sweat in some suggestive yet wholly new shape. I used to ascribe the same natural facility to painters and musicians, until I got to know some of them and realized that like me they’d been blessed with the dubious and vindictive gift of making it look easy. Going through an old manuscript one day I came across a (typical) page that looked like a knife fight had happened on it. Scissored passages, blood-red interlinear and marginal notes and corrections, a whole paragraph eliminated with slashing violence, six different page numbers in the upper right corner. In the finished book it nestled perfectly in context; read like a series of offhand remarks I’d thrown away with my feet up on the coffee table, a drink in my hand. Who would see the struggle? Who could? Some scholar-fanatic, a fawning hagiographer, an archivist accustomed to assessing things solely in terms of linear feet? Who could recognize that the provisional success had only meant moving on to the next failure? But Salteau never fails. Never hesitates. Never stammers when called upon to improvise, or to respond to the budding hecklers in his audiences. Salteau’s powers of invention, working within the constraints of polished legend, are constant.

Think of the story as a basic unit. Stand at the counter in the kitchen in the morning, shoveling in yogurt and bran, the old story of trying to live forever, why do you eat bran, well, I want to live. That’s one story. Or you say, dropping the spoon into the bowl to finger your jawline, I cut myself shaving, and the Mrs. says, with, I’ll grant you, an extraordinary level of awareness, wasn’t that a new blade? And the story wends its way through all the satisfying twists and false conclusions: the way it used to be, how I learned to shave, the corporate misfeasance of Gillette, ending Zen-like on the decision to grow a beard. This is how everyone lives; the traffic and lines, the rude clerks and precocious children, the price hikes and small happy surprises; times without number, continuous, and one day we look down to see our hands doing whatever it is they happen to be doing—chopping vegetables, typing, jerking off—and we finally recognize the truncation in that perpetual view, the necessity of a mind’s eye in order to see all of ourselves at all; we realize that we have been stuck staring at those hands for as long as our lives, our selves accruing and forming from the imperceptible blending of each moment into the indistinguishable modules of a whole, the unending stream narrated entirely by a hero without a face; those hands the only unvarying things, from delivery room to deathbed, to mark the fact that what we witness is ours and not someone else’s. How can we live if we don’t make discrete chunks of that continuum? This basic unit, the proffered parcel of our days and nights alone: anecdote and memory; association and reminiscence; conjecture, desire, and regret; the bones of the lunchtime saga over a glass of wine.

4

M
ONDAY
afternoon at four o’clock it began to snow. It was still snowing at midnight when I turned off the TV and climbed the stairs to my bedroom. It was snowing when I opened my eyes at seven thirty and went into the bathroom, the tile icy underfoot, to shower. Outside, the ragged sound of a snowplow scraping a path down the center of the street came through loud and clear. I listened to Interlochen Public Radio while I made coffee and the snow came down. Thick, abundant, lake effect snow, deep drifts wind-sculpted, joining with the mounded shapes of buried cars, mailboxes, fire hydrants, picket fences, to form spectacularly suggestive feats of architecture, Gehry igloos. I began to consider the task of dressing. It wasn’t especially cold, I had boots and a down parka, but the storm seemed to call for ceremony. The muffled streets were deserted, the only sign of humankind the fresh channel that the plow had scored in the roadway snow. I was excited about walking. Last-man-on-earth stuff, a fantasy since I was a kid. How would I survive while managing to retain every modern convenience? was the question, then as now. I imagined generators, water tanks with raincatchers, automatic weapons.