Vacation (16 page)

I got on a Greyhound bus and rode out of the city. I had an idea of what I hoped to find. Outside urban limits, over the bridge and beyond, I expected to see the forests and the rivers and the animals of our country. I had a vision of myself starting someplace new, being someone new, someone real, no more mistakes, I’d get it right this time. I was desperate but hopeful. I thought about who I could be and whom I could be with. I imagined myself healthier, in a green place, everything getting greener all around me. Instead I saw flat fallow fields, tollbooths, beige strips of earth, a toxic highway, punctured houses in the distance, a cellophane horizon, apocalyptic gloom. Gasoline signs hung in the sky. I got down off the bus in a town of grid streets. I walked for miles, turning left at every corner, marking off the territory over and over. I ate my sandwiches and looked at trees drained of leaves, the blue of mailboxes on corners, fossil-logos pressed into the sidewalks, people the shade of cement. A feeling of isolation and doom descended on me. I had no idea what I was doing, I had no plan. Where was I supposed to go? When I’d walked all I could, I went to the Greyhound station and got on the bus heading back to the city because there was nowhere to go, nothing for me to run to, only straight roads leading to points.

Myers ran. Around him, houses, a tangle of trees, the vile heat. He had trouble focusing his eyes. He tripped, almost fell. He hurried by a line of homes. They were small, made of concrete blocks, with sprays of plant outside, could have Gray inside. He arrived at the end of another meaningless street. Looked each empty way—nothing. Looked behind him. At the other end of the block, a group came around the corner. He could see the dark red slash of the hotel uniform. He ducked into the first place he came to, a walled courtyard.

SPOKE

Three days into conscription, I fled. I escaped over the mountains.
I walked. I swam across rivers with my belongings tied to my head.
I slept hidden in the bank ferns. I was lost for weeks. One day I saw a pair of Mormons walking across the hills. Once I found a village full of corpses. I arrived in Honduras at last and staggered into town. The soldiers threw a few cold tortillas at me and put me in a camp. Later they sent me to the United States and said, You are in asylum here now. They gave me to a Mexican family and told them to raise me and the family dutifully did. For this reason, when I speak to a Mexican they think
I talk almost right but not quite right, and the same with a Nicaraguan. So yes, I am and am not a Nicaraguan, certainly more so than most people are anything and not at once.

Myers stood behind the wall, tugging in air, gulping. Through a barred opening on the other side of the courtyard he could see fallen houses and restaurants, crumbling in the salt air, a discotheque now out of commission, glass-smashed shops. The insane sound of the cicada. He heard footsteps coming up the street, running, maybe two sets, maybe more, he couldn’t be sure. He waited. They went by. He was dizzy, needed a steadying, and braced himself against the wall.

(If things had gone differently for Myers, if he had, say, gone to Corn Island on the afternoon plane, heard the story from Spoke, rejoined his wife eventually, and lived happily ever after, he would have told her Spoke’s story and she would have listened and asked questions and been interested.

He had to swim across rivers, Myers would have said. He had to wear his belongings on his head.

Oh, that’s very sad, she’d say.

Yes, he’d agree, shaking his head. What our governments do to private citizens in the name of defense…)

THE WIFE’S CONFESSION (PART V)

That might have been the end of it. I might have gone home to my husband, forgotten it, shop-talked and pork-chopped with ease.
I got on the bus that stood ready to pull out. I was resolving to myself, my mind revolving. This nice man who loves me and here’s how I treat him? I go dashing off, don’t even give him a chance to explain? I’m going to do better, I told myself, be better. Something’s got to get better and it’s going to have to be me. I was saying this to myself.
Better, better, better
.

There was a man in front of me as I boarded the bus. I took no notice at first. A bit of a commotion was going on, people lifting their belongings, trying to fit them into places, people who looked more or less homeless. The man took a seat and as he turned, his face made me think of my husband’s. They were the same types—smart young businessmen, vaguely good-looking in the same boyish, blondish way. He had a wedding band on, he looked perfectly normal. Just the sight of him made a little beaker of irritation tip over me because he reminded me of my husband. Then a woman was standing above him.

What are you doing, bozo?

He answered as if startled out of thought, as if lifting the words from my own head, as if he’d been given a dream drug and would now come out with whatever he had in there. I’m leaving, the man said.

I had a sting of understanding.

Good luck, chum, I thought.

The woman said, Not in my seat, you’re not.

He fumbled for his coat and headed for the back. He had a sort of skittish, panicked manner to him. There were no more seats nearby and so I also had to continue on toward the back. He took a window seat, the last available window seat. I like window seats. People were behind me and in front. I put down my bag next to him and sat, not because
I wanted to, but because there were nearly no seats left and it was time to get out of the aisle. The bus started up. Exhaust filled the air. We sat and waited. I didn’t know his troubles and he didn’t know mine. We rode that way, side by side, each in our own bewildered state. He stared forward, didn’t look out the window, didn’t read around in a book.
I guess he meant to ride headlong into it, collide if need be, get what was coming, face first. We arrived in New York. The bus drove through a freezing February parade. Streamers clung to the posts and confetti lay strewn in the streets.

I got off the bus. I was curious: was he leaving on his own or would someone come to meet this cheerless creature? I walked behind him out of the station. No one met him. He carried only a black overcoat and a briefcase. He stopped to put on the coat but for nothing else—no phone call, no snack, no restroom visit. He walked out of the station and I got into the taxi line. I watched him go up the street. He was blending in with the other people. In a moment he’d be gone. I stepped out of line to keep him in view a few seconds longer. Where was he going? To a hotel? I wavered. I went after him—not to follow him but just to find out. Where do you go when you leave?

Nowhere, it turned out. He walked east, then south through downtown. He walked under skyscrapers, over bridges. I followed.
I didn’t have anywhere I had to be. My husband wouldn’t be home until the next day and our clean apartment was unnerving. This stranger kept going. The way he walked, it was as if he’d been plopped onto this land from some foreign star and was searching for the way back. Everything about him had a quiet, sad dignity. He spoke to no one that first night. He paused on the bridge to look grimly at the water, then to look up into the sky. The city seemed dinky over there, whiskered with light. Above us, the bridge was a majestic iron prison. The water seemed made of steel. I felt myself moving closer to him, reaching. Then he went on. At last, very late, he came to a brownstone eight blocks from my own. He rang and was let in.

Inside the courtyard it was quiet. Myers couldn’t leave yet. He’d wait a few minutes to make sure they were gone. He put down the briefcase, leaned into the shade, took deep breaths, bent over coughing. He took inventory, examined his pockets, had a large stack of cash. The damn hospital bill. Like a toy hospital bill, like something you take out for play, that’s how little it was—but still, he’d used up the last of his traveler’s checks to pay for it. His arm, the unemployed one, was in some sort of wrap, not a cast proper, but a Saran Wrap scenario and it was slack in places, unraveling, the tape coming up, the straight pins loosened in one spot and gripped too tight in another. The entire arm was now aching and the fingers at the end had swelled. There was also the side concern of the ribs. How far did he think he was going to get in this condition?

He had a slip of paper that they’d discharged him with at the hospital, handwritten in English, more helpful advice from his superiors, as if it’d ever done more than get him where he was today.

1. Apply ice

2. Elevate above heart

3. Wiggle uninjured fingers gently and often

SPOKE

So I didn’t come back until now, all these years later, until after the war ended, until many years after the war had ended, after we’d all been pardoned by the new government—not the new government after the revolutionary government, but the new government two governments later. We were finally pardoned for running away and they finally sorted it out, who got what and who got nothing and who got invited home. But I didn’t come back then either because by then I was a grown man and it hardly mattered anymore and it kept not mattering, but then one day suddenly it did. And here I am, on my vacation, on my first visit home, and one thing I can say about my country is that they sure don’t know how to take advantage of the tourist opportunities they have here. They could make a big buck.

Hello, elevate! Unless he wanted to lose the thing!

Myers propped his arm against the wall.

There may have been things wrong with him from the start, things she’d disliked all along: his unrealized potential, what he hadn’t done, what she thought he should have done, his crushing quiet failures, his miniscule moves up the pay scale. Face it, he had been ill-bred, then misled by parents, stifled by teachers who had been shuttled in to represent civilization. Then they waved him out into the disorder alone. Who could want a man like that?

There were also the unmentionables, such as his weaknesses, the stepsister pains of his soul, the sufferings having to do with ego and desire. Not explicable or reasonable, not growing out of the commonplace, but out of the unkempt weeds of the mind.

He saw himself clearly. He had never been happy, not really. She may have known that and hated it.

His arm dropped from the wall. He had to get out of there fast. He saw that clearly too.

TTHE WIFE’S CONFESSION (PART VI)

I went home. The next morning I woke at dawn. I wasn’t going to leave my husband after all, it appeared. A seam of light lay on the sill. I had slept restlessly, had kept walking in my dreams. I felt defeated.
I rose. I had only a few more hours of freedom left before the man-and-wife rigmarole resumed. I fiddled with the dishwasher. What would that man do now? I wondered. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. I opened the refrigerator—nothing but soda and bread. It occurred to me: The brownstone was right beside the grocery. Maybe a block or two farther. I could go see. Maybe he would give up, get back on the bus, and go home. Or maybe he’d have it in him to stay away. I’d just look. Then get on with things.

I walked back. I hovered outside his brownstone wrapped in my coat, ducked in the shadows, for all the world like a saleswoman selling smack. When he came out, I went after him.

I continued in that manner for four and a half months, as an understudy or a soft-shoe—always a few yards behind. He began a job.
I followed him there. Our walks became evening affairs and I had to haul out the long list of lies to my husband, but I barely felt it.

Any other person would have been boring to follow, the same squares drawn on the grid over and over, but this man struck out newly each day. He didn’t have the determined stomp of the tourist, more the meandering step of someone tentatively entertaining the thought that he may have lost his way.

I knew this all stemmed at least somewhat from my husband’s deceit. I wasn’t going to confront him about it. Why should I have to grovel before him to get him to tell me what any husband should tell a wife? I hinted at it, showed him that I knew, to see if he’d break down and confess.

I’m so tired I could drop out the window rather than face the stairs, I’d say.

That woman could go through the glass like a rock, for all I care, I’d say.

No response. He could look as blank-faced as a pie plate. Fine, if that’s the way he wanted to play it. I grew angrier and angrier. I kept following the stranger.

I never revealed myself to the man I was following and he never noticed me. It’s amazing how unobservant people are, how focused they are on themselves and their own crusades. But it hardly mattered. Between us we had space, silence. We had longing shooting one direction and nothing coming back. His despondency tied me to him. His jagged wanderings. His sad starlight vigils. I gave in to it. I went along.

It was not so different from any relationship, really. I watched but
I had no access to his motivations. When he ate, I couldn’t tell if he was hungry. When he talked, I didn’t know what he said. When he headed home, I didn’t know what he found there—I could say the same of my husband. Yes, when he went home he found me there, but what am I?