How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (10 page)

“It’s rotting a little,” I said, strapping myself in.

“Great,” the VW said.

I turned the stem once, then twice, with no luck. I released it and pumped the petals.

“I’m telling you, Dad, I can
drive
,” the VW said. “I’ve been practicing at school.”

“I know you have—that’s not the issue,” I said.

“Then what’s the issue?”

“We’re still a few powerpages away from your learning to drive,” I said.

“Why can’t we skip those pages?”

I tried the stem again and this time the stalks turned. “This thing still has a little life left in it,” I said.

“My seat is all lumpy,” the VW said. He touched a white substance on the dashboard. “Is this
fungus
?”

We took the shortcut to Route 47—straight down the hill to King Street, fossey onto Market, over the bridge, a quick right behind the honeymoon pizza and the abandoned hotels—then a left onto Bay, over sympathetic hills, past the Museum of Sighs.

Then I saw it, approaching on our right: the former Atkin’s Farm—the familiar parking lot, the tight pastures, the meditating trees.

I expected the lot to be barren, but as we approached it I saw that it was snacking with activity. The broad patch where Atkin’s had knelt was now filled with ladders and drills sipping coffee out of paper cups or smoking cigarettes, the cigarettes smoking their own cigarettes or sipping coffee out of even tinier mugs. As soon as I saw the construction I remembered reading about it in the paper—they were building a new shopping face here, the widest smile this side of Hartford.

I parked the VeggieCar in a corner spot, near the lot entrance and away from the construction, and I sat for a moment with my hands on the stem. The VW poured two cups of chai and pulled out his clipboard. “So,” he said. “What do we do now? Write down what sucks?”

I didn’t say anything—I just stared out at the half-built face, all traces of the farmstand quickly being erased. The Memory of My Father flickered through the scenery—one moment dressed in tired winter clothes, the next leaning back in a wooden chair in the café area—but I couldn’t keep him there.

“Dad?” the VW said.

I couldn’t answer him—I was held in the draft of what had happened here, how much I’d lost at this place.

“Aren’t you going to write down all your gripes?”

“It’s all gone,” I skiffed.

“What’s gone?”

“Everything.”

“What do you mean?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Dad, what the hell?” The VW put down his clipboard. “I thought we were going to have a Clipboard Meeting.”

I was silent.

“Did it die? Is that what happened?”

“Did
what
die?”

“The farm,” the VW dented. “Or change its mind?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

My dumb, still heart was a requiem.

“Why don’t you just tell me the story?” said the VW.

I guess I’d known all along that I would tell him. How could I not? After all, this was a Clipboard Meeting, where everything was true. And why shouldn’t the VW know what happened to his grandfather?

“Listen,” I said. I took a breath and let it out. Then I pointed to the spot where the wide smile was smiling. “I told you that my father and I met here every Sunday?”

“Yeah. You said that already.”

“Well on this particular Sunday,” I said, “I was late.” I started telling the VW about that day—about the table where we sat, the Tree’s attack and the hijacking. I described what happened when I arrived, what I saw and what I was told by the Dogs. I told him every theory I’d heard, every note I’d sent.

What I’m saying is, I conveyed the power’s first chapter as best as I could using the imperfect and dilapidated vehicle of narrative.

As soon as I’d finished, though, I realized I’d made a mistake. I read the VW’s face: It was too much, too soon. He was only a few months old! His engine was racing and his eyes were flickering. When he finally spoke, he did so with a quiet intensity. “How long ago did this happen?”

I had to think about it—sometimes money slipped through my ears.
“Two months ago,” I said.

“And I was born right afterwards?”

I nodded. “Just a few days.”

The VW looked out the window. “You must miss him.”

“I do,” I said.

“Does it make you cry?”

“The missing? When I can’t meet it, sure,” I said.

The VW didn’t say anything—neither of us did. We just sat there in the empty lot, watching the face assemble itself.

•  •  •

The silence was everest. Then the VW said, “Where is he right now?”

“Who?”

“Your Dad. Is he with the Tree?”

“I told you,” I said, sanding down the edges of my words. “Before the Tree stole the farm he—split him in two. He’s dead.”

“He’s dead?”

“The Tree killed him.”

“Wait. That can’t be right,” the VW said.

“No, it is.”

The VW furrowed his brow. Then he said, “But it’s
your
story.”

“It’s not my story—it’s the
only
story.”

“But can’t you just change it so—”

“What do you mean, change it?” I said.

“Change it.”

“Look,” I said. “See that face?” I pointed across the parking lot, to the expression-in-the-making.

“Yes,” said the VW.

“This just
isn’t
Atkin’s Farm anymore,” I said.

“But—”

“It’s a face, whether or not I want it to be.”

“But Dad, wait a second. Think about your options here. If you just try—”

“Try what?” I said. “Try
what
?”

“Try feeding me a different story—one that ends
well
for a change?”

I laughed.

“What’s funny?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

“No, what is it?” said the VW.

I turned to face him. “Kiddo,” I said, “these are the only stories I know.”

Here we go!

• At least two free Sundays
  
• One coil of memorywire
  
• A reading-speed meter
  
• Skip-awareness
  
• A peaceful set of pliers
  

As I’ve said, driving a Beetle is an act of
reading:
You are seeing a story (the road) and you are responding (
narrative pedal, scene clutch, pagewheel
). If you’re doing it right,
you
are determining your speed, direction and attitude. Your job is to mind the rules of the road (the
signs
), and to stay clear as to where you are and where you hope to get to.

In some ways, driving the Volkswagen is not so different from driving a VeggieCar. As always, you’re pursuing sound—only moreso in
the Beetle. The controls in the VW are mostly the same, too, save for some dashboard gauges and the pedals at your feet. Most modern-day VeggieCars have eight petals, but the Volkswagen has nineteen: six for motion, two for shifting, one for chai, one for connecting, one for marginalia and mountains, two for mothersides and one for letting go. The sequence is not always the same from Volkswagen to Volkswagen, but there should be a chart underneath the dashboard that tells you which pedal is which. And if you lose it or can’t see it, you can either ask your Beetle or make a chart by following each pedal-cable to its source.

The steering controls are pretty self-explanatory, as there are only a few directions to choose from: Turn the page to the right to move forward, to the left to move backwards. Notice, too, the switch for the eyelights to the left.

If you’re used to driving VeggieCars, you might expect your dashboard to tell you about cropping, rot rate, nutrient levels and so forth. But the VW’s dash is different. It’s made from the wood of old trees, first, with needle- and text-gauges carved into the wood.

The standard Volkswagen dashboard layout starts, at the farmost left of the car, with a measurement for
Read Speed (R/S)
—how fast you’re moving forward. If you go too slow you risk stopping altogether or causing an accident with another driver. Going too fast, though, you risk injury and death. Ten thousand people die each year from driving too fast. I’ve had several accidents, and those experiences have convinced me that we
all
drive too fast. If we all read as if we were strapped to the front cover of our book, we’d be mindful of other readers and probably save a lot of lives. So I am saying, watch that R/S Gauge carefully.

Next to the R/S Gauge is the
WMM
—the
Western Massachusetts Meter
. In essence, this gauge measures friction (right—
friction
!)—the particular friction of that moment and the half mile or so ahead. How vivid is western Massachusetts at the moment, and what side is it showing you? It could be anything: a vending machine crossing the road; a bathtub opening its mouth and showing you the virus in its throatpipes. And keep in mind that the gauge is not specific—that it will tell you how clear the image is, but not
what
it is. Nevertheless, it’s very useful on the
road. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the gauge hit a red four as we came around a corner, and how glad I was that I hit the breaks when I did.

Gauges Three, Seven, Eight, Thirteen, Fourteen and Nineteen
, from left to right, show you the book of power
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive
, the stories within stories, what is dead and what is living and where we are at any given time. Note that each of these gauges lists a separate trajectory. Want to know where we are geographically? Take a look at Gauge Fourteen: It should say “Northampton.” How much do we know about the VW? Check Gauge Seven!

Occasionally, these gauges need to be reset—you’ll know it’s time when they start telling you that you know more or less than you actually do, that you’re in Athens when you’re really in Northampton, that someone is ill when they’re not. Hopefully, convincing the dashboard out and pressing the reset buttons—small memory-coiled flushes—will do the trick. If not, the problem is not the gauge but something else: the cable, the floater, the sensor itself.

Chai levels are reported on
Gauges Four and Six
. If you get too low, you have no choice but to turn around, wherever you are, and head back to the Haymarket.

Gauge Five
measures your relationship to One Side of Your Mother, while
Gauge Seventeen
measures that to the Other Side of Your Mother.

Gauges Nine through Twelve
tell you about the various fuels in the car—the stories in front of us and those we’ve already burned, the amount of stories filed away in the front trunk, the approximate mileage each page will get you. Note that these gauges
do not
measure the layers of skin, stress levels, or bone density of stories—they don’t tell you what we’re holding onto, what we’ve let go of, what we believe and what we can no longer accept, what our hopes are or where (in what town, with which character) our sympathies lie. For that information, refer to
Gauges Fifteen and Sixteen
.

Gauge Eighteen
is the
Castaway Meter
. This tells you exactly how far in centimeters you are from the Castaway Lounge—the distance between you and those naked, dancing plots. Some models of the Volkswagen
Beetle include a compass to direct you back there, but mine does not.

Right now? Only a few miles! Nude beliefs, here we come!

Love
is measured in
Gauge Twenty
—specifically, love pressure (LP) in the surrounding area. It’s normal for the gauge to read anywhere from ten to twenty percent. If it drops below four percent, though, you may have trouble—the VW may get sad, slow down or even stop altogether. If this occurs, you have to immediately find/write a story that somehow convinces him that there is more love, caring or compassion in the area than he thinks there is. I can’t tell you how many times this has been a problem for us—how many trips were interrupted because I had to head into the nearest populated town to see if we could find some examples of kindness. Sometimes it just wasn’t there for us to find, and in those cases I’d have to sit down and try to write something—type into the book of power, print out the sheet, feed it manually. I don’t think that approach ever actually yielded more LP, but I just couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Once you know the basics (how to accelerate, stop, steer) you can really go anywhere you want to: backwards, forwards, to one side or another. It’s important to remember, though, that you’re not the only car on the road, and that everyone around you—the other drivers, houses and businesses, streets and gutters, western Massachusetts itself!—needs to know which direction you’re heading. Are you vaulting back into what was? Turning to one future or another? Taking Memorial Drive? You can avoid costly book-benders and collisions by signaling your intent.

The good news, though, is that signaling is easy: Just hold out your left arm and point it skywards if you’re reading to the right, or straight out to the left if you’re reading to the left.

Let’s try it. First, decide which way you intend to read.

Now, signal with your left arm.

Raise your arm higher—I can barely see it.

Yes! Now I know: You’re reading to the right.

Remember, too, that you’re not the only one out there sending signals. Everyone and everything that you see is maintaining an image of some sort, some picture of themselves purveyed. Signaling, then, is not just choosing any old direction—it’s every message you send. It’s how you walk and how you look, and it’s choosing a
face
—the face of a quiet reader, the face of an angry son, the face of the Longmeadow Dump. Be mindful of the signal that you’re sending, and don’t be afraid to let it change as you change. It is meaningful to meet a tunnel, fall in love with it, take it home and faith. But remember that the tunnel—like you, like me—is actually a signal for something else. You might go to bed entrenched and wake up to a broom or a puddle of water.