How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (22 page)

For a few minutes after that I heard the sounds of construction from the VW’s room—the revving of engines, the whining of a saw. Then the noise stopped, and the apartment was completely quiet.

That morning, I woke up early and booked for a while. I’d collected a few Northamptons over the past weeks, as the bookstore bridge had suggested, but fitting them into the book was another matter—I often had to bend the stories, or break them and reshape them. I began that particular day by taking out the ogeltree to clean it, but then I snapped a piece of the plastic by mistake. I called around and found a place that had one—Amherst Typewriter—and then I knocked on the VW’s door. It was only eight in the morning, so I assumed that he was still asleep. “Storytime, VW,” I said.

The VW often slept late, and sometimes slept through the day if he was sick, but he usually mumbled something—a custom-made, a u-turn-term—when I woke him up. That morning, though, he didn’t say anything.

“Kiddo,” I said, “we need to get to Amherst—I need an ogeltree for the book. Can we leave in ten minutes?”

Again, no answer.

“Hey.” I knocked again. “Ten minutes, OK?”

I put my ear to the door. “VW?” I didn’t hear anything. “You’re worrying me—are you OK?”

He wasn’t answering.

“I’m going to open this door now, alright? VW? I’m opening the door.”

I opened the door into a plume of engine parts, books, tools, maps.

But there was no VW. The VW was gone.

Your Volkswagen will lead you through multiple versions—this version and others as well. Don’t read this as a malfunction—this is how Volkswagen Beetles (and/or books about Volkswagen Beetles—Muir’s, mine, or anyone else’s) work! They move, they shift, they change.

Sometimes, though, one of the transmissions can
un
shift. You can lose ground. You shouldn’t worry if your VW shifts or revises, but you should
absolutely
worry if the car stops shifting, or if the version stays constant. If that happens, something is wrong.

In the event of an unshift, open up the engine compartment and remove the
control unit
. Then, take out the
momentpump
. Underneath it you’ll see a middle
transmission
, encased completely in glass. Some Beetle owners describe the transmission as taco-like—I’ve heard others say it looks like a bird in a glass coffin. Like I say, every car is different. Plus, the transmission is still a sort of mystery-vision for me—I know that it connects to the engineheart (where stories are bred), for example, but I can’t say how. All I can tell you is that the transmission connects the story to the reader, and thus, that it’s an integral part of the car.

If the transmission is unshifting, you may have a storylinkage problem, in which case something is keeping the story from moving forward. To investigate this, undo the sufferbolts around the edges of the glass casing and take a look inside. You’ll see a series of interlocking narratives. Is there any schmutz between them, any wrinkle or disconnect that you can see?

Once, my car’s transmission was malfunctioning because of a piece of storyfuzz, and as soon as I removed it the car ran like an awning. Usually, though, I’m not so lucky—it’s more likely that you’ll open the casing
and find a narrative deteethed or twisted, in which case you’ll need to order a replacement for it.

If you want to drive the car in the meantime, you’re going to have to shift it yourself—to push the story forward manually.

Let’s say, for example, that the story is:

Your son is a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle who has disobeyed you and left the house on his own. When you open the door to his room you find the
afterstory:
condensers, scraps of tin and steel, diagrams, translators, pages of verbs in various languages. These words are the first things you see, depaged and collected in a shoebox by the door. You pick up the box and look through the words: “mlape,” “svesket,” “marchon,” “balinquoo,” “quandary.” There’s not one term you recognize.

You step into the room and see strange engine components, some books about aerodynamics, a notebook full of sketches, charts and diagrams on the wall. You scan one of these charts, which appears to denote topographical musical notation. Another drawing, which is taped above the VW’s worktable, appears to be a hand-drawn map. You study the jagged, intersecting lines. That crooked trail there appears to be a river, but which river?

Then you study the volksenscratch notes—here he’s written the number two, and there the number five, and—

No.

Suddenly you see: This is a drawing of Route 91, from Northampton to Greenfield.

The Volkswagen has gone after the Heart Attack Tree.

That explains the maps, the engineering books, the projects. He wasn’t working on a
birthday present
, but the very opposite—an unpresent, the gift that keeps on taking away.

Understand that your Volkswagen has no concept of the highwaysong—what the tune is, how to hear it or steer it. He won’t even know if he’s in the verse or the chorus. And he’s sick—he’s very, very sick.

He won’t make it to
Deerfield
.

And you, suddenly sans car, have no way to catch up with him. The narrative has unshifted.

Were that the case, you might shift the story manually, like this:

First Gear: The Volkswagen is your responsibility. This is
your
fault, and no one else’s.

Second Gear: He will die in the sound if you don’t find him.

Third Gear: What are you waiting for? There is not a second of time-of-money to waste.

Fourth Gear: Go! Go now.

I grabbed the heavy power-in-pieces and ran out the door, down the hill to Prospect Street, over to King Street and towards the entrance to 91. In twenty minutes I was sprinting up the on-ramp, my mind a needle. Before I reached the top of the ramp, even, I could see the flush of vehicles—Veggies, bioleggers, riffs and phrases, traveling vests and fences, etcetera. The choruslanes were jammed; vehicles switched aggressively from one staff to the next and some even jumped over the driver in front of them. Up ahead, I saw a biolegger elbow a fence on its way past, and the fence spin onto the median.

It began to rain. I put my hands over my ears—the drops of sound were
deafening
.

I stuck out my thumb and began running along the breakdown lane. I was crying and waving for help, but no one would stop—VeggieCars and bio’s shrilled past me, yelling insults out the window. “Get off the road, you crazy
vosk
,” shouted a woman in a carcoat, and then a shower on bio’s viced “Don’t you know the storysong is only a
metaphor
?”

“For what?” I shouted back. She couldn’t hear me, so the question ran along beside me. And it was just one of several: Did I really think I could catch the VW? That I would find my father this way? And which direction was I going, anyway—towards the past, or fast-forward towards a future?

Yes. Yes to every question. I was running towards my family, towards life. I believed—I still believe—that his heart was still beating. That
my
heart was still beating. That
your
heart is still beating.

•  •  •

I’d been sprinting along the highwaysong for about ten minutes when I suddenly saw a blue 1971 Volkswagen Beetle driving in the other direction. I stopped running and tried to flag it down. Thank god! “VW!” I shouted.

But the car was driving ethereally fast, and when it sped past me I saw that it was
brand new
—the notes bounced off of its shiny blue paint. This car wasn’t my son. I stopped waving to it, and watched it disappear around the bend of the previous verse.

As I was standing there a jazzy, syncopated riff approached and pulled over. Inside was a trio of instruments—a piano in the front seat, a bass and drums in the back.

I was drenched by the musical rain, and I’d been weeping and mumbling so I’m sure my face was red and swollen. When the piano rolled down the film, he read my face and said, “Need a ride?”

I got into the riff. “Noisy night, huh?” the piano said, steering us back into traffic.

“Did you just come from Springfield?” I said.

“Hartford,” said the bass fiddle.

“You didn’t see a Volkswagen driving in the other direction, did you?”

“A what?” the drum set said. His voice was smoky and cracked.

“A Volkswagen,” I said. “It’s a kind of car. They’re sort of round? This one’s blue.”

“Jesus,” the drums said. “I’ve never even heard that
word
before.”

“I think I might have seen one of those as a kid, in a museum somewhere,” said the piano.

“Is that why you’re out here?” said the bass. “Did you lose your car?”

“My son, yes,” I said.

The bass asked, “Is he traveling south?”

“I don’t think so—I think he’s going north, towards Greenfield,” I said. “But I’m not sure—he left home this morning and didn’t tell me where he was going.”

“He ran away?” the piano said, furrowing his wooden brow.

“It’s a long story—a whole novel, actually, and this is the wrong version. He left to follow—to track—a farm.”

“A
farm
?” the piano said.

I nodded. “And I
forbade
him from traveling on ninety-one. Who can navigate with all this
noise
?”

“Tell me about it,” the drums said. “We weren’t even supposed to have come this far—numb notes missed our exit a few miles back.”

“Numb-notes,” the bass said, smiling dumbly.

Then the drums leaned forward—I could feel him studying me. “What’s that?” he said.

I looked back at him.

“That,” he said, pointing.

“It’s a power,” I said.

“A power?”

“—book,” I said. “I call it
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.
”

The piano shook his head and hunched over the riff’s steering wheel. “It’s pretty dischordant out here,” he said.

“What’s it do?” the drums said.

“Oh,” I said. I looked down at the book. “I don’t know. I always carry it with me. It holds stories.”

“Does it project them, or—”

I shook my head.

“Does it do calculations or solve problems?” the drums asked.

“No—it just stores the experience.”

“Converted?”

“No, raw,” I said. I looked down at the book. “So it doesn’t
do
much of anything, I guess.”

The drums looked at the book with disdain.

“Sturdy,” I said quietly.

“I’m sorry?” said the piano.

This book was a true friend—I wasn’t going to be embarrassed about what it did and didn’t do.

“That’s the other thing about this book,” I told the drums. “It’s sturdy.”

But no one told me this when I was raising my son, when he was sick, when I was working frantically to heal his skincrust, fix his failing memory, his weak axles and wheels. I didn’t know about Jaws or the dump until later—at first I was ordering all of my parts new, which cost me
hundreds of years
! Finally, when the VW was two and a half and sick as a forest, I clutch-cabled. I’d lost my job at the newspaper and wasn’t making an income from my father’s house, and I’d already sold everything I had of value: my banjo, my mountain bike, a few pieces of history that I wasn’t using anymore (I sold all of my experiences with the Lady from the Land of the Beans one Sunday for an hour and a half, and a thief projector scene-talked me into selling the Cape Cod Wedding—fast dancing with the Other Side of My Mother—for a measly forty minutes.)

I had to do
something
—the storypumps were no longer accepting my promises of false future-time—so I walked downtown one afternoon and went into the store called Faces. I told the VW that he could look around as long as he stayed close, and I went to the counter and spoke to an old kiosk with a beard. I told him that I wanted to sell my name, and he laid it out on the glass counter. I remember how much he liked it, how his eyes lit up as he ran his hands across it.

I remember asking him, “If I do sell it to you, can I get it back?”

He grimaced. “Hard to say. Some of these names sell the same day,” he said. “Others we can’t
give
away. Tricky business, naming.”

“This is only temporary,” I told him. “Within a few weeks I should be finished with my new power, a road called—”

“Boy—what a
name
,” he said. He wasn’t listening.

“Anyway, I should be able to sell that route for a hundred-fifty, two hundred years,” I said. “And then I’ll be back for this.”

Just then the VW spit up. I heard him retch and turned around to see him standing by a face-adjustment booth, his eyes receding in embarrassment. I went over and picked him up. “What happened, buddy?”

“I think I threw up,” he said.

I looked into the oil and its images, spreading out on the carpet. “You OK now?”

“I’m tired,” he said.

“OK. Just a few more minutes, alright?”

He nodded.

I went back to the counter. The kiosk was still studying the name—turning it over and over in his hands. “It’s long, so that might keep people away. But who can tell? It really depends on what people are looking for. I can’t make any promises,” he said.

I nodded sadly. “I certainly understand the impossibility of promises,” I said.

The kiosk paid me twenty-two hours, and then he took my name off the table and put it in the glass case. I remember looking through the glass and seeing it there, the sudden pang in my chest.

This was my
name
—my father’s name, Old Forever’s too!

“I’ll be back soon,” I told him.

That was so long ago. For years I castawayed and faithed, believing that someday I would save enough hours to go back into that story and slap my time on the table. “When they give me my name back?” I used to say, “I’m going to wear it like a Saturday.”