Waiting for the Man (18 page)

The Ghost Inside

The hills gave way to ground as level as a bowling alley. The sun came up behind us, just as the surprisingly excessive sprawl around Columbus gave way to farms and small towns and industry. We hit Indiana and the highway became a straight needle through its heart. The line of cars behind the bus grew as the sun rose higher. At every exit cars got in line and got out, too. There were obviously those in each community who wanted a part of me, of the event, and so they drove to the next exit before returning home with a story to tell. On overpasses, crowds gathered, some holding signs, encouraging me. There was something communal about it.

And still no Man. I was happy for Takeshi’s presence. In many ways. But I was still driving blind. The Man had been with me for so long. Inside of me. And now, just as quickly and suddenly as he had appeared, he was gone. And if he was gone, why was I still driving? What compelled me forward? I had no desire to stop.

We drove through Indianapolis. Takeshi wanted to see the Speedway. I told him if he wanted to he could get out and find a ride with someone else and he seemed unwilling to do this. “No stopping, OK,” he said quietly. “No exit.” He continued to beg me to let him drive and I wasn’t willing to do this either. The act of driving was important to me. It kept me focused. It gave me a sense of control.

The cornfields of Indiana buzzed with crop dusters and huge circular sprinklers and I thought that we take better care of our food than we do ourselves. There was very little else to see. Or that I noticed. We see what we want. And there was nothing I wanted to see here. Unless I was told to. The flattened earth was all around us, the farms that fed the nation, and I found the lack of distraction a great comfort, as if the road had been made tedious to light the path to my destination, like the little blue beacons that light airport runways at night.

“Are you hungry?” Takeshi asked.

“Not at all,” I said. “I should be.”

“You need food,” he said. “You need strength.”

“Just having the cooler is comforting,” I said.

Takeshi looked toward the back of the van. “But you don’t eat,” he said.

And this was true. It was as if my body had stopped functioning properly. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

Takeshi nodded. I pulled into the next service station on the road, just outside Terre Haute, and parked in another lot and for a moment I thought we were back in Ohio. The parking lot was a gallery of cars bearing the license plates of travelers and tourists. The trucks at the end of the lot belched fumes and farts. Trucks pulled in and out, station wagons, minivans, buses, RVs. Families and seniors, young couples, inordinately large truck drivers, small children delighting in the purchase of another Happy Meal. This is why we have such fond memories of family vacations: the endless supply of fast food, meals as candy every day, the joy of eating things our parents don’t normally encourage us to eat. And eating them all the time.

The media bus had to park in another section of the lot with the other buses. I lost sight of it as it turned the corner and disappeared behind the McDonald’s and I felt a smile creep across my lips. I had the notion of leaving immediately but then Takeshi got out of the Odyssey and raced toward his date with a Big Mac. And then the notion hit me again.

I couldn’t do it and didn’t. I would have felt lost. Or more lost. I waited for him. I should be in there, too, I thought. I could not recall the last time I felt hungry. I opened the back of the Odyssey and looked inside the cooler and took a bottle of Tropicana. I forced myself to drink it. The juice tasted rancid. I bit into a Pepperidge Farm cookie. It was the texture of sawdust. And then I looked into the cooler again and the thought of food made me ill. I felt nausea cling to me like plastic wrap. I needed to purge myself. Sooner than what would be comfortable. I ran to the washroom to see what I would bring up.

I found an empty stall. I closed the door and found a foul shit-laced toilet. Piss surrounded the bowl and I raised my shoes to see that I was standing in vile brownish water. And then I threw up. I just opened my mouth and out it came, the memories of pasta and calzone, the fried chicken eaten out of pink and lime green Tupperware, the hot dogs, the Cokes, the stale coffee Dan bought me in the mornings. I threw up more than I knew I had in my body and I threw up some more. I threw up the days and weeks of sitting on my front steps, the groupies and crowds, the priests and rabbis, the photographers, the reporters, the helicopters hovering overhead, where sleep became impossible and I feared I’d lost the Man. I threw up the hills of New Jersey, the mountains of Pennsylvania, the farms of Ohio, Dan’s cell phone, the black bus. I threw up Dan. I leaned back against the door, light-headed to the point of dizziness. I had trouble breathing. Spittle hung from my chin and stretched back toward the awful liquid on the floor. I felt empty, a shell. I felt like crying.

Someone knocked on my door. “You all right in there, son?” a deep Southern accented voice asked.

I realized where I was. “I’m fine,” I stammered between breaths.

“You sure now?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you for asking.”

The washroom was silent. Everyone had obviously heard me throw up. “I’m all right,” I announced. “Everything’s OK.” I paused to catch my breath. “Honest.”

And slowly the sounds of the washroom returned. Flies being undone and redone, streams of piss hitting porcelain, taps being turned, hands being washed and dried under the mechanical hot air, farts, heavy turds hitting the water, sighs of gratitude.

I wiped my chin, extricated my feet, flushed, and opened the door. The men in the room granted me a wide berth. I walked to a sink and turned on the taps and cupped my hands in the cool water. I splashed the water on my face and put some of it in my mouth. I rinsed my mouth. I did it again. My mouth tasted of metal and I could not wash the taste out. I wiped my face with a paper towel and studied my reflection in the mirror. There were bags under my eyes but otherwise I looked the same. What’s going on inside, I asked myself. I dried my hands under the blower. I exhaled, trying to release the stench of decay, but I could not. I needed some gum. Maybe brush my teeth.

I walked into the lobby of the service station. The media were waiting for me. A multitude of cameras and microphones and digital recorders were pointed in my direction. Fuzzy boom mics hovered like blow-dried vultures above my head. A crowd had gathered around the reporters, curious, overjoyed by this sudden and surprising vacation event in the middle of Indiana. A wall of noise greeted me, the questions being hurled all at once, enough to make it seem as if I were being attacked. A deadly clamor. Why now? I thought. The reporters had been so civil to this point. I looked for Dan and Takeshi but could not find them. The questions kept coming. I shielded my eyes from the glare of the cameras. I thought about retreating to the washroom but already there were people between me and the door. I felt helpless. I raised my arms to plead for calm. I yelled for Dan. I closed my eyes.

Strength
, the Man said.

I opened my eyes, surprised, bewildered. I looked around and there he was, with the reporters. Smiling. A toothpick in his mouth. The reporters and vacationers and cameramen and the sound technicians went silent. I could hear the beating of my heart.

I smiled.

Slowly, the noise grew back into a roar. Dan pushed some reporters aside and appeared, self-important, like an explorer successfully conquering the jungles of Africa, and made his way toward me. I had questions, too, but not for the reporters. The Man stood there. He drank a Coke. “I need some gum,” I told Dan. He reached into his pocket and handed me a pack of Trident.

He raised his arms. The crowds were silenced. I felt grateful, finally, genuinely grateful for Dan. “Let’s do this in an orderly fashion,” he insisted. “This wasn’t in the plan. So do it properly or you get nothing.” He looked at me for approval and I nodded.

“This is your turf,” I told him.

He stepped away from me. He pointed to someone I could not see and this person asked, “Is it true you were just sick in the washroom?”

I was stunned by the immediacy of the question. By the speed of the transmission of this news, by the poisonous feeling from the stall, and now, I realized, it would be on the news. I shouldn’t have been surprised and wondered if I was surprised by my own sense of surprise in the first place. I could still taste the bile. I popped a piece of gum into my mouth. And then I popped another one.

Dan looked at me sympathetically. “Go on,” he said. “I’m afraid we have to do this.”

I cleared my throat. The Man had asked for strength. I looked at him and he raised his Coke and winked. “Yes,” I replied. “I was sick. I threw up. I feel a lot better now. We had a purging.” I paused. “I upchucked. But I’m ready to hit the road.”

Laughter. The boom above my head inched closer. Dan pointed to another reporter. “Will you have to abandon your journey?” was the question.

“No,” I said. “Not for something like this.”

Dan pointed to someone else. “This is a two part question,” the faceless reporter said, another male voice, and it suddenly hit me that Angie was the only woman on the bus. “Did you just hear the Man’s voice? You seemed to have a moment there. And if so, what did he say?”

“I did hear the Man,” I confirmed. A buzz came up from the crowd. “I haven’t heard from him in a while and I was getting nervous. But I heard from him. Just now. And I’m not telling you what he said.”

Dan laughed. He laughed at the presidential nature of the whole affair, I think. He pointed to another reporter. “Where is this heading?” a high-pitched voice asked.

I shrugged. I didn’t know. We were holding a press conference outside a service station washroom in Indiana! The question was stupid and I fought a deep urge to say so. “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

The reporters laughed again, though I noticed some of them checking their watches, worried, never having intended to participate in an open-ended news story. “If he knew, you’d have received a detailed itinerary,” Dan said to more laughter.

“Maybe T-shirts at least,” I added.

The laughter died down. The press wanted something tangible to justify their continued presence. They wanted to know they were riding the black bus for a reason. They wanted to know their stories would air that night, get printed in tomorrow’s papers. They wanted to know the years of journalism school weren’t completely in vain. “I’m just going,” I said. “I don’t know where. Obviously. But I’ll drive into the Pacific Ocean if that’s what’s expected of me. Right now I’m driving west, like I was told to. And until he instructs me otherwise, I’ll keep going. I’m sorry to have to put you through this. Honestly, I am. I’m sure all of you have something better to do, families to go home to. But none of this was planned. None of it.”

Dan was beaming. Every time I cooperated, it was a complete surprise to him. A sign that the world works sometimes. He put his hand gently on my back. He was orchestrating a news conference. He pointed to another reporter. “I’d just like to get back to your recent bout with nausea?” a flat Midwestern-tinged accent said. “Are you worried that perhaps your food supply’s going bad?”

I smiled. Though my mouth still tasted of my insides, I could feel the lights coming on in the world. I saw Takeshi standing anonymously, lost amidst the forest of media, and I found it funny, silly, but in a good way, in a stupid harmless way. For the first time since the journey began, I felt maybe I was enjoying myself. I must have thrown up a lot of the anger I had been feeling. Or perhaps I was just light-headed from the lack of food. “I love your accent,” I told the reporter. “I’ve always liked the way Midwesterners talk.” I didn’t even know if this was true but I said it.

That’s good
, the Man said.
Now keep going
. And I took that to mean to keep going west.

Dan exploded. He broke into a great, big laugh and the media joined in. Some of the public broke into applause, strangely, and the cameras recorded the event, this love-in, the point where the entire ordeal ceased to be a chore. “It’s a good thing we’re in Indiana!” Dan bellowed. The Man disappeared. He was gone again. But he was here. With me. And that was good enough.

I made my way through the crowd and found Takeshi. “I could use a smoke,” I whispered in his ear.

We left the building and walked through the parking lot to the Odyssey. “You’re some rock star!” Takeshi said, finally, perhaps fully understanding the circus of my existence and appreciating his newfound surroundings, the story he was going to tell his friends back home getting better and better.

“Let’s take a picture,” I said.

Takeshi opened the door and searched through his backpack and produced his camera. He placed the camera on the roof of the minivan. He craned his neck to look into the display. “Self-timer!” he said, barely controlling his enthusiasm.

“Why haven’t we been doing more of this?” I asked.

“I thought maybe you didn’t want pictures,” he said.

“You’re right,” I said. “But this is your vacation. Take all the photos you want.”

“I have cigarettes, too,” he announced. He pressed a button and ran toward me. He put his arm around me. “Say something funny!” he ordered.

“Mozzarella!” I shouted.

Takeshi hunched over with laughter. The camera took the photo.

“Mozzarella!” He screamed. I wasn’t sure he knew what mozzarella was and it didn’t matter. Things had taken a turn. I could feel it. The Man had delivered a one-word message that was enough to let me know he was still watching. It was all I needed.

We got into the minivan. Takeshi fished a pack of cigarettes out of his backpack and threw one to me. He lit mine with a heavy silver lighter decorated with a picture of John Wayne. “I bought this in Arizona,” he said.

I took a deep drag. I was energized, again, and figured I really could drive into the ocean, that I could do anything that was asked because I was starting to think everything meant something, even though I didn’t know what it was. Not yet. And I guess that is why I was doing what I was doing. To figure things out. To understand. To go someplace perhaps I was meant to go. To see things. To find an answer to a question I hadn’t known to ask. To look around at things and think, finally, Hey, that makes perfect sense.