Waiting for the Man (19 page)

STAY WHERE YOU ARE

Athena has summoned the PR person. She wants us to meet. I protest this plan. I’m not ready. I don’t possess the knowledge that can drive intelligent conversation. Not yet. “Then don’t,” Athena says. “Just meet her. She’s nice.”

“Why now? Why not give me a little more time?”

“Just a little chat. Your work will affect hers.”

“Not any time soon.”

“Next week,” Athena says. “She’s coming up for two days.”

The meeting. At the agency, I’d flown across the country for a two-hour meeting. Eight hours in the air for two hours’ face time. The need to meet face to face, given the technology that surrounds us, given the speed with which we can communicate, is testament to something resilient, to some primal need we share. The video conference will never become the go-to. The images that travel thousands of miles, by satellite, in cables, constantly hovering above us, have yet to overcome the power of a simple handshake. Chat has yet to replace the conversation. Social media has nothing on lunch. Our need to see someone, up close, to read their gestures, their facial ticks, remains. The idea of the meeting hasn’t changed in thousands of years. It is why young girls will still scream at the sight of their heartthrob. Athena wants us to meet in person, which is the simple fact that all the hypemasters forgot when promoting video conferencing. You watch science fiction, with its vision of the future, of utopia, of dystopia, and people still sit around tables discussing things, making plans, shaking hands. Touching. Our technology has done much, but it has yet to replace human touch. Even a sour economy hasn’t completely killed the face to face. “This makes it serious,” I say.

Athena dismisses me. “You should just meet,” she says.

“This place is full,” I say. “No vacancy. Even with the world’s problems. If the Big K Ranch and Spa had a neon sign out front, some of the letters would have burned out by now. You’ve had a great summer as far as I can tell.”

Athena leans back in her chair. “Why are you so worried?”

I’m not worried. I’m simply unprepared. I have nothing to say to this person. She seems to be doing her job. “I’m not,” I say.

“Good,” Athena says. “She’s nice. You’ll like her.”

I am worried. I’m worried about meeting PR people. Their job is to tell people things. They can only keep secrets for so long. I can imagine how much indiscretion a PR person from L.A. can muster.

And then I’m thinking about how I haven’t considered Dan’s next move. I don’t know if he has one. But the more people I meet, the greater the chance of my past returning, right here, to this place. This sanctuary.

“Do I need to prepare anything?” I ask.

“That’s very professional of you.” Athena laughs.

Later that evening, after a staff dinner of mac ’n’ cheese with a side of creamed spinach and bison sausages, back in my room in the trailer, the background awash in the noise of the employees’ nocturnal bacchanalia, I think of the map I’ve created, the psychogeography of my days. I have composed simple emails to my parents, imploring them to stay silent, to not let anyone know I was fine, doing well, happy even. I promised them more detail soon, at a time when I was sure I was safe from scrutiny. I could not press send. I don’t know when that time will come. I don’t even bother with the fake addresses anymore.

This place is not a sanctuary. Simply an odd career choice.

Our choices are made for many reasons, few of them conscious. And all of our choices take us somewhere, inevitably, as they must. Choices create their own momentum. Their own trajectories.

I’m agitated. For whatever reason. I head out and walk to the employee lounge. I order a beer and a shot of whiskey. I down the whiskey and I order another. I down it and order another. The bartender gives me a look. “Just do it,” I tell him. He shrugs and pours the shot. I tilt my head back and down it. I take a long, thirsty gulp of my beer.

“You OK?” the bartender asks.

I nod. I feel out of breath, the whiskey burning my throat. I put my head in my hands and try to breathe normally. In this place, under the large, impossibly eternal sky, the world suddenly feels small. Again. I take my beer and shuffle off to a table in the corner of the room.

I’m feeling, what, paranoid? Is that possible? Of what? I am in a situation that is surprising, surely, but pleasant. The meandering course of my life, its strange trajectory, finding myself here. And now I have an actual job. At a luxury guest ranch with a ridiculous name. In northern Montana. There is nothing wrong with the picture.

Never assume you know how your life will turn out.

Without assumptions, disappointments can’t haunt you. Everything is a surprise.

There’s a lot to be said for mystery.

I finish my beer. “Another one, please!”

“Come and get it,” the bartender says. “I’m not your fuckin’ waiter!”

I take my empty glass to the bar and pick up a full mug. “Sorry,” I mutter. Now that I’m management, my interactions have become complicated, bound by codes I never meant to write.

I return to my seat. I start to laugh. My life
is
funny. It has been. If I can’t see the humor in it, if I don’t see its arc as nothing less than funny, what am I left with? I take a big gulp of my beer. I’m a branding consultant for a high-end guest ranch in northern Montana. It’s the punch line to a convoluted joke.

Or the beginning of the rest of my life.

Goin’ Out West

We entered Illinois and I felt, for the first time, West. Growing up, this is where I figured the West began, when I thought of the West at all. Terms such as Midwest didn’t enter my vocabulary until much later. All Midwest ever said to me was not east. The east stopped a few miles from the coast, somewhere in New Jersey. Everything between where I grew up and the Pacific was something else.

The flatness of the land was like a plate. And it didn’t stop. Miles and miles of farmland surrounded us and on it, we saw farmers working, driving plows and combines and tractors, we saw the land being irrigated and sprayed and tilled. It was being worked. I needed to see these things to know that outside the Odyssey the world continued, people had jobs, things to do, vegetables to grow. Farming is the first rung on the ladder of a functioning world. I needed these things because ever since the crowd grew around my front steps and the media made me into a news item, my life had become a kind of reality TV, a permanent webcast, a diversion from what the world was. I caught glimpses but I could never be sure that perhaps I was not the center of the world’s attention. Driving past the farms, seeing people live, I understood how easy it was to be fooled by your surroundings, how the presence of a few reporters made it easy to think the world cared about what you did, or that somehow your story, the story that the media claimed to be beaming to everyone, was nothing more than the story of someone living their life, and because it was different, it was news. I understood that the media had to make celebrities feel their fishbowl existences so that they knew they were special and worthy of the millions of dollars they commanded. That kind of money needs validation.

The farmers were going about feeding the world and no one much cared about them. Except at election time.

Every once in a while the Man sat in the backseat. This made me euphoric, and then he would disappear again. Sometimes, I would see him sleeping back there, or rummaging through the cooler. But he was there. Even when he wasn’t. He didn’t talk to me, not anymore. He wasn’t inside like he had been on the steps. But he was there. On the roof of the minivan for all I knew.

Takeshi was mesmerized by the endlessness of the fields, by the amount of food he had already seen and had continued to see. Something about the world was making sense to him, I thought, something very basic. The realities of the economics of the world were careening by his window. He took picture after picture. “You make food, we make cameras,” he said.

“We make food that feeds the people making movies with your cameras,” I said. “And then you watch the movies and become more and more American.”

“And you drive our cars,” he said. “Like this one.”

“And you eat our burgers,” I said. “I know from my job, you guys love American food.” I used to have a job.

“You watch your movies at home on our TVs,” he said. “You eat sushi. You eat ramen.”

“Movies by Sony,” I said. “On Sony TVs and DVD players and home theater systems.”

“It’s all connected,” he said.

The road was straight for the most part and we passed towns with silly names as we aimed for St. Louis. If my being in Illinois gave me some sense of being west, getting to St. Louis would be the confirmation. I remembered the Gateway Arch from watching the Mets play the Cardinals, the big white arch that looks like the canniest piece of product placement McDonald’s had ever placed, right by the Mississippi, the monument you had to pass, or at least see, to know you were west. The Mets would get smoked in the shadow of the Arch by Ozzie Smith, starting one more impossible double play, or later, by Mark McGwire clubbing another moonshot.

You see the Arch from a great distance because the land around it is so flat. It appeared on the horizon like a shining white hill until I noticed it was an arch and that I could see right through it. There’s something hallucinatory about it. Takeshi kept saying, “Cool.”

The cell phone rang, and it startled me. Dan hadn’t called me yet. I answered it. “The media want us to stop in St. Louis,” he said.

“I have no intention of stopping,” I told him, accelerating the Odyssey.

“Some of my colleagues want to get off,” he said.

“Good for them,” I replied. “They have real lives to lead.”

“If you don’t stop, the bus won’t,” Dan said in a tone that sounded like a threat.

“I’m not worried, Dan,” I said. “I can only stop when I need to.”

“Some of the national outlets have people waiting there. Replacements. There’s also some local media that are interested in interviewing you,” he said. “And the mayor’s office called. He’d like to see you, too.”

“You’re not giving me a good reason to stop,” I said. I had figured the press conference in Terre Haute would have been enough for a little while. I kept forgetting the incredible appetite of the media for news, for content, things to fill the channels we zoom by while sitting on our plush La-Z-Boys in darkened homes. We are insatiable, after all. We eat our Pringles and drink our Cokes and when it’s all gone we want more. The news guys know their careers are a distracted viewer away from the toilet. It’s a tough way to live.

“I’m a bit surprised,” Dan said. “I was under the impression things would be different.”

“Because of Terre Haute,” I said.

“And I thank you for that,” he said.

“I puked and the whole world knows about it,” I reminded him.

Dan laughed. “That was unfortunate,” he said. “But you’re OK now, right? That’s the most important thing.” He didn’t sound sincere.

“We’ll stop when I need gas,” I said. “I’m in a good mood for once. Don’t ruin it.”

Ahead of me, at a large interchange, I saw signs for Kansas City and I followed them. “Where are you going?” Dan asked.

“West,” I said, bored. How many times did I have to tell him this?

Dan was thinking. I could hear him think. Behind him, I could hear the voices of the media. Some sang “Kansas City.” I heard complaints about not stopping in St. Louis. “The Gateway Arch is supposed to be something,” he said. “You can go to the top, you know, in these noisy, archaic pods. I can’t believe they let people in them, but there you have it. I went a few years ago. It’s worth a stop.”

“We’re not tourists,” I told him.

“I’m not suggesting you are,” Dan said defensively.

“You’re thinking of a photo op,” I said. Dan was using my opening in Terre Haute to see how nice I could be. I may have felt better about things, but that didn’t mean I was feeling nice. “I’ll stop when I need gas,” I said, closing the door on him. I surprised myself with my tone, by how quickly I could take my feelings of peace and happiness for granted.

I hung up. Though I don’t think that’s what you do with a cell phone. The vocabulary can’t keep up with the technology. Did I turn it off? I pushed a button.

The land around us became wooded and we hit some hills. But the road was razor straight and that damned “Kansas City” song got caught up in my head. I had images of smoky honky-tonks and large cattle lots and the George Brett Pine Tar Incident.

We had long passed over the Mississippi and were now, officially, West. No one could deny this. The river cut the nation in two and I expected to see the Man on the side of the road with a sign. I expected to find him standing in the middle of the interstate, his hand up commanding the Odyssey to stop. Something dramatic. I tried to picture the meeting and I couldn’t because my expectations were so inflated as to render my imagination mute.

We entered a service station and it had just occurred to me that the perfect location for a service station was some anonymous nowhere people chose not to settle. I felt silly thinking this, realizing how long it had taken for me to figure this fact out. It was not a salient observation.

Takeshi was thrilled to see a McDonald’s and ran from the Odyssey as soon as I had parked it. I got out and waited for Dan to walk over and try to convince me of something else. The black bus rolled to a stop in that part of the parking lot reserved for large vehicles and Dan exited and ran toward me.

We’re not done, the Man said. And I looked for him but could not see him.

“We’re losing at least a quarter of the bus,” Dan said with alarm, his undone shirt flapping by his sides.

“You got a cigarette?” I asked. I had the urge to smoke constantly and was thinking of going inside the station to buy a pack.

Dan tossed a pack of Marlboro Lights my way. “We’re losing some very important media,” he said.

I held out my hand for a lighter and Dan reached into his pocket and gave me one. “Keep it,” he said. “Keep the cigarettes, too.”

I lit my cigarette and felt instantly, infinitely, better. “It was going to happen,” I said, exhaling. “You knew that. You can’t be that optimistic.”

Dan began to pace. He radiated an awesome nervous energy. He took another pack of Marlboro Lights out of his breast pocket and tapped out a cigarette. I lit it for him. He stopped pacing. “I’m not trying to be optimistic,” he said and he took another drag of his cigarette, “but what I’m worried about is coming this far and losing everything. There’s a story here and the people leaving now aren’t telling the whole thing.”

This was, in a different way, the same fear I had, a fear that was tempered by a kind of hope that felt boundless. Dan had nothing to hold back his fear. Everything he had perhaps feared before the journey was about to come true. “I’ll speak to them again,” I said. “I don’t care if they leave but I can’t stand your desperation.” I was angry at Dan for making me feel this way but his eyes were pools of loss, and he hit my sympathy button. He meant to do this, just as he had when he called me outside of St. Louis. Dan was too smart to chance anything. And like me, he was a guy a long way from home with nothing to show for it. “But no questions,” I said.

We walked to a small patch of grass next to the parking lot and I sat on a picnic bench. Takeshi found us and joined me. He opened a paper bag to produce a Big Mac, a large fries, and a Coke. Behind us, a map of Missouri with a convenient arrow pointed to our exact location made for nice visuals for the TV guys. Dan assembled the media. He told his colleagues not to expect the news conference to become regular but that he had requested I make a statement, now that we were beyond the Mississippi.

Dan stepped away. I looked into the tired, unscrubbed faces of the media and felt sorry for them. “You guys are a mess,” I said. Nothing. No reaction. They wanted me to provide the sound bite they needed to file their stories. I cleared my throat. Takeshi ground his face into his burger. “We’ve been on the road for a while now,” I started. And I realized that I had no idea how long it had been. Nights and days had lost their meaning for me. I could not recall the time of day we passed St. Louis or Terre Haute or Indianapolis. I had no idea what time of day it was. The clouds obliterated the sun and any hint I might have had. “I appreciate what you have all had to go through to get here. Honestly, I do. We could all use a shower about now.” There were murmurs of agreement from the media. “However, I really believe we’re getting close to our goal. We’ve crossed the Mississippi. That’s the West in anyone’s book. And though the Man was not very specific about where he would reveal himself, he did tell me to go west. And so here we are. And he’s back. The Man’s back and once in a while he tells me to keep going. Honestly. And that’s what I’m doing.” I paused. I wanted to reach into my pockets and pull out a cigarette but I was worried about my mother seeing me smoke on television. I smiled thinking this. “I just want you to know I’m looking. We’re moving forward. I’m not trying to pull anyone’s chain here,” and decided to do exactly that. Something about the look on the reporters’ faces made me want to lay it on thick. “Something profound is happening. Something amazing is going to happen. Something of a transcendent nature. I just don’t know what that something is.”

There was a sound bite. “Thanks, guys,” I said. I got up quickly and ran toward the Odyssey. The reporters ran after me, throwing questions. I wasn’t in the mood to play catch. I got in and waited for Takeshi. He got in, Big Mac in one hand, Coke in the other, and I turned the ignition. The Man was in the back, smiling. And then he yawned. “You should be taking pictures of this,” I told Takeshi and pulled out. The reporters stood in the middle of the parking lot, stunned.

I drove to the gas pumps. Dan ran after me. I got out to fill the tank.

“Oh please,” Dan said under his breath.

I ignored him. I picked up the nozzle and pushed a button to choose my gas. I put the nozzle into the tank. “If we lose interest, you definitely lose as well,” he said.

“You lose!” I shouted. I took a breath. The smell of fumes. The beeps of the gas pump as the tank filled up. The energy that would move us.

I watched the numbers on the pump climb and climb. “We were just friends,” Dan said, confused.

“We still are,” I said. “I mean that.”

Dan put his hands in his pockets and waited for me to fill the Odyssey. When I pulled the nozzle out, he checked the tally on the pump and went to pay the bill. I waited for him. “I was just hoping you’d show some consideration,” he said upon returning.

“That’s an interesting word,” I said.

“These are my colleagues,” he said. “I feel a sense of responsibility toward them. I made them a promise. The same thing you promised me, by the way.” Dan was breathing so heavily I thought he would explode.

“I’m doing my best,” I said. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m lying or not when the camera’s on me. I don’t like the idea that I might be performing. I resent that I’ve lost my compass for sincerity.”

“That’s rich coming from a man who used to write ads,” he said. He looked toward the reporters who were still huddled together in a group looking like lost dogs. He sighed. “They’re just tired.”

“We’re all tired,” I said.

“Kansas City?”

I nodded. “Unless I’m told otherwise.”

“Unless you’re told otherwise,” Dan repeated.

He turned and walked slowly to his bus. The reporters and cameramen and technicians awaited his news with an awful kind of desperation. I watched Dan as he spoke to these people and their disappointment in what he had to say was obvious, even from a distance. Shoulders drooped. Shouting. There was a lot of shouting. Dan looked my way for help but I had none to offer. What help could I have possibly given Dan and his band of tired journalists? They chose to follow us, or they were told to. Someone had made the decision to get on the bus. Paymasters. Editors. Producers. Executives. To accompany me on my search. I could look at Dan standing with his lost tribe and not feel a bit of guilt. They had brought themselves here.