Waiting for the Man (26 page)

The Visitor

The wind has more bite today. It cuts its way past the layers of clothes, past the outerwear, past the fleece, past the cotton, and gets inside you; the cold inhabits the body like a curse.

Yesterday, I enjoyed a Thai massage and a lithe Hispanic woman dug her toes deep into my back, all the while humming to the relentless pan flute flowing from the speakers. The pan flute lives on in the world’s spas and on public television. I was thinking some old slide guitar would work in this environment. Ry Cooder, for example. The pan flute didn’t work in Montana. If it worked anywhere at all.

The ranks of guests has thinned out. There are no ski hills nearby. In winter, apparently, the mountains are home to hoofed mammals and semiconscious bears and badgers and wolves and other creatures not worth confronting.

Some of the staff are planning winter getaways.

Athena says the owners would like me to present an overall plan for the branding of a group of high-end ranches across the West. She offers me a three-year contract. I can live wherever I choose. I tell her I’ll think about where I’ll live. I accept the contract. The pay is remarkable and the taxes here are low. She says, “I think this could be fun.”

“Fun is relative,” I say, Scrooge-like.

At breakfast, I eat a bowl of oatmeal, consider taking up jogging. I’ve known people who have considered taking up jogging for years, as if the act of consideration itself makes one healthier. Psychosomatic exercise.

I need to draw up a strong list of B-level celebrities. I might have to employ Lindsay’s probable skill at celebrity wrangling. A friend in New York had a well-paid job keeping his ad firm’s celebrity clients happy. He was a highly remunerated gopher. His cynicism wore Prada. I should call him.

Tomas joins me at the breakfast table, a copy of yesterday’s
Chicago Tribune
in hand. “You can just print it off the internet,” I tell him.

“I like the feel of newsprint,” he says. “I’m a sense person. Especially touch. I have to touch everything. I like the stains even.”

I used to enjoy reading old news. My living room in New York was awash in old editions of the Sunday
Times
. I could pick up any section at random and read. In some ways, news never gets old. Events just add layers of meaning to the original story.

“If the Cubs lost two days ago, they still lost,” I say. Tomas is buried in the sports section.

“There’s something eternal about the teams in Chicago,” he says. “They have their place and they play their roles.”

A horn sounds outside, to signal the delivery of today’s produce. Tomas looks at his watch and gets up. A truck’s horn here makes about as much sense as a lion’s roar. There are towns and cities not that far from here. Relatively speaking. But this is the kind of country where your next-door neighbor might live fifteen miles away.

I need a research assistant.

The wind outside is now howling.

At the front desk, the phone rings incessantly with guests making spa reservations.

In my office, I order a large planning calendar for my wall online. I order my favorite pens. A notebook. I read the
Times
. I don’t miss New York.

I decide to study the history of Montana. And then the West in general. I’m sure there’s more to this place than Lewis and Clark.

I go up to the employee lounge and drink three fingers of Woodford while reading a printout of the Mets’ front office problems. Three fingers become six.

I step outside and lean into the wind and have a smoke. I don’t enjoy it. I think of Angie and I think of Sophie up in Montreal. And realize I shouldn’t. Ever again. If that’s possible. I try to concentrate on the Mets.

In the lobby, I run into Athena. “OK,” I tell her.

“OK what?”

“I want to live here,” I say. “At least for now.”

“I’ll draw up the papers.”

“I’m tired of that trailer finally,” I say.

She says, “I have to go,” and she rushes off in the direction of the dining room.

Keith walks into the lobby, our eyes meet, and he turns and walks out.

Back in my office, I decide I need a couch. A better light fixture. Perhaps a plant. One that doesn’t mind shade. I still don’t know what I want to do with the stuffed goat.

Glamorous B-list celebrities.

The power of narrative allows all of us to feel important, to connect to the world, to feel alive. A connection is important for any brand. The consumer wants to see himself in the narrative of a brand. A company without a compelling narrative has nothing to offer in the end. It can’t tell anyone what it’s about. It can’t sell itself because there’s nothing to sell. A strong brand is a narrative that helps sell stuff.

The line between two points. The arc. Details that say nothing and everything. Embody values that allow the consumer to imprint their own. Impose without being imposing. Make people feel better about themselves. Associate themselves with things that are good.

The big Afro may come and go but the pan flute is finished forever.

I’m toying with some lines. They are shameless but only because I thought them up:

Find Your Story

Discover Yourself Here

Discover Your Story

Let Us Tell Your Story

Live Your Story With Us

Find Your Story.

The long-range forecast is calling for snow. In Montana, global warming is not so much a threat as a promise.

Athena sends me an email. It is a photo of an island in Greece. No message. Just the photo.

I have started a letter to my mother once a day for the past month. I should get on that.

I could tell her of my happiness. Of how I have found myself in a place I feel I belong. Of starting anew. Of the possibilities and direction promised by the endlessness of the sky. I could tell my parents to come for a visit.

Yesterday, it was announced that one of the horses is pregnant. There was an extravagant celebration in the trailers to honor the news.

A knock on my office door. It’s Dan. And he’s smiling.

LET ME STAND NEXT TO YOUR FLOWER

We drove on dirt roads and one-lane roads and small two-lane roads that passed through a desolate landscape. We drove by small towns that consisted of nothing more than a gas station. We saw oil rigs pumping away on the fields, steel grasshoppers quenching a never-ending thirst. We passed signs for provincial parks and only then did we realize we were in Canada. “When did we cross the border?” Angie asked. There was alarm in her voice.

I drove on, driving toward something, my body driving the Odyssey somewhere. I did not know where I was going. Every turn was a surprise.

Roads would end and I would have to back up and try something else. The land felt emptier than any place I’d ever been. I felt afraid. “Maybe you should turn around,” Angie said. “I don’t like the fact we crossed the border without telling anyone.”

“I’m not turning around,” I said. “I can let you off but I’m not going backward. If we’re here, we’re here for a reason. Everything that’s happened to me, to us, has gotten us to this point.” I stopped the Odyssey and got out and walked toward a lonely fence. On the other side of it was more of the same, miles and miles and miles of prairie. The fence looked ridiculous here. What was it trying to keep in? Or out?

Angie stayed in the minivan. “Really, Joe. I want to go back,” she said through the open window.

“So go,” I said. “I don’t care. Take the van.”

“I will,” she said.

“I’m not stopping you.”

I stepped over the pathetic fence and started walking.

“Joe, please,” Angie shouted. “Don’t go.”

I don’t know how long Angie sat there watching me disappear into the tall grass. I imagine she waited until I was out of sight, until she could no longer be certain that I’d return.

I walked to the crest of a small rise. On the other side of the hill, a deep gully broke the carpet of tall grass. From the top of the hill, I could see the world. I watched the Odyssey driving away, kicking up dust behind it. It faded from view until it was swallowed up by the prairie.

I’d left her. I’d walked away. Once she realized that, there was nothing for her here. She was left with her own search. I imagined she’d try to find America again.

Night fell. I hugged myself to keep warm. The sky was an invitation to a party of stars. To an immensity of awe and wonder. Shooting stars raced across the firmament of what must have been an ancient people’s idea of heaven.

I stared at the sky and I yelled at the Man. Who are you? I yelled and my voice echoed out of the prairie and I could hear it go around the world and then it returned and went inside of me. The question lodged itself in me and it stayed there.

And then I felt myself leave my body. I felt myself flow into the wind and above the earth. Time became fluid. I saw myself sitting on the hill and then I saw my life unfold in a dream as lucid as if I’d lived it. I had, of course.

I was in a silent place. The silence was unbearable. I heard my beating heart, the blood traveling through my body, the movements of my muscles. I heard myself think. I felt as if I were flying. And I was. I was in space. I was in space zooming in toward the earth. The earth was floating in front of me, a hazy orb, a single globe, and I flew toward it, out of the metallic effluent and toward the world. I saw the invisible arms of history cut through the people of the world. I saw everyone. I saw the population. I saw all that had come before them, the immolated, the conquered, the divided, the heroic, the millions of acts of cowardice, of surrender, the billions of anonymous lives lived anonymously. I saw the minutiae of history, I saw history, like the thin strands of tissue connecting axioms in the brain, linking everyone, all of whom had either chosen to forget or never knew or even remotely imagined the interconnections that bind them together. I saw the air, the air that sustains billions of breaths every day, the air that holds in it the dying wishes of some great and not-so-great and even vile people, everybody, all inside the same polluted air.

And then I heard the sounds of billions of hands clapping, the drone of billions of laugh tracks on billions of televisions, the failing engines of millions of cars, a trickle of noise that soon becomes overwhelming. It was noisy.

And then I was close enough to smell the smoke, smoke from industry and kitchens, the smell of cyanide and oil refining and curries and seared flesh and the burning of healthy trees. The smell hit me like a blind-side cheapshot. And I braced myself for entry, for the blood-boiling heat of a thousand suns, for the heat that is the final line of defense for a fragile sphere floating miraculously in the numbing emptiness of our collective home.

I passed by colors, colors that melded together as if they were melting. By oranges and blues, lavenders and greens, reds and yellows. I imagined I could hear the Wicked Witch of the West screaming her death’s lament and then I realized, no, I was screaming, I was bellowing, cursing, begging. I was melting.

And then I was falling. Floating was past. I was part of the earth. I recognized the familiar shapes of the oceans and continents. I was feeling gravity’s pull. And I fell through the radioactive belts of Van Allen, the charged solar particles that do nothing to keep you warm, rapidly falling through exosphere, thermosphere, down to stratosphere, through a particularly nasty part of the sky called the dust belt and into the troposphere. And then the science changed and I considered topography, geography, geology, hydrology, the brown and green shapes of land unencumbered by lines and divisions. By politics. From the upper reaches of the sky, the world looked good, healthy, natural, peaceful, though I knew better, falling through high, thin, wispy cirrus clouds, pancake-flat altostratus clouds, marshmallow-soft cumulonimbus clouds, I fell, through powder puff cumulous clouds, falling with a disquieting, almost humorous speed.

I fell over the Atlantic and zoomed in. Past islands, bays, hooks, spits, tombolos, narrows, inlets, cays, gulfs, beaches, sounds, harbors, down the coast, past the gray smudges of cities, past the refineries and wharves and ferry boats and sewage pipes, down the East River, which is really a strait, it was obvious to me now, and then I was above land, above the checkerboard pattern of urbanity. I was almost on the ground. I fell past buildings worn gray with age and neglect, past deadened streets where the tireless cars sit on cinder blocks, to the signs of gentrification, the construction cranes, the scaffolding, the new building materials that signal wealth, and then . . . there. I. Was.

I saw myself sitting on the steps. I saw my neighborhood and I saw myself, lonely, sitting, waiting.

And I watched the crowd gather about me. I watched the studied indifference of nonchalant kindness of the people who gathered to watch, to observe, to solve the puzzle that was my act. I watched myself eat lousy pizza, watched another kind woman bring some delectable-looking leftovers in a pink Tupperware container. I watched Dan stare into his notepad, his face etched with the painful realization that nothing would be easy. I watched myself struggle, every night, with the fear of being hurt, the fear of every noise emanating from the darkness, the fear of a man enduring goblins and demons in his fitful sleep.

And then I flew up. I took a look at America. At the continent. At its vastness, so open, so well connected. I saw how the roads in America are limitless; from my vantage they looked like the clogged arteries of an American man. Every village, every town accessible to the larger town, which in turn is accessible to minor cities, that connect to the major ones.

I could taste the wind.

I could see the anguish on my face.

I could see that the sky never ends.

I understood that the air is never clean, not even in America, a place where the activities of everyone I could see is visible only in the landscape, in the large golden squares that demarcate the properties of those whose job it is to make sure we eat. The air carried within it the stench of disappointments fulfilled. The jet stream shot by bringing with it exotic smells from Asia, faraway places, imagined places.

I tried to remember when the world lost its potential for me.

And I saw the minivan. I saw the minivan and the black bus hurtle through the countryside, the story beamed to an indifferent world. I saw the minivan cross the artificial boundary. I saw how artificial the boundary was. I saw how this line does little to the ground, how irrelevant it looked from up above and I thought the arbitrary nature of the thing only pointed to our frailties and failures. I recognized the irony of painting invisible lines, the wasted energy, the strange desire of people to divide, to separate, to close doors, to turn backs, to obfuscate, to commit unspeakable acts. All for an invisible line.

I saw my minivan zig and the black bus zag.

And I saw the bus stuck at a place where the invisible line is defended, actually defended by uniformed personnel, by confused personnel who had no idea where I was. I listened to a dead-end conversation between two spent forces, two impotent forces. There are no answers in these discussions because the questions are regurgitated, repeated, elliptical. One half of zero is always zero.

I dove into the metaphorical hearts of those on the bus. I saw the hardening, the loneliness, the blank realization of futility. I felt it. I felt what it is to hold a heart that beats but is lifeless. I felt what it is to know that everything I have aspired to ends only in failure. I felt the inherent weakness of the world’s barely beating heart. I touched it. I put my hand on my chest and touched it.

And then it was morning. The grand vista of the world around me returned. Nothing had changed. I watched the dance of the rising sunlight on the endless grass. I watched the wind come over the distant mountains and then kiss the earth. I thought about the folly of the events that had led me here, about the departure of logic in the absence of meaning from my life. I felt like a simpleton.

I knew that to abandon the adventure here was noble. I began it alone, in my head. And it would end that way as well.

And I walked. I began to walk away, my shoulders hunched, the sun’s new light elongating my shadow to make it appear a blackened carpet nailed to my feet. I was profoundly dejected. I thought of the possibilities of promises unkept. I felt tired, tired by a quest I now realized I was not strong enough to undertake. I walked staring straight ahead. Afraid of perhaps seeing the Man riding his white horse in the tall grass, his hat flopping about his head, promising things I now know were not his to promise, his empty hands held skyward.

And I let it go. I just thought about this and let it go, and I felt a floating sickness in me that was enough to illuminate the darkest corner of the most despotic empire. I may have felt freedom. I’m not sure.

The mountains were remarkable. There was a beauty to this place that resonated deep inside of me, that rewrote something, altered my DNA.

And from those mountains a wind rolled across the flat land, a wind that had blown itself around the world since before the land existed, blowing over oceans and seas, mountains and prairies, cities and towns. This was the wind eternal, blowing by me, on its never-ending quest for a final resting place. I watched the yellow-gold flicker of the tall grass bending in the eternal wind.