A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (2 page)

Sometimes, before he'd left his job and everything else behind, when he was teaching his eleventh-grade American lit class—expounding on, say, the narrative tricks and turns that Faulkner is up to in
As I Lay Dying
—he'd step away from the blackboard and realize that he'd scribbled so much there that not one word of it was legible, that he had produced a kind of portrait in black and white of his own addled mind. No wonder his students often seemed shell-shocked, mouths open, pens frozen above their spiral notebooks. How could they possibly figure out what they were supposed to remember?

Instead of listening to the news reports, then, he'd quickly scanned through the radio stations until he wound up tuned to the frenzied sermon of some evangelical preacher. When he moved beyond the reach of that Christian station, he easily found another—and then another after that. He didn't exactly listen to what these preachers were shouting, but he found himself transfixed, just as he had been as a child, by the eerie, discordant music of their voices, by the rising and falling intonation and the congregations' dark murmurings of assent, Hammond B3 organs punctuating the complex rhythms of hand claps and foot stomps and shouts, the rapid-fire ricochet of call-and-response.

Sit at His feet and be blessed!
one of these preachers shouted, and a hundred voices, maybe a thousand, answered straightaway:
Amen.

Keep my mind stayed on Thee!
And the voices replied:
Amen.

Expect to be landed upon the shore! Meet me over in the city that's not made by hand! They tell me that city is made four-square. I want to go there! Gates upon the north and south! Gates upon the east and west! I want to go there! I'm clamoring to go there!

Lord, make a way out of no way!

Amen,
Henry had silently chimed in. The cavernous echo of these broadcasts made them sound to him like indecipherable but urgent transmissions from another realm. He thought, of course, about his father, who'd been a professor at Tulane, an anthropologist who'd begun, long before Henry was born, frequenting such churches throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, recording and transcribing the sermons and hymns. Henry's father had written his dissertation on sorrow songs throughout the world, examining the shared thematic strains of Gypsy cantatas, Portuguese fados, black spirituals, and Delta blues. Henry had once heard someone describe his father as a “song catcher,” and he remembered as a young child picturing him wearing khaki fatigues and holding a giant net, swinging it in wide circles as if he might somehow sweep these songs from the air the way a scientist would capture butterflies in a field of wildflowers. He remembered his father once telling someone—a colleague? a student? Henry himself or Mary, his sister?—that the only thing he was an absolute expert at was longing and loss.

And now Henry had become an expert on that as well. He had lost everything, yes, just as Latangi had said, but as he'd tried to tell her, it hadn't been the hurricane that had done it. He'd lost everything months ago—nearly a year now, in fact.

Everything,
Henry thought, hearing Latangi's lilting voice as he sat on the motel-room bed, still transfixed by the images on the TV.

He had squandered not only his job and his marriage but his entire life, reinventing himself by means of erasure, summoning thin air, as it were, from substance. He'd had everything and then,
poof,
in a magician's cloud of manufactured smoke, he had nothing. He hadn't exactly understood at first that this was what he was up to, couldn't have explained it even to himself. But the hurricane had merely completed the job, had hurled him forward so that finally, lo and behold, he no longer recognized a single thing about his life.

Lone behold,
one of his students had once written in a paper, and Henry had loved the mistake.
Lone behold.
He'd added it to the list of delightful errors he kept on an index card in his desk drawer, a list he no longer had because he hadn't bothered to return to pick up anything from school when he quit.
Quit or was fired?
Well, it didn't matter.
Lone behold, hammy-downs, boneified, tale-gating, butt naked, asp burger, peach-tree dish, udder silence.
He remembered all of that, remembered precisely where the index card was in the drawer, remembered which kid had made which mistake, remembered whether or not he had cringed or winced or laughed or felt a profound compassion for all that was good and kind and true and dumb in this world.

Udder silence.
That's what he needed. For a long time now—he couldn't remember how long—there'd been a strange clatter in his head; he felt as though his brain had been scrambled, pithed, the way he'd been forced to do to the frogs in his high-school biology class when Father Ferguson, skeletal and arthritic, his vestments reeking of formaldehyde and cherry pipe smoke, rattled from table to table to make sure none of the boys were engaged in extracurricular acts of torture. “Your problem, Garrett,” Father Ferguson had once scolded him, knocking his pipe against Henry's desk, “is that you can't think straight.”

It was true, Henry knew. And it was still true. He could not think straight. He had never been able to. But now it was worse. Now, in addition to his own crooked, winding, aimless thoughts, he heard, not voices exactly, but clatter—he didn't have a better word for it; he'd tried but couldn't come up with anything else that accurately captured the sensation. It wasn't static or interference or noise; it wasn't feedback or reverb or echoing; it was
clatter.
He was besieged by snatches of song lyrics, by lines from poems, by commercial jingles, by actors' stentorian recitations, by bits of conversation from years ago, from childhood, all of it looped and overlapping, endlessly repeated until, for no reason he understood, it suddenly stopped, his brain going quiet.

The clatter, despite the annoyance of it, despite the cacophony, made Henry feel oddly ecstatic, transported, brilliantly alive, as if his brain were finally letting go, bit by bit, of all the useless information he had acquired his whole life. He had never remembered his dreams until the clatter began, but now he woke up with long, intricately convoluted stories spilling through his thoughts, unable to distinguish sometimes what he had simply imagined from what he had actually seen or heard or done. The world—the very fact of his being alive in the world—seemed in these moments incredible to Henry, as if any minute now light would burst forth from his fingertips.

Then the clatter—the ecstasy of the clatter—disappeared, and he was left feeling despondent, shaken, utterly and unalterably alone. His right eye—just the one eye, not the other—began watering for no reason, as if half of his face, half of him, had set about weeping.

Amy, of course, had told him to get help, to talk to someone about what was going on—she'd told him this from the very beginning, in fact, from the first dream he'd had about his father—but Henry hadn't listened. Why
should
he listen? He already knew what was happening. He was merely following in his father's footsteps. He was gradually but inexorably losing his mind.

Going crazy, as Amy knew, as he'd told her a hundred times, was the most distinctive and persistent of the Garrett traits, the deep dark cleft in their familial chin. He'd explained it to her when they first met—not a warning exactly but, well,
information,
he'd said, just something he figured she ought to know. He'd made it sound as though he were joking. He hadn't been, of course. He'd described for her the generations of Garretts who had made the ascent to the rickety, toppling edge of sanity only to peer down into the great abyss below. Most of the stories were mundanely sad ones, stories of quiet disappearances and grim sanatoriums and lonely suicides. Some were so strange, though, that they were almost funny. Before the turn of the century, in the 1880s or 1890s, one of Henry's paternal ancestors had famously leaped from a bank building on Canal Street, his pockets stuffed with cash. Snooks Eaglin, a local musician, a blind man, had written a song about the incident, a song Henry once heard him sing at the Mid-City bowling alley where he performed on Thursday nights, the crowd shouting out requests while dancing on the waxed wooden floor in bowling shoes or sock feet, the thump and rumble of the balls and the crack and echo of the tumbling pins creating the sensation that a mighty thunderstorm was raging outside.

Angel's left his wings behind
, Eaglin sang in a comical stage whisper, as if he were imparting a secret he was worried might be overheard. He leaned near the microphone and flashed a smile directly to a young woman in the audience as if he could see her, as if he weren't really blind.

Henry had meant to approach Eaglin sometime and ask where he'd heard the story and when exactly he'd written the song, but he never did. He lacked his father's fervor for historical detail. All around, in every way, Henry knew, what he lacked was
fervor.
Instead he possessed
torpor;
he embraced
turbidity;
he welcomed
languor.
He was a
woolgatherer. A coward. A squanderer. A louse.

Oh, the sweet, sad lamentations of one Henry Archer Garrett,
he heard in the radio preacher's singsong voice
, the woeful likes of which this world might be well and goodly blessed to never see hide nor hair of again.

Amen.

Henry had also told Amy how as a child he'd watched as his great-uncle William Rainey Garrett, his grandfather's only brother, became completely undone.

“Undone?” Amy had said.

“You know what I mean,” Henry had answered.

“You mean crazy?” Amy said, and he'd nodded, but what seemed more interesting to Henry was the
manner
in which that craziness expressed itself. His great-uncle had been a municipal court judge who, after his wife died from breast cancer, began handing down increasingly bizarre sentences to defendants. He'd ordered a landlord convicted of beating up tenants late with the rent to leave the state and not return until he'd gotten Willie Mays's signature on a baseball glove, and he'd told a French Quarter stripper convicted on morals charges that she had to adopt three dogs from the SPCA by the end of the week or he'd send her to jail. Finally, his great-uncle ordered a man who'd been convicted of stealing a few hundred dollars and a Doberge cake from Gambino's Bakery to scale the Robert E. Lee monument and scrub the pigeon droppings from the Confederate general's hat; the monument was sixty feet high, and while drunkenly attempting to comply with the order, the man had fallen, breaking his left arm and cracking his hip. He'd made it only about five feet up the column. At that point, Judge Garrett had been quietly removed from the bench.

It had all begun, Henry told Amy, with his great-uncle's wife's death. So maybe it had been sorrow that fueled the madness.

“At least sparked it,” Amy said.

“At least sparked it,” Henry agreed.

Henry had gone with his father to visit his great-uncle a few months before the old man died. The navy-blue Lincoln Town Car in his garage had four flat tires, and Henry and his father listened as his great-uncle, sitting at the kitchen table, repeated the same story over and over—how he'd once stood with his wife, Maudellena, at the top of Mount McKinley when the wind was so strong it blew pebbles across their feet until they were covered up to their ankles.

“You already told us that one, Uncle Will,” Henry's father said each time the story was done, smiling conspiratorially at Henry and patting the old man's arm.

“Did I?” he said, shaking his head, a strange vacant look of horror imprinted on his face, as if each moment contained for the old man some component of recognition of the clarity and reason that had been stolen from him.

Henry's father, before he disappeared, had told Henry, though Henry was too young to understand exactly what his father meant, that this penchant for madness was like a fascinating but exquisitely grotesque family heirloom, one that remained tucked away inside a drawer for years and years until it was finally pulled out for inspection on some appropriately dire occasion.

“No matter how badly you want to see it, don't go looking for it,” his father had told him. “Maybe you won't stumble upon it.”

Henry had just nodded, thoroughly confused. Who would want to go looking for madness? And what
should
he be doing, what should he be looking for instead?

It was as if his father were talking to himself, though, rather than his son, and yet his father had indeed stumbled upon this grotesque family heirloom. “Carried off by the blues,” his mother had once said of his father's disappearance, as if it were something charmingly romantic, deserving of its own musical homage. She had never once acknowledged, despite Henry's and Mary's anguish and confusion, that their father had—
cruelly, unforgivably
—abandoned them, had simply left behind everything, the only apparent clue to his disappearance the words scribbled on a sheet of paper on his office desk at Tulane. They were, Henry eventually learned, the first three lines of a Charley Patton song:

His father probably hadn't meant anything by writing out these words and leaving them on his desk. They probably were not a suicide note or a final cryptic fuck-you flourish. His father was always scribbling lyrics in the black notebook he kept in his pocket. When he was little, Henry hadn't understood that his father wasn't making up these words, that he was simply transcribing what he'd heard.