A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (3 page)

Now Henry had done exactly what his father had done. He had disappeared. He had driven aimlessly until he wound up precisely in the middle of nowhere, in a motel with lampshades printed with the image of Ganesh, the Hindus' crazy deity, a royal elephant astride a rat. Wasn't there anywhere else he could have gone, any friends who would have welcomed him, who would have embraced him and offered a meal and a bed?

Friends.
They were already part of the
everything
that he had managed to lose.
Wife, home, job, friends.

The art of losing.
That was part of the first line of a poem he used to teach, a poet losing door keys, handkerchiefs. Even a continent, she said.
A lover? A father? Had she lost a father?
He couldn't remember.
So many things,
the poem had asserted,
seem filled with the intent to be lost.

He had lost them all, lost everything. He had swallowed ruin and wreckage and despair. He was alone, fully alone, and he could not even bring himself to weep, could not summon that awful cry of loss and longing and regret that would at least announce that he was alive.

Well, he needed to sleep. But he could not stop watching, in silence, the devastation on TV. Even the commercials that interrupted the news—the shiny cars and complicated exercise equipment and scowling attorneys—seemed part of the whole ordeal, a scripted morality play whose message, like that of the hysterical preachers on the radio, was inscrutable to Henry. At first he tried to guess what the reporters must be saying as they stood on wet and dark French Quarter corners—at St. Peter and Royal, at Chartres and St. Louis—or rode through the flooded streets in narrow boats with outboard motors, but as the hours passed he realized that, to counteract the silence, to fend off his exhaustion, he had begun making up their words. They mouthed the lyrics to Bob Dylan's “Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” which he'd once proposed to Amy they adopt as their theme song, a suggestion for which she'd only half jokingly slapped him, hard enough to sting. The reporters recited ingredients that Amy used to read aloud to him from the recipes she'd concocted. They counted to one hundred in French and then Spanish—Henry had memorized these words as a kid without bothering to learn the languages—and they sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Latangi's lilting Indian accent. He saw the masses huddled outside the Superdome and the convention center, some of them shouting angrily at the cameras, most merely hanging their heads, defeated and grim, and he heard in his head the swelling strings of that endless Gavin Bryars composition, the one that for nearly an hour looped the sad, sweet voice of a bum in a London tube station, the bum singing over and over:
Jesus's blood never failed me yet.

Udder silence. Lone behold.
None of this can be real, Henry told himself, and it was as if he were constructing for his students some complex exercise in grammar and mechanics: none of this
can be, could be, will be, has been, has ever been, will ever be, will ever have been
real.

But it
was
real, Henry knew. He knew that much, at least. He was not that far gone. He kept recognizing the neighborhoods and buildings that popped up on the screen: an antiques store on Royal Street where he once bought Amy a mirror, the plywood covering the store's windows ripped away, the glass shattered; Lawrence's Bakery on the corner of Filmore and Elysian Fields, its metal roof twisted grotesquely, like the recently shed skin of a giant snake; the Robert E. Lee theater, the floodwaters nearly reaching its marquee; the Bucktown shrimp boats pitched up against the side of an elementary-school gym like broken and abandoned toys. In high school Henry had dated a girl from Bucktown, a Mount Carmel Academy girl named Lacey Gaudet whose father had single-handedly built a new house in the backyard of their old one, transferring the bricks one by one from the old house to the new. When he was just about done, Henry had asked him what he planned to do with the foundation of the old house, and Mr. Gaudet said he was going to turn it into a giant indoor swimming pool, each room a different pool but all of them connected by narrow channels of water. “Just like the bayous,” he'd told Henry, smiling. “What do you think?”

Henry had believed him, hadn't realized that Mr. Gaudet was pulling his leg. But then he had slapped Henry on the back and said, with a bitterness that caught Henry by surprise, “It's all coming down, son. It's good for nothing.”

Henry had liked Mr. Gaudet. He had been a riverboat pilot but retired early when his wife died. Lacey had once proposed setting up her father and Henry's mother. When Henry said he didn't think so, Lacey said, “It might be cool, you know. He's kind of lonely.”

“My mother doesn't go out on dates,” Henry told her. “You've met her. She doesn't go anywhere.”

“Well, maybe she would,” Lacey said. “Maybe if he called her and asked her.”

“No,” Henry said, uncomfortable. How could he explain to Lacey without hurting her feelings that her father and his mother inhabited separate worlds, that they were about as different as two people could possibly be? His mother was—what? An intellectual? An artist? A bohemian? What word would she have used? An eccentric? A recluse? A hermit? A loon?

Henry could still hear his mother's voice, the silly wordplay in which she and Henry's sister had engaged, a kind of game requiring the construction of nonsensical phrases:
Unilateral eclipse. Ecclesiastical ellipsis. Liturgical itinerancy. Truncated vice.
There were rules, but Henry hadn't understood them. He'd sensed that they didn't want him to understand.

When he and Lacey had first started dating, Henry had offered to help her father with the house. “What can you do, Henry?” Mr. Gaudet had asked. “Masonry? Roofing? Tile work?” Henry had been forced to admit that he didn't know how to do anything. Mr. Gaudet had wrapped his arm around Henry's shoulder as if to suggest that he felt bad that Henry didn't have a father to teach him such skills. But Henry's father, of course, hadn't known how to do any of those things either.
He was a professor,
Henry had wanted to say, figuring that would provide sufficient explanation. Even before his father left, nothing in their house—leaking faucets, broken tiles, warped window screens, peeling plaster—had ever gotten fixed.

Breaking things. Breaking down.
Those, too, like losing, were the arts that Henry—and so many Garretts before him—had mastered.

Lacey was the one, though, who had broken up with Henry. It was during senior year, after a dance at Mount Carmel, one in which they'd argued the whole time about something—he couldn't remember what—the two of them sitting at the top of the gym's bleachers and shouting at each other over the music.

“This isn't exactly what I'd call fun,” Lacey had told him once they'd finally gone outside, and she'd left him there, leaning against his car, an old mud-colored Chevy Impala with torn red vinyl seats, a car that still smelled, a year later, of the skunk he'd run over one night on Pontchartrain Boulevard. After that night Lacey had made a face every single time she got into the car, but Henry had grown to like the smell, the strange acrid sweetness of it.

It had been the very night he'd hit the skunk—in fact, precisely
because
he'd hit the skunk—that Henry and Lacey had first had sex, in a thick grove of magnolia trees in a small park near the lakefront. Earlier, they'd stopped at the 7-Eleven near Lacey's house, and they'd poured a pint of rum into Coca-Cola Icees, their usual concoction. They were driving around listening to the radio and trying to finish their drinks before heading to a party. But when they hit the skunk—they'd thought for a second that it was a squirrel, which was awful enough, but then they were instantly assaulted by the smell, their eyes watering, Lacey suddenly coughing and gagging—Henry pulled over as soon as he could. They scrambled from the car into the magnolia grove only to discover that the smell was still there, that it was on their clothes. So they peeled off their shirts and jeans, but Lacey smelled her hair and then her hands and started gagging again. She started cursing in a way he'd never heard her curse, using the foulest of language, choking it out—
Jesus motherfucking Christ! Goddamned motherfucking sonofamotherfuckingbitch!
—but she was laughing even as she cursed, and Henry was laughing too but also worried someone would hear Lacey, would come running and think he was assaulting her, so he tried to put his hand over her mouth. She snapped at his fingers as if she meant to bite him, but then she licked his palm and said,
Ugh, I can taste it, I can, I swear it's fucking everywhere,
so he started licking her hand and then her arm and then her neck, just to tease her, to make her laugh, and he kept saying
I like it
or
Mmmm
or something stupid like that, and that's how they'd wound up actually doing it, both of them a little drunk, or at least tipsy enough to fend off the shyness and the cringing embarrassment and the ignorance and fear. And it was okay; it was. They both felt fine about it and in the months that followed they got a bit better and managed a kind of patient, fumbling grace, but they never quite overcame the new weight that somehow descended upon their time together, and it was probably that weight, the drag of it, more than any big argument or suspected infidelity, that finally caused Lacey to break up with him.

He wondered now what had happened to Lacey Gaudet. She'd gone off to LSU, he knew, but then he'd never seen her again, never come across her name in the
Times-Picayune,
never heard from someone who knew someone that she'd gotten married or had had a baby or had wound up divorced. How could it happen that people simply disappeared from your life? And her father—was he still alive? Was he still living in that house? Then it occurred to Henry that even if Mr. Gaudet was alive and still living in Bucktown, the house he'd built with his own hands was certainly now gone. Henry closed his eyes and tried to imagine it, tried to envision not just the Gaudet house but every house in the city underwater: his mother's house, Amy's. He imagined water rushing street to street, climbing walls, bursting through windows. Oh God. Was it really possible? Even though he was seeing it on the TV, he couldn't do it, couldn't really create a convincing picture in his head.

Henry stared at the screen until dawn, until he noticed the line of light at the edge of the room's heavy curtains, then he turned off the television and stepped outside, out onto the parking lot, the asphalt glistening, the few cars and pickup trucks there shining with dew. Where was he? How had he wound up here? There was no one, not a single person on this earth, who knew where he was, what had become of him.

No, there was this one person, a complete stranger: Latangi.
L
as in
library, a
as
in
love.
A
as in
love
?
T
as in
flowering telegraph lines
?

Nothing made sense anymore.

Henry looked beyond the motel's gray walls and flat roof to the mountains, but the air was misty, and the mountains seemed to have disappeared overnight, seemed as though they had simply been erased.

He stepped back into his room, lay down on the bed in his dirty clothes, closed his eyes, and slept.

AS USUAL,
his sleep was fitful, littered with the fragments of dreams, each with the same absurd, entirely predictable theme—that he was lost, that the world lay in ruins around him. In each he appeared as a sort of shadowy figure, a phantom or nomad. Or worse: a tourist who had misread his guidebook and had wandered into a neighborhood or across a border where he wasn't supposed to stray.

One moment he shuffled unnoticed through a bustling, dusty market somewhere in Senegal; in the next he bent above a legless Armenian beggar to hear the plaintive strains of a reeded duduk. At a Shinto shrine in Nara, the ancient Japanese capital—a place he'd actually visited with Amy—he knelt on a carpet of cherry blossoms before a mural depicting the sun goddess's brother Susano, the god of storms, brandishing his sword above the roiling waves to slay an eight-headed dragon.

Like a portentous National Geographic Channel special, these fragments of dreams were accompanied by an interminable narration, a relentless litany of woes intoned in a weary, measured cadence.
The world is irreparably in thrall to violence,
the voice declared.
Everywhere soldiers flash their rifles and spit curses. Men, women, and children cower in the street. Villages burn, cities collapse, cars explode into blossoms of
bright shrapnel and black flames. Somalia. Yemen. Sierra Leone. Iraq. All is chaos, misrule. All is fury and vanity and desire.

How is it,
the narrator pondered,
that this man who would throw away his life has survived? Why hasn't he been shot or captured and held for ransom or beheaded? This man who no longer believes in luck, in providence, in blessedness or good fortune? This squanderer? This coward? This louse?

The dreams went on, a turgid and wearying documentary, inexpertly spliced, the narrator's voice a caricature of Henry's own, his baritone deepened to a bottomless bass. Henry watched himself shoving his way through teeming streets, past young girls twirling in the last tatters of taffeta dresses, past boys who bared their scrawny chests and flexed their withered arms as though their bodies were made of steel. Henry saw himself crossing deserts and traversing mountains, braving listing buses and smoke-spewing trains. He had no idea where, in these dreams, he was trying to get to, where it was he thought he was going. He was lost. He was always lost. He didn't need these dreams to tell him that.

And then the girl appeared, as she always did now, and Henry was struck once again by the sheer desolation of his desire. The downy swell of her abdomen, the torturous landscape of still-ripening breasts and thighs. Her delicate hands, the nails jagged, gnawed, unpainted. The melancholy smile, the schoolgirl shrug of her shoulders, the clack of a peppermint, the sweetly indecipherable scent of her skin. The images descended into the obscene, a jumbled litany of erotic enumeration:
lithe folds of labia, dark areolae of breasts, ass and calf and snatch
—all of it tawdry and overwrought, as if the words had been stolen from some slathering poet:
the pouting berry of lips, the jaunty
cock of hips, the sinuous stretch and spread and coiling whip of ecstatic release, song of the demonic, protrusion of nipple, juice and sweat, blossom and blossom and ache.

Oh God. And now, for the first time in all of these dreams, the girl had acquired a name: Clarissa Nash.

Clarissa Nash.
Henry had no idea where this name had come from, who the girl might be. She was not one of his former high-school students, thank God, at least not one he could remember. And why—
and how?
—would he remember someone he didn't remember? He tried to persuade himself that she must be simply a character from a book, but he knew that this too could not be true. She was far too real, far too—absurd as it might sound—
detailed.
How old was she? Nineteen or twenty, Henry guessed, maybe a bit older. Not a child. At least not that. Even so, he was forty-one. His desire was unyielding, sublime, pathetic, absurd. Whether or not she actually existed seemed, in a way, the least of his concerns. He just wanted her, wanted these dreams, to leave him alone.

The girl, unnamed then, had begun to appear in his dreams three months ago—in May, when Amy had finally given up on him and left New Orleans. She hadn't cried when she told him she was leaving; she'd been resolute, abrupt, unflinching. He'd asked her to stay, to give him time; he'd explained that he was doing better, that he was figuring things out.

“You're living in a grocery store, Henry,” she'd told him. “What is it exactly you think you're figuring out?”

It was true. Nine months earlier he'd moved out. He'd taken everything he owned to the empty grocery store, which he'd bought with his share of the money from his mother's estate. It was a vast, fluorescent-lit aluminum-and-glass building on Magazine Street a few blocks from their house on Prytania—Amy's house, actually, a beautifully renovated shotgun he'd simply moved into when they got married. Everything about the grocery store was tired and sad and downtrodden, the front windows smeared with grease and dotted with the taped corners of old advertisements, the aluminum shelves sagging and bent, the red-tiled floors cracked. Fresh and Friendly had been the grocery's name when it was still operating, though Amy had dubbed it the Stale and Surly. She'd refused to shop there, pointing out that the canned goods were always covered with dust, that the floor was always sticky, that the one shelf reserved for international foods included, as if they were exotic delicacies, anchovies and Vienna sausages. She'd said that Melvin the butcher, in his white shirt and thin black tie and bloody apron, constantly complained about the weather and about foreigners and about children's grimy fingers on the glass of the meat case.

Amy had nearly killed Henry, of course, when he told her he'd used his mother's money, his only inheritance, to buy the building.

She'd shaken her head, disgusted. “You've fucking lost it, Henry,” she'd said. “This time you've really fucking lost it.”

He'd tried to explain it to her, had begged her to understand. Now, though, to be honest, he couldn't really remember what he'd been thinking or what he'd said to Amy in his defense. He had just felt—he had
known
—that he couldn't keep the money from his mother's estate, that he didn't want it. And when the store had been put up for sale, he'd bought it. It was crazy. He'd known it was crazy. But it had been necessary. That was one of the words he'd used with Amy.
Necessary.

“Necessary?” Amy had said, incredulous, irate, packing her bags for a trip to Central America, to Guatemala and Honduras and Belize.
Hunting the Palm's Heart: A Hundred Recipes,
her next book was to be called. She'd told him the names of the different trees: the cohune, the waree, the jipijapa, the pokenoboy. She'd told him that each had a different heart. The names had spun in his head; he'd imagined the spiked leaves, the towering trunks. He hadn't been able to respond, to think clearly, to explain what he meant.

“You're going to open a
business,
Henry?” Amy had said, and he'd known from the way she'd said the word
business
precisely what she meant—that he was not equipped to run a business, to run anything: a lawn mower, a vacuum, a blender. He'd tried to think of something he could say that he planned to do with the building—open a bookstore, maybe, or perhaps a concert hall or coffee shop.

“You could have a restaurant there,” he'd told her instead. “I bet you could do it.”

“If I'd wanted a restaurant, Henry,” Amy had responded, “don't you think I'd have mentioned it by now?”

She'd looked at him, fuming, waiting to hear what on fucking God's green earth he might say next.
God's green earth.
That was one of her favorite expressions. He'd said nothing, so Amy had zipped her luggage shut, looked at him again, and sighed. “I don't know what's wrong with you,” she'd said, her voice quiet now. “I understand something's wrong, but I can't tell you what it is or how to fix it. I wish I could. Believe me, I wish I could. But you're going to have to do it on your own. You're going to have to find someone, Henry. I've thought about this a lot. Before this. Before now. While I'm gone, you're going to have to find someone. You hear me? You understand what I'm saying?”

“Yes,” he'd said, “I understand.” And she had just left him there.

No. First she had put her arms around him, told him she loved him, told him that he was the kindest man, the most generous and loving man, she'd ever known. She told him he'd get through this, that she knew he would, but that he needed to figure out how. “You
need
to,” she'd said, but he hadn't been sure if that was a plea or a threat. Then she'd left.

He'd stood there in the bedroom, waited, then sat down on the bed. He'd wanted to call out to her, tell her that he had lied, that he did not understand anything, that he was—his mind was—addled.
Disordered.

Then he'd heard the door close, heard Amy leaving. He understood what he was losing, what he had lost, but he couldn't help himself.

Find someone,
she had said. He'd known exactly what she meant: Find a doctor, a therapist, a shrink. Talk to him or her. Take whatever pills were prescribed. Get better. Get himself unaddled, unclattered, de-pithed, unbent.

Instead he had simply moved out of their house and into the store. This, too, he had decided, was necessary, was something he needed to do even though he could hear Amy's voice in his head, even though he knew what she would say, the very words she would use.

Crazy.

Idiot.

Disaster.

Unforgivable.

Too much.

The end.

He'd thought about his father's disappearance—home and then not home, here and then gone. Now and now and now and finally then. These words took on a flavor in his mouth, a certain metallic bitterness. They acquired colors and shades, even shapes. He saw them in the late-afternoon light spilling through the grimy storefront windows and in the dust his feet kicked up off the red-tiled floor.

So unremarkable had been his father's departure that he had no memory of the final words that had passed between them, a final glance or touch. Here. Gone. Now. Then.

With Amy still in Central America, unaware of what he'd done, he'd settled in. He slept on a mattress in the nook of the elevated customer-service counter, all of his possessions—his books and records and CDs and fountain pens and photographs, his clothes and his collection of old inlaid wooden boxes, his father's double bass and beat-up guitars and banjo, a kora from Mali, congas from Cuba, a few of his mother's strange, garish paintings—all of it spread out across the grocery-store shelves as though he meant to sell them. He didn't know why he was there, didn't know what he was doing, what he would tell Amy when she returned. His mind wasn't right—that was about the only thing he knew. He felt sometimes as though his eyes wouldn't quite focus, as if his pupils were dilated and taking in too much light. His thoughts wandered like a dog endlessly tracking a phantom scent, like random musical notes on a staff that, when played, produced something that vaguely resembled a melody but was not, was simply noise. When people started peering through the windows and knocking on the glass doors, asking what he wanted for this or that, he let them in, told them to pay whatever they thought was a fair price. It was usually more than he would have thought to ask for.

He figured that, soon enough, everything would be gone and he would be released from his life, but then at night or early in the morning, people began leaving their own stuff, their own unwanted possessions, outside the door: bags of clothes and toys, toaster ovens and boom boxes and ice skates and prom dresses and bow ties and bicycles and picture books and paperback novels and ceramic vases and dog crates and infant car seats and shoe boxes stuffed with photographs and postcards and letters. Henry hauled everything inside and put it all out on the shelves, and before long there were teenagers with spiked hair and young couples holding hands and old women and antiques dealers spending hours rooting through the junk, homeless men coming inside for the coffee he made in one of the half a dozen drip machines—two Mr. Coffees, two Black and Deckers, a Krups, a Braun—that had been left at the store, men who couldn't manage more than a few words of conversation but liked to pick up his father's banjo or one of the old guitars and pretend they could play, mumbling the lyrics to songs they hadn't heard in years, songs that reminded them, Henry guessed, of women they'd known before their lives had fallen apart.

Just like me,
Henry had thought, and a song by Paul Revere and the Raiders leaped inside his head:
It's just like me to say to you, Love me do and I'll be true.

He recommended books to those who came in looking for something to read, not the books he'd taught his high-school kids over the years—
The Grapes of Wrath
and
Leaves of Grass
and
The Great Gatsby
and
As I Lay Dying
—but old paperbacks with yellowed library cards glued to envelopes on the inside covers, books that he hadn't actually read but that had been left outside, their titles full of a kind of inept promise:
The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, Detour to Oblivion, Wild Angel, Gideon's Mouth, The Bottom of the Garden, Pray for a Brave Heart.

They might be terrible books, Henry thought, but they would all be good names for bands—Wild Angel, Detour to Oblivion, Gideon's Mouth—and he would use one if only he knew how to play an instrument or sing, if only he weren't completely talentless and also, by the way,
forty-one,
as Amy had reminded him, two decades too old for such nonsense.