American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (21 page)

The last prisoners left, numbers not names, were the compulsive fugue walker, Speer, sweating out his swollen fantasies, and Rudolf Hess, Deputy Leader of the Party, survivor of a brain-cracked flight to Britain. Their relationship, hostile, jealous of history, a grudging alliance of shared solitude, was Beckettian, absurdist. The pacer of dirt circuits and the watcher in the long coat, madman or cynical sage. It was Hess, the witness, who suggested the beans. That Speer should measure each circuit achieved by shifting a bean from one pocket to another, like a cricket umpire tolling the number of balls bowled in an over, or one of Beckett’s Cartesian pebble suckers on an Irish strand. ‘My memory loss was faked,’ Hess boasted, faking it again for Speer, the ultimate faker, the man who almost convinced himself.

Speer is 5. Hess is 7. Numbers are painted on their backs like stencils on packing cases. A snatched photograph of Speer in the garden has him leaning on his hoe like William Blake’s engraving: ‘The Traveller Hasteth in the Evening’. A long-striding walker is being walked by his furies into a dark night. I came across this image as a cover illustration on a pamphlet issued in 1971:
A Defence of Sacred Measure (such as the foot, mile, acre and other units of British metrology, and of the ETERNAL and HUMAN values inherent therein).

And in this spirit I trudged my loop through Seattle’s weather and winking signs and concrete levels and sodden Indians with polystyrene coffee beakers filled with more rainwater than coins. What Speer became, his daily circuits an energizing device for memory, was a writer. Continents tramped and mapped were provocations for text; a terrible freight of words, private diaries crabbed and scribbled. An archive of 25,000 pages was smuggled from the cell on illegitimately defaced toilet paper. A monster novel in which the satanic opera of the Reich would be deconstructed by way of meditations on cinema, landscape, fine art and the absent, ever-loving family.

‘My only previous acquaintance with such prison cells has been in American movies,’ Speer wrote in October 1946. He recognized, very early in his fractured autobiography, that the one thing the
Nazis were really great at was inventing euphemisms. Miles were devoured in the shadow of high walls and guard towers in the north-western Berlin suburb. He crossed continents. A singular invader. An army of one. By the time he reached America, I was tracking him, but Spandau time never became my time. As with Speer, the daily plod – witnessed by surveillance systems – was nothing more than the assembly of a shaky outline for a work of unreliable fiction. New quotes invented to fix the past.

When Speer introduced his daemon, Hitler, he spoke of the Führer’s obsession with Karl May’s invented Wild West and the exploits of his noble backwoodsman, Old Shatterhand (the Aryan version of Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking). Newsreels of fire, burning cities, erupting volcanoes, induced in Hitler, as Speer recorded, a sexual rapture.

‘Lacking a tape measure, I measured my shoe, paced off the distance step by step, and multiplied the number of paces. Placing one foot ahead of the other 870 times, thirty-one centimetres to a step, yields 270 metres for a round. The project is a training of the will, a battle against the endless boredom; but it is also an expression of the last remnants of my urge towards status and activity.’

The Beckettian other, Estragon to his Vladimir, Rudolf Hess, sits mute on his bench, watching, muttering to himself about doctored food and stomach cramps. But Speer spears on: ‘Today I walked eighty-nine beans.’ As he passes the spectre with the Gothic skull and heavy black eyebrows, he whispers: ‘I am going to an island beyond Sicily. I can’t go any further.’ His audience, his goad, the Deputy Leader in the threadbare greatcoat, says something. And repeats it on the next lap: ‘Why not go by way of the Balkans to Asia? To the United States of America. The lands we have yet to conquer.’

The itinerary of the ultimate bad journey was established, or channelled. While concentration camp surgeons, slave masters, bureaucrats of genocide, interrogation experts peddling their dubious skills, decamped for Bolivia, Uruguay, Speer trudged through Siberian winters towards the necrophile carnival of Mexico.

‘After the despair of the past weeks I have resumed my tramp. This morning I left Europe and crossed the pontoon bridge to Asia. Sometimes I think about death.’ News from the world outside arrives like a trailer for a film by Fritz Lang. Speer recalls Wernher von Braun fantasizing about flight to the moon. Now it seems he has helped the Americans launch a satellite. ‘I think of new potentialities for annihilation.’

Hitler used Karl May as proof that it was not necessary to know the desert in order to direct the movement of troops across North Africa. ‘The people are as foreign as American Indians.’ With imagination, you do not need to travel to know the world. ‘I am still 3,300 kilometres from the Bering Strait. Endless forests of larch and fir, with gnarled silver birches in the highlands. Grass often over my head.’

Hess stared at him in astonishment. An ant crawled through the hairs of his drowned hand. He gestures. In his triumph at reaching the coast, Speer has forgotten to transfer his bean. ‘My respects, my respects,’ Hess whispers. The walker sits, for a moment, beside the watcher. They discuss the old regime’s love of forests and the philosophy of the beauty of highways, as developed by Todt, and manifested in the vision of the Autobahn. When they part, to return to their cells, the sky is red as a blood orange.

Insomniac, feeding on contraband pills, Speer, the author of this insane journey across the world, evaluates his rivals; he reads everything from Walser to Böll as a lamentation. ‘Today I passed Seattle on the West Coast of the United States. In sixty days, despite cold and high winds, I have covered 560 kilometres.’

‘I’ll tell you the difference between you and me,’ Hess says. ‘Your follies are contagious.’

And so they were. I was invited to Berlin to lead a walk across a city I didn’t know, from east to west, Alexanderplatz to the 1936 Olympic Stadium; a walk made in the precise footprints of a journey documented in an earlier book,
Ghost Milk.
It was a redundant concept, but I accepted it as a way of taking a look at what remained of
Spandau. I would be met by the film essayist Chris Petit, who had some experience of the city, and who was presently engaged with his Museum of Loneliness, an unrealized project for staging minimalist interventions in the narrow gaps between blocks of social housing. A young woman called Lisa agreed to drive us to Spandau, a failed supermarket behind inadequate fencing, alongside a former redbrick barrack block, and premises occupied by peddlers of alternative medicine and garden furniture.

Parking slots were reserved for
ARCADIA BERLIN,
which seemed about right, a wink at Speer’s attempt to lay out a garden in this dark place. And a reminder that Speer had once corresponded with the Scottish poet and garden-maker Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay’s stern arcadias were structured from ruins: ‘The World Has Been Empty Since The Romans.’ Spandau was an accidental Hamilton Finlay, an informal conceit with no gardener, no artist.

The sun was dropping, flaring in the windows of structures that had once been part of the prison. We squeezed through a gap in the fence beside the wreck of a
WURTMAXE
sausage stall. Among the unloved shrubs, the yellowing and riotously fecund firs, we poked about for traces of Speer’s walked circuit. We compared the present ground, like an abandoned retail park on the fringes of the M25, with covert black-and-white images of the Nazi crocodile around the high-walled enclosure in the published Spandau diaries.

Did Speer plant the tree hanging over the boulder painted with a white number? The former exercise area was now the site of a neo-Nazi cult shrine. The grey rock with the painted 7 was dressed, blasphemously, with a collection of small white stones like the ones traditionally left on Jewish graves. A freestanding metal plate was decorated with the cardinal number, a horizontal line through the middle in the European fashion. A wreath of straw, like the wheel of a symbolic chariot, was laid around the crudely painted white number in a memorial gesture. There were further hidden 7s all over the sunken garden area.

And of course I found myself booked into room 700 on the 7th floor of my hotel in Mitte, the old East. When, tired after the flight
from London and the Spandau excursion, I went upstairs for a rest before the evening’s inevitable talks, performances, late meal, my bed was stripped back, and a strange couple, the man gaunt, the woman generously proportioned, were fucking vigorously on the floor. He was wearing a black leather vest and a pair of polished shoes. She was naked. She glanced at me, and then they carried on. Through the window I could see the ball and spike of Fernsehturm, the TV tower overlooking Alexanderplatz.

It was Hess who was remembered. He was 7. Speer was no longer part of this. At the event, which had been pitched as ‘women talk, men walk’, I sat behind a man whose leather jacket was customized with a snake swallowing its own tail:
TO LIVE IN DISCONTENT
. As we suspected, dinner was late, in a fashionable restaurant decorated with V2 rockets and foxes with bandaged paws. The waiters were unhappy actors. The bar was full of stylish Russian hookers. The building had once been a Jewish Girls’ School. There were photographs in the corridors recording some of the tragic history. Everybody was waiting for Veruschka, who never arrived. After an hour, when a bowl of salad came around for the second time, Petit pushed back his chair. We had a beer in a beat bar that traded on the fact that Charles Bukowski had once visited town. It was too late for food. By now Speer had become an anagram for Spree, the river along whose bank we would soon walk, in search of a hollow tree from which I could deliver my lecture on the symbolism of 7; on Malcolm Lowry, William Burroughs, Beckett, Céline. And the eternal recurrence of bad journeys.

When Lowry arrived at his Taormina
pensione
, struggling in the wake of D. H. Lawrence, as I was now stalking him, he expressed his delight at the notion of collecting another volcano. He would soon be sailing to a barren island. All the signs were auspicious. They had given him Number 7 and the villa was called the Eden. He unpacked his typewriter. It was the Day of the Dead. ‘I swim to and fro,’ he said. ‘And I contemplate a story of this place.’

He was the story, it was never written.
Tremor in Taormina.
Seven was the number waiting for him in Mexico. Names and numbers
are candles. In
Dark as the Grave
, Lowry searches for his friend, the descendant of Zapotecan kings, a man who ran for twenty miles beside his horse. ‘Fernando had helped to make this life fruitful and good as men should have had it in the Garden of Eden.’ Another garden, another oasis. Another
pensione
from which he will soon be expelled. It was the Garden of Eden.
Le gusta este jardín? Que es suyo?
The inscription on the ceramic tile in Ripe. ‘And it was of Fernando too that he thought as, following the guide, he descended into the dark tomb number seven, where gleamed the guide’s one candle.’

‘Travelling makes you ill,’ said Roberto Bolaño. Sometimes my insensitivity has consequences. I noticed, of course I did, that Anna was struggling with the fallout of the fainting fit that left her dehydrated and sick after that Shoreditch cellar meal and the plush viewing of
True Grit.
But grit was part of her Englishness, her upbringing. Pain was managed. Days of high energy, bolstered by vitamin D, were exploited. If Anna could manage the morning walk, it was assumed that all was well. I was aware that Seattle was problematic. So I found a better breakfast bar with granola and green tea.

But all was not well in our high tower. Anna had peeled to the pulse of the city. She lay awake on the huge hard bed trying to work out how to tell me that she was going straight to the airport in the morning, returning to London. The difference quantum had become critical. This was as remote from Hackney, children, grandchildren, as it was possible to be. The old dream of driving down the Pacific Coast came with too high a premium. I needed it for my book, which is to say my continued existence. Anna supported the fiction, but another few days in Seattle and she would be left without shape or substance. The myth, in any long, close relationship, is of common ground. That memories can be truly shared and refined by repeated tellings. That anything overrides the brute imperatives of the work in hand.

We took a slow, convalescent boat trip around Elliott Bay. And it helped. We would be leaving Seattle soon. Meanwhile, I had one last expedition to undertake: a bus ride to a special place on the other side of the water.

After visiting J. G. Ballard in Shepperton, as part of a walk around the fringes of the M25, London’s orbital motorway, I noticed how
the celebrated writer’s name invaded other cities, and always as a marker of outer limits. On a busy promotional trip to Paris there was no opportunity to tramp, as I’d planned, to the end of one branch of the Metro, the station called Balard. (Jim Ballard, like Anna, would never discuss surgical procedures he had undergone. The amputation of a single letter was a private matter. Health, like his current work in progress, was not a suitable topic for conversation.) What I’d forgotten was that Ed Dorn had once lodged in the Ballard district, as somewhere ‘to keep costs down’.

My concept was overburdened with symbols: a day’s stroll around the curve of the mauve track from Bastille (known) to Balard (mysterious). The writer Philippe Vasset, who produced
Un livre blanc
as an investigation of all the blank white spaces on the map of Paris, and who supported himself by making regular trips to the City of London to tease out information for a subscription-only bulletin on the latest rumours from the Secret State, told me that he knew Balard. It was where the French tested underwater defence systems. On the other side of the road, they planned a holding camp for economic migrants.

‘Où est votre place? Comment habiter ici? Malgré la couverture satellite permanente et le maillage des cameras de surveillance, nous ne connaissons rien du monde.’

Seattle had its own remote Ballard. We found the No. 15 bus and climbed aboard with a motley of the decent poor, an underclass of the physically disabled, Native Americans, cleaners and short-order cooks returning home. We crossed the bridge. Under the shelter of a flyover, a man stood holding up a cardboard sign:
I WILL DO ANY WORK. GIVE ME A JOB
.

The rain was in temporary remission. It was easy to see why Seattle was chosen as an objective correlative for the Danish gloom of
The Killing
, a television series saturated in weather; a melancholy parade of hooded coats, agitated windscreen wipers and crumbling human physiology. The shards of the World’s Fair offer a backdrop for the title sequence of a slowly unravelling murder mystery. We walked away from the safety of the departing bus like slouched
TV-noir characters heading straight for an encounter with a floating corpse, the woman with one shoe and no pants in the shrubbery of a twilight park.

Anna was recovering well in this version of Shepperton on Salmon Bay. We ate in a Vietnamese café and then continued down a straggle of pet hospitals, storage facilities for geriatrics, boat builders, to the Ballard Locks and public gardens.
HEALTHY FOOD FOR DOGS & CATS. MUD BAY BALLARD. GIVING UP KNOWLEDGE EVERY DAY. BALLARD JAM HOUSE
. In the photograph, Anna is smiling, but there is a fine mist over her sore eyes. The smile is tight. And she has a mouth filled with broken wine glasses.

Ballard is the Pacific Scandinavia, the former world leader in the manufacture of shingles. The first mill, completed in January 1888, was the Sinclair. Here was established a town of wood, fish, iron. A new place populated by Norwegians and Swedes, many of whom drifted down from Canada. The first whites arrived as homesteaders in 1852. Before that, land was occupied by the Shilshole band of the Duwamish tribe. Captain Ballard won 160 acres of land alongside Gilman Park on the toss of a coin.

The park was a civic imposition; walking there we recovered some residue of our old familiarity. The neat wooden houses on the other side of the inlet reminded me of sailing down Norwegian fjords. Confident incomers, women in hats and heels, used to pose for portraits at the junction of 85th Street and 32nd, where there was a sign saying
CITY LIMITS
. Beyond the dirt road, the forest began. And the source of their prosperity. Fire-food. In 1889, a raging inferno consumed every lumber mill, wharf and warehouse between Union and Jackson in Seattle. Materials to rebuild the city came from the yards of Ballard.

The car they had for us was a Chevrolet Impala. It was solid, comfortable, silent. There were no manifests or manuals. ‘Just get in and go. You can leave the keys in LA. Have a great ride.’ I didn’t want to crunch against a concrete pillar getting out of the subterranean garage, but the woman was right. This boat drove itself, even if it took
us three days to work out the radio. And we never succeeded in finding anything worth listening to, a steady diet of messianic hucksters, tired country and western, adverts for furniture stores.

We cut downhill towards the ferry. I was surprised at how smoothly this was going, fifteen minutes in and we were on the water, crossing Puget Sound towards Bremerton and the Olympic National Park. I remembered another Danish take on the West Coast, the migrant director Nicolas Winding Refn’s film of the Jim Sallis novel
Drive.
The stunt driver in zipped windcheater who moonlights as a professional getaway man is checking out possible motors for the night’s business. The limping mechanic tells him he looks like a zombie and offers: ‘Benzedrine, Dexedrine, caffeine, nicotine.’ The boy, played by Ryan Gosling, doesn’t smoke. He’s more of an existential gum chewer. Like a Jean-Paul Belmondo part regraded to Robert Macfarlane, the respected British academic, author, climber. Lean, contained, easy-moving, but with a dangerous glint in the eye. ‘There she is,’ says the gimp. ‘Chevy Impala, most popular car in the state of California. No one will be looking at you.’

As we bumped down the ramp, rain became torrent. Anna was navigating, but I had nothing better to offer her than a laminated map of the Pacific Northwest with bruise-blue mountains drawn in three-dimensional form, and seen from a migrating bird’s point of view. The Olympic National Park is as negotiable as our own Victoria Park in Hackney, with a few more hills. We could skip around the whole promontory in an afternoon; then on down 101, the snaking coast road, to San Francisco. And, ultimately, Los Angeles.

An hour of streaming traffic, military bases, hunger pangs, took us off-highway in quest of a convenience store, proper roadmaps – and 101 itself, our route out. With a bag of Gary Snyder’s books in the back, I wanted a quiet evening in which to read and re-read, in preparation for the visit to his Kitkitdizze retreat in the Sierra Nevada. I’d missed Snyder on the previous Beat odyssey with Pavel Coen. And somehow, given the Zen discipline of his approach
to life, his reputation for not suffering fools gladly, or at all, the mountain poet seemed the most challenging of my American assignments.

Gary’s varied approaches to the roads between Seattle and California unspool like Kerouac’s scroll for
On the Road
. He is constantly on the move, making notes, employing humour,
noticing.
‘Two pigs in a pickup sailing down the freeway.’ He favours the more direct Interstate 5. He sketches off-highway signs: hexagonal
DENNY’S
, starry
CARL’S
, loopy
MCDONALD’S,
eight-petalled
SHELL
,
MOBIL
with a big red
O
. The soft roar of flow.

We don’t overtake, we are part of the necklace. Under black clouds, with densely wooded or stripped hillsides banked around us, the afternoon closes in. We drive the drive. Miles of snaking road with occasional rigs lurching towards us, stacked with peeled forests; a Dunsinane of Ken Kesey hard-hat lumber out of
Sometimes a Great Notion.
I read 636 pp of the Panther paperback, only to find the last page missing.
Viv closes the large book. For some time she has been turning the pages in silence. ‘I
still
don’t understand what happened.’

We have to get off this road. The urge to walk through the forest is too strong. I will try to find a track to the lake. The rain has released some of the wet-tobacco, primeval rot of the fallen trees; tangled roots, green mulch, heavy, boot-sucking red clay. There is a shuttered cabin. We push on for a few minutes, enough to know that another half-hour and we are not coming back. Anna’s face is so white she seems to be in a pioneer studio with drapes of ancient grooved bark behind her. The drooping moss-encrusted branches, ferns and crocodile logs are another element entirely. Trees not only cut off the light, they absorb intruders, devour memory.

When Tom Clark re-imagined the crazed French author’s flight and Danish imprisonment in a novel called
The Exile of Céline
, he said that all the natives talked about was ‘faster forests’. Trees are sourced industrially and marked as furniture before they can put down anchors into the ground. Nothing of that here. This forest pre-dated the first migrants across the Bering Strait. Tourists were
stumbling through the fringes searching for a cobweb on which to rest, husks for some spider’s larder. Everything since we accepted our voluntary imprisonment in the Impala was as Céline said when he described a faked Pompeii with a plaster Vesuvius puffing out smoke. His friend Jacques Deval took him on a tour of a Hollywood film set: ‘eerie, spectral and somehow staged’. Like the submarine pens of Washington State. And the psychotic marines who bring their invasion traumas home. Frontier survivalism is horribly rewired.

We found a motel and, coats over heads, made a run for shelter. The town, a mean strip of shops and bars alongside the highway, close to a logging camp, was called Forks. Gary Snyder told me, when we met, that he had written two poems here. Or that he’d revised one poem and made it new. The bed was substantial; the noise of the traffic splashing through water on 101 was soothing. Natives liked
mass
on their plates. I had grilled salmon and a tub of salad; enough to feed us for a week. The surface of the table was inset with images of grizzly bears. Several fellow diners were tubed to oxygen cylinders, which they hauled around on wheels. They tucked away deep bowls of steaming meat with no hindrance.

My morning circuit, which left me sodden but exhilarated, wouldn’t play back into any Spandau mapping. It was everything Speer would find impossible to project by drawing on orthodox sources of reference. Monster rigs were parked all the way down the narrow strip, glistening in a psychedelic spectrum of green-and-red reflections: commercial signage, rain-slicked petrol-station windows, fuzzy haloes around light poles. A narrow gap between the high backs of the lorries and the electrified noise of the cafeterias and convenience stores revealed a startling, deep-blue gash of sky. Our motel was low-level, down-lit, set against the silver lake of a parking lot. White weatherboard cabins shimmered in pink bounce.

VAMPIRES WELCOME
.

There is a sinister trade-off here; blood-bite solicitation alongside
lists of combat veterans who made it home safe from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of the names are Mexican in origin. Any space left is given to the cult of wood: Native American art, eagles, leaping fish. A new moon shines on
DIE TWILIGHT SAGA
. Coach tours bring Germans to the forest feast. To windows of stag skulls. And non-ironic US flags.

All is explained when I get my coffee. This obscure halt between Mount Olympus and Destruction Island was chosen as the ideal setting for the globally popular
Twilight
vampire franchise, about which I knew nothing. Stephenie Meyer, author of the four dark romances, didn’t drive around to locate this place. She googled her way to the perfect nest for teenage plasma addicts. The pitch is a young girl called Swan who falls for a 104-year-old Dracula; a Forks man fastidious enough to drain the blood of animals rather than humans. Another character shapeshifts as a wolf.

Around the breakfast bar, where I digest this information, a couple of loggers in baseball caps and plaid shirts are carrying on the card game that has run through the night. The oxygen cylinders have wheeled themselves home. The good old boys are talking about how they can fix things for a grandkid done for drunk driving in possession of a case of beer and an armoury of handguns and hunting rifles.

Albert Speer: 17 April 1962. ‘Endless forests surround me; in the distance are smoking volcanoes.’ When the Nazi architect learnt that he was, after all those years, to be released from Spandau, he violated prison rules for the last time by sending a telegram to an old friend. ‘Pick me up thirty-five kilometres south of Guadalajara. Holzwege.’ Holzwege was the pseudonym Speer used for clandestine correspondence. He took it from Heidegger. And it has a nice double meaning: ‘wood roads’ and ‘wrong ways’.