American Spirit: A Novel (23 page)

Television to the rescue, and the thumb stops pressing forward through the channels at the first note of the calming voice-over on a PBS documentary about mathematician John Nash. The voice speaks calmly about game theory and Nash going mad and getting strapped into state beds and roughed up by state employees trying to tame him with needles and pills; numbers and theorems and failing out of Princeton and MIT until he’s falling asleep alone in wards manned by the state, then rising again when Stockholm gives him the prize. And the silent conversation between Matthew and Tatiana might be the one everyone has in front of a television with someone they love. Imagined silent reassurances and pledges to believe in each other no matter where it leads the two of them, all spoken without a word or glance, all requited with a mute and implicit contract, one quietly hopes.

And then something comes out, is actually said, Tatiana breaks the silence to say it. “You have a touch of what he has, you know; that brilliance.”

Seems unlikely to Matthew, based on any number of proofs—getting hit by a car while jogging around a grocery store, for instance. Or, say, selling psychotropic brownies in order to afford a used handgun after being fired at work. But it’s easy to lie there letting Tatiana be wrong, entertaining
for a fleeting rush that genius comes in many forms, and that too many people on earth have been too quick to let the tiny failures of navigating day-to-day life in the suburbs be faulty barometers of a brain’s potential.

And she speaks again during a pause between the documentary voice-over man and interview footage with Nash. “What’s your favorite prime number?” she asks.

A long, thoughtful stare to middle distance, the way geniuses pause, and then finally: “I’d say fifty.”

Tatiana is silent long enough to make one think the brief conversation is over, and then she whispers: “Fifty isn’t a prime number.”

A beat in the timing, and then Matthew and Tatiana erupt, laughing, and it gets to sounding like crying for all the snot and tears and coughing. And then another half hour passes in silence, and a decade of John Nash’s life goes by, and the eyes are slits lit by flickering blue.

“Can I smell your stomach?” This from Matthew, and brave considering the way things went in the shower earlier. Matthew falls asleep there, on a gorgeous and soft belly, Tatiana’s warm skin cooled on top by air-conditioning, and smelling of summer already happening; of jasmine and Laurel Canyon somehow, he’s certain. He drifts off listening to what everyone did to John Nash, convinced the story is about what the world did to Nash’s heart, not his head.

The Lonely Stretch

B
EFORE MATTHEW’S EYES
are open he knows she’s gone; the feet have roamed the edges and felt nothing there for seemingly an hour or two. Hard to tell what time is doing at the end of sleeping, so maybe the feet have been searching for two hours, maybe ten minutes. The last part of sleep was all dreams of plane crashes; of the dumb black caskets going into a hole at the feet of the guy from the church acting like he knew them; into the hole underneath the frowns of neighbors and friends that Matthew hasn’t seen since. Waking up and the head is racing:
She’s gone, people go, that’s what happens, don’t get too close, keep it light, get on the road, go see Tim.
And then the numbers tick by: 9, 331, 269 plus 12 percent, 301.28, and then the head offers one last bit:
You’re like
A Beautiful Mind,
but all you can figure out are
hotel bills and heartbreak, both of which prove you’re not a genius.
There are morning people, evidently. One is probably not a morning person if one wakes up at 9:00
AM
in a hotel room saying, as the day’s first words spoken aloud, “Fucking early.” But the bag is packed, even easier without three mugs to cram into it. And checkout happens in the phonetic laziness of the region coupled with the fast rhythm of wasting no words at this hour:

“Three thirty-one, checking out.”

“Okay, total is three twenty-one twenty-eight.”

“K.”

“Need a receipt?”

“Mmm, no.”

“Leave it on the card?”

“Um, yeah, thanks.”

The morning valet kid is thirty-eight or forty. He doesn’t whip the car around the corner as much as he lurches the rented Taurus into the driveway like an apology that’s difficult to get out at this hour. Matthew gives the guy a couple of dollars as if it’s going to make a difference, crams his legs and knees into the cockpit, closes the door without any foreign hydraulic pageantry, and instantly winces and wonders if two dollars was enough. If fifty people check out before the guy gets off work, that’s a hundred bucks. If they tip him four instead of two, dude walks with two hundred. If he works four days a week, he’s making thirty-two hundred a month. But forget fifty times two, and forget the generous raise from two bucks to four multiplied by a four-day schedule—if
you’re parking cars downtown at forty, math hasn’t worked like that for you, ever.

If Tatiana’s British car situation was sculpture stolen from the Tate Modern, then Matthew’s ride for the next week is a Dumpster taken from behind a Walmart; feels like riding on a cinder block that somebody tied to a bad soft mattress. But it has snacks, it has satellite radio, it has a full tank of gas that can be filled again and again.

South Flower leads to Eighth Avenue, which takes you to the 110, then 101, 5, 580, 280, and they all unfurl in front of the teal or moss or wintergreen chariot; the midsize Ford Taurus or similar. Leaving Los Angeles the long way, the scenic route, the way that avoids the trap of Las Vegas. It’s like going four hundred miles out of your way to avoid driving by the bar that you know will mean bumping into your dealer and your ex; sometimes the long way is the shortcut in the long run. Hollywood fades to Pasadena’s streets of little houses still strong in the stucco of dreams from a couple or few generations ago; the freeway on-ramps, bordered with immaculate ice plant, and below them the residential streets lined with little squares of old green grass and yucca trees. Everything across the seat and out the passenger window feels sturdy and perennial; everything is little white houses of two or four good people with good intentions, and prickly side-yard agaves that creep up these houses.

The day-by-day chariot pushes on past it and eventually on the left stands Magic Mountain, one last stab at reminding departing motorists that life can still be a theme park dream,
and if not Disneyland then it’s not too late to pull off Interstate 5 before the pass to chase the dream at Magic Mountain; but, hey, seriously, last chance. Up the big, long uphill stretch of 5, up the grapevine, where the big diesel trucks modestly admit they’re beat, pull to the right, downshift, and refresh the rev and whir, like that part in every song that huffs a tired wheeze under its own weight before getting the idea to change keys and feel new again for a minute. Eventually families in cars pull into the big rest-stop parking lot in front of Pea Soup Andersen’s; safe wagons from Sweden or Norway or something, piloted by modern dads who never scream about how they’re gonna turn this thing around and take everybody home; moms that talk to kids like they’re already at Stanford.

Keep pushing up Interstate 5 and the sensible Scandinavian cars start turning into well-worn economy boxes from Japan and worn-out pickup trucks in small and medium sizes; Bakersfield, already sending word this far south, letting one know the dream hasn’t made it up this far from Los Angeles, and whatever fortune is up in San Francisco sure as hell won’t be coming down this far south. The heat is starting to do a decent job of making waves and ripples over strip malls, cinder-block taverns, and old Taco Bells or Kentucky Fried Chickens turned into half-assed local Chinese joints. Someplace between Bakersfield and north of it, Matthew pulls off at a combination gas station/produce stand/Mexican grocery market/Laundromat/diner and seller of area rugs with dramatic portraits of saints and virgins on
them. The woman working the counter is where luck stops; honky-tonk hair beehived above a face that makes it clear there’s nothing around here that would pay the likes of Matthew middle six to come up with marketing plans. The only marketing plan in the works of any place or person around here is: Live through this as long as you can, then try again. The aged beehive soaks up mentholated smoke as the mouth below exhales it heavenward, her eyes framed by reading glasses hung on a lanyard of fake gold chain and emeralds. To her immediate left, pieces of greasy chicken sweat under lights behind a case of thick nicotine-yellow-and-brown glass. Matthew peels off a run of paper from a medium-sized wad and puts the bills on the counter. Says he wants to put it all on pump five, unleaded.

“Jojos?”

“What’s that?”

“Jojos.”

Long pause.

“But what is it? What’s that mean?”

And with that, Lady Hard Luck stubs out her long, skinny menthol into a cat food can of ashes from the last ten, and gestures with half her heart over to the glass case where the chicken is. Chicken must be
iojos,
or maybe they belonged to someone named Jojo, or maybe the tanned-dead, damp potato wedges or whatever the fuck is in there with them are
jojos.

“Just the gas, I think.”

So legal tender is tended. Matthew moves outside back
to the ride, pump side, putting the get-there juice into the tank, staring at a beautiful Hispanic woman painted or dyed or woven right onto one of the area rug mural things hanging outside the
jojo
cash hut. The woman on the rug is gorgeous after enough time spent lonely behind a windshield and on a plane, she’s heartbreak and gasoline, she’s cigarettes and caffeine, she’s the vision that gets a man driving another eight hundred miles on black coffee adrenaline. She’s the patron saint of a thousand bad decisions waiting to happen; just the idea of trolling roadside fruit stands and taverns for someone who looks like her is the siren tempting the SS Taurus to wreck on rocks. So onward, onward, onward!

The drive continues, the brain makes a game of checking and rechecking in the side mirror to make sure the gas cap has been put back on, so every five minutes there’s the refrain of:
Oh, shit, is it on? Oh, right, it’s on. It looks like the little door thing’s closed. Okay, good. Should I pull over and check? No. I’d know if it was off. I’d know; I’d see it going empty on the gauge too fast.
The drive’s decent pace eventually carries Matthew right into San Francisco’s workday traffic, office people getting out of the cage, cars creeping up off Market and Third and Embarcadero onto 80 to crawl across the Bay Bridge. Across the bridge, Matthew’s trek continues over the land between the city and Berkeley where everything feels like a nineteen seventies movie, over Davis and the Yolo Causeway and Sacramento, onward east past places with names like Truckee. Up around Donner Pass, the eyes feel shot, and everything inside Matthew is slowing down as the
Taurus continues locked into a stiff shot of cruise-controlled speed. Pushing on, there must be caffeine and Taurine on the horizon. The rental ride is free of the BMW’s vices that are locked up back in JFK’s long-term parking; but on the drive to find Tim in God’s country, it feels good knowing that one can’t reach up and crush a line of an over-the-counter cocktail of pep to keep driving. This is real American living; this is pulling off when you’re feeling sleepy. Well, not pulling off and sleeping, but pulling over in Reno, anyway.

There are probably a thousand or two interesting places to buy fat little vials of vitamin-pumped energy potion and tall skinny cans of energy drink in this tiny city. Reno probably has myriad dicey and effective opportunities to duck into a parking garage or alley and get jumped up on something. But the pull of this little place scares someone like Matthew enough to stay on the freeway; its pallor, every sad lyric and disease in top shape waiting for someone like him to get off the interstate. The nerves light up with synaptic warning, Matthew is a deer bristling at the danger of eating grass next to a highway. Even just driving past the place one feels this way; just driving by, okay and, yes, pulling off the interstate for one quick roll down that tiny strip that has the sign boasting of being America’s biggest small town, or smallest bad situation, or biggest little lie you’ve ever told a loved one, or whatever the Reno motto is.

Through the windows of the tiny Harrah’s the eyes catch a flash of strippers dealing cards and a casino Starbucks in a food court, yes, but what are the chances of getting past the
traps and into that Starbucks? Certainly there are good people here, maybe the girls in underwear and tuxedo collars are good eggs at heart—there are probably honorable situations to be found here, but Matthew would be detoured for three years if he stays here more than about a minute. A left and another left on the street heading back to the eastbound interstate, then the chain drugstore is probably the least exciting place to wind up in this town, but they’ve got the aforementioned energy aids to wake a driver up, and they’re right next to the highway, easy off, easy on. Matthew gets the green Ford parked between the white lines, locks it down, walks up the walk, into the den of fluorescent lights, candy, drinks, and hygiene items. A woman in a black Audi looks up, all glitter and graves, and she smiles a huge bleached smile, issuing a “Hello, honey!” and it feels a little like someone’s glad to see him after a long drive.