How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (18 page)

“Here
where
?” I said.

noho, florence. whatly hatfield. right here!

“This morning he told us that the Tree had been hiding the farm at Northampton-area trailer parks, dead-end streets and abandoned wooded areas,” the Sergeant said. “We’re checking those now.”

laying lo, stealing hearts

“Are you kidding me?” the VW said. “He’s been this fucking close the whole time?”

“VW—language! What did I say about that word?”

last I heard, went west. thru Greenfld? to S—F?

“What’s SF?” the second Dog asked.

I thought about it. “Shelburne Falls?”

The hospital pointed at me. Then he wrote,
Tr. parkd farm outside grocery story—ran in for some milk
.

I tk my chance, ran for it
.

The VW turned to me. “We’re going there—right Dad? We’re going after him.”

“No we aren’t,” I said.

The SergeantDog extended his paws. “Let’s take one step at a time here,” he said.

The hospital started writing furiously.

“The first thing is get you healthy,” the Sergeant told the hospital. “Then we’ll resume our search for the farm.”

The hospital threw the pad down and pointed at me. His eyes met mine.
“Your dad is sitting there—waiting for you,”
he gasped.
“He—needs stories.”

“I realize that,” I said. “But I just can’t—”

“Now!” said the hospital. His voice was faint and hoarse, but his eyes were bullets. “Before it’s too late!”

If the green light on your VW’s dash goes on, it’s time to change your car’s
sufferoil
. Sufferoil licks the engine of the Volkswagen and collects in a
sufferpan
underneath the engine at the rear of the car. Sometimes the gasket that connects the sufferpan to the rest of the car can split or leak, and then it’s necessary to change that entire gasket, or perhaps even the pan itself. Otherwise, though, changing the sufferoil is a simple Q and A. Q: The oil and the filter? A: Yes!

And while it
is
simple, it’s also incredibly important. The sufferoil holds those moments in the VW’s experiences that are too cold, bright or sharp. These experiences turn over and over in the Volkswagen’s muscles and limbs if you don’t regularly change the oil and clean them out. Is your Volkswagen depressed? Is he or she driving slower and more sluggish than usual, or crying at the storypump? Maybe he or she is carrying around some heavy western masses—a death, a bad interaction with a tractor trailer, maybe even the sight of roadkill or a family of lost, hungry soda cans wandering down the side of Route 5 near the center of Greenfield. Whatever the case, it’s your job as a parent to remove these moments and sketches before they seep into the memory coil and become fixed. There are experiences to
hold onto
, but you must
let go
of others or else they’ll damage your VW permanently. Therefore, change your car’s oil every fifty pages. Take out all of those heavy words, drop the storyfilter and change out any moments that are overly-sad or lonely. Let him or her feel new again. I’ve taken out whole characters (the Lady from the Land of the Beans), cut complete narratives short because they felt sluggish and mean, and you’d be amazed at how much lighter and faster my son could move after such changes.

Here’s a stepper for how to do it:

Step 1
. Use a non-emotional wrench to loosen and remove the six
sufferbolts
located in the bottom center of the car. As their name suggests, these bolts may have wars in their bellies and may therefore be tough to turn. This is why it’s so essential that you use a confident, no-bullshit wrench; if a look-away gets ahold of these coats, and either smells the suffering in the gasket or talks about it with the bolts, the wrench is liable to give up or feign a great struggle. Remember that these bolts already have enough to worry about, as they’re the keeper of secret, pressure-filled narratives, stories with depression turns and lost acres, burdens in their own right.

Step 2
. Once you’ve removed the plugs, let the oil drain into a pan. Be aware: This oil is dangerous stuff, as it not only holds a local history of suffering—a collage of moments experienced by the Volkswagen and those who have ridden in him (this means you), and all those he’s come into contact with since his last oil change—but also select moments of common suffering: hungry children farming VeggieCar fields, graves filled with murdered sneakers, mandolins clawing at the windows of moustached, sour-faced trains, Conceivable Beards sad in their graves. This is another reason to change the oil frequently (and thus, flush those tales out of the Volkswagen), and
to avoid getting any of this oil—any of these stories—on your hands
. Once my hand slipped while I was draining the sufferoil in my Volkswagen, and I was infected with the story of a Smith College student who drowned herself in a public fountain. It took twenty-four hours for that story to clear from my blood, and those hours were some of the most difficult I’d ever encountered—every word was a prison, every note the same.

Note, too, your Volkswagen’s limits—that sometimes he or she can’t discern between
real life
and
stories
, what is on one side of the windshield and what is on the other. This confusion is especially common when his oil has thickened with living to the point that it can’t pass through the pre-Memory filter. This filter can be changed, but it’s hartford to get to. It’s best, then, to keep on top of the sufferoil situation and avoid putting yourself in this predicament.

As you pour the oil into the pan, you’ll see and hear the suffering—it
will play for you in warped liquid images and call out in twisted, muffled sounds. My advice, then, is to avoid looking at it whenever possible. If not, you might be reminded of something terrible and senseless, or see yourself or someone that you love in situations that will hurt to relive. During the first year that I had my Volkswagen, for example, I made the mistake of studying an image in the oil and I realized that it was
me
, on the operating table at twelve, the doctors’ hands on me, the life of the Volkswagen at stake. Another time I saw Old Forever, shuffling into the bathroom late one morning, his mind a thicket.

Step 3
. Once you pour the oil into the pan, bring it to the Northampton Waste Center where they’ll bury it in lined canisters.
Don’t
leave the oil around the house. I know a smooth who poured old sufferoil in a five-gallon bucket and left it in his garage, and his own experiences leaked out of the bucket and seeped into the pavement, the sewage system, the yard and finally into the foundation of his house. Years later he was still finding burgundies shivering in his kitchen cabinets, scurrying when he turned on the lights.

The oil, when you pour it, will start to scream. It knows about time and is frightened. And it should be—its life as we know it is over. No one knows what happens, or will happen, with the oil that we’ve buried. But the best thing you can do here is change the oil quick, avoid contact with it and get rid of it immediately.

NEVER put old oil back into the car, even in an emergency. You’ll wind up with rescreens and morphs, situations you know stocked with odd hybrid characters. There is no faster way to sadden or confuse your Volkswagen beyond repair.

Step 4
. Pull down the center plate and take out the
sufferscreen
and filter. Replace it with a new one. Don’t go Hadley with this—good
sufferfilters
, while simple, are crucial to the forward motion of your car. If your filter doesn’t have newfound sounds and sunrise expressions, don’t even install it.

Step 5
. Replace the bolts and make sure that you’ve got a good seal. Is there any space for suffering? If so, loosen the bolts, reset the gasket and tighten the bolts again.

Step 6
. Open the sufferoil and pour it in. Don’t touch it or contaminate it in any way. And again, make sure that it is good oil. Good sufferoil will be fine, almost cocky, when you pour it. You want it to be saying things like, “No
sweat
,” or, “Fuck it—this is no
problem.
” If it’s hedging (talking about a loved one, asking questions like, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”) don’t use it.

Step 7
. Start the car and run it. Your VW should immediately look and act more confident. Good, clean sufferoil is absolutely essential to the happiness of your Volkswagen.

But what could I do? I just couldn’t traipse all over western Massachusetts, searching every streetsong, sidewalk, and parking space for the shadow of a pasture or the flash of a farm—I didn’t have the car for it! By then the VW could barely make it to Hatfield without breaking down—how could I have told that story?

So I made a decision.

First, I traded some time for a saw—a metal, bendy musical one. Then, one afternoon a few days after our visit to the hospital, I dropped the VW off at the Chest of Drawers’ apartment. The VW begged to know where I was going, but I wouldn’t tell him. I had to take this trip alone.

I walked down 47, towards South Hadley, and followed an offtrail up Summit Mountain. I climbed to the top and sat myself down on a rock. There I could see the sun armpitting back into the Pioneer Valley.

I knew what I had to do. I clenched my teeth, plunged my hand into my chest and took out my heart. It was small in my hand, and it beat furiously in the cold mountain air. I put it down on the rock and I left it there. Then I looked for a place to hide. I walked down a slight hill and over to a military monument which stood about a hundred feet away. I crouched behind the monument and waited.

Time passed. The moon crept up into the sky. I could see it staring at me and my heart, now softly beating on the rock.

In the middle of the night a picnic table tottled over to the heart. He looked around, sniffed the ground, and macked over to me. “Yo,” he said to me.

“Hi,” I said, trying to sound innocent.

The table nodded towards the rock. “Someone dropped their heart back there,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Is that your heart over there?”

“Oh,” I said. I pretended to check my pockets for it, and then my chest. “Sheesh. It must have fallen out of my chest by mistake or something.”

“You should grab it,” he said. “There are trees that
eat
hearts up here.”

“I’ll go get it right now,” I said.

But I didn’t, of course. I stayed crouched behind the monument, my saw in my hand, waiting.

Sure enough, a tree crawled towards the heart around five or six that morning. The tree was thin and small and his face was grey.

I leaned forward. Was that
him
? He was so much smaller than I’d expected. I looked around for an Atkin’s but I didn’t see one.

The tree, meanwhile, silked tentatively towards the rock. He stopped about ten feet from it, sniffed the air and looked around. Then he stepped forward.

As he reached for the heart I ran towards him, screaming and swinging my singing saw. The tree put his limbs up. I pounced, throwing all of my weight at him. He fell and I dug my shoulders into his chest and put my saw to his wooden throat.

It was then that I felt the tree’s birchy skin and read his ancient face.

“Please, please!” he begged. He had a British accent.

This
couldn’t
be the same tree.

“Were you going to steal that heart?” I hissed. “Hah?”

“It was just lying there on the rock!” he stammered. “I’m just so hungry is all.”

I dug the saw into his throat. “You’re murderers—all of you,” I said.

“What? All of who?”

“One of your brothers stole my
father
, took
his
heart.”

“Who? I don’t know what you’re—”

“He’s driving a
farm
. An Atkin’s. Do you know him?” I pressed the saw into his white skin.

The old tree howled. “Is he a birch?”

“What?”

“A birch!”

“How the fuck would I know that?”

“Where does he live?”

“He drives a farm. An
Atkin’s
Farm.”

“I—no. No I don’t.”

I cut him. “You’re full of sap,” I said.

“Really—I don’t,” the tree said. “I promise—I would tell you.”

I picked up my tiny heart with my free hand and held it for the tree to see.

“I honestly didn’t know that was your heart,” the tree stammered. “I would never have taken it if I had known.”

I didn’t care—I dug the saw deeper into his skin. The tree screamed as I cut him in two, and his sap ran over the stone and onto the dirt path.

The song of that tree’s death rang out from my saw on Summit Mountain and rained down over the Valley. I hoped that somewhere, my Heart Attack Tree was hearing it, that he was realizing his fate, and that he was frightened.

I cut that tree into tiny logs and I left him there in a pile. Then I put my heart back in my chest and walked down the mountain.

And now all of these ideas are coming to me—all of these stories.

One winter, I rented a small cabin on Bow Lake, New
Hampshire—miles and miles away from Northampton—and the VW and I spent a week out there, walking along the deserted dirt roads that ran around the lake, reading books, renting movies and doing the things we were always too busy to do at home.

We’d gone there, though, because my son was growing more ill. Areas of his skin—his armpits, his neck—had started to turn brown. He had a terrible cough, and sometimes his scanner misfed stories. Often, he had trouble sleeping or lost track of time. Then, the VW and I were having breakfast at a diner called the Northwood and I struck up a conversation with an old wood stove. I told him a little about our situation—where we’d come from, that we were here on vacation, what we were vacationing
from
(Those days I spent most of my time either chasing stories for the
Wheel
or going to auditions with the VW, who’d decided in the months prior that he wanted to be an actor.). When the stove saw the VW shivering on his stool he said, “Looks like that kid could use a mechanic.”