How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (26 page)

I want to tell you the end of the story, the katydids raccoon, and I think I can do so in one seissun, a seissun I’ll call “Know-How.” Because now I know how.

The VW failed to track down the Heart Attack Tree, and so did I. Some roadsongs yield bookmills, and some trips trip and slip and break their Volkswageny necks. In the months after the Volkswagen’s death I stopped writing about Trees, thinking about Trees, believing in Trees altogether. If I saw a Tree on the street or on a lawn, I would shout at it in disbelief and then turn and walk the other way.

I spent most of those first Memory of the Volkswagen weeks by myself, in my home, wearing silence and watching, through the window, the long, slow blink of Northampton—the way the city opened her eyes on me, closed them, kept them closed for a while, and then opened them again. I’d always ask her the same question: “Will you help me?” But of course she didn’t respond. As if she wasn’t aware of my sorrow!

“I’m all alone,” I told her.

The city said nothing.

Sometimes, I’d forget the
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive
and I’d start driving out to Florence or Amherst just like I had six months earlier. I’d be moving at top speed when I’d awaken to the fact that my son, my car, was dead—that this trip was impossible, just a Memory. Then I’d have a breakdown-in-belief, which involved my stopping suddenly and falling to the ground, often injuring myself and ripping my clothes. Then I’d get up, brush myself off, and walk home.

But if you don’t find the stories, they’ll find you. And that’s exactly what happened to me one Friday a few months after the VW’s death.

By that time, I’d traded in enough of the VW’s parts to be able to afford a used pair of BioLegs, and I’d gone ahead and had the surgery
^*
. The bio’s were slightly too small, and sometimes they really ached, but
hey—they were convenient and reliable, and they got me from one chapter to the next.

I was short on time, though, so I was still selling extraneous chapters from the book of power. That day, I’d brought a few stories (“Valve Adjustment,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter”) to the Troubadour—an experimental bookstore in North Hatfield—to see what I could get for them. I’d turned in the chapters at the counter, and I was browsing through the shelves while the owner—a kind vinyl sofa—assessed them. I’d found a few books on the moment and I was skimming through them. Even though the VW was gone, I still had questions. I couldn’t help but wonder, for example, whether Momentism, the belief system, had anything to do with a
momentpump
. So I was flipping through the beliefs, one by one.

Deep in those dark stacks I felt a tap on my shoulder, and when I turned I saw a tall, thick oak tree hovering over me. He was wearing a disguise—a fake moustache, fake glasses, a baseball hat, a trenchcoat—but even so I knew exactly who he was. I read his eyes and they told me the story. And I could smell the blood on his breath.

I’d always planned for this moment, for the day when I finally met the Tree, and how I’d hurt him in surprising ways—saw his arm off (how I wish I’d had my musical saw with me!), crush his face, poke out his eyes or kick him in the balls. But none of that happened. He put one branch over my mouth, picked me up with another branch and drew me inside his coat, close to his chest. Then he turned and walked towards the exit.

Inside his coat, it was dark as birth. There were stars, and a moon, and it was perfectly quiet. I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t want to. I observed that I might suffocate, and for a few seconds every word was the same. I met my own Memory, looked into its hollow eyes.

The Tree rushed me out of the store and through the parking lot. When he opened the coat I covered my eyes in the new light. By the time I’d caught my breath and regained my wheres, the Tree was gone—I saw him sprinting down Route 5, the trenchcoat waving open to reveal his thick, barky legs.

I didn’t chase him or call after him—at that moment I didn’t even
care about him. I was too stunned by what I saw in front of me. There, parked on a sidestreet about fifty feet away, was an idling Atkin’s Farm. I ran toward it as fast as my bio’s could carry me.

The night had told me the truth about my son, but lied about my father.

He was sitting inside, heartless, at his table near the scarred window. He was only half-alive. His face was a still lake and his eyes were dirt roads. Through the hole in his chest I could see his lungs, struggling to fill.

“Dad,” I said. “Dad.”

He looked at me lakeishly. It was clear from his eyes that he had no heart.

“Dad,” I said.

“What,” he said. Then he said my name, and put out his hands.

“Stay right there,” I said. “Stay right there, OK?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

I ran back into the store and spoke to the sofa behind the counter. “Please,” I sang. “I need to buy back some chapters.”

“What chapters?” he said. “Of the power.”

“Which power?”

“The one I just sold you,” I said. “You sold it
here
?”

“Remember, I was just in here?”

“When?” he said. “Five minutes ago!” I said.

“No kidding?” he said. “No, I don’t remember that.”

“Literally like five minutes ago.”

“I think I would remember that.” The sofa put his hands on his hips. “Well, I’ll go check.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Let me just find my glasses,” the sofa said, wobbling into the back room.

Wires in my mind began to fray, to snap. “Please hurry,” I said. “A man’s
life
depends upon it.”

Then I heard the sofa’s voice: “Was it a book about sand?”

“No—it was about—”

“Was it a songbook?”

“It was stories from a book about
Volkswagens
,” I shouted back.

•  •  •

I sprinted out of the store and back to the farm. I sat down beside my Dad at the corner table and I held out a story—a quickloom about a makeup named Emily.

My father looked at the pages. “That’s supposed to save me?”

“It’ll buy us a few more minutes,” I said.

He took the story and began to read.

I got behind the deli counter of the farm, fired it up, shifted it into gear and sped it back to Northampton. There wasn’t much money. I raced up the hill to the Crescent Street Apartments, ran inside, then coaled back into the farm and drove it out onto Route 5 and south, towards Springfield and the BayState Hospital.

Twenty minutes later I pulled into the hospital parking lot, parked the farm and ran into the emergency room. When the hospital recognized me his eyes became dry, dour stalks. “You,” he hissed. “How
dare
you show your noface here.”

“Listen,” I said. I bent over to catch my breath.

“After singing the song that killed my son? I should have you removed—”

“We found the farm,” I said. “And we found my father.”

All his rooms were dark. “Good for you,” he nickeled.

“But he’ll die if you don’t help me
right now.
”

The hospital pursed his lips.

I put an oily, plastic garbage bag on the counter.

“What’s this?” he said.

I pointed at it. “Look inside,” I said.

He opened the bag and peered inside. “You must be kidding me,” he said. He reached down to the bottom of the bag and pulled out the VW’s engineheart. It was small, rust-free and still beating. “This is—”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“It still holds stories,” I said. “A lot of them.”

“A transplant?”

I nodded.

“You want me to—”

“Yes. Please. Yes.”

His eyes were waiting rooms. “I should sit here and do nothing. I should let you watch your father die.”

“Please,” I said again. “I’ve already lost a son.”

• One engineheart
  
• Questionhope, one bushel
  
• One book of power
  
• As many stories as you can find
  

Do as much as you possibly can.

I wish I could have shown you that engineheart—the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still.

One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took the bolts off the casing and opened it up. Just to see how it worked. Opening that heart was like opening the first page of a book—there were characters (me, the Memory of My Father), there were themes (engineering, money, journalism), there was rhythm and chronology. I saw, in the images, old roads I’d forgotten—Huntington, Bird’s Pit, Loudville—and scenes from stories where the VW was just a newborn.

I can’t pretend to tell you how it worked. I tried to understand the science of it—the songs which ran from story to story, the small, multi-geared motors, the coils of wire—but it was too complex, too difficult to name.

But I do know that it held a true translation: miles to words, words to notes, notes to time. It was the
heart
that converted the pedestrian song of Northampton to something meaningful, and it did so via some sort of fusion: The turtle that howls a bluegrass tune at the edge of Bow Lake becomes a
warning
in the Volkswagen heart (Fear of Death + turtle = The Tale of the Fear-of-Death Turtle).

And that’s just the beginning—the first heart layer. It will take years and years of study, and the energy of every single living thing, to understand the tiny minds and roads in the subsequent layers, the relationship between the music of one layer and the topography of another, the mechanics at work to make every single heartmoment turn together.

The world has
just begun
to understand the mysteries of the Volkswagen heart!

The point is, this
was
always the way it was supposed to be. Even I could see that the Volkswagen Heart was wired for travel—genetically coded, in this case, to track that untrackable farm. His pages were already written—as are mine and yours.

Yes, yours too! I am looking into your eyes right now and I am reading your life, and I am excited/sorry for what the road holds for you. It’s going to be amazing/really difficult. You’ll love/loathe every minute of it!

The surgery on my father took twenty-four hours, most of which I spent in the waiting room, floating in anxiety. Early the next morning, the Memory of My Father appeared in the chair across from me, studying the wall clock and writing notes on scraps of paper. After a few hours of waiting he said, “I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry?”

“No, I said, my body floating above the chair.

“I’m starving,” he said.

Then he checked his watch, stood up and walked out of the waiting room. And that was the last time I saw him—he never came back from the cafeteria. He may be in Springfield or Canada, or he may still be waiting in line for hospital food.

A few minutes after that, a doctorcoat I didn’t recognize stepped into the waiting room and called my name. I turned to face him. His coat had been white before the surgery, but now it was technicolored—he looked like he’d just been through some sort of colorwar, and lost.

“Good news,” he told me. “The story goes on.”

My feet landed on the carpet. “It does?”

“Thanks to the heart,” he said. “Was that
yours
?”

I shook my head. “It’s a Volkswagen heart,” I said.

“But who wrote those stories?”

“I did,” I said.

“The ones about Colorado? About Bingo?”

“Yup,” I said.

“You know, those are some of the
loneliest
stories I’ve ever read,” he said. “Have you ever thought about seeing a therapist? I have a colleague—he’s very good. He uses a—I think it’s called a therapy
machine
? So the therapy is very precise.”

A few days later, after my father was restoried and speaking, I started up the Atkin’s Farm and drove it to the old, empty site of the Cooley-Dickinson Hospital. I parked it there and left it. The farm stands there still, as a Memory-All for the BayState’s son.

Now my father and I go there every Sunday. We sit at a table near the window and look out at the convenience store across the street and
the vegetables crossing between Northampton and Florence. I tell my father about the 1971 Volkswagen Beetle—about our summit-mountain transmissions and our bingo-bio-breakdowns, about the quabbins and the junkfarms and the podium productions. I know he probably gets tired of the stories, but they’re the only way for him to know who the VW was—they’re all I can do to keep the Volkswagen alive.

And he tells me stories, too—farmtales, mostly, about the Heart Attack Tree commandeering Atkin’s up the Deerfield River, the Conway Inn telling anec after dote. Sometimes he’ll be mid-adventure and I’ll realize that the story he’s telling me (a trip into Hatfield or Pelham) isn’t his—that he never took that drive. He’s describing one of the Volkswagen’s experiences, a leftover in his engineheart, and he doesn’t know the difference. But I never correct him or say anything about it. No matter who’s telling it, I’m happy that the story is being told.

Every once in a while there will be some confusion while we’re sitting there: An ambulance or an injury will step into Atkin’s because they believe it’s the hospital. They’ll be bleeding, or screaming, or about to give birth. Someone will take them by the hand, lead them to a table and chair, and give them a donut. They will feel better immediately—they will no longer be ill, or pregnant, or in pain.

Here’s how this works: At Atkin’s, the donuts are homemade. Their outside is powdery, but when you split them open you find blood, and a heart. This, I know, is how everything works. Everything—the morning, the trees, every single page!—has a soft and plentiful center.

I have seen the future, and it is Atkin’s Farm, where every road is a Route 47.

Oh God! There is so much to look forward to.