How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (8 page)

After sitting with the Two Sides for an hour or so I remembered that it was Thursday, normally a work day for them, and it occurred to me
that I hadn’t heard about Storrs in weeks. “Hey Mom,” I said. “What’s happening with the library?”

I had to ask the question several times. They were so lost in the fog of death that I think it was hard for them to even hear my voice. But finally the Other Side of My Mother turned to me and asked, “
What
library, honey?”

It was less than a mile away, so the VW and I walked over. As we approached it, I could see that the old colonial building was now lying on its side and that the parking lot had now turned into a southwestern desert, complete with cacti and unbearable sun.

I unlocked the door but had to push hard to open it even a crack. As soon as I did I could smell the decomposing books inside.

I’ve always wondered: Why do so many things have to die in this book, and why is there always that
smell
?

The VW held his nose. “Why do so many things die in this book, and why is there always that same
smell
?” he said.

“Just help me push, will you?”

He did; we pressed against the door until we could open it enough to squeeze inside.

As a child, this library had been a real home for me. I remember running through the rooms as a boy with my brother and the distant Promise of the VW, getting drunk off the books as a teenager—hiding among the shelves and pressing those secret words against my eyes.

I realize now: I
couldn’t
agree after that. How could I, after all the mechanical work I’d done on my own mind—the carving and slicing and reshaping? I’d liquidated tissue, pulled some wires out and used them to reconnect things in new ways. I’d told no one, either; it was secret surgery.

I remember, too, all the time I spent with the Two Sides of My Mother—sitting at the desk with One Side as she checked out the books, helping the Other Side in the basement as she operated on those volumes that were sick or dying (watching her steady hands as she made tiny incisions in the books’ skin, the wordoil that sprang onto her arms).

Now this place was cold and dark, empty as a kite. The VW and I walked the halls on the first floor and then climbed up to the second,
checking the pulses of the books strewn across the shelves and the hardwood floors. All I wanted—all that I had
ever
wanted—was to find something alive, but that wasn’t going to happen here. This place was a tomb.

In the midst of checking the last room for survivors, I turned around and realized that the VW was no longer behind me. I called his name, and when he didn’t respond I retraced my steps. At first I was upset—he was always wandering off, getting lost!—but that feeling disappeared when I saw where he was. I found him standing at the top of the second floor balcony, his hands wrapped around the banister, his head hung and his eyes staring down at the shelves of dead magazines on the lower level. I could tell when I saw him how overwhelmed he was—his face was an underground tunnel to free the slaves.

I stood next to him without saying anything. Then I said, “I think they’re all dead.”

“Why,” he said, without looking at me.

“I just checked all the rooms,” I said softly.

“But why did it happen?” he said. “Why did they die?”

I felt almost like a real father. “I don’t know,” I said. “I used to ask that same—”

“
Everything
has to die, doesn’t it,” the VW said. “You, and me too.” His eyes were dim—either on a low setting or else turned off completely.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but then I thought of something the Other Side of My Mother used to tell me, an old twig I’d long since stepped on and snapped. “It’s only the body that dies, VW,” I said. “The soul,” I said, etcetera.

“I don’t want to die,” he whispered.

“Kiddo,” I said. I picked him up and chucked him on the chin. “These books were old. They were ready to die.”

The VW scanned the magazines, some of whom had leapt to the floor and died with their arms or legs outstretched. “They were?”

“Sure,” I lied. “Look at their faces.”

“But I’m young and new,” the VW said. His eyes brightened. “Look at
my
face.”

“Right—”

“And you have the
tools
, right? To repair me if anything goes wrong?”

“Most of them,” I said.

The VW’s face grew stern. “And you know what you’re doing?”

“Absolutely I do—I’m writing a book of power on Volkswagens,” I said.

“So why can’t you just make sure?”

“To keep writing?”

“To keep me
going
. To make sure I don’t break down or ever get old or die.”

“Well—I’m—I mean, that’s why I spend so much time maintaining you, buddy. To make sure you’re running right.”

“You promise?” the VW said. His face was now a holiday, a free giveaway.

“Promise what?”

“Promise that I won’t die?”

I didn’t say anything. My mind stalled. I hated the idea that the VW was worrying about this
now
. He was just a child, for god’s sake.

“You promise, Dad?”

The high-beams of light in those eyes—I would have said anything to keep them shining.

Transmission from
whom
, though?

From the Chest of Drawers, my friend and former professor, who taught Religious Studies at Northampton University. We used to go hiking up Summit Mountain in Hadley. And if we didn’t, I always wished that we would have—that I’d really had a friend named the Chest of Drawers, that there really was such a thing as Summit Mountain (with a museum inside which told stories of the old cable-car hotel that used to stand in its place, and a monument to a group of soldiers who’d crashed their plane into the mountains), that there was such a thing as Hadley, or America, or me.

When the VW was old enough I took him with us, but it was always problematic when I did. When he was younger the VW couldn’t keep up, and when he was older he was ill all the time, never strong enough for the hike. He would have to stop and rest, or I’d look back and find him leaning against a tree. Once, in his last year of life, I remember he stopped halfway up the trail, knelt down by a brook and vomited black, chunky oil into the running water.

But what was I supposed to do? I was a single father to a Volkswagen—I couldn’t just leave him in the parking lot by himself. So the Chest and I made do; sometimes we’d slow our pace down so that he could keep up, and othertimes I’d carry him on my shoulders.

The clearest transmission that I can remember, in fact, happened late in the summer of ’03, on one of our first hikes with the Volkswagen. I hiked the first half-mile with the car on my shoulders, but then he grew rambunctious and started asking to be put down. When I said no he started banging his heels against my chest.

I told him to stop it. “I’m only doing this because I don’t want you falling behind,” I said.

“I
won’t
,” he said.

“You say that now,” I said, “but I know you, kiddo. You’ll wander off.”

“_____,” said the Chest.

“He gets distracted very easily,” I told the Chest. “Maybe on the way down, VW. OK?”

“We’ll just keep an eye on him,” the Chest said.

“Yeah! You’ll keep an eye on me,” the VW said.

I slowed down and leaned in close to the Chest. “But what if we lose him and the mountain changes?” I whispered to him.

“What do you mean?” the Chest of Drawers said.

What did I
mean
? This was in mid-September; the leaves had suffered and were now lying dead on the trails. Even so, you had to keep watch over this mountain, like all mountains, at all times. You didn’t want to give it a chance to change its mind—to transform into a fjord or a roller rink. Such shifts made hiking (not to mention booking! How can I describe something if I don’t know what it is?) almost impossible.

The key was keeping it straight in your own mind. It
was
September. The leaves had suffered and
were
lying dead on the trails.

“We just have to keep a close eye on it,” I told the Chest.

“I will, I told you,” the Chest said.

“The key is keeping it straight in our minds,” I said.

The Chest nodded and raised his fist. “I shall pray for it, _____,” he said.

By that time we were in view of the plateau at the top of the mountain and the Summit House, a museum dedicated to height and vision. With its wide decks and clean histories, the Summit House loomed over us, its cool breath on our shoulders, western Massachusetts flapping its gaze on all sides.

I set the VW down and he ran to the stairs and started hopping up them—one at a time, then two. “Dad!” he said.

“Easy, kiddo,” I said.

“Two at a time!” the VW said.

“Yup, I see,” I said. The Chest and I walked up the steps, around the VW and onto the deck.

“I’m doing it,” he said. “Look. See?”

“I see it, buddy,” I said.

Then all three of us leaned against the deck railing and peered out at western Massachusetts—which, at that moment, looked almost real. Sure, there were wires, but most of it was grass and wood, with actual pavement along the roads and literal houses and rivers. I think back on this and wonder: Was there any hint of grey smoke in the air? Was there scenery, or anything in the margins? I can’t say. My memory keeps this scene clear, and gives it sunlight and honest-to-rivet clouds.

But I do remember the VW pointing out a virus of red and grey buildings in the distance and asking me what it was. “Is that a disease? Is the land sick?” he suggested.

“Sick?” the Chest of Drawers said. “No it’s not sick—”

“Well, that depends—” I said.

“That’s Northampton U,” said the Chest.

“That’s a school, buddy,” I said.

“I used to teach there, VW,” the Chest said. The VW nodded, then started running his hand along the bars of the railing. I could tell that the Chest of Drawers would have liked to have told the VW more about his career, but the VW turned and skipped along the veranda.

I sat down on one of the benches and stared out at the expanse. “That’s about as honest a view of things as I have ever seen,” I steined.

The Chest didn’t say anything. He just sat very still on the bench, looking at the view, his eyes beginning to trade.

“Chest—what,” I said to him.

“I’m sorry?” the Chest said, as if he hadn’t heard me.

“The expression on your face is a China House,” I said.

The Chest smiled. “I’m just listening,” he said.

I looked out at the green fields, the tiny bioleggers on the road below. “To what?” I said.

“You don’t hear that?” he said.

“Hear
what
?”

“That sound? The pasture-chord?”

I listened. “No,” I said. “I don’t hear anything but wind.”

“It’s a song—it’s being sent from over there, I think,” the Chest said, pointing west.

“I can’t hear it.”

The Chest grimaced and shook his head. “I would share it with you if I could,” he said.

•  •  •

A few minutes later the three of us started our walk down the mountain. I didn’t carry the VW this time; I just tried to keep an eye on him. When he’d stop too long to smell or touch something—funky-shaped leaves, animal poop, paths that intersected ours—I’d call his name sternly and he’d come running.

As we continued, though, the Chest and I became engrossed in a conversation—we were talking about a mutual friend, Dancing Fingers, who the Chest told me had recently died. I was stunned—this woman was my age, and she lived less than a mile away from me in Northampton. “Why didn’t anyone tell me about that?” I said.

“She was sick for a while,” the Chest said.

I shook my head. “I had no idea.”

Fingers had been a peer of mine and the Lady from the Land of the Beans’s back in college, and as far as I knew the two of them continued to speak once a month or so by phone. I wondered why the Lady from the Land of the Beans hadn’t called me or told me, or told the Volkswagen to tell me.

“It was a stomach condition,” the Chest said. “Her stomach wouldn’t stay, wouldn’t cooperate.”

“Wouldn’t
cooperate
?”

The Chest shook his head. “The stomach had its own ideas about what it wanted to be.”

“What did it want to be?”

“A scholar.”

“Of what?”

“Of
gastrointestinal studies
,” the Chest flacked, as if I should have known better than to ask.

We walked on without saying anything. Then I said, “Was there a funeral?”

The Chest nodded.

“Was it a small one?”

“No, there were a lot of people there. Didn’t you read the obituary in the
Wheel
?”

“I don’t know how I missed it,” I said.

I was lost in a regretfog for the next few minutes of the hike, and I only came out of it because I realized that I didn’t know where my son was. I stopped and looked around. “Wait a minute,” I said to the Chest. “Where’s the VW?”

He stopped and turned around. “VW?” he called out.

There was no response.

The Chest of Drawers and I walked back up the hill, calling his name. We found him a few hundred feet up the trail; he was just standing there and staring into the woods. “Hey,” I said, grabbing his shoulder. “What did I say about staying close?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Hey—” I said again, but then the Chest of Drawers said my name.

I turned.

“Look,” the Chest said, and he pointed off the path.

I peered into the green rage, and after a moment I saw what had stopped the VW: About a hundred feet away, a bank and a pinball machine were intertwined and faithing against a tree, their backpacks on the ground beside them.

I crouched down next to my son.

“What are they doing?” he whispered.

The pinball machine’s scoreboard was full, the bank’s windows fogged. They were so involved—so cofaithed—that they didn’t even know we were there.

“Come on—let’s go,” I said to the VW.