Driver's Education (13 page)

The boy's father began to worry and his mother chewed at her nails; their dinner spread on the kitchen table, steaming and untouched.

The father stood and the food stopped steaming, held its breath. “I'm going,” he said.

“But where?”

“To find him.”

The father drove a perfect yellow car to the cinema where he'd last seen his boy. When the car ran, it was silent: unlike other cars, it hushed its throttled chugging so it could listen to the man hum. Once inside the theater, he craned his head beneath seats and dug his slender fingers into empty popcorn boxes. He shouted out his son's name into the Technicolor dark and the people filling the seats yelled,
Quiet!

He saw him at the end of the film's credits, the boy dodging words and names as they raced across the screen. There he was, worming through the hole in an O, and then, hanging with one hand from a J's curved hook.

He called out to the boy. He said, sternly, “Enough of this! Come home,” but it was moments too late: the last credit vanished and the screen went black, taking the boy with it.

And so he drove to the theater in the next town, and then to the theaters in the city. The theaters on the coasts and in the valleys and on the peaks of mountains, snow dusting the tops of their marquees. He crisscrossed his world searching for his son, who was lost threading paths through his own.

It was a crude exercise, but I kept at it each night for six years. When a page was completed, I slipped it into a deep empty drawer in my father's desk. I watched as, over time, the sheets accumulated into a weighty stack, a messy epic that weighed down the wood in which it sat. The evenings that my father was home, I'd press my ear against his bedroom door. I'd listen for the soft, static shuffling of paper.

•  •  •

There were other things I did to keep my father and his car from leaving.

Three different times I siphoned out Lucy's gas; I disconnected the spark plugs; I pulled at wires and valves and filthy rubber hoses without knowing what functions they served. I heard from someone, somewhere, that if I shifted gears while the car was off, the transmission would eventually give. I'd wait well into the night for my father to sleep, and I'd sit at the wheel and shift from first to second to third, for one hour, for two, for three.

After midnight in April of 1963, when I was fifteen, I crouched next to the car's hood in the garage and released the air from all four tires. If I'm remembering correctly, I had a hell of a time with it. I suppose I thought it'd be as simple as deflating a bike tire. That once I unscrewed the valve cap and depressed the pin inside, the air would rush out quickly and seamlessly; the job would take minutes.

Not so. I scrambled between the tires in the dark, listening to them, inhaling their traces of bitter asphalt. The air wasn't being released quickly enough; despite the deflating hisses, the tires stayed solid and firm. I reached from the front of the car toward its rear, trying to touch two valves at once. My arms were too short and my legs were too long. I stumbled incessantly in the black. Bruises grew on both knees from sliding against the cement and my knuckles bled. I stared at the valves. I slapped at the tires' hides with my open palm.

I was sweating and hyperventilating, but I was afraid of slowing down. Had I not felt a loose screw press against my hand when I tripped, I'm betting I would've kept running, like a dog chasing his tail, until I passed out. It felt like gravel, but sharper, and it drew blood from the lines on my palm. It was small—a quarter of an inch—with a piercing point and a rusted thread. I felt along the front right tire's inner loop until I found the valve and I slipped the screw into place, pressing it until the pin depressed and held. The air released in a wide steady flow. I waited, counted, and it kept coming.

I found more screws, rummaging through my father's workbench, through his toolbox with the broken hinge, searching blind along the dark contours of the floor. Each time I found one that was the right size, I wedged it into one of the empty valves, and the hissing grew louder, the tires harmonizing with one another. When the air leaked from all four, I told myself it was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard.

But then the next morning, the tires were full again.

Finn

It's closing in around one o'clock in the morning, and it's been almost an hour since Randal and I arrived in this goddamned city, but we both say it feels like we've been here for years. Like we've been driving aimlessly along thousands of vacant grey streets and staring at a thousand empty storefronts passing a thousand empty cars. And we've said a thousand times that it's fun, but a thousand more times that we're tired. So finally we agree to book a room at the Forbes Avenue Suites, which is well lit and situated on the edge of a collegiate neighborhood called Oakland, and which advertises free garage parking, free cable, and rooms to rent by the hour, day, week, and month.

“What're we supposed to do with Mrs. Dalloway?” Randal asks me when we've parked Lucy. He's got his pack unzipped an inch or two and from the black space within protrudes one of the cat's gnarled paws.

“I don't know,” I say. “Take her with us?”

“Can't we just, like—”

“Like what, Randal? Leave her in the trunk?”

He doesn't say anything—he just chews the inside of his cheeks. Finally: “I think she's hungry.”

“We'll buy her something to eat.”

“What if she eats
us
?”

“This is ridiculous.”

In the hotel room, I wait until Randal steps into the bathroom, and until I hear the shower running, and until he begins some off-key rendition of “November Rain,” before I release Mrs. Dalloway from the pack. She takes in the room slowly, nonchalantly, hopping with unexpected grace between the legs of a wooden coffee table and a set of stained wool curtains. I keep trying to pet her, though she won't let me; she just sort of trots away every time I graze my fingers against her arched back. It's only once I totally lose interest that she returns, sliding her balding head against my open palm.

“All right,” I tell her. “I see how it is.”

I slip out into the hallway, which is partly outside—a sort of balcony that looks out over Forbes Avenue and runs along the length of the hotel. The air is so thick that you can almost see it pinned to the contours of the hills, and there are no stars, only streetlamps.

I call Karen, who's phoned me seventeen times over the past four hours. She picks up on the third ring and she sounds out of breath and Hugo is barking.

“Christ,” I say. “He's so loud.”

I hear her opening cupboards and then closing them. Rummaging. “He's hungry. He thinks I'm feeding him.”

“It's one o'clock in the morning. You haven't fed him?”

More cupboards closing. “I think,” she says, “I'm out of dog food.”

To anyone else, I suppose the hour at which I'm calling would seem weird, but Karen holds shares of my insomnia and has cultivated a sleepless existence of her own. She's taught me how to appreciate empty streets caked in darkness, how three a.m. doesn't have to bring around that droopy sadness of the soul. How to have dreams with my eyes open.

We get each other on the phone around one, two, three o'clock when there's something worth watching on TV. It'll be a rerun of a competition program she especially likes. Or some social experiment shtick that interests me. We'll talk about how they've cast it. How they've cut it, how they've rearranged it. How we could always do it better.

“This dog,” Karen says.

“Yes.
That dog
.”

“I love him, though.” She says something to Hugo I can't make out. “You know? I really love him.”

“Of course.” I lean my elbows on the wet rusted iron of the balcony's railing.

“It's just—sometimes I wonder if it was best. For him. Does that make sense? He would've had such a better life there.”

“In Toronto?”

“In wherever he ended up.”

Hugo is still barking. Karen yells
Shutthefuckup
and then apologizes to him. I'm beginning to smell; I can smell myself. I dip my nose beneath the loose collar of my shirt. Sweat and salt and something else, something airier: pine.

She continues: “I've been trying to get hold of you all evening.”

“I was in a lot of tunnels,” I tell her. “I don't think my phone works in tunnels.”

“Regardless, I have you now.”

I wipe the water from my forearms and see orange streaks. “Yes, you do.”

“After you left today I met with programming.”

“Did you know that the only way to get through Blue Mountain is to drive through all these tunnels?”

Across from the hall-balcony thing is a mural, a massive piece of graffiti art that flanks the east wall of a parking lot.

“They're shuffling around some things.” She's still talking. Hugo has stopped barking. Now, instead, there's that motor-boat-in-muck chomp of a dog gorging himself on kibble. “There's—how did they say this?—there's a general concern that some of the network's flagship programming is feeling a bit stale.”

The mural, the one across from the balcony, has shattered skulls and derelict landscapes and upturned streets: the intricate stuff of postapocalyptic fiction.

I say, “Another question: do you know what to feed a cat? Like, aside from cat food?”

Karen says, “Jesus Christ, Finn, listen to me, they're canceling the show.”

I duck my nose farther back into my shirt. I speak into my chest so it muffles my voice. “They can't do that. Can they? They can't do that.”

“They can. And they're going to.”

“But how? How can they do that when we're the Most Popular Reality Program they have? That anyone has?”

Karen sighs and it whistles. She speaks from her chest. “I don't think that's the case anymore. I actually don't think that's been the case for a while, Finn.”

She tells me then what happened. She tells me how after I'd left she'd received a call from the head of the channel's programming department—a woman called Ms. Balthildis van der Bijl (whose Dutch name, I should probably mention, literally means “of the ax”). Karen explains to me how none of this seemed particularly strange. A little different, all right, because they usually met on the first Tuesday of every month, and this call was
after
that meeting, which incidentally had gone pretty well, etc.—so, yeah, a little different, but not strange, no definitely not
strange
.

So, right: at 5:30 Karen leaves the office on Seventh, and because she has a few extra minutes and because the only thing Karen hates more than puppy mills is the subway during the summer, she decides to walk to the network headquarters, which are in Times Square, on Broadway. But then on the way, somewhere north of Penn Station, she steps in two steaming mounds of dog shit, which she thinks is supposed to be good luck in some other city, Paris or something, but here, in New York, when you're wearing
brand-new
open-toed shoes is just fantastically repulsive.

At headquarters she heads up to programming in a glass elevator packed tightly with the sort of girls that make Karen and me happy that we work in our annex on Seventh, and she doesn't even have to explain the looks they gave her, the way they held up their tilted pierced noses, the way they threw their spiteful eyes down at her shit-caked toes.

“I went to the ladies room before I told the receptionist I was there,” she says. “I tried to wash myself off the best I could. At least off my goddamned
skin
. Because, I mean, can't you get something awful from . . . that? Hepatitis or something? Cholera? I'm not a doctor. But Christ, Finn. I've never seen this much crap before in my entire life. And I was
sweating. Not just sweating. But, like,
shvitzing.
If you would've seen me you would've thought it was raining outside. Raining shit and sweat.”

“But what happened?” I ask. “In the office? When you got in there? What did Of the Ax say?”

“She was sitting in the glass conference room—the one that faces Broadway—with three other guys, which I suppose should've been a sign. But when I sat down I still didn't have any idea anything was wrong.” Because, she explains, the Ax was still wearing that big Dutch smile she has. And she was saying these fantastic things like
Oh hello, hello hello hello, don't you look vonderful
in that big Dutch accent of hers, which is really quite calming and wonderful, probably one of the best accents out there, which is sort of weird, isn't it? Because Dutch, as a language, is especially grating on the ears.

I say, “I don't know. Maybe? But Karen. When did you know something was up?
What did they say?
”

“Frankly after van der Bijl mentioned how
vonderful
I looked they got right into it. Basically, the show's not pulling weight. The past two seasons we've been clocking in a point three in eighteen to forty-nine. They think—”

“The rating systems are fucked. Everyone knows that. They think what?”

Hugo barks again; Karen clicks her teeth. “I'm paraphrasing this, all right? Just—know I'm paraphrasing this: they don't think we're producing a relatable sort of reality anymore. These good-looking kids. This demographically perfect representation. This ridiculous house with its Swedish furniture. Its Bjorn lamps and its Blarfemfarb beds and its Klaataven chairs. The general feeling is that people—that the
audience
—no longer relates. That it's just not real.”

“We'll make them get jobs.”

“We already make them get jobs.”

“Then we'll make them get more jobs. We'll only cast people from Detroit and Tulsa and Cleveland. We'll film there, too. Did you tell them all this? Did you tell them I can make something as real as they want?”