Passenger (20 page)

PART III

TWENTY-THREE

It is a seven-hour drive from Baltimore to Ithaca, New York, give or take.  Several times I think Clarence’s rusted red pickup truck will not make it—that it will sputter and die on me and I will have to leave it to fossilize on the side of the interstate while I hitchhike the rest of the way.  But that does not happen.  It shudders and rattles like a maraca and coughs up plumes of black exhaust, but it holds itself together.  There are cassette tapes tossed pell-mell around the cab, rap music, and I play them to drown out the disconcerting noises of the old truck.

I pass the skylines of unidentifiable industrial cities to my right, faint and mirage-like in the haze of midday.  Underpasses, gangrenous with graffiti, crowd in to suffocate me.  Great clots of traffic tie up the highways.  There is little room for negotiation.  Then, as the afternoon grows old and cools toward sunset, the highway opens up and traffic disperses like the scatter of light.  Urban sprawl gives way to snow-crested pines and rolling country hills.  The sun is brighter here, the sky more open.  I burn along at a decent speed, the steering wheel vibrating in my hands, a fever coursing through my system.  There is no need for me to stop and eat—my stomach feels like a clenched fist—and I stop only for gasoline.   

Two hours south of Ithaca and there is a needling toward the back of my head.  
Metal plate.  
The headache is still there, but the needling is new.  It is akin to the sensation of waking after a long sleep and having your arm, which has been propped at an awkward angle, go numb.  I rub my head, press some fingers against my wound, and wince.  I consider spinning the wheel and launching myself through the concrete barrier that separates the highway from the fir-studded hills.

“Damn…”

The rap music is making things worse.  I eject the tape and spin the radio dial to locate a station.  Something soft.  Classical.  A twinge courses through me as I rest the dial on a recording of Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata.

I catch a glimpse of my haunted eyes in the rearview mirror.  
Soy fantasma.  
Too clearly I can see the void inside me looking out.  The sight sickens me.  A person cannot live on the here-and-now alone.  People need history; people need a past.  There is no going forward without first going backward.

Go,
I hear the teenage fortune-teller speak.  The voice is so real it makes the hairs on my neck stand up.  
Go.  Backward.

I am trying, but I am not in control.  I haven’t been in control since waking up on the damn bus roughly one month ago.  I am a passenger along for the ride.  There is no controlling any of it.

Go.  Backward.

They ask your name and you say,
Nobody.

You: this passenger, this floundering shadow of a storm-tossed man.

The pickup crosses through a valley and the highway narrows.  It seems all other vehicles have slipped off the exits because I am alone.  It is like they all know something is about to happen to me—something horrible—and they do not want to be around for it.

I drive and let up on the accelerator as the road condenses to a single lane.  Trees file by on either side.  It is a long, straight stretch of blacktop, straight out to the horizon.  Suddenly, I am in a painting by someone named Courbet.  Suddenly, I am in the one memory I have managed to retain throughout all this…

Both feet slam on the brake.  The truck tires screech and the truck itself fishtails to the right, kicking up gravel like marbles, the stink of burning rubber overpowering the world.  The truck bucks and convulses before quivering to a halt.  A second later, as if in need of oxygen, I spill out of the cab and stagger, zombie-like, toward the center of the street.  The world is silent.  The trees don’t even appear to sway in the breeze.  It is cold up here, damn cold, but my adrenaline is pumping, my heart pounding like thunderous applause, my clothes drenched in sweat.  Piano Sonata 14 plays through the open door of the truck.

Standing in the center of the roadway, I am just as lost as I have been all along.  The needling has increased at the base of my skull, but there are no memories here, nothing to pick up and dust off.

Yet this place…

This
place…

For one insane moment, I am thinking of the bench at the last bus stop, the one with
believe
stenciled on it.  I think, too, of the gumball machine in my apartment—of the solar system of tiny colored globes in the glass shell.  And of Nicole Quinland warning,
What if you’re not supposed to write this stuff down?  What if you’re not supposed to remember the stuff all at once?

But there is no remembering.

I shout, I scream, I rush at Clarence Wilcox’s truck and dent the fender with kicks.  I slam my fists down on the hood, flecks of rusted red paint jumping like corn kernels in a skillet.  Folding my arms, I rest my head in their embrace, the heat from the truck’s engine rising up through the hood nearly overpowering.

I pray for unconsciousness.

Amazingly, I pray for the forgetting to start all over again.  Because something inside me warns that I have already traveled too far, that I have already sealed my fate.  Start over here, now, in the middle of this tree-studded byway, right here, and let me figure out how the hell to get back.  Newborn child: right here.  Clean-slated spirit: right here.  Empty goddamn husk: right here.

Once I’ve calmed, I climb back in the truck and sit for a moment behind the wheel, not moving.  I glance at the palm of my left hand.  Smudged, but still legible—

1400 St. Paul Street, Apartment 3B

I drive.

By the time I cross into Ithaca the sky is bruised with sunset.  The town is a handsome, manicured suburb outside the main drag of the city.  The homes are large and fronted with brick and there are expensive cars in the driveways.  Snow has fallen recently: it carpets the big lawns and is packed against the street curbs like a comforter pushed to one side of a bed.

Madeline Troy’s house—or what I assume, given the address, is Madeline Troy’s house—sits on a bluff surrounded by a yawning sprawl of snow-wooly pines.  It is smaller than most of the other houses in the area, but nice-looking. It has a whitewashed wraparound porch with some wicker chairs placed around a small table.  A chimney made of alabaster stone climbs one side of the house.  There is an octagonal window in the upper portion of the front door and there is a hint of a flower garden just down from the porch, mostly stunted and frost-covered now in the cold.  Butterfly wind-chimes tinkle from the portico.  A concrete sundial, blue-green with moss, sits incongruously in a patch of shade.  A comfortable white fence surrounds the entire property and, just outside the fence, the mailbox is a wooden mallard.  Its wings, joined by a common axle, and like the propellers of an airplane, turn lazily in the wind.

I park in the street.  And sit for a long time, considering how to proceed.  Or if I want to.

The walk to the front porch takes forever.  It is punctuated by the crunch of frostbitten grass and the disconcerting creaks of the porch steps.

Madeline Troy.

I think,
Who is Madeline Troy?

I think,
Fantasma.

I knock on the door.  Wait.  Shuffle uncomfortably from foot to foot.  I can smell my own perspiration on me.  I am a degenerate.  I must look like a serial killer.

The bolt on the other side of the door snaps.  The door itself groans as it opens.  Inside, it is as gloomy as an Arctic winter.  The dough-white face of an elderly woman seems to drift straight out of the gloom—and, for one heart-thudding second, I swear it is Sister Eleanor back from the grave.

“Madeline?” I say.

“She’s not here.”  The woman’s voice is soft, almost a whisper.  She is trying to take me all in without being too obvious.  “Can I tell her who’s…?”

I wait for her to continue.  When she doesn’t, I say, “Ma’am?”

“Palmer.”  She practically breathes the name.  “I didn’t recognize you.  You look…you’ve lost weight.”

My fingers wrestle with each other.

The door opens wider.  “Come in, Palmer.  It’s cold.”

The home is an old woman’s home.  There are pictures of Jesus on the walls and an old television set with rabbit ears in the parlor.  The faint aroma of cooking infiltrates the foyer.  Somewhere, a wall clock ticks down the seconds.

“I’m in the middle of dinner.  Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“You look like you could use a shower.”

“It was a long drive,” I say.

“Come on, then.”  I follow her down the hall to a small bedroom. It is a bedroom replete with yellowed photographs that look burned at the corners, housed in pitted brass frames that appear too heavy for any nails to hold.  Plush drapes in floral patterns match the bedspread.  A cedar trunk rests at the foot of the bed and, across the room against the far wall, there is a dresser on which sits a beveled mirror.

There is a tiny, blue-tiled bathroom off the bedroom, and I follow this old woman to it.

“Here,” she says.  “Have a shower.  And you can lay your clothes out on the bed, if you want, and I’ll wash them.”

“That isn’t necessary.”

“Doesn’t matter.”  The woman seems disinterested.

“When will Madeline be back?”

“Should be soon,” says the old woman.  “You know, Palmer, you shouldn’t be here.”  Her eyes linger on me a moment longer before she turns and leaves the room, closing the door behind her.

The bathroom is well-kept and clean.  There are blue towels on the walls, pink rosettes stitched along the hem.  The sink basin is white and spotless, not a single hair in the drain.  The shower curtain is of a sheer fabric, also blue, also with matching rosettes, and I pull it aside to inspect the tub.  A bar of soap in a dispenser is suction-cupped to the wall.  The tub is shiny and looks like it has never been used.

I strip and fold my clothes on the toilet lid.  Naked, I examine my scarecrow frame in the oval mirror above the sink.  My eyes look like someone has boxed them shut.  The jut of my jaw stretches my lips taut.  I flex my arms and scrutinize the mechanics of my muscles, my joints, the knobby way various bones appear to protrude at odd angles. My chest is a washboard, my pelvis a concave seashell.  My penis has shriveled to near nonexistence, having retreated into my abdomen.  My knees are twin shells, calloused, cracked, and flaking with dried skin.

Hello, skeleton.  Hello, concentration camp survivor.  Hello, Auschwitz Jew.

I have been going at this a long time.  There is no denying it.  I feel weak enough to pass out.

Hello, ghost.

I shower beneath a stream of tepid water.  I shower for maybe twenty minutes, a half hour.  I have no concept of time.  The water no longer feels good on my skin.  Instead, it burns where the cold winter air has lacerated my flesh.  It makes the rough patches soften then harden.  Shuffling in the water of the tub, my feet look enormous; I can make out the bones and tendons with each flex of my toes, the toes themselves like narrow, broken bits of twig, the nails the color of turpentine, chipped and unhealthy.

There is no distinction between mental and physical depletion.  You regress and regress and regress until you are nothing more than a mound of wet sand in an old woman’s shower…

When the water has gone cold, I shut it and towel off.  I pull on my clothes with the surrender of someone sentenced to death.  I try to urinate, but there is no fluid left in my body.  I would not be surprised if my penis coughed up a cloud of dust.

I step out of the bathroom and into the bedroom to find a young woman sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at me.  She is slim, with small shoulders, drab-colored hair pulled behind her head in a lank ponytail, her face plain but with a firm, admirable jaw, her eyes lamentable and somber with regret.

“What are you doing here, Palmer?” she says.

“Madeline?”

She stands immediately, so slender the mattress hardly moves.  She takes a step toward me.  Almost in slow-motion: slaps me across the face.  I see it coming from a mile away, yet I let it come. Because something tells me I deserve it.

“That’s for coming here.”

I do not move.  I say nothing.

“You look like death.  Why are you here?”

“I was hoping you could help me.”

“No.”  Her eyes grow wet.  She is struggling with some great thing that appears to be welling inside her.  Both her hands press against her abdomen.  “You promised you’d never come back here, Palmer.  Please…”

“I needed to see you,” I say.

“You have to leave.”

“Please…”

“No,”
 she sobs.  And the tears come.

Watching her, I feel an ounce of recollection dawn on me…but then realize that I am not recalling any memory of this particular woman but, rather, the woman I had followed around on Christmas Eve back at the art museum—the woman with the small child who told me she’d call the police if I didn’t stop following them.  There is a striking resemblance here. Had I thought that woman from the museum was this women, was this Madeline Troy?

“No,” she goes on.  “Don’t you get it?  I don’t want to look at you, Palmer.  I
can’t
look at you.  And you promised me—you
promised
me—”

“I don’t remember my promise.  I don’t remember anything.”

“Are you trying to hurt me?”

“No.”

“Palmer, are you trying to hurt me?  Do you want me to hurt?  Because I hurt every single day.  I don’t need you here to do it because I hurt every single day.”

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Leave,” she says, and turns her back toward me.  Covering her face with her hands, I watch her reflection in the beveled mirror.

“I sent you a package.”  I am startled at how small my voice sounds.

“Yes,” she says.  She drops her hands but won’t turn to face me.  “Oh, yes.  And what was I supposed to do with that stuff?  Do you know how long it took me to get rid of everything, to pack it all away?  To forget about it?  Do you have any idea what it was like to open that goddamn box and see all that stuff?”