Sometimes a Great Notion (14 page)

“. . . so the card convinced me, among other things, that I am still much more at the mercy of my past than I ever imagined. You wait; the same thing will happen to you: you’ll get a call from Georgia one of these days and realize that you’ve many a score to settle back home before you can get on with your business.”

“I doubt that I could settle that many scores,” Peters said.

“True; your scene is different. But with me it’s just one score. And one man. It was amazing the number of pictures of him that card conjured up: booted feet, with spikes no less. Muddy sweatshirt. Gloved hands forever scratching scratching scratching at a navel or an ear. Raspberry-red lips draped in a drunken grin. A lot of other equally ridiculous pictures to choose from, but the picture that came on the clearest was of his long, sinewy body diving into the river, naked and white and hard as a peeled tree . . . this was the predominant image. You see, Brother Hank used to spend hours swimming steadily into the river’s current as he trained for a swimming meet. Hours and hours, swimming steadily, doggedly, and remaining in exactly the same place a few feet from the dock. Like a man swimming a liquid treadmill. The training must have paid off because by the time I was ten he had a shelf simply
gleaming
with trophies and cups; I think even held for a time a national swimming record in one of the events. Lord God! All this brought back by that one tiny postcard; and with such astonishing clarity. Lord. Just a
card
. I dread to imagine what a complete letter might have produced.”

“Okay. But just what in the shit do you hope to accomplish going home? Even, say, you do settle some funny score—”

“Don’t you see? It’s even in the card: ‘You think you’re big enough now?’ It was that way all my time at home—Brother Hank always held up to me as the man to measure up to—and it’s been that way ever since. In a psychologically symbolic way, of course.”

“Oh, of course.”

“So I’m going home.”

“To measure up to this psychological symbol?”

“Or pull him down. No, don’t laugh; it’s become ridiculously clear: until I have settled my score with this shadow from my past—” “Crap.”

“Crap.”

“—I’ll go on feeling inferior and inadequate.”

“
Crap
, Lee. Everybody has a shadow like that, their old man or somebody—”

“Not even able to get on with the business of gassing myself.”

“—but they don’t go running home to
even
things, for shit-sakes—”

“No, I’m serious, Peters. I’ve thought it all out. Now listen, I hate to leave you with the hassle of the place and all, but I’ve—thought it all out and I’ve no choice. And could you tell them at the department?”

“What? That you blew yourself up? That you’ve gone home to settle a score with the naked ghost of your brother?”

“Half-brother. No. Just tell them . . . I was forced because of financial and emotional difficulties to—”

“Oh man, come
on
, you can’t be serious.”

“And try to explain to Mona, will you?”

“Lee, wait; you’re out of your head. Let me come over—”

“They’re calling my bus number. I’ve got to rush. I’ll send what I owe you as soon as I can. Good-by, Peters; I’m off to prove Thomas Wolfe was wrong.”

I placed Peters, still protesting, back on the hook, and once more drew that long breath. I complimented myself on my control. I had pulled it off nicely. I had managed to remain religiously within the boundaries in spite of Peters’ attempts to subvert our system and in spite of a mixture of Dexedrine and phenobarb which was bound to make a fellow a little giddy. Yes, Leland old man, no one can say that you didn’t present a concise and completely rational explanation
regardless
of all the rude distractions . . .

And the distractions were getting more rude by the second; I noticed this as I pushed out of the booth into the rush of the depot. The fat boy was humping the pinball machine toward a frenzied orgasm of noise, neon, and numbers. The crowd was pushing. The suitcase was pulling. The loudspeaker was advising me in a roar that if I didn’t get on my bus I would be
left!

“Too much up,” I decided and at the water fountain washed down another two phenobarbitals. Just in time to be swept up in a maelstrom of motion that landed me, marvelously and just in time, on the loading platform in front of my bus.

“Leave the suitcase and find yourself a seat,” the driver told me impatiently, as though he’d been waiting for me alone. Which proved to be exactly right: the bus was completely empty. “Not many going West these days?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.

I walked unsteadily down the aisle to a seat at the back (where I am to remain almost unmoving for almost four days, getting off at stops to go to the can and buy Coke). As I stood, removing my jacket, the door thumped closed at the other end of the bus with a loud hiss of compressed air. I jumped and looked toward the noise, but it was so dark in the unlit bus in the garage I couldn’t see the driver. I thought he had gone out and the door closed behind him. Left me locked in here
alone!
Then the motor beneath me thundered and began straining in pitch. The bus started out of the murky cement grotto toward the bright New England afternoon, lurching over the sidewalk and throwing me finally into my seat. Just in time.

I still hadn’t seen the driver return.

The weird, billowing anarchy of motion and sound that had started in the phone booth was now surging around me in earnest. As though the debris had finally begun to settle back after hanging suspended overhead all the hours since the blast. Scenes, memories, faces . . . like pictures embroidered on curtains billowing in the wind. The pinball machine clattered and clung to my eyes. The postcard rang in my ears. My stomach rolled, voices tolled in my head—that interior monitor of mine bellowing for me to WATCH OUT! HANG ON! THIS IS IT! YOU’RE FINALLY COMPLETELY FLIPPING! I clutched the armrests of the bus seat desperately, terrified.

Looking back (I mean now, here, from this particular juncture in time, able to be objective and courageous thanks to the miracle of modern narrative technique), I see the terror clearly, but I find it a little difficult to believe that I was sincerely able to blame much of this burgeoning terror on the rather hackneyed fear of going mad. While it was quite fashionable at the time for one to claim to be constantly threatened by the fear of finally flipping out, I don’t think I had been able to honestly convince myself of my right to the claim for a good while. In fact, I remember that one of the scenes swirling past me as I clutched my seat was a scene with Dr. Maynard, a session at his office where I had told him in dramatic desperation, “Doctor . . . I’m going
mad
; the final complete flip, it’s swooping down out of the hills at me!”

He had only smiled, condescendingly and therapeutically. “No, Leland, not you. You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It’s become almost impossible for you to ‘go mad’ in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently ‘went mad’ and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now”—And I think he even went so far as to yawn—“you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard. Another thing: all of you have a talent for releasing frustration through clever fantasy. And you, you are the worst of the lot on that score. So . . . you may be neurotic as hell for the rest of your life, and miserable, maybe even do a short hitch at Bellevue and
certainly
good for another five years as a paying patient—but I’m afraid never completely out.” He leaned back in his elegant Lounge-o-Chair. “Sorry to disappoint you but the best I can offer is plain old schizophrenia with delusional tendencies.”

Recalling this, and the wise doctor’s words, I relaxed my grip on the armrests and pulled the lever to recline the seat. Hell, I sighed, exiled even from the sanctuary of insanity. What a drag. Madness might have been a good way to explain terror and excuse anarchy, I mooned, a good whipping boy to blame in the event of mental discomfort, an interesting avocation to while away the long afternoon of life. What a crashing drag . . .

But then . . . on the other hand, I decided, as the bus thundered slowly through town, you never can tell: it might have constituted as bad a drag as sanity. You would probably have to work too hard at it. And at times, almost certainly, a little sneak of memory would slip past your whipping boy and you would be whacked just as hard as ever by that joker’s bladder of reality, of pain and heartache and hassle and death. You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned
end
when it counts . . . you would sure as anything clear up
just
enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society. Yes, I sighed again, in the long run insanity would be the same old cold-hearted drag of too solid flesh, too many slings and arrows, and too much outrageous fortune.

I reclined my seat another notch and closed my eyes, trying to resign myself that there was nothing I could do about this runaway anarchy I had hold of but wait for the pharmaceutical pilot to come on and take over the controls and let me sleep. But the pills seemed uncommonly slow in coming on. And in this ten- or fifteen-minute wait—the billowing; the ringing; the bus, empty but for its solitary passenger in the back, huffing and whooshing through the town—before the barbiturates took effect . . . I was forced at last to consider those questions I had been skirting so skillfully.

Like: “What in the shit you hope to accomplish running back
home?
” I knew that all that obscure Oedipal pap I had fed Peters about measuring up or pulling down might be approaching some kind of truth . . . but even if I were able to bring off one of these coups, what did I hope to
accomplish?

And like: “Why should one want to wake up dead
anyway?
” If the glorious birth-to-death hassle is the only hassle we are ever to have . . . if our grand and exhilarating Fight of Life is such a tragically
short
little scrap anyway, compared to the eons of rounds before and after—then why should one want to relinquish even a few precious
seconds
of it?

And—thirdly—like: “If it’s such a goddamned hassle—why fight it?”

The three questions lined up in front of me, just like that: three insistent bullies, hands on their hips and sneers on their faces, challenging me to meet them face to face, once and for all. The first one I made a little headway with, owing to its more pressing nature and the help I had during the trip. The second didn’t receive satisfaction until weeks later when circumstances following that trip happened to occasion another challenge.

And the third still waits right now. While I take another trip. Back into the memory of what happened.

And the third one is the toughest bully of them all.

But that first question I set to work on straightaway. What do I hope to accomplish going home? Well,
myself
, for one thing . . . my little old
self!
”

“Man,” Peters says over the phone, “you don’t do that by running
off
someplace. That’s like running from the beach to go swimming.”

“There are beaches East and beaches West,” I let him know.

“Crap,” he says.

Looking back on that trip (and forward on this one), I can calculate and know it took four days (the thing about being removed, thanks to modern technique, is, while it may afford objectivity and perspective—with all events tunneling back from this point like images in opposing mirrors, yet each image changed—it presents a tricky problem of tense) . . . but looking back I remember the depot, the gas, the bus trip, the blast, the disjointed narrative to Peters on the phone—all these scenes as one scene, composed of dozens of simultaneously occurring events . . .

“Something’s wrong,” Peters says. “No, wait . . . something’s happened, dammit Lee; what? You’re in New York to identify
what?
But man, that’s more than a year ago.”

I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with will-power, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest.

“Lee!” This time it’s Mother. “Where are you going? Are you ever
going
anywhere?”

Nor is chronological reporting by any means always the most truthful (each camera has its own veracity) especially when, in all good faith, one cannot truthfully claim to remember what happened accurately. . . .

The fat boy turns to leer at me from the pinball machine. “You can win ’em all but that last one, hot shot.” He grins. Stenciled on his T-shirt is TILT in large orange letters outlined in green.

Or accurately claim to remember what happened
truthfully
. . .

And Mother plummets past my bedroom window, forever and ever.

Besides, there are some things that can’t be the truth even if they
did
happen.

The bus stops (I hang up the phone and hurry out to the car and drive to the Campus Diner) and starts again, jerkily. The diner is crowded but subdued. The people remote. A film of tobacco smoke drawn over the faces makes them look like displays behind glass. I peer through this film and see Peters sitting at his table back near the cigarette machine, sharing a beer with Mona and someone who leaves. Peters sees me coming and licks the foam from his mustache, the surprising pink of the Negro tongue darting out at me. “Enter Leland Stanford, stage left,” he says. He picks the candle from the table and lifts it toward me in a theatrical gesture. “Rage, rage and remember Dylan Thomas,” he says, and Mona says, “When you get home, Lee, look around and see if you dropped it back there somewhere.” Sweetly.