Then I heard the old man saying, “Open your eyes.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. “They’re already open,” I tell him.
“Of course they are,” he says. “Any fool can see that.” He wheels his wheelchair over to the door and for some reason I think this is very funny. I can feel a huge grin forming on my face. And the man is smiling too, we’re both smiling, and it’s very funny. But I don’t know what it is. I know I’m smiling but I don’t know why. I try to think, Why am I smiling?
The man looks up from his wheelchair. “It’s easy to move your mouth in a certain way. It’s easy to do many things.” He looks toward the door, and still smiling, I stand up, I thank the man, and then I walk out the door.
VI. (Acedia)
1
The gas station in New Jersey. There we were. We’d been talking, happy and convivial. Anne was getting gas and I’d gone into the store to get some snacks for the trip. As I came out of the store she was waiting at the entrance, and I was just about to open the door of the car when that other car … I didn’t see it but I could hear the dark car, and the brakes of the dark car, as it collided with our little station wagon. Anne had parked, not in the road, because there wasn’t an actual road, but on the asphalt, and she was waiting, the car running, and I was just opening the door, just starting to get into the car, and that’s when I heard the brakes, looked up, and for a split second I saw the outline of darkness that was that other car colliding with our car, with the driver’s side of our car. I was all right but Anne was knocked forward into the window and the steering column and she wasn’t speaking. She was unconscious. The dark car sped off and I tried to see the license plates but I was more concerned with Anne. I went to her, held her head in my hands, and something was wrong. She was hurt, I told someone to call an ambulance. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to slap her and there was no doctor. I asked for a doctor but there were just the gas station attendants and they didn’t know anything. No one knew anything and I didn’t either. Was she dying? I didn’t know. She was breathing, and I could feel a pulse, but I couldn’t wake her up. When finally the ambulance came I was yelling at them, why it took so long, and they let me ride in the back, on a bench, and there was another man, a medic of some sort, and he’d made a bag of liquid that he attached to a tube that went into her arm. I wanted to look at her and see her but this man put a mask over her face, to help her breathe or make her breathe, and there were bumps on the road and the siren was going but I didn’t hear it. The man didn’t talk and I didn’t talk, not to him. I told Anne to be all right, to feel fine, and her eyes were closed except for a brief flash. She opened them, looked up, and I was there so she saw me. And then she didn’t. And we got to the hospital and they slid her out and wheeled her into the emergency part of the hospital and I was left outside a door. They took her through this door and I waited to see her. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to see her but I never did. Not alive. That brief look was all I got. And then she was dead. After that my Anne was dead.
2
So here I am. So okay. Man of adjustment and all that. So what do I do? There’s nothing I can do.
I look around.
I happen to be standing by a light pole, bleached by the sun, in a town (Gila Bend) that could hardly be called a town, and wouldn’t be except for the several gas stations and the bend in the road. I too am bleached, standing without sunblock, without direction, and also without the belief I’d spent so much time believing. If my world was one thing, and now that world is gone, there’s still a world, but it’s not my world anymore, and certainly not a world I care very much about. I still exist, still have what seems like existence, but the reason for moving is gone. So I’m not moving. I’m not hitchhiking, not walking, not watching the occasional passing car. I’m just standing there, between two nearly identical gas stations, one red, one green. And that’s when a white sedan pulls up along the shoulder on the road, ahead of where I’m standing. I don’t know if the car is stopping for me, or for some internal reason that has nothing to do with me, but when I walk to the car, the car doesn’t drive away. I look in the open window and there’s an old man, healthy but old, looking at me.
“Where are you going?” he says.
“Yuma,” I say, pulling a random name off my memory of the map.
“That’s where I’m going,” the man says.
I throw my bag in the back seat, get in the front, and off we go. There’s some minor chitchat as we drive across the burnt flat desert but the man doesn’t spend much time beating around the bush. After only a couple of miles he asks me if I would like to have my dick sucked. I decline, as politely as possible, and that’s about it until the man casually mentions that he’s not really going to Yuma, that in fact he’s getting off at the next exit.
“You said you were going to Yuma,” I remind him.
“That was a mistake.”
“What do you mean mistake?” I say. “You said you would take me to Yuma.”
“I could,” the man says, and leaves the rest of his thought just dangling.
Then, holding the steering wheel with one hand, he reaches over to the glove compartment and takes out a round piece of plastic. He puts this plastic to his mouth and begins talking, pretending that he’s talking to some other car, as if the piece of plastic is a radio, a wireless radio, and he begins asking if there’s anyone on the road going to Yuma. Then he places this object, a brown piece of Bakelite, against his ear and cocks his head as if listening. After a pause he tells me that there’s a car behind us going to Yuma and that the driver is willing to give me a ride.
“Are you kidding?” I say. “What are you trying to do?”
“I’m arranging a ride for you.”
“With that?” I reach for the small faux microphone, but the old man is quick. He pulls it away and stashes it between his legs. He explains that it’s a special device, that he used to be in the secret service and it’s a high-tech gadget that not too many people know about.
I don’t care about the gadget or about Yuma; I just want to stay in the comfortable car. I’m like a powerless country with one natural resource, and this man has his eyes on that resource. And because there aren’t many cars traveling on the road, and because the radio isn’t playing, I start talking to him a little provocatively, coquettishly even, saying for instance that I have nothing against the idea of oral sex. And I can see that this excites the man, or distracts him, enough so that he passes the exit, and I think I can keep the man going like this for the next whatever odd miles.
And they are odd. Because the man has a goal, he’s persistent, holding his imaginary microphone between his legs, talking occasionally to imaginary agents, listening to me, as the exits go by, as I wonder aloud about blow jobs, trying to walk a line between interested and not that interested. But the man is interested and as he’s saying it, I’m wondering if his teeth are real.
Gradually, my initial disgust starts to wane. I wouldn’t say I’m titillated, but the wall of resistance I had in my mind begins to crumble, partly because it’s a perversion of my normal mode, and partly because my normal mode has done nothing for me lately. I’m ready to tell my normal mode to fuck off.