Since Mike’s job was to fix cars, he found a number of things that needed to be fixed. “I can fix anything,” he said, and he raised the car up on blocks in his small garage near the Gowanus Canal. He took off the wheels to show me, with a screwdriver, the brakes or the shoes of the brakes, which he said needed replacing. He snapped the belts, which looked perfectly fine to me, but he replaced them. He replaced the oil and the hoses—“You don’t want leakage,” he said — and because he was an old friend, he threw in some fresh brake fluid. And because the idea of replacing the old with the new was philosophically appealing, I approved the repairs. I paid Mike when he finished, and as I was just about to begin my journey, just about to drive away, as I opened the door and was about to wave to Mike and settle into the low vinyl seat, he mentioned something about a poker game.
Well, I wasn’t interested in games, and I said I wasn’t interested. “I think I’ll pass,” I said, and although I said it, I didn’t drive away. I got out of the car and waited until the players showed up, all of whom I knew. We shook hands, performed the requisite slaps on the back, and I explained to them that I was getting up early tomorrow and that I had to call it a night. But I didn’t call it a night. I had the belief that I would find Anne, but I was beginning to think it might be a good idea to test that belief, to get a little confirmation.
The next thing I knew I was sitting at a round table covered in green felt, with Welters and Perper, Polizze and Mike, and Mike’s brother, known as Bones — all friends from Stuyvesant High School. Although I didn’t attend this particular high school I was part of their circle. And when the game began, for the first few hands, I got nothing. A few pairs, a few aces, but basically nothing. I folded quickly to keep my losses at a minimum. This went on for a while with some players winning, some losing, and all the cards seeming random and unrelated. Yet even when the hoped-for cards refused to materialize, my belief that they would materialize didn’t abandon me. Instead it hardened into surety, or a faith, in which I lost sight of the fact that I was losing, a fact I didn’t want to believe. I was a winner, I thought. Born to win. And so I kept betting and kept losing, and anything is possible, I thought, and when the next hand of cards was dealt I ended up with three queens. I was sitting there, trying to look nonchalant, and I didn’t bet much, or press too hard, but I won the hand and with it the money. And I began to feel good, to feel that some luck was coming my way. I knew enough to know that luck, or intuition, or harmony, moves in waves, and I could feel that a wave was gathering for me. And I won again. I won the next hand, and the hand after that, and now it was easy. And this is how, fueled by the facts in front of me (the cards on the table), my confidence was reinforced by reality.
And when the game ended, or when it ended for me, I left my winnings on the table. When I stood up and walked to the door I was feeling in sync, not only with the cards, but with the world. I knew it didn’t always happen like this, but if a person pays attention, sometimes the underlying logic of the world is revealed, sometimes there’s a convergence of desire and actuality, and because it comes in waves, it’s possible to ride those waves. I said goodbye to my friends and walked outside. I walked from the round table into the cool, damp air, and standing there, I felt that convergence. The thing I’d been wanting to happen was finally happening. And sure, I recognized that it might not always be happening, but eventually it would. When it mattered, it would happen, and when it did, I would be paying attention. It didn’t matter about winning some stupid card game. Winning a game didn’t matter. What mattered was finding Anne.
7
I didn’t want to think about probability. The probability, if I thought about it, of finding Anne before she got to Lexington was not that great. And yet I believed it could be done, knew, in fact, that it could and would be done. The worn-out map was an outline, and I would follow that outline to get close to her, and once I was close, then the world would tell me what to do. I would follow the dictates of the world, first by paying attention to the signs, and then by following them. Which signs? I would know them. How to interpret them? I would learn. The world was interconnected, so that in following the signs, and living under the sway of these signs, I would be following Anne’s trail. To understand the world, I had to be part of the world, and I was determined to go into the world and, like Bach or Mozart or Charlie Parker, let the world play through me. I would read the world and communicate with the world and be directed by the world. And let the world tell me what to do.
That night, instead of sleeping, I loaded the car with the objects of my life. You wouldn’t call it packing because it was a little too random for that. My goal was to travel light and mainly I brought along things that reminded me of Anne. Most of it I knew I didn’t need, but I packed these things, which included a cardboard box of paperback books, photos in an envelope, a sleeping bag, a laptop computer, a potted cactus, binoculars, clothes, cassettes for the car, and my father’s mandolin. I packed all these things, along with my notebook, into the trunk and the back seat of the small car, and I knew I was probably leaving behind something important, but nothing that I really needed. It was late and raining when I locked both locks of the blue front door, got in the car, and drove away.
Before I drove away I sat in the car looking up through the rain-spotted window to my house, lit by the streetlight. I said goodbye to the place I’d painted and plastered and lived in. Then I turned, away from the house to the street, and beyond that to the city, and beyond that to something else.
I knew what I was doing.
My life was dependent on how well I paid attention, and so, as I drove through the nighttime city, I didn’t mind the stoplights or the honking or the rutted road, because they were a part of the world. I was driving along on the elevated expressway, with the buildings of the city below me, listening to a Spanish-language cassette tape that either Mike or the nurse had left, a tape which, when it worked, acted as a white-noise background for thinking. El gusto es mio, el gusto es mio. I was thinking about Anne, and also thinking that a journey of a thousand miles begins at this exact moment, and the next thing I thought was that something was wrong.
As I said, it was raining, and as I was changing lanes I noticed that something was wrong with the steering. There was a lag time. I would turn the wheel, and then later, not too much but a little bit later, the car itself would turn. This led to overcompensating, which led to swerving, and because this was a problem I pulled off the highway, drove down the off-ramp onto a boulevard and into a gas station, where I parked under the bright fluorescent lights. I opened the hood, checked the few things I knew to check, and found that I was low on power-steering fluid.