The second principle of transformation is to do the thing you’re compelled to do, and I felt compelled to do something, so I reached out. I didn’t think about it, but I saw myself as I reached out my hand, slowly, and touched this person, lightly, just below the cheek.
I expected the muscles of her face to go limp and relaxed, and her lips and the muscles around her lips to become full and relaxed, and her shoulders to relax. But that didn’t happen.
She just looked at me. And then she walked away.
2
I wasn’t keeping track of the mileage because the mileage didn’t matter. What mattered to me were the clues, and so I concentrated my intuition, unsuccessfully, on looking for clues. And lack of success is exhausting, and after a day without success, my intuition needed some rest, so I pulled off the road into the town of Charleston, West Virginia. It was the state capital, a town with brick buildings and people crossing streets.
I parked by a newsstand, bought a New York Times, and got some change. I needed the quarters because, even without my cell phone, I was calling my house at regular intervals. I found a pay phone in front of a diner and listened to the ringing, half hoping that what I knew was happening, wasn’t happening. That Anne would pick up. I was wishing this unnecessary nightmare would just stop. But it didn’t. I got the same answer I always got. Silence. No Anne. No clue. And I wanted to smash the receiver into the stupid box that seemed, at the moment, to be the cause of my frustration.
Instead I called Anne’s mother’s house. When I did I could tell from the tone of the voice on the answering machine that the family was upset. It was a new message, with a new ending, a stoic “We’re all right.” And I thought, Why would they say that they’re all right unless they weren’t all right? Unless Anne hadn’t told them where she was going. I also called some mutual friends and listened to their recorded voices for a sign that Anne had appeared. She hadn’t. I checked the obituary section of the newspaper, not that I would have believed anything anyway. There were a million different versions of the truth, and I wanted my own particular version.
In an effort to facilitate the creation of that version, I crossed the street to the plain glass windows of a barber college. Not a barber university, but a college, for haircutting, and I opened the glass door and a long row of barber chairs was on the left, a long mirror on the right, or vice versa. Anyway, a number of young men and old men were standing by the chairs. As I entered, a woman at a metal desk asked me what I wanted, meaning what kind of cut, and also if I wanted a shave. Well, I thought I probably did need a haircut, but I usually cut my own hair, and usually I shaved myself as well, but I told the woman that I wanted a shave. I paid the two dollars and she handed me a stub and I went to chair number three and sat. A soft, round-headed man elegantly unfurled a white sheet, cascaded it over my chest, and as I leaned back into the chair, for the first time since I’d left New York I let myself begin to relax.
There may have been music playing but what I remember were the cushions of the chair and the minty breath of the man, his voice surrounding me, talking about something, soothing and low, and his hands, warm and smooth, touching my cheek and neck, relaxing the tightened muscles, and I could have slept, but it was better than sleeping. And then the towel. A hot white towel was placed delicately over my face, and in the darkness I could see nothing, and I wanted to see nothing and think nothing, just nothing. No me, no Anne, no fear, sadness … nothing. I imagined my whiskers, such as they were, softening, and the man’s voice asking me some questions, and for me there was only one question. I told the man what I was doing. I told him about my wife. I said she’d run away. I talked about my dream of finding her. Under the white sheet I told him my dream and incubated the dream, and his voice seemed to moan or hum or drawl understandingly.
Then the warm towel was pulled from my face, and I realized that the man who’d covered me with the towel was no longer there, that he’d been replaced by a younger man, not a younger version of the original barber, but by a different barber entirely. The sweet eucalyptus smell was the same, but I knew by his touch that a switch had occurred. The hands, when they touched my face, didn’t soothe and caress but merely applied whatever substance was meant to be applied, in this case, shaving cream, and I wouldn’t say it didn’t feel good, but not in the way I’d felt before. This new man, or young man, was doing his job, but without passion, and as I sat there I wasn’t sure which of the two barbers I’d told my story to.
So I said to the new barber standing behind me, “What do you think?”
He said something about the work at hand, something like “Easy does it,” or “We’ll have you ready in no time,” something that an experienced man might say but that he was saying in order to seem experienced, and yet because he wasn’t experienced and hadn’t lived enough to be experienced, it wasn’t right. And I noticed then that I was starting to get a little annoyed at this younger barber.
“I asked you what you thought,” I said.
And as I sat in the still soft cushions the young man told me what he thought. He said he thought I was joking. He thought it must be a joke, he said, “a hopeless joke,” to look for someone in the whole expanse of the whole entire country. And whether or not he intended me to hear the disdain in his voice, or feel the humiliation, it didn’t really matter. Gradually the comfortable cushions became not so comfortable, and the hot lather not so soothing, and the voice, which had never been that mellifluous, became grating and sour and I wanted to get up. I felt an impulse to move, but because by this time the barber had unsheathed the straight-edged tool of his trade — his razor — and was scraping it across my skin, I couldn’t move. And the fact that I couldn’t move made the impulse to do so more pronounced.
Although the agitation I felt was centered in my chest, the thing I was hating was this barber. As the straight-edged razor slid or scraped its way across my neck I felt betrayed. I was mad at the first barber for leaving me with this guy because he was touching my face. And I hated it. I sat perfectly still on the outside, but inside I was churning. All I could think of was moving and the necessity of moving, but because of the razor next to my neck I couldn’t.
In thinking about moving, however, I was preparing myself for the prophecy that would ultimately fulfill itself. Sitting in the chair, the sheet spread over my chest and shoulders, I’d planted the seed of moving, and although I thought I had it under control, before I knew what I was doing, that’s when my face was cut. Just barely. Not the barber’s fault. He wasn’t being a bad barber. I just happened to twitch, slightly, and the uniform surface across which the blade had been cutting was suddenly not uniform. It changed direction, or I changed direction. And although it was more of a nick than a cut it didn’t matter. It wasn’t what the barber had done, it was what he had said. An impossibility, he’d said. Hopeless, he’d said, referring to my attempt to find Anne. He was wrong, but he’d said it.
And when he whisked away the white sheet, smiled politely, and indicated that I should rise, I wasn’t ready to rise. There’s something called “dealing with anger,” and yes, I’d been angry plenty of times, but I wasn’t especially skilled at dealing with the feeling. It always seemed a little dangerous. But it was preferable to the fear that he might be right. And so I was mad, and I knew I was mad because, although I still felt obligated to tip this guy, when I stood up from his chair and reached into my pocket I started feeling for something insignificant, some coin with which I would show him my displeasure. But since I’d used all my coins for the telephone, I pulled out instead a wad of folded dollar bills, and the bill on the outside had writing, in blue ink, “I