They drive for another mile or two. The asphalt ends, so they cut the engine: emptiness all around them, disused space, a no-man’s-land between the industrial zone and the pasture fields, and it is difficult to understand why they stop here, under a sky furrowed with dense smoke clouds that twirl fast from the refinery chimneys, then spread into dreary smears, secreting carbon monoxide dust — an apocalyptic sky. Within seconds of parking the car by the side of the road, Sean takes out his pack of Marlboros and starts to smoke without even opening the window. I thought you’d stopped, Marianne says, gently removing his cigarette from his fingers to take a drag herself — she smokes in a peculiar way, palm over her mouth, fingers tightened, the cigarette held between two metacarpal joints — exhales the smoke without swallowing, then puts it back between Sean’s fingers as he mutters no, didn’t feel like it. She shifts in her seat: Are you still the only guy in the world to brush his teeth while smoking? — summer 1992, camping in the desert near Santa Fe, a tie-dyed dawn, coral-red and monkey-palm pink, coffee in tin cans, the fear of scorpions crouching in the cold shadows of rocks, the song from Rio Bravo—“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”—sung together, and Sean with the toothpaste-stained handle of a toothbrush sticking out from one corner of his mouth while at the other side of his smile he was smoking his first Marlboro of the day — he nods: yes — the ridge tent streaming with dew, Marianne naked under her fringed poncho, hair down to her butt, and reading in an exaggerated declamatory tone a collection of poems by Richard Brautigan they’d found at the back of the Greyhound bus that had dropped them in Taos.
* * *
I should never have made him that surfboard. Sean takes the time to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray, then abruptly leans over the steering wheel and bangs his head against it, thud, his forehead rebounding violently from the hard rubber. Sean! Marianne squeals in surprise, but he does it again and again, faster and faster, repeatedly banging the same part of his forehead against the wheel, thud, thud, thud, stop it, stop that now. Marianne grabs his shoulder to hold him back, but he elbows her away, knocking her into the passenger-side door, and while she is recovering from this, he grips the steering wheel with his teeth, biting into the rubber, and emits a deafening roar, a wild, dark roar, something unbearable, a noise she doesn’t want to hear, anything but that, she wants him to shut up so she grabs him by the neck, sinks her fingers into his hair, into his scalp, and shouts through gritted teeth: Stop it now! pulling him backward until his jaw unclenches from the steering wheel, until his back is touching the seat, until his head bangs into and then stabilizes against the headrest — his eyes closed, his forehead burned red between his eyes by the collisions — until the roar becomes a wail. After that, she lets go, trembling, and whispers you mustn’t do that, you mustn’t hurt yourself, look at your hand — his fingers are clamped onto his knees like pliers — Sean, I don’t want us to go crazy. In that precise moment, it is possible she is talking to herself, measuring the madness that is rising inside her, inside them both, this shared madness the only form of thought possible, as if it were the only rational way out of this unimaginably vast nightmare.
They slump into each other, curling up together inside the car. But this apparent return to calm is merely an illusion, because Sean’s lamentation is worming its way into Marianne’s mind, and now she begins to think what might have been, this Sunday, without the accident, without the driver’s exhaustion, without the lure of surfing, without her son’s obsession with those goddamn waves, and at the end of this thread of dark thoughts, which she follows wearily through the labyrinth of her mind, there is Sean. Yes, Sean, that’s it, it was him, it was Sean who had encouraged that inclination in Simon, who had sparked and nurtured it, all of it, canoes and Maoris, tattoos and surfboards, the ocean, the migration to new lands, the osmosis of nature, that whole jumble of myths that so fascinated her little boy, that whole widescreen fantasy in which he grew up. She grits her teeth, fighting the impulse to hit the man next to her, this man who is groaning and whining. Yes, thinking back, it was those trips they took together to deliver skiffs, leaving behind her and Lou, “the girls”; it was their shared addiction to riding waves that led Simon, later, to take risks on his own, going out more and more often in conditions that were too cold, too stormy, and his father never saying a word about it, because he was a laidback, solitary father, an enigmatic father who had isolated himself from them to the point where, one evening, she told him go, I don’t want to live with you anymore, not like this, a man she loved but … fuck it. Yes, it was surfing that was to blame — that dangerous folly — but how had she, Marianne, how had she allowed that addiction to adrenaline to grow to such dimensions inside her own home? How had she allowed her son to fall into that vertiginous spiral, into that endless tube wave, that insanity? Yes, she was to blame too, for not doing anything, not saying anything, when her son started living his life at the whim of weather systems, dropping everything when a swell was forecast, his homework, everything, sometimes getting up at five in the morning to drive fifty miles in search of a wave; she had done nothing, because she was in love with Sean, and probably fascinated, herself, with that whole stupid fantasy — the man who built boats and fires under snow, who knew the name of each star and each constellation in the sky, who whistled complex melodies, enthralled that her son could also live his life so intensely, proud that he was so different from the others … so, yes, they were both to blame, because they had done nothing to stop this, they had failed to protect their child.
* * *
The mist that has formed on the windows is starting to trickle in drips when Marianne says, surfing was the best thing you ever gave him. He says, oh I don’t know, and they both fall silent. The best thing had been the process of making things, what it moved inside him, the use of foam and resin instead of supple wood to build canoes. In early December, he had gone to the Landes to pick up polystyrene boards from a “shaper” on the coast — a wiry-bodied man in his fifties with a red Apache scarf tied around his head, gray-bearded and ponytailed, wearing Tahitian bermudas, a specialist fleece, and fluorescent flip-flops: an old hippie, basically, who barely said a word and never made eye contact, who surfed whenever he could, the luminescent screen of a portable weather station constantly relaying wind and swell forecasts; Simon had spent a long time thinking about those materials, which were new to him, studying their density, their resistance, before opting for the extruded polystyrene boardstock foam rather than polyurethane, before choosing epoxy resin rather than the cheaper polyester resin; he had spent a long time watching the shaper as he planed and sanded, and had then loaded everything in his station wagon, driving through the night, thinking about making his board, mentally tracing its shape, obsessing about its solidity, and all this in secret.
* * *
They get out of the car to go for a walk — let’s go outside, Marianne said, opening the door. They leave the car behind on the path, parked against a thicket of brambles, and cut across a field, taking turns to clamber through the barbed-wire fence — first her, then him, one foot, then the other, back held flat, each holding the wires above the other’s head, below the other’s stomach, watch out for your hair, your nose, your eyes, don’t get your jacket caught.