Then they’d been together at the airline ticket desk, and she’d pretended he was her daddy, and he had bought the ticket with money she’d given him. But after that he’d wanted to come out here to the parking lot and had tried to get her to get into the car with him again. He said he’d done what she wanted, and now she had to be nice, too. He put his hand on her arm.
She still could not remember what happened then, but when he’d looked at her before driving away, the thing she remembered about his face was that there’d been a long scratch on it. Madison knew she hadn’t gotten back into his car. Instead she had run back into the terminal, and tried to fly.
She pulled the ticket out of her pocket. She had never been to Seattle. Why did she want to go now? She didn’t know. She did want to, though, and right away. Being kept away from Seattle felt bad. She would have to find—as Dad sometimes said, when on the phone to office people—“some other more workable solution.”
Belatedly realizing that her coat felt bulky in the chest, she put her hand in the inside pocket. It came out holding an envelope. It was dusty. Inside were hundred-dollar bills. A lot of them. They couldn’t be Mom’s—she had credit cards. At the bottom of the envelope was a small metal ring, with two keys on it.
Madison put the envelope back into her pocket, mentally filing it among the things to be thought about later. She was smart. Everybody said so. She would get to the bottom of this.
Now, in the meantime, back in the parking garage, she noticed a woman standing a few cars down, loading a small suitcase into the back of her car. Madison walked toward her and stopped a few feet away.
The woman turned. She was younger than Madison’s mom. “Hello,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Madison. What’s yours?”
The woman said her name was Karen. She was nice, and friendly, and within a couple of minutes Madison began to believe she had found a more workable solution.
When Karen drove the car out of the lot, Madison was sitting in the passenger seat. The woman seemed disconcerted by all the road choices, as Maddy’s mom sometimes did, and so, to let her get on with it without an audience, Madison reached into her pocket and pulled out the notebook once more.
She opened it to the first page and read what came after the first line:
And the people looked, and they saw that Death sucked, but they assumed this is what God wanted—because our God was a harsh god, and hated us. They believed Death to be His final punishment, at the end of our short spans of bloody sorrow: that He drops us on this dark and brutal plane to scurry from cold shelter to poor food and back, in endless rain, all the while bowed under the knowledge that at some time, at any time, a heel dipped in gore could drop like thunder and smear us broken across stony ground. We see the people we love taken from us, turned sick and rotten in front of our eyes, and we eat and fuck and dream our febrile lives away, because we understand that this will be our fate, too—and that afterward comes an eternity lying silent and blind in a dark, soft cloud: this prospect sugared only by the lies we learned to tell ourselves as soon as we could speak, the promise of an imprisoned life everlasting, in the lofty attic of Heaven, or the basement corridors of Hell.
But, and here you must listen…
The lie is not quite a lie.
These places do exist, but close by. People realized this slowly, started to make plans. Some did. The very few. Those who possessed the will and strength of purpose. The self-chosen ones. Those who learned that the doors to prisons could be unlocked in the night, that we could venture back. And who in time came to realize that they could inhabit the daylight hours, too, become the householder once again.
People like us.
People like you, my dear.
“What’s that you’re reading?” the woman asked as she turned with evident relief onto a big road.
“I have no idea,” Madison said.
chapter
ELEVEN
The bar I’d been in had been okay but staid, and after a while they put the game on and everyone watched with the sound off. Not my kind of place. So I migrated to somewhere along the street called Tillie’s, which was more scuffed up and played loud rock and roll. That didn’t mean it was a great environment for me to be in, however. The good and bad thing about bars and alcohol is that they blur social bonds. Sometimes this can be a plus—a lonely person finding solace in the company of strangers, the temporary tribal warmth of sitting around the same campfire. But it can also be that one individual begins to seem as relevant as the next, that the person you love is suddenly too annoying to bear and complete unknowns become your best friends. As a result you end up having conversations you probably shouldn’t. I do anyhow. I’d been talking to one guy in particular, and the discussion was going downhill. This person had shadows under his eyes, his hair needed a trim, and his jacket was decent but looked like something he’d bought during better times and now inhabited in the way polite men of reduced circumstances spend winter afternoons sitting on benches in well-tended parks.
“Jack Whalen,” I repeated, loudly, leaning forward to get right in his face. “You might have to order it or get it off Amazon, but it exists.”
The guy did not seem impressed. If anything, he looked like he thought I was even more of an asshole than before. Evidently he hadn’t heard me correctly. Or hadn’t understood. His eyes said he was as drunk as I was. That was pretty drunk. I opened my mouth to start snarling in earnest but noticed something in his eyes that stopped me in my tracks. I realized it wasn’t just contempt I was dealing with, but a kind of weary hate.
There was a sound behind me, and I straightened up.
A guy in a pale gray suit strolled into the john with his hands already at his fly, barely getting to a urinal before pissing like a racehorse.
“Whoa!” he hooted, turning to grin at me, obviously impressed with his own voiding skills.
“Right,” I said. It felt weak, but I’m not sure what else I could have contributed. I dried my hands primly on my pants and stumbled back out of the restroom, feeling cold along the back of my neck.
The music in the bar sounded flat and old now, and the room was brighter than I remembered. And yes of course I had sort of known I was in the men’s room, talking to myself in the mirror over the sinks. It’s happened before, when I’ve been exceptionally fried. I glance at my face, and for a moment the reflection there looks like a complete stranger. At first the encounter is convivial, but sometimes it gets personal, a “pull your socks up, shithead” routine. This time I knew that for a second I’d really forgotten I was talking to myself. That could not be good. Not when it was only eight in the evening and I could see no likelihood I’d be going home anytime soon.
Or tonight, for that matter. I suddenly remembered I was a hundred miles from where I lived. That I’d told the Zimmermans I’d be back hours before now. That I was long past driving and had nowhere to stay, and that I’d still had no contact with my wife, whose cell phone contained messages I did not like the look of.
Then I remembered I’d been thinking these things on the way to the restroom and had made no progress toward resolving them then either.
I was relieved to see I had most of a Mack & Jack’s left, and I tried to lock back into the scene. One of the waitresses was pretty cute. She was slim and good-natured, with carefully unkempt hair, and wore her apron well. My appreciation of her was generic, like that of a woman registering a pair of nice shoes she neither wants, needs, nor can afford. Other patrons were more directly appreciative. Half an hour earlier, one guy had hoisted himself off his stool and gone regretfully into the night. I’d overheard the waitress saying good-bye as he went, adding, “You do have rights as a father, you know.”