Begin to Exit Here (3 page)

“I don't think invading a tiny Central American country means you're civilized,” Thomas said as he threw a pinecone into the bonfire.

“Yeah. Panama
is
pretty small. We should've invaded Canada,” I said.

“You're not supposed to invade your allies,” Janice said.

“When I asked if we were civilized,” Annie said, “I didn't mean is the United States civilized. I meant are
we
civilized, here? A man drives a Japanese car into my nineteenth-century tobacco shed because he's drunk. And do we settle anything, make the world better? No. We rip the shed apart, pour gas on it, and have an explosion and fire in my driveway.”

Janice leaned her head in front of me to look at Annie and say, “At least we had the guy arrested for destroying your property, so we could set it on fire.”

I liked her even more. A deep sense of irony in a woman was as important as breasts and a vagina. Again I'd thought of something I couldn't tell her. I realized you usually can't talk about sex, even if you're not having it.

The fire was burning pretty violently, then, with yellowish orange flames whipping against each other, rising about six feet or higher and shooting unpredictable bursts of embers up into the dark, like thousands of tiny red stars escaping into the night. People were sweating. It was already eighty-seven degrees that night, and the bonfire got it up to maybe a hundred and thirty degrees, we guessed, within six feet of the fire.

“This is my favorite southern tradition: Sweating,” I said.

“That's not a southern tradition,” Annie said.

“I guess it's just a southern misfortune, then.”

“Shut up.”

“Fuck
it's hot,” Thomas said.

“I always wished the TV weatherman would say that one day,” I said.

“I think we should move away from the fire,” Annie said. We all got up, backed away, and started walking to the patio to get something cold to drink. Janice asked me what I'd thought of doing, now that I'd been fired from the paper.
I told her I might write a southern novel called
As I Lay Sweating.
She said, as she playfully rubbed some sweat from my forehead with her finger, that I couldn't write a southern novel because I wasn't a southerner.

“I know. Maybe I'll write a German novel,” I said as we walked up this big hill behind Annie's house, just sort of spontaneously deciding to go up on the hill together, with neither of us saying why, like we didn't know.

“But you're not really German, either,” she said.

“No. I'm not really anything. I guess that makes me American.”

The light from the bonfire was bright enough for me to see her smiling at me, and I was happy, even though I scarcely knew her and, as far as I knew, this might be the only time I'd ever see her. The world put people together as randomly as it guaranteed that nothing would work and your hopes were stupid. But I kept liking her, in case it would work.

She carried with her a glass of some blush wine or something, and I had a new bottle of IBC Root Beer. Near the top of the hill was a little spot next to the trail that was cleared and padded with thousands of dry pine needles where we sat together and stared down at those idiots, our peers, who apparently had found a pitchfork and were using it to roast hot dogs over the bonfire.

“Look at them,” Janice said. “It looks like a cookout in hell.”

“I've never seen a cookout in hell, but maybe you're right,” I said, watching this tall guy with glasses hold the pitchfork close to the edge of the fire with little dark things impaled on the prongs. We assumed they were hot dogs. Naturally this led to a discussion of theology.

“Do you get to eat hot dogs in hell?” Janice asked.

“The Bible doesn't say. It's badly underwritten.”

“Do you believe in hell?”

“No. I think eternal damnation is too long.”

“Too long? How long should damnation be?”

“Maybe a month. I think being in a lake of fire for thirty days is long enough.”

She looked at me and laughed. “You sound like a heretic,” she said. “You could go to hell for not believing in hell, you know.”

“I worry about that. Maybe on Judgment Day I'll bring a lawyer with me. You know, stand around with a few billion sinners from all of history, waiting for your turn to be held accountable for every instant of your life, and while everybody else around you is crying and whimpering, waiting to see if their names are written in the Book of Life or not, I'd say, ‘Look at me. I brought an attorney. Ha, ha.'”

It made Janice spit wine again and laugh.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “In a way, though, I like watching you spit wine. It's either sensual or sensuous. I forget which.”

As people down in the yard and the driveway wandered
around the bonfire, moving in and out of the light like ghosts in summer clothes, dancing and, I assumed, preparing in some cases to go copulate, Janice and I talked among the pine needles, beginning to know each other. She said she moved here in 1978 to study archaeology at the University at St. Beaujolais.

“Bones?” I said.

“When people die, that's frequently what they become,” she said. “But you know what you're more apt to find than bones?”

Of course I didn't, but I at least wanted to guess. “Dirt?” I asked.

“Trash,” she said. “The one thing that all ancient and modern cultures produced with universal proficiency was trash. I went into archaeology, my God, with the usual vague dreams of helping discover profoundly interesting and stunning Indian villages and burial sites filled with relics and artifacts and maybe even world-crushing evidence of esoteric religions or fantastic jewels and things.”

“Like
Raiders of the Lost Ark?”
I wondered.

“I love that movie, but, archaeologically, it sucks,” she said.

“Sucks. You're using academic terms.”

“By the time I got my degree in 1982 and spent time at local Indian digs, I realized that much of what we'd ever find in the search for important knowledge of lost cultures was just real old trash, like burned-up animal bones,
charred beans, and the general discarded crud from prehistoric dinners.”

“Really? And then what did you do? Do you teach?”

“I used to, for a little while, but the pay is so horrible. I could barely afford to live in squalor.”

“Ah, squalor. I was probably one of your neighbors.”

“Have you lived in squalor?”

“Next door to it. Several times.”

“Anyway, where was I?” she asked.

“In squalor. I was your neighbor.”

“Yes, yes. And when I kept realizing I'd picked a profession where jobs are extremely hard to find, and when you get one you have a master's degree and the salary of a dishwasher, I finally became something people never heard of. I hate to say it. It sounds so abstract and unreal.” She kind of grinned and grimaced at the same time.

“Tell me, tell me,” I said, because I didn't care what she was. I liked her, and I'd like anything she told me.

“I'm a statistical research assistant in viral epidemiology,” she said.

It took a while to think about such a long title. I patted her leg and said, “John Keats wrote a poem about that: ‘Ode on a Statistical Research Assistant in Viral Epidemiology.'”

She thumped my cheek with her finger. “You're a charming lunatic. Annie told me you were. I see no reason to disagree with her.”

“That's almost like being complimented, isn't it?”

“Almost.”

After I walked down the hill to get some more blush wine and root beer and happily walked back up the hill to sit next to Janice and wonder if she'd undress and pin me to the ground where I wouldn't resist, I looked up at the almost-full moon and kind of contentedly smiled at Janice, saying, “It's pretty exotic sitting with a woman under the summer moon, talking about bones and viral epidemics.”

She closed her eyes and laughed. I think we got along spontaneously, or accidentally, or one of those qualities you think you're identifying when really you're just suddenly happy and you don't know why, but you hope it doesn't quit and get replaced with the normal emptiness and sadness of being alive one more day alone.

For a while she talked about having visited Canyon de Chelly in Arizona and looking at the fantastic Indian ruins fastened so solidly and improbably to the canyon wall that it looked, she said, “like the wall grew a home for the Indians. And then you have to imagine, because there are no records, these primitive people without winches or cranes building these monstrous, thick networks of walled homes along the sheer edges of goddamn cliffs. And all the Indians are gone. Vanished. Inexplicably leaving behind an entire city in a canyon so that, one day, our rowdy European ancestors out conquering the continent and smugly stealing whatever the hell they wanted could come along and discover some ruins.”

Sipping my root beer in the humid, hot dark, I looked at Janice and said, “My ancestors didn't look for ruins. They made them.”

She said, “What?”

“I'm part German. That means I'm descended from the Vandals and Visigoths and Ostrogoths and the regular Goths.”

“So? Is that bad?” she said.

“It was back then. They walked around Europe saying, ‘Look. A nation. Let's steal it.' Or if they didn't want to steal a country or it was too hard to do at the moment, they'd walk through a city and break it.
Crack. Ha, ha. There goes your civilization.
Do you know what they did one time? While wandering through Europe on a customary rampage, the Vandals sacked Rome. Some people can say of their heritage, and maybe
you
can, since you're part Italian, that they're descended from people who built ancient Rome. All I can say is my ancestors liked Rome so well they robbed it. Jeez.”

Janice put her hand on my knee and said, “Don't sack me.”

“I don't know you well enough to sack you,” I said. “I'm one of the polite Germans. I say, ‘May I sack you, please?'”

“You're evidently thinking of an expanded, more personal meaning for sack,” she said, smiling ironically.

“At first I wasn't, but I am now,” I said, happy and scared and astonished that in a few seconds my discussions
of the plunderings of ancient Germans had been transformed by Janice into a metaphor for sex. I didn't know what to say. I pretended to be interested again in the people around the bonfire.

“There's another southern custom I think I like: People roasting marshmallows on a pitchfork over the remains of a burning shed,” I said, looking over at Janice to see if this latest insidious insight of mine seemed funny and distracting to her, and if she maybe had a somewhat erotic look on her face, as if she were thinking of how we might sack each other. She was smiling, but why I couldn't be sure.

“I'm starting to get a little drunk,” she said, pouring her wine into the pine needles. “I better drive home while I still can.” And in the same instant when I was sad that she was going to leave, as if suddenly she was tired of me and I wasn't at all the kind of man she wanted to know, she said, “Would you like to go home with me and look at my artifacts?” And she started laughing, as though I were embarrassed and she found that charming.

I was going to say I'd been looking at her artifacts all night, but instead I just said, “Yes.”

S
he lived in a small basement apartment overlooking the core of the Earth, was how she described it to me when we got there. As she gave me a brief tour of her apartment, she said, “These are genuine cinder-block walls, not cheap imitations. Notice how they retain moisture, allowing for the uniform growth of mold and mildew. This apartment is ecologically balanced. I sometimes have spiders, earthworms, crickets, and centipedes, which I really despise and kill as often as I find them. A physics professor I had in college said that if we humans finally destroyed the planet in a nuclear cataclysm, bugs would survive and dominate the Earth. I think they're already trying that in my apartment, so I'm engaged in a guerrilla war to usurp them.”

There was a neat old antique desk of some sort in her little living room, made of polished, dented maple with brass handles on the drawers. When I pulled open the center drawer to look at whatever papers and things would be in the neat old desk, there was a big black pistol there next to a loaded magazine stuffed with large bullets.

“Janice?” I said to her in the kitchen, where she was fixing me some Italian coffee and getting some wine for herself. “Do you shoot centipedes with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic Beretta?”

She looked at me through the kitchen doorway and smiled, then started laughing, holding her hands over her face in surprise or embarrassment as if, oh, no, I'd found the silly little nine-millimeter Beretta. I held up the gun and said, “I guess if a bad viral epidemic breaks out, you'd treat patients with this?”

She walked up next to me, still laughing, and put her hand lightly on my back and said, “My father gave me that on my birthday last August.”

“A gun? For your birthday?”

“I'm supposed to shoot you if you behave badly in my apartment.”

“I don't think I will.”

“My father read some newspaper story about date rapes. He got upset and bought me that gun, so I guess if things go badly tonight, I'll have to shoot you in the forehead, if you don't mind.”

“Things won't go badly,” I said, putting the gun back in the drawer. “How many men have you shot?”

“I don't count them,” she said, patting my back and returning to the kitchen, where I followed to be near her and get some coffee.

“Dating is a lot different now than when I grew up,” I said. “Men are supposed to carry condoms and women are supposed to carry guns.”