Dancing in Dreamtime (8 page)

“I
am
caught up.”

“But it's not a machine. It's just a big bureaucracy. It's not running your life.”

I realize I should try to reassure her. But I feel compelled to insist, “
Something
is running my life. I've lived this day before. Maybe many times. In fact, this may be the only day I've ever lived.”

“That's nonsense. Think about other days. Remember our wedding . . .”

“What if those memories are the illusion? What if they're planted in our minds to hide the fact that we're doomed to keep repeating this one day?”

Her gaze rakes across me, then swivels away. “You've been under stress—”

Unable to stop, I push on. “Sleep makes us forget today, so we can wake up and live it again as if it were new. But I've seen through the scam. I know I've lived this day before.”

“You need to rest,” she says carefully. “Let's go to bed.”

“I tell you, I
know
!” I slam the table, scattering pomegranate seeds. One version of me looks on, appalled, as the other self pushes back from the table, upsetting the chair, then jerks his arm free from Sharon's grip and grabs his coat and lurches away.

“Gordon, you're not going out.”

“I have to.”

She follows me into the hall and crosses arms over her breast, shivering. “Sweetheart, you're scaring me.”

I should take her in my arms, this woman I adore, and I should whisper in her ear a prayer for our coming child. But I cannot. I knot the laces in my boots, swing the door open, and step outside.

“Please don't go,” Sharon cries after me.

“I
have
to.”

The door slams.

I blunder forward into the night. Snow is falling, large flakes that sway as they tumble. I tilt my face up to feel them settle on my cheeks, but they make no impression. My feet convey nothing about the ground I walk over, my ears capture no sounds, my nose discovers no smells. My whole body is numb, as if all of me, and not just the artificial ankle, were made of metal and plastic. Only my eyes keep me bound to the world.

I must do something crazy, as Sharon says. For her sake, for the baby's. So I step into the street just as a snowplow turns the corner and heads my way. In the glare of the truck's headlights, I cannot make out the driver, cannot tell if he sees me.

Should I stand here, or should I leap aside?

At the last moment I leap aside. Without slowing, the truck rumbles on, spewing snow. My heart thuds. My senses revive. Did I choose to live, or was the choice made for me?

I must go back indoors to comfort Sharon. I will hold her until she sleeps, then I can sleep, forgetting this day, so tomorrow will come as a surprise.

I awake from feverish dreams to the thunder of jets overhead, which reminds me that I must report to the airbase this morning for X-rays. The daylight world knifes into me.

One October day, an accountant from Buddha, Indiana, decided the time had come for him to travel around the earth. Although Jason Moss had always felt a passion for women, as a man might have a passion for bowling or pies, a profound shyness had kept him a bachelor, and so he had no need of explaining his journey to any wife or child. No goodbyes were needed for his kinfolk either. They all lived elsewhere, mostly in trailers on the coasts of Oregon and Maine, where they hunted mushrooms and carved figurines out of tree roots. Every Christmas they would write to him—Box 12, Buddha, Indiana—and send him photographs of a woodstove they had built from an oil drum, or a packet of seeds for growing foot-long cucumbers, or a newspaper clipping about the extinction of Siberian weasels. He would answer these letters promptly, saying that business was good, the weather bad, and his life ticking on as usual.

And so things had kept ticking along until his forty-seventh birthday, which fell in the middle of apple season. To mark the day, Jason always drove out to Burley's Orchard, where he picked two bushels of Granny Smiths, enough to keep him in fruit until spring brought rhubarb. On this particular birthday, after his baskets were full, he was standing tiptoe on the highest rung and reaching for one final apple when the ladder slipped. During the
split second of his fall, he remembered the last glimpse of his father waving from the door of a boxcar, remembered helping his mother drag home from an auction a tombstone bearing the family name, and he realized he was utterly sick of adding up columns of numbers, sick of hearing doors slam in his rooming house, sick of living womanless in Buddha, and he vowed that if he survived the landing he would set out on a journey and not stop until he had circled the planet.

Jason hit the ground without breaking a bone.

That night he reviewed his catalogs of backpacking gear. Since he had been poring over the various editions of these catalogs for years, he already knew which items to order. As many things as possible should be green, because that struck him as the proper color for traveling: a green rucksack and sleeping bag, green tent, green shirts and trousers and waterproof jacket, a slouch hat of green felt, and green nylon laces for his boots. Along with the order for boots he enclosed a sheet of paper on which he had carefully outlined his stockinged foot.

Packages arrived for him all winter.

“Setting up a store?” the deliveryman asked.

“Just some things I've been needing,” Jason replied.

When all the gear had been delivered he practiced stuffing it in the rucksack. The loaded pack weighed forty pounds, one-quarter as much as Jason himself. Dressed in green and propped on the walking-stick, which blossomed into an umbrella at the flick of a button, he posed before the bathroom mirror. Hardly an imposing figure, he knew. Skinny, bespectacled, a clerical sag in the spine. No one could mistake him for a voyageur. But he had never much cared what other people thought of him.

All winter he studied maps, planning his route. Wherever there was land he would hitch rides or walk, and when he reached the edge of a continent he would sail. About the walking he felt no qualms, because every weekend he ambled through the woods near town. His legs were bony, perhaps, and bowed, yet quite sturdy. Sailing might present more of a challenge, for Jason had never set foot in any craft larger than the canoes he paddled on Syrup Creek. He had visited Lake Michigan, which was too wide to see across, and had watched cargo ships docking in Chicago, but such experience would hardly prepare him for crossing the sea. Prepared or not, he felt certain he would find a way, once he set out, to keep going.

Of course he could not set out immediately, not even when the last of the hiking equipment arrived with the warm weather in April. First he had to inform his clients that he would no longer be able to keep track of their money. Breaking the news to his landlady, who hated changes, took a week.

“That's a cockamamie idea if I ever heard one,” she railed at him. But eventually she grew reconciled to the scheme, and advised him to rub alcohol on the soles of his feet, which would toughen them, and always to wear wool socks.

There were forms to fill out at the insurance company and post office. His savings, which after decades of shrewd living were substantial, had to be invested in such a way that even five years from now, even in Tasmania, he would be able to pay for whatever he needed. Delivering his clothes to the Salvation Army kept him busy for an afternoon. He had to find homes for thirty-four house-plants, including some finicky African violets and a rambunctious aloe that had won a red ribbon at the county fair.

Having at last cut himself free of people and having reduced his possessions to what could be carried in his pack, he still had to decide in which direction to begin his trip, whether east or west. If west into the prevailing winds, he could be guided by the sounds and smells of things. In Illinois he might sniff the pigs of Iowa. In Utah he might hear the purr of rain on the Sierras. Ever since Marco Polo revealed how long and toilsome were the eastern routes, the great explorers had journeyed west, Hudson and La Salle and Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, the men whose travels Jason had studied since childhood. But if he set out eastward, he would not have to squint into the afternoon sun. Most days the wind would be at his back, helping him along, and his steps would be aligned with the spinning of the earth.

In the end he chose sunrise over sunset and headed east. He was accompanied to the edge of town by his Vietnamese laundress, his Argentine barber, several former clients asking final questions about their money, a boy whom he had once helped with algebra, and by the landlady, who presented him with a handsome pair of green wool socks. “Remember,” she said, “there's always a home for you in Buddha. And rub your feet with alcohol.”

Jason hoisted the walking stick to wave back at them. Then he faced the rising sun and took his first true step.

Each of these steps was, on average, thirty inches long, which meant 2,112 paces to the mile. At three miles per hour, eight hours a day, every week he would take 354,816 steps and cover 168 miles. In just under six weeks he would lift each boot a million times. If he maintained the same pace on the oceans as on land, he would
circle the earth in a thousand days. The land portion of this circumambulation would require 16,727,040 steps, assuming he walked the whole way.

With these numbers buzzing in his head, Jason made his way down the Cincinnati highway. His calculations were soon in need of revising, however, for within an hour he accepted a ride in a chicken truck. On its side was painted
BUDDHA
'
S BETTER BROILERS
. The chickens were so crammed in their cages that a deaf person seeing the truck from a distance might have thought it was loaded with snow. A person with good working ears could have made no mistake. Jason heaved his rucksack onto the seat and climbed in. The driver was a bear-shaped woman with skin the color of wheat bread and eyes that made him think of pirates.

“Where you headed, bowlegs?” she roared above the noise of the chickens.

“Around the world,” Jason shouted back.

“Lucky dog. Wish I was. But I've got to come on home after dumping these squawkers in Cincy. Listen to them. You ever hear such a racket? It's all I hear seven blessed days a week. Chickens! As dumb as an animal can get without expiring. Shoot, if I didn't have the four kids I'd buy me a backpack and go with you.” She glared across at him. “Say, you married?”

Jason admitted that he was a bachelor. The woman's presence filled the cab like the smell of fresh biscuits, and filled him with yearning. Could he stand to meet and leave a woman each day for a thousand days?

“That's pure waste, if you ask me,” she said, “a healthy gent like you and no wife. There's not enough men to go around as it is, when you get up in the neighborhood of fifty. They die off right and left. My old man walked under a concrete chute, arguing with the
foreman about a baseball game, and that put out his lights. Made himself into a statue.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Jason.

“He wasn't much account. Warm in bed, though, and a set of ears at the dinner table.” Without warning, she slammed her fist against the cab's rear window, yelling, “Stupid birds!” Jason leapt, but the chickens never hushed. Then she added gruffly, “Travel the world, you ought to find a sweetie somewhere.”

“One never knows,” he answered.

“Hey, listen, do me a favor. They say the Japanese have bred up this mute chicken that lays three eggs a day. Would you check that out for me?”

“I'll certainly inquire.” Jason scribbled the query into his pocket notebook. “And to whom should I address my reply?”

“Doris Wilkins. Rural Route 3, Buddha.”

Be bold, he thought, and asked her, “Why haven't I ever seen you in town? I'm an accountant, and I thought I knew all the business people.”

“My farm's four miles out. I only go into the burg for groceries. What few bucks I make I can add in my head.”