How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (14 page)

The Memory of My Father was born at Atkin’s in the clutch of the Tree’s escape. Or, he was born in the days afterwards, in my childhood home in Longmeadow, sprung from our—mine, my brother’s, the Two Sides of My Mothers’—collaged mourning.

Or, he was
never
born—he’d simply always been there, in my mind, a Memory available for hire and waiting, right off the page, for his moment.

I have to admit: In some ways I’d been preparing for the loss of my father my whole life. I’d expected it to break me and it did—the bile of loss scorched every surface inside me, incinerating some wires and parts completely and forcing others into new places in my body. I changed for good. I’d been a student—the Promise of a Book—and I became nothing: a poor father, a stumbling reporter, a really terrible lover. All the hair moved off my head and my stomach swelled with what I could not get back, with the terrible space of his no-voice, our non-talks, the never-again feeling of connecting with someone, of feeling understood, of being loved. I literally went to a new place in my own mind—drove off from some things and never returned to them. I built an entire world—OK, a county or two, but still—inside myself based on loneliness and bewilderment, on what was not, on the sounds things make when they crack, break, split, shatter, pop.

The Dogs didn’t help things, either. I expected a massive search or news about suspects, but I didn’t hear a bark from them. In the first month or so after the attack, I went to the Amherst CityDog Barracks twice a week and spoke through the window to the Dog on duty.

“Nothing new,” he’d say as soon as I approached the glass.

“Are they still going out?” I’d ask. “Are they looking?”

He’d always tell me they were.

Finally I met with the Captain—sat in the leather chair in his office, looked him in the eye. He leaned over the desk, his paws crossed.

“We go out on tree patrols every day,” the Captain said. “But truthfully, we have no leads on your tree at all.”

“Did you try Montague?” I asked.

“Of course, but—”

“Charlemont?”

“It’s not that simple,” he said.

“Greenfield?”

“Mr. _____—it’s not that we can’t find Heart-Breed trees. But it’s almost impossible to find one particular tree—not a Memory, mind you, but the tree itself!—if he wants to hide. Hell, this is why we try and get them to register!”

“How hard can it be to find a tree driving a farm?”

“These things survive by hiding, by camouflaging themselves. He could literally be anywhere—alive or dead, right under our nose or a thousand miles away.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” I said. “My
Dad
’s in that farm.”

The Dog leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips. “Did you read the report? That hard-to-see Truck saw the whole thing.”

I knew what he was implying. “Still,” I said. “He could still be—”

“He’s not,” the Dog said. “Read what the Truck said about your Dad’s
chest.
”

It wasn’t too long after that meeting—after the sentence of loss had begun to set itself in my mind and its rhythms became known to me—that I walked out the front door of the Crescent Street apartments, on my way somewhere, and noticed the Memory of My Father—a flickering
image of my father at about fifty-five—balancing on some rickety scaffolding, doing something to the shakes or the gutter. I guess my mind had started to accept the version that my father was gone, that he wasn’t ever coming back. At the time, in fact, his Memory wasn’t even a surprise—I think I’d been building him my whole life, and to be honest I’m not even sure that this was the first time I noticed him. We had no formal introduction or conversation about our relationship, not even a hello. The Memory of My Father saw me staring up at his work and he climbed down to talk to me as if we’d seen each other five minutes earlier.

“I can’t save it,” he said. He was dressed in paint-covered jeans that once belonged to me, a too-tight flannel shirt from the Salvation Army and moccasin shoes that likely came from a tag sale. He looked out from behind tinted glasses in brown plastic frames.

“Save what?” I asked.

“The sophet,” he said, looking up at the gutters. “It’s all cracked to shit.”

“Can’t you just replace a section of it?”

He frowned, shook his head. “Whole fucking thing needs to go,” he said.

“Shit,” I said. “We’re talking a good few hours, right?”

He cleared his throat and spit. “At least.”

The more I lived with this Memory, the more I learned about its limitations—what it could and couldn’t do. Sometimes it froze on me, and other times it did nothing but mimic my actions. I’d be powering at my desk, say, and when I picked up a stapler it would reach down and pick up the Memory of a Stapler. I’d type the words “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive,” and it’d type “The Memory of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.”

There were also moments, though, when the Memory was a mystery, an evocation from a deep, hidden section of my mind. Not long after I saw him on the scaffolding, for example, I drove the VW home to my parents’ house in Longmeadow and I saw the Memory of My Father again. This time he was painting the house a new color, a color called
Fear of Death. Apparently he’d decided to do this without asking anyone (which is just like my father!), not even the Two Sides of My Mother. Not that they would have objected—they spent their days now dressed in black, smoking their fingers in unison and staring out the window, as if by doing so they could change the course of trees and hearts.

The Memory of My Father saw the VW and I pull in and held up his hand. “Give me just a
second
, I’m almost done,” he said, running his brush against the side of the house, then stepping back. He held out his arms. “What do you think?”

The color was so bright it almost hurt to look at. “It’s not subtle,” I said.

“You don’t like it either? What the fuck! Everyone’s been giving me shit about it.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. It’s just—sort of loud.”

“It’ll fade, it’ll fade!” he said. He was still holding the brush in his hand, and the Fear of Death rushed to the edge of the bristles and threatened to slip off and drop to the pavement.

“Won’t that take years?” I said.

“Not with the weather we’ve been having.”

I knew exactly what he was saying. “The inner weather, you mean?”

He put his hands on his waist. “What?” he said.

Later, the four of us—myself, the Memory of My Father and the Two Sides of My Mother—went out to Bridge’s for pizza. Bridge’s had been one of my parents’ favorite places when my Dad was alive—the pizza there was brief and kind—and it felt good to be back there. And it was just like my father for the Memory of My Father to reach for the tab with his paint-stained hands and pay. This was symbolic, of course, because he didn’t really know time, nor could he make it or lose it. He was, at that moment, my Dad back in the mid-1990s, when my father was renovating the Crescent Street apartments and pouring all that he had into them. My Dad’s hair at the time was wild and gray, his glasses were gold-rimmed and his wallet, when you opened it, had nothing but sand inside.

It was during dinner that night, I think, that I more fully realized
how this Memory worked—that it could change according to where I was in my mind, and that it was able to do certain things (work, pay) and not others (hug, sip tea, read or write). The Memory of My Father could say certain words or phrases, but others were hidden from him. Sometimes his image was almost completely transparent and other times it appeared so solid that you might actually think he was a real man.

When we came home that night we got a fresh glimpse of the Fear of Death, still tacky in the half-light. The color made the house look tragic, like carry-on luggage. House = luggage, flight = cavity/chest.

Plus, that evening the neighbors started calling about the color, and a few even knocked on our door. One man, a neighbor we’d never met before, had hair of solid gold. He stood in the doorway and said, “Tell me that’s a primer.”

I’d thought the Memory of My Father would have sworn at him, but by this point he was my father a few years later, and he was calmer and more content. “No,” he said. “That’s actually the color.”

“What color is it?”

“It’s called Fear of Death.”

The neighbor crossed his arms, sighed and looked again at the front of the house. “Boy,” he said. “I mean, it completely changes the neighborhood.”

The Memory of My Father didn’t say anything.

The man looked at him and said, “You’re staring at my hair.”

“No—no,” the Memory of My Father said.

“You are.”

My father even older now, the Memory of My Father flickered shyly and held up his hand. “Sorry, hey. I mean,” he said.

“It’s extremely heavy, in case you wondered,” the man said.

“I can imagine.”

“I constantly look for places where I can rest it.”

“Well here,” the Memory of My Father said. He held out his hands and the man put his gold head in them.

As the light faced the firing squad the Memory of My Father and I sat outside on the back patio, sipping the Memory of Beer. The Memory
of My Father winced and custom-swore when he cracked the can, just like my father used to.

We both took deep sips as we looked at the color in the dark. Even lightless you could see its images.

After a moment the Memory of My Father asked, “Is it that bad?”

I reached into the swamp of my heart. “Course not,” I said. “It’s
true
. Who cares if it has meaning and weight?”

“I didn’t mean to offend anyone with it,” said the Memory of My Father, now my father as an old man—just weeks before the attack. “I just picked up the brush. It did all the talking.”

“I know the name of
that
tune,” I told him, and we both took a slug.

We sat there for a while more. Then the Memory of My Father fell asleep in the metal chair, and the chair wrapped its arms around him and held him there. I watched them lie together for a few minutes and then I put down my beer, stood up, went over to the side of the house and put my hands to the paint.

It was still alive—not yet dry, not yet dead. I touched it and it touched me back. All at once I knew Memories I’d forgotten, images that had made me. I felt an incubator. I knew the warm breath of my first refrigerator, the smell of the yellow kitchen floor. The first sign of an old soldier I never knew, his beard a forest of dying snow.

If the quiet, teethy taupe of your VW’s dashboard legumes, the VW is asking for
Jaws—
the Jaws Junkyard, on Route 66 in Westhampton. There are several junkyards in western Massachusetts—Highway Auto, Ludlow Salvage—but I know of no other yard as volkstocked as Jaws. They literally have
rows
of VW corpses to pick through. Also, they have a car in the front yard that was once a shark. I’m serious; it has fins and teeth but it drives on the road. I’ve never seen anything else quite like it.

I think of Jaws now and my lungs ache. How many afternoons, pre-attack, did I spend there with my father, picking through bodies for parts for our cars?

What I’m saying is, they have great prices.

If you do go to Jaws, though, remember that not all Volkswagens are the same. Some have external feeders, others have internal ones and some burn paperless altogether. I once lifted up an engine compartment lid on a VW at Jaws and found a nest of screaming birds. I opened another and found a field of crops. Where were the morning cables—the combustion chambers? I have no idea how it could be that the inside of each was so different, but there it was, for our review, the VW undercover variation.

Even so, always be sure that the part they give you is right for your car—the balloons at Jaws’ll sell you any old part they can.

One time, the VW and I went out to Jaws to see about getting a new
believer
—the circuit which connects the storypump via sunrise to the middle transmission. In the weeks before that, the VW had stopped believing in almost everything—the road, the book of power, every story I told him. That’s how I knew his believer was shot.

So I did what I had done so many times before—I drove us out to Westhampton, parked the VW at the salvage yard entrance and stepped into the office trailer. I spoke to a dirty red balloon who was sitting behind the counter, reading a magazine and eating a grinder.
^*
When I leaned against the desk I could hear the stories in his chest—one about volume, another about a new set of curtains. He looked up at me and I said, “Looking for a new believer for my son.”

The balloon put down his food and swiped his hands together. Then he picked up a clipboard. “What year is your son’s car?”

“He
is
the car.”

“What year?”

“Seventy-one,” I said. “Beetle.”

The balloon flipped a page on the clipboard. “Only one we have is a four-point from a state prison.”

“A
prison
,” I said.

The balloon nodded. “It should work. Beliefs for Bugs and state prisons—” he scanned the page—“should be interchangeable.”

“You sure?”

“That’s what the listing says.”

“You don’t have any VW believers—factory parts?”

The balloon let out a little air. “This is the only believer that I have on the whole lot,” he said.

“How much?”

“Three and a half,” he said.

“Could you order a Volkswagen-type believer from another yard?”

“I can put your name on a list,” he said. “You need it right now?”

I looked out the window of the trailer and saw the VW studying a puddle of mud and antifreeze.

“I really do,” I confessed. “Poor kid doesn’t know
what
to believe.”

•  •  •

From the moment the balloon handed me that dead, grey part (which, incidentally, was about the size and shape of a
bagel
), though, I should have known that it wasn’t going to fit. But like a reese I bought it, took it home and tried to install it. When I removed the old believer, I found that it had
five
points—not four, like the prisoner. Nevertheless, I installed the new one and hoped for the best.