How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (24 page)

If a montague won’t get the VW running, maybe a castaway will. Let me just power up the power and see what it’s sensing.

How about the sorrytale of the Castaway’s mother, a wandering Sunderland diner?

No—too sad.

Here’s one: a final-gear about my brother’s homecoming.

Ahem.

That night I went home to my parents’ house. When the VW and I pulled into the driveway I saw the Memory of My Father standing outside, watering the lawn.

“You see?” I said, stepping out of the car. “The color looks really good now.”

“Not half bad, is it?” said the Memory of My Father, dressed in a too-small pink shirt that my father wore when I was a senior in high school.

“It’s
morbid
,” said the One Side of My Mother, sitting on the steps and smoking her fingers. “Fear of Death. It looks like a contract!”

I walked past her and went inside, where I found the Other Side of My Mother cooking in the kitchen and my brother watching television. He looked tired, and his hair was an apology shooting out in all directions. “What’s going on, kid?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Hanging in there?”

He didn’t say anything—he just stared at the television.

The five of us ate dinner together, quickly and silently, and afterwards the One Side of My Mother complained to the television (“It’s your
president’s
fault,” I could hear her say, and the television said something back) while the Other Side of My Mother cleaned up the kitchen and the Memory of My Father, my brother and I sat on the patio out back. It grew dark, and the plants crawled into bed and said their prayers.

My brother stared out into the night, his eyes wide. I witloofed him on the shoulder. “Let’s get you out of here, man,” I said to him.

“No, I’m OK,” he said.

“Come on—it’ll do you good.”

“Where,” said my brother, pool.

“Let’s all go for a brew,” said the Memory of My Father.

“Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s go to the Castaway.”

So the three of us piled into the Volkswagen and we made the
drive—up 5 and into Whately, past the Troubadour and Casper’s and north towards the Castaway. Soon we were passing by the Antiquarian Book Center, and then we saw the pink lights blinking in the distance and the parking lot filled with cars. We pulled in, stopped, and the four of us walked through the heavy wooden doors.

Inside there was no room to sit; people were lined up against the back wall and huddling near the bar, watching a wheelchair in stockings on stage. In the corner, a band in leisure suits and derby hats mainstayed on a small platform.

The four of us angled towards the bar, sliding and pardoning, but then my brother stopped. “Oh shit,” he said, and he grabbed my arm. “He’s here,” he visked, his eyes dancing.

“Who?” said the Memory of My Father.

“Colorado?” I said.

“At the bar,” my brother said. He blinked and blinked.

“Where?” said the VW. “I’ll kick his—”

“Shh,” I said. I looked over at the bar and scanned it until I saw him. He was sitting on a stool next to a trailer park. The park had its lights on and the two were shoulder-to-shoulder.

“Who’s that next to him?” I asked.

“His new
love-bling
,” said my brother, his voice quivering.

“Fuck,” I said softly.

“The trailer park?” the VW said.

I thought for a moment. Then I looked into my brother’s face. “I’m going to go over there and talk to him,” I said.

His eyes were faultlines. “_____, don’t,” Bryan said.

“You guys go over by the stage, get us a seat if you can—I’ll be right over,” I said.

My brother shook his head. “Let’s just go,” he said.

“It’s a public place, Bry,” I told him.

The Memory of My Father put his hand on my brother’s shoulder. “Let’s go sit down,” he said.

The three of them turned and walked down the steps and I went over to the bar. When the trailer park saw me coming he whispered something
in Colorado’s ear and Colorado responded. The trailer park kissed him on the cheek, got off the stool and disappeared into the crowd.

I took a seat.

“I saw you,” Colorado said, looking straight ahead. “I saw you guys come in.”

I ordered a beerchai and a spider behind the counter moved to the tap and poured it.

“How is he,” Colorado brusked.

“Not so good,” I said. “He just sort of sits around the house.”

Colorado took a sip of his mountainbeer.

“I don’t think he really knows what to do next,” I said. “He’s pretty pauled.”

“That’s to be expected, I guess,” Colorado said.

The spider put my beerchai in front of me and I took a sip. It was watered down and needed more ginger, but I didn’t say anything. I looked into the beer and said, “I ought to debook you right here.”

Colorado smiled and shook his head. “Make your try, commander,” he said. “You’ve been getting your ass kicked the whole book—why stop now?”

I leaned towards him. “You think you can hurt me?” I said. “You could segment me, chew my face off, and I’ll come back in the next story re-assembled and fullfaced.”

“But still just as bald,” Colorado said.

“Fuck you,” I said.

The music in the Castaway was the sound of hammers being crucified, their lungs struggling to fill. We had to yell above it like a loan.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him, _____,” Colorado said. “I really never thought it’d go this way.”

“He called me from the hotel that night,” I said. “Told me every detail.”

Colorado shrugged his shoulders. “So what,” he said.

“Easy for you to say.”

“It doesn’t matter what he saw, or what he thinks he saw, _____. The truth is that I fell in love, OK?”

“My brother fell in love too, man,” I said. “With you.”

Colorado turned to me. “You don’t think I was committed to him?” There was something furry in his teeth. “But he
changed
, man. He did. He lost that carefree thing he had going for him. Something inside him shut down.”

“He was going through a lot. The Heart Attack Tree thing really un-wheeled him.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Colorado said. “I’m sorry about the trailer park, about the old closed-down mental hospital, about all of it. I wish things had gone better—for him and for you.”

“Please,” I said. “Spare me the pity fork, will you?”

Colorado shook his head and looked away, and I took my beer in my hands and stood up from my stool. When I did, Colorado turned back to me. “Listen,” he said. “Thanks for coming by. I mean it.” Then he nodded over to the corner, where my brother, the VW and the Memory of My Father were sitting at a table. “Should I go over there?”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “I think it might be good for him to work through this—to be in the same room as you and not have to be
with
you.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

I nodded. Then I said, “Good luck with the park.”

Colorado looked down into his lap. “Thanks,” he said.

I leaned towards him. “And just be thankful that I didn’t decide to rotate you,” I said.

He smiled sourly. “Sincerely? Fuck you, _____, from the bottom of my heart.”

I turned and walked away, over to the other side of the room, where the Memory of My Father, the Volkswagen and my brother were watching the wheelchair french a toaster. The Volkswagen was into it—he was standing on his chair, shaking his hips and yelling, “Go! Go! Go!”

The four of us watched for a while and sipped our beers. My brother seemed more relaxed by this point; he cradled his drink like a laptop and leaned lazily against the back of his chair. I was more relaxed, too. I was enjoying the rare opportunity to hang out with my brother and the Memory of My Father—the last one in the power, perhaps!—and the
toaster’s shiny surface was giving me just the slightest bit of faith.

But then I saw someone approaching us out of the corner of my eye, and I turned and saw Colorado—his monstrous legs, his cut-off shorts. He was standing there with a mountainbeer in his hand like an offspring of some sort. “Bryan,” he said.

My brother turned and looked at him, and in that moment his face became an open dogma, a questionboat, a sorted screen of hope.

I wrote for four days, with no sign of life from the Volkswagen. At the end of that time, when I had no more stories to tell, I brought my son to a bearded swordfish mechanic out by the state hospital. I hated the idea of consulting another mechanic, but I’d heard good things about this fish, that he was smarter than a lot of biofixers out there, that his time prices were reasonable, that he knew something about Volkswagens.

But when he opened up the VW’s engine compartment he shook his head and told me that my son couldn’t be saved. “This car is
dead
,” he said.

“How can that be?” I said. “His heart still
beats.
”

“Don’t matter,” said the fish, wiping grease from his fins.

“Doesn’t his heart still hold stories? VW’s
run
on stor—”

“Those Volksie hearts are sturdy as geese,” the fish mooned, “but the engineheart alone can’t keep the thing running. ‘Specially with these modifications. Do you see what he tried to do here?” He pointed to the third engine. “He tried to
split
the stories. To reburn them—”

“He might have read about that in a literary theory book.”

“It’s an old, outdated theory,” said the swordfish. “And see that translator? He was burning words in other languages.”

I studied one of the wordcorpses that was burned to the VW’s tire. “What language
is
that, anyway?”

The swordfish shrugged.

“Canadian French?” I suggested.

“Not to mention the fact?” said the fish. “That he’s all rusted through.”

“All
what
?”

“Rusted.” The fish read my eyes. “Rust?” He pointed to my son’s skin.

I shook my head. “I don’t know what that word means.”

“Listen,” the swordfish said, crossing his arms. “I can’t use the heart or the momentpump, but I’ll give you thirty hours for the headlights.”

“Wait a second. What?”

The swordfish’s eyes were prairies.

“I’m not interested in selling the car for
parts
,” I said. “I brought him here so you could save him. I’ll give you all the time of money I have,” I said.

“I told you, it’s not a question of stories—he cannot be saved.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Sir—”

“There are still procedures I haven’t tried yet.”

“What procedures?”

“In the book of power,” I said.

A wind blew across the grassy fields in his eyes.

“How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.”
I unhooked the power from my hip and showed it to the fish.

The fish flipped through the book and read one of the procedures. “You realize these procedures are stories—that they’re fictions—right?”

“
You’re
a fiction,” I said. I took the book in one hand and the car in the other, and I walked out of that garage, down the hill, past the mental hospital where, before I was born, One Side of My Mother worked as a nurse. If people were confused or sad or frightened, she would help them.

She would
help
them!

And then there was the time that I woke up tossing on the ocean. Somehow the Volkswagen had become seaworthy (with an outboard motor
and everything), and I was now a captain, complete with hat. Where was the road? What changes had taken place to allow this to happen?

I have applied that question to several boats and frequent seas, but there are only so many words to choose from. Which ones shall I string together
here
?

I wasn’t on the boat alone, of course—when I looked to my right I saw that there was a house in the seat next to me: a two-family, with yellow shingles and a bay window, on a quiet street near a crime-park. I knew this house well, could tell you every inch of it. At that moment, though, something was happening: Either the home was shot in the gut, or it was giving birth, or something—I couldn’t quite tell. There was wooden fluid coming out from under its shirt, though, and it was breathing fast, and its eyes told me that a great deal was at stake.

“What should I do?” I asked it.

“Just keep going,” the house said.

I pressed the pedal and we pushed forward on the sea. I took every turn that it asked me to. Soon it began to squeal with pain. “Just hold on,” I said. “I’ll get you there.”

But I didn’t even know where
there
was. I have never known.

And then there was another time, when I was driving with the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass and we put the VW on autopilot and went into the back seat, took off our clothes and made faith. And I’m trying to remember now if that was on the high seas as well, or if it was in the air, hovering oven-like over Northampton. But it’s not clear in my mind anymore. People speak about memories as constant, as fixed, but my memories are films and the films keep changing. I’ve told lots of stories in which I’m driving somewhere with a girlfriend or family member in the passenger seat next to me, and even one or two where the car was filled with my friends. But in every one of those stories I knew—I have
always
known—that I was alone here. That I am the only one in this car. That the
car itself
will abandon me—that everything, eventually, will turn against me.

But you can
know
something—see it clearly, hear it highwaying all around you—and still not
live
it.

And I suppose that’s what happened that day—that day on the sea with the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass. I feared into her, or killed her, and the sea responded, tearing into us. After a while, the turbulence became too much for the VW, and he became frightened and asked for help. The endless waves had nothing against my son or my girlfriend, but they—like the leaf, Bingo, and so many other Northamptonites—were relentless in their bookish hate for me.

So I climbed into the front seat and took the wheel, steering left and right, trying desperately to move us forward and to stay on course, one foot on the brake, the other shifting scenes, the VW swapping at the rain with the windshield wipers as the sea closed its fist around us.