Either way, it was a memorable experience, one I would savor and cherish, and as I was thinking about what a fine experience it was and how happy the experience was making me, a car drove up outside. Gilbert went to the door and there, standing at the door, was a white man, a ranger. He’d seen the Pulsar, he said, and now he was here to take me back — something about the native domiciles being off-limits, or private property, or National Park regulations. My car, however, was a unique situation, and so he’d make an exception and let me spend the night in my car. I nodded at Gilbert, who nodded back, and I got in the truck with the ranger. He dropped me off, took down my information, said he’d check back in the morning and that I could make the necessary arrangements then to have my car towed out of the park.
The stars were out and then the clouds came in and I stood outside, leaning against the car. I drank from a bottle of water, ate cashews, unrolled my sleeping bag in the back seat, and although I tried to sleep, I was awake the whole night. My mind was filled with thought after thought, starting with the car. Why hadn’t I fixed the car before it was ruined? Why had I been such a cheapskate? And it wasn’t the car; it was my life. The dream I’d had for my life was getting smaller and smaller, shrinking and cracking, and at a certain point tears actually came to my eyes. I was crying for that dream, or the loss of that dream. I felt an actual physical pain, a heaviness in my body. And once I felt it, once the reality of the deadness of my dream started festering in me, sleep was impossible.
5
I mentioned that I was an editor in New York, at a baby magazine. But I wasn’t always an editor. Growing up in Chicago I had, I don’t know what to call it, a dream, I guess. I wanted to be a playwright. I felt I needed an identity, as a person. I needed something I could be, some thing, and I thought a playwright, that was something I could be, I could live with that. If I was a playwright I could be happy, I thought, so I got together with some people and started a theater company. I did all the things I thought a playwright would do. I got an odd job. I wrote a play. I wrote this play and the play got a production and I thought, Okay, this is it, I will be the thing I want to be. This will make me what I want to be, I thought, and the theater mounted the play and the play was a failure, critically and artistically. I could see that. But I thought, No, you learn from your mistakes. Yes, you do, you learn, and I did, I learned from my mistakes and I knew, I knew what to do the next time. I wrote another play, and this play was much more original. It was something no one had ever seen before, and it was going to blow the walls away. I directed it, with a pornographic movie projected on a screen behind the actors, and I thought it would be good, really good, and I was excited about it. But the play was a failure. A different kind of failure, but a failure nonetheless. But no, I thought, you learn from your mistakes, yes, yes you do, and not only that but those obstacles make you stronger. A great playwright isn’t just born, you have to struggle and overcome the obstacles and be stronger, and I was, I was getting better. I knew what I’d been doing wrong. So I wrote another play, and I thought this play would be good, and it was, it was really good, it was from a true-life experience and it really was good and this play won a prize. So the confidence I had in myself was confirmed, by an outside source, and yes, I thought, I’m on my way to being the thing I want to be. I’ll be happy now. And that’s great, and the play won another prize. I was flown to New York and I thought, Okay, here we go, and I felt as if the world … here it is, and I went to New York and the New York producers looked at it and it wasn’t quite right for them, they said. But that was okay because a theater was planning a Chicago production, and I thought, That’s good, that’s better, start small, start small and then just go forward, conquer the world, and the theater put on the show and no one came and the show lost a lot of money. The theater company went bankrupt, and I didn’t know what to do. I began to think, Something is not right here, obviously, and I took some time off and I discovered what it was, what it was I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t being myself. I was trying to do something else, and that’s it, I thought, I will write a play that is who I am, about people and the things between people, and the society, and the structure of that society. And I wrote this play that I thought was good, brilliant even, and it had a reading and it was terrible. It was. I was cringing at my own words. And so I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. And I began to think that maybe the dream was not the right dream. Maybe I had the wrong dream. But I didn’t want to say that, I didn’t want to admit defeat. I was strong. I could persevere. And I was walking along, in New York, on Wooster Street, it was Wooster Street because the sidewalk was bumpy and I had to keep my eyes down so as not to trip, and I was walking along, and all of a sudden I felt it snap. It snapped. The dream. The dream died. And I let it die. It didn’t feel that bad. In fact it felt good. It felt like what it must feel like, or what I imagined it must feel like, when a dream comes true.
6
In the morning the ranger knocked on my window. He gave me a ride to the ranger station where I called the towing service. As I waited for the tow truck, I wandered around the exhibits and dioramas, reading about desert plants. As I sat on the toilet in the Park Service headquarters I realized I hadn’t thought about Anne for almost a day, and thinking that, I remembered how she used to arch her feet when she sat on the toilet.
When the tow truck came I watched the man hook the Pulsar to a chain and winch it onto the truckbed. I got in the cab and we drove off across the undulating flatness of the desert, punctuated here and there by masses of less eroded sandstone in the otherwise eroded expanse. There were ruins along the road but I wasn’t paying all that much attention. I was worried about the bill. The driver, the son of the tow truck owner, talked about timing belts and said there was a fifty-fifty chance of piston damage.
We pulled into the Sinagua Trading Post, a curio shop and towing service with a junkyard in the back. It was run by a man named Cecil, an old Arizona leatherneck — literally a man with a leatherlike neck — who told me my car was junk. He said he’d fix it if I wanted him to, but there was a fifty-fifty chance of valve damage. He said he’d buy the car and offered me fifty dollars, which just about covered the tow.
I wanted more than that. This was my life and I didn’t want to give it away, which is what the man, essentially, was asking. I was not in a good negotiating position, leverage-wise, but I didn’t want to let go. I’d bought the car and had invested the car with my dreams. Money too, but mainly dreams. I’d invested that small, powerless, uncomfortable car with my life, so it wasn’t that easy to just let go, to just say take it, to just walk away from what had been my self.
When we dream of cars and driving in cars, they say we’re dreaming, partly, about our selves, the things that move us through the world. And at first Cecil seemed to recognize this; he was polite and even compassionate, but he was also businesslike. He added up the hours replacing a timing belt, and parts. Plus the tow. Plus the fact that the car wasn’t worth that much from the get-go. And then he gave me time to think. Which I did, outside the store, on a bench in the shade, looking at the hills, watching cars pass on the road. Slowly I came to a realization that the era of the car — and me in the car — was over. My car was gone, and being gone it was one less thing to stuff my life with.