“The end of summer, in like an agrarian society, it’s pivotal, right? But it’s her that really wants to go. She’s like really into folklore, aren’t you, sweetheart?” the boy said adoringly, and wrote down the name of their festival-Samhraidhreadh-on the back of his bespectacled girlfriend’s hand while she laughed because the pen was tickly. He pulled her wrist forward to show Ron, and Ron had never heard of it and couldn’t pronounce it, either. But something about their journey touched him-its pilgrim zeal, its pointlessness-and in a demonstration of goodwill that he did not really feel he took them all the way to Edinburgh, thinking that to perform, however disinterestedly, an act of kindness might bring flooding back a former true impulse to be kind, the way he might swing a numbed limb to and fro hoping that movement would restore sensation.
So began a habit of stopping for hitchhikers and offering to take them wherever they were heading, since the direction or distance didn’t affect him much. That winter, drifting farther north on the main tourist routes, he came across more of them than he expected, and once or twice in bad weather he slowed down and offered lifts when none was being asked for, until he realized how that might look. He told himself it was a way of meeting people-people distinct in his mind from fellow prisoners-though it was really only practice at being in proximity to them again.
Their company was easy because, he soon discovered, young people were curious only about themselves. He just had to keep quiet, as he was anyway inclined to do, and within minutes his passenger would launch into an account of himself that kept him chirping on for miles, as if Ron had demanded some justification for his being where he was at that precise point in his life. Unless the journey was very short, Ron would soon know pretty much all there was to know about whole extended families: the birthday parties, the funerals, the divorces, the day the dog had puppies. A hundred personal philosophies were explained to him in all their complexity and variation, he learned of ambitious and intricate life plans based on a faith in something or other or on recovery from the loss of it, and all of it was offered to him, he sensed, as barter, a diligent trading of autobiography for transportation. Not that that made them real passengers, certainly not. It was a symbolic reckoning only, a token proffered for safe passage. So he listened quietly, intending his silence to convey that his side of the bargain was that he would not trouble his companions to pretend they were in the least interested in him. For the most part they honored the transaction, measuring out their disclosures like shining coins counted from palm to palm and expecting none in return.
But on the rare occasions anyone asked, he was always ready to say that he was just taking time out, he liked Scotland, and it suited him not to stay in one place for long. Sometimes he was tempted to volunteer a remark or two about himself beyond that, just to hear his own words cross the air between himself and his passenger, to test the link between that person’s life and his own. But when he rehearsed in his mind what those words would have to be, the temptation vanished.
I used to be a bus driver. Seven summers ago I took a party of schoolchildren to Portugal. We were late for the ferry going back, and during the ninth hour of driving, in torrential rain, I must have fallen asleep. We came off the motorway. Six children and a teacher, who was pregnant, were killed. I went to prison.
What link could there possibly be, after that, between him and, say, a happy young Canadian couple who were, like, really into folklore?
During the evenings, and when he woke in the night, his passengers’ words would come back to him as intermittent phrases in a dozen accents, the sounds fragmenting in his head like the scrapbook of images of the small physical details he recalled: the back of a hand sore from an insect bite, a damp space where a tooth was missing, an earlobe punctured decoratively in three places. He would remember the smells they brought into the car, of the ferny, rain-soaked hills and their sour sneakers and wet nylon clothes, and he’d recall how secretly and greedily he had inhaled, once they got talking, their cigarette and bubble-gum-scented breath. And as he lay awake, it made him gasp, the fear he had felt for them at journey’s end, setting them down blithe and undefended to fare again for themselves in this world crowded with dangers. He had no interpretation for any of these things.
Toward the end of the second winter, he noticed that most days he thought about stopping. He was still in the north, mainly because nothing was drawing him in any other direction, but he was running out of places to go. The landscape was beautiful, he could see that, but he had had his fill of the more or less stultifying succession of glimpses taken from the road, the amassing of the same mental snapshots over and over. On the night of his fiftieth birthday, he washed and shaved in the gents’ of a pub called The Highlander’s Rest, ate the mixed grill and chips alone in the bar, and slept parked in a turnout. He woke tired. He wanted a spell of quiet away from the engine drone and diesel warmth of the Land Rover, to be in one place for a while. He had no idea where or how it was to be found, but he longed for somewhere to stay.
Silva, the geese are back, you said as you stepped into the trailer. Hundreds of them. You can see their shapes but not their colors yet, it’s too misty. They’re downstream over on the far side of the river on that long black rock you can see at low tide, just down from that old ruin you like, the cabin with the little jetty.
You left the door open. It was still early, and you let in the cold.
They must have found a whole family of fish down there, you said, waving your hands. All around the rock where the water’s glassy, they’re feasting. You should see them, they’re landing and diving and dipping their necks and sending ripples all the way across, beautiful slow ripples lapping all the way over onto our side. You can hear them. Listen, can you hear the water?
I whispered to you to shut the door. Anna had kicked her covers off, and I was afraid the chill on her legs might wake her up. Then I listened and shook my head.
No, Stefan, I don’t hear anything.
Well, of course you don’t, not with the door shut, you said, coming over and sitting down. But it’s a nice noise when you’re outside. Want to come out, lazybones?
I hushed you with a finger placed on your lips.
What’s the time? I whispered. She’s still asleep. We’ve got a little time, haven’t we?
You glanced over at Anna and back at me, pretending to be puzzled. You’re awake, I’m awake, why would we want Anna to stay asleep? Then you rose and quietly drew the blanket back over Anna’s curled little body and tucked her giraffe in beside her. You came toward me, smiling. I still remember precisely how the mattress tilted as you clambered onto it. We didn’t have a lot of time. When you entered me, I wanted to cry out, but I trapped the sound in my throat and pressed my mouth against your neck.
Not long afterward it was Anna who broke the silence with her creaky, waking-up noise that was not exactly crying but a test of her voice, a call of emergence. Although she was nearly two, when she fell asleep it really was still a fall, a sheer drop into that fathomless well of baby sleep; it turned her body solid, so her chest hardly rose and fell and her eyelids did not even flicker. It seems fantastic to me now that I could watch her like that without feeling panic at how far away from me she went in her sleep. I loved her waking-up noises; to me they sounded like the snuffling of a small creature returning from the lost, clambering back up through undergrowth from a foray a little too far from the nest. The real crying would start a few moments later, when she was awake enough to know she was hungry.