"…I don't know why he has done this, what I have done to deserve this… other than my being honest and kind…"
Carradine looked like a guy who would be selling handmade hemp wallets at a flea market. I was surprised Hand wasn't joining their conversation. This man was the type of guy Hand was inevitably chatting up. Hand had collected so many of these people, had so many stories, and always the stories involved someone he'd just met and instantly befriended – there are people who meet strangers and people, like me, who know only those they've known from birth – and usually Hand soon after loaned them money or, in two separate instances, allowed them to live in his garage.
"Yes, I live like a king," the white man on the bus was saying, "and can entertain my friends from around the globe… Of course, I was never good at English. For three years I was in remedial English… my teachers didn't understand my individual needs for expression…"
The shuttle stopped at the hotel. Carradine had five bags, which he struggled to lift, one over his shoulder, two in his left hand, two in his right. Hand took two for him, and the burdened white man followed us out. We stepped down from the shuttle into the lobby.
"You been to Senegal before?" he asked Hand.
Hand said we hadn't.
"Well, you'll see more beggars and cripples there than in your whole life." He glanced at me. "You'll feel right at home."
We walked into the lobby. Was that a joke about my face? It was, I think. We were in line now, waiting to check in. The white man looked at our shoes, our backpacks, gauging their contents.
"So," he said, "you guys planning to do some drumming?"
And we were still in America. We were in Schaumburg, or Bensenville, wherever this hotel was, and were walking down a quiet hall with purple and yellow crosshatched carpeting, and were not en route to Senegal and I hadn't – I just realized – packed shorts, and wouldn't get there until morning and had wasted the day. One of seven gone.
Passing a middle-aged couple in matching jackets:
– You two need to change.
– What? Why? the middle-aged couple said, to my head, in my head.
– Because you are wearing the same jacket.
– We bought them while on vacation in Newport.
– You must be hidden from view.
– The jackets are nice.
– They are not nice. You must change to save us all.
I argued with strangers constantly, though only in my cloudy skull, while always I adopted this hollow admonishing tone – my grandmother's, I guess – which even I couldn't stand. The silent though decisive discussions were a hobby of my mind, debating people I knew or passed on the road while driving:
– You, driving the Lexus.
– Me?
– Yes, you. You paid too much.
– What?
– You paid too much and your soul is soiled.
– You are right. I have failed but will repent.
It helped me work through problems, solving things, reaching conclusions final, edifying and even, occasionally, mutually agreeable.
– You, on the motorcycle.
– Yes.
– It's only a matter of time.
– I know.
It would be fun, I suppose, if it wasn't constant and so loud. It was unavoidable and now, to tell you the truth, after many years of enjoying the debates, I wanted them to end. I wanted the voices silenced and I wanted less of my head generally. I didn't want the arguments, and I didn't want the voice that followed, the one that apologized, also silently, to the people I'd debated and dressed down.
– Sorry! this last voice would say, jogging after the first like a handler after a candidate. Won't happen again! Here's a little something for your trouble!
I wanted agreement now, I wanted synthesis and the plain truth – without the formalities of debate. There was nothing left to debate, no heated discussion that seemed to progress toward any healing solution. I wanted only truth, as simple as you could serve it, straight down the middle, not the product of dialectic but sui generis: Truth! We all knew the truth but we insisted on distorting things to make it seem like we were all, with each other, in such profound disagreement about everything – that first and foremost there are two sides to everything, when of course there were not; there was one side only, one side always: Just as this earth is round, the truth is round, not two-sided but round and -
Hand and I got our own rooms. On the mattress over the covers I closed my eyes and attempted sleep but instead met my head as it floated above my bed with its many nervous eyes, and my head was in a belligerent mood. Kill the fuckers. Kill the fuckers. Kill the fuckers. Here I was again. I shunned argument but felt close to the battle. Every day I had hours when I wanted to direct a machine gun, somewhere, anywhere, feel the falling shells tapping my instep – hours when every conflict in the world felt familiar to me -
I sat up and called my mom. I hadn't told her about the trip – I'd planned to call from Greenland – and now my reasons for waiting were confirmed.
"You're using your new money?"
"Yes."
"What did Cathy say about that?"
"She had nothing to say about it."
I knew she was livid, more at Cathy than me.
"Will, this just sounds silly."
"Well…"
"You're just acting out, honey."
"Well, thank you for that piece of -"
"You've had a rough year, I know, but -"
"Listen -"
"And frankly," she said, "I'm confused."
I looked across the bed, into a mirror, and saw a face so angry and wretched I turned away.
"Tell me," I said, with a level of patience that impressed even me, "why. Mom. You are confused."
"Well, wasn't it you who didn't care about traveling? You used to raise such a fit when I wanted to take you on trips, even up to Phelps or something."
"That was different."
"It was you. It was you who sat right there, on that stool in the kitchen, in the first house, and said that you didn't need to travel anywhere, ever. I wanted us to go somewhere exotic and you said you could do all the traveling and thinking you'd ever need without ever leaving the backyard."
I sighed as loudly and ferociously as I could.
"Yes indeedy!" she went on, "Hand was the one with the plans, who wanted to be in space and all, but you said travel was a distraction for the unimaginative. It was all very moving, your speech. I wish I had it taped."
I wondered how loudly I could hang up. Maybe this was one of those phones with the actual ringer on the base. That could make quite a sound. I would just throw the thing down and -
"Will?" she asked.
"What?" I said.
"Why don't you go home and call me tonight and we can talk more about this? I think you two are making a mistake. Think about the money! Let me talk to Hand. Is this Hand's idea?"
"It's too late. We bought the tickets."
"To where again?"
"Senegal."
She scoffed. "No one goes to Senegal!"
"We do."
"You'll get AIDS!"
I hung up. Did I mention that she might be losing her mind? The last time I visited her new condo in Memphis, she'd been using conditioner on her hands, mistaking it for softsoap. Tommy and I are terrified we'll have twenty years of angry and groping senility, as we did with Granna, who half the time you wanted to care for, whose long straight grey hair you wanted to brush – but who the other half of the time, with her barking exclamations – Where's my baby! Where's my horse! I broke those things because they needed to be broken! -- you wanted to suffocate with a pillow.
I tried to nap, but now my head was alive, was a toddler in a room full of new guests. It jumped and squealed and threw the books off the shelves. Yes I'm one of the slowest talkers you'll ever meet but my head, when I have it and it's not asleep or being borrowed, is not slow. My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance – this is why people tell me secrets – my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound. These were filed near the front.