The Grand Tour (29 page)

I am alone. We all are, children of the universe, all. We come from dead stars and are destined to return to them…

He read Vance's novel for ten long minutes, despite the increasingly loud murmur of dissent that filled the room. When he was finished, to a smattering of confused applause, he put the pages down and stared out at the crowd, which stared back at him. He picked out Eileen in the back of the room, her brow furrowed and lips pursed in an effort not to laugh. A voice rang out in the middle of the crowd.

“Why don't you read your own book?” Although Richard couldn't see the acne-ridden forehead or the Adam's apple bobbing up and down like a fishing lure, he recognized the grinding, adenoidal tone.

“Hey, Vance,” he said into the microphone. A relieved chuckle went through the crowd: this was clearly some sort of inside joke. “I like yours better than mine, that's why. I read the whole thing last night. It's not perfect, but it's real, at least.” A cardboard stand-up of his book's cover wobbled flimsily by the entryway.

No one spoke. He pointed to the stand-up and said, “What I'm saying is, none of it happened. It's bullshit.”

The words surprised him as he spoke them. How true they were and how momentarily unburdened he felt saying them. He realized just how much time and energy he'd spent telling himself that it wasn't bullshit at all or that there was enough mitigating truth in it to make it not entirely bullshit or that, if it was bullshit, it was a type of bullshit that was truer than simple truth and lots of other similar bullshit. He realized he'd spent as much time and energy, probably more, simply not thinking about it.

He was also surprised to learn that a hush falling over a crowd actually sounded that way. It was as though a physical thing—an invisible layer of some kind of heavy silt—had been dropped from the ceiling on everyone. Everyone looked at him. They were, he realized, searching for a sign in his face that it was a joke or waiting for a mitigating statement. He reflexively located Eileen again, now shaking her bent head with an incredulous look he'd seen a lot of over the years.
Just when I thought you couldn't sink any lower.
He put the manuscript back in its box and walked out into the crowd, which parted for him. He handed it to Vance and looked around at the newly individuated faces—Vance, Stan, Kathleen, an older man wearing a bomber jacket with insignias from places he'd served—then walked through them. Eileen reached for his sleeve on the way out, but he had momentum working for him, along with an intense desire to fuck right off. He spiraled down an iron staircase, ducked out the front door, and immediately doglegged back under the sidewalk scaffolding into the stygian darkness of a neighboring shithole.

“Back so soon,” said the woman behind the bar without looking up from the sink full of glasses she was washing. She'd been washing them when he was there before as well—the apparent endlessness of her labor in the painted black of the room created the impression that this was a sort of purgatorial space. Maybe by the end of the night he would be chained to the bar with an eagle tearing out his liver. But no, he thought, that wasn't purgatory, and, anyway, he could do a perfectly decent job of tearing out his liver himself.

He peeled off several twenties and fanned them out in front of him. “Set me up with a bottle of Bushmills and a glass, if you would.”

She wiped her hands on the rag that dangled from her front jeans pocket and bent over the bar on tattooed forearms—the left a harp and the right a bow and arrow. “What does this look like to you, the Wild West?”

She poured a glass of whiskey neat, set it in front of him, and relieved him of a bill. From the cash register, as she made change, she gestured to the outside world—the still light of late afternoon—and said, “Little early to be throwing the top away, don't you think?”

“There's nothing for me out there.”

“There's nothing for you in here, either.”

He drank. “At least here, there's no pretending.”

“There's nothing here but pretending.”

He sat there for a while pretending not to pretend. Then the door opened, and Vance stood beside him, hands on the bar, looking straight ahead in a way that, again, reminded Richard of Carole; she would sit right next to him and stare off silently, as though he couldn't have sensed her displeasure from farther than three feet away.

“You okay?” Richard said, finally.

Vance shook his head and said, “I believed in you.”

“Well, there's your first mistake.”

“Was it all made up?”

“No.” He sipped his drink and thought about his words carefully—he didn't think he'd say it again, and he wanted to say it right. “I was drafted, and I went to Vietnam. I drove a supply truck for a few months. We mostly delivered stuff that got airlifted into Cam Ranh Bay around to smaller bases. Bao Loc was one. Food, bottled water, beer, medical supplies, ammo, maps, foot lockers, flares, radios. Canteen supplies—pots and pans and ladles, knives, colanders, potato peelers. Boxes of books for little private libraries in the officers' clubs: lots of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. Michener and Hemingway, maybe a little sci-fi—Heinlein was a biggie. And we sometimes delivered mail when the Army Postal Service got too busy.

“I got a general discharge in July 1971, same as in the book. But mine was for being drunk and erratic, imagine that. Unsuitable for further duty. Threw a punch at an officer in the canteen, that was the last straw. My CO liked me, or felt sorry for me, and he put me in for a general, just to get me the fuck out of there. Same as in the book, too.”

The kid stared at him, waiting. He went on, “So that part of it's true, I guess. Fucking up, and not knowing if I could do the thing they were asking me to do. I was scared to death driving that truck, every time we went on delivery. I know what the fear is like. We got pretty close to being zapped one time, too, a mortar went off in the road a hundred yards in front of us. I don't know if someone was aiming for us or if it was just a random shell or if a monkey jumped on a landmine. Whatever the case, I shit my pants. Literally shit them, drove the rest of the way with shit in my pants.”

“But you never fought. You weren't infantry. You didn't go to Saigon.”

“No.”

Vance shook his head, as if trying to clear it out, make room for a concept that was too big to fit, even though there wasn't really anything to understand. “I just don't get it.”

The whiskey tasted metallic and greasy, and he signaled for another. “I'd thought about doing a memoir forever, played around with stuff. When my second marriage was breaking up, when I moved out to the desert, it felt like the right time to really dig in, tell my story. I started writing about my time there, and you know what I realized? Nothing. When I thought back to it, nothing really happened, nothing that dramatic or interesting, and what I remembered was just me. Same as always. My dumb thoughts, my little postage stamp of awareness. Nothing anyone would be interested in. Hell, I wasn't interested in it. I guess, looking back, I wished that there had been a real story, you know? Something that mattered.

“So just for fun, I started writing the version where something big, something real, did happen, like it did to lots of guys over there. Like Berlinger—he was a guy I knew from Bao Loc, this big, funny asshole, like in the book. He saw some bad shit on patrol, freaked out, and deserted. Got captured in Saigon three months later, strung out on dope, living in the back of an evangelical church. He did five years. Another guy I knew got his leg blown off. I wrote their stories. I wrote other stories I'd heard about—guys who went nuts, guys who lost friends, lost their minds, guys who had to make half-second decisions that changed their lives forever. And I got into it enough that it started feeling like it was mine, you know? When I sent it out, people assumed it was a memoir. I didn't even have to lie, I just kept my mouth shut, let them believe it happened to me.”

“But it didn't.”

“No,” Richard said. “The only thing that ever happened to me was me.”

The kid turned and walked out of the bar, into a rectangle of softening afternoon light. He paused outside for a moment, framed in the window, a still rock in the rush of people streaming by. He seemed to be making his mind up about something, or maybe he was just trying to orient himself before he started walking. Then he turned left and was gone.

The bartender came over with the bottle and put it in front of him. “Here,” she said, collecting several of the bills fanned in front of him. She poured them both a shot, knocked hers back, and raised the empty glass. “To your health.”

“Y
ou can't sleep here.”

The voice was male and not particularly friendly sounding. The statement itself was demonstrably false, as Richard had been sleeping undisturbed in the back booth of the bar for what felt like a long time. Obviously you could sleep here—that someone didn't want him sleeping there was an entirely different issue. He began formulating a response to that effect, when he felt rough hands grabbing his green sports jacket, hauling him up from the bench. Anyone strong enough to lift him from a prone position would have to be terrifyingly enormous; he opened his eyes and verified this fact.

The bouncer, a bearded leviathan encased in jeans and a black Zildjian T-shirt, deposited him with gentle condescension on the sidewalk in front of the bar. Before closing the door, the man clapped his hands together as though dusting them off, a bit of gratuitous cruelty that drew a laugh from somewhere inside. Inside where? The bar had no sign, just a giant, ornate letter
M
stenciled on the window that Richard could barely make out in the dark. Of course, not knowing the name of the bar was the least of his concerns. He also didn't know where he was, past knowing he was somewhere in, or near, New York City. A man in a charcoal business suit with a phone to his ear skirted balletically around him without a downward glance. Richard slowly pulled himself to his feet and looked around, bleary. There were no skyscrapers here, no identifiable landmarks. A gust of wind blew a sheet of newspaper past a row of storage units next to where he stood. He imagined picking up the paper and discovering,
Twilight Zone
–style, that it was some impossibly distant date in the future.

What had happened? He wasn't sure. It felt like his brain had been replaced by a urinal cake—he was having difficulty remembering anything that happened longer than about ten seconds before. His ejection from the M Bar already had a reported quality, as though it was someone else's anecdote. Vaguer still was an earlier memory—more of a ghostly afterimage—of walking down the street drinking from a paper bag, singing, babbling to himself, getting pushed over by someone. He was just sober enough now to have a sense of how incredibly drunk he'd been, and how unbearable sobering up the rest of the way would be, if he let it come to that.

He moved slowly down the sidewalk, toward the black shard of water visible between buildings, just to have something to move toward. Like life, he thought, immediately hating himself for always having the same thoughts; his mental landscape was like the background in one of those cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoons he'd watched with Cindy when she was young and he was unemployed, in which the same five background frames—a house, a rock, a bird, a car, a dog—cycle past again and again, although in his case: pointlessness, deception, regret, and so on. The shimmering, sinister glass of a storefront momentarily reflected his image, and he thought how incredibly tired he was of this guy, this scuttling lump.

He wasn't so much tired of his defects—they were so old and familiar that, like a tattered quilt, they brought with them a certain shabby comfort—as he was tired of the splinter of his consciousness that recognized these defects yet refused to do anything about them. This, in fact, was the truly defective part, the part that knew better but didn't care, or didn't care enough, or had just given up a long time ago. The derelict mansion of his life had been built from bricks of fear and weakness, but wholesale surrender to his own worst instincts undergirded the whole rotten edifice.

The sidewalk petered out into cobblestones and a sort of open-air plaza near the river. Stumbling through it, he was dimly aware of other people doing things: walking their dogs, talking, laughing, playing music too loud, eating, drinking, sleeping.
Dimly Aware of Other People:
now there was an epitaph. A gray concrete retaining wall impeded his progress, separating him from what, despite his brain fog, he recognized as the East River. It had to be, because Manhattan glowed behind it, a smeared stadium of light. Somewhere in Brooklyn, then. The interior of a taxi flashed in his mind, but his motives for coming here were lost to him. Movement for its own sake. Escape. He threw one leg up on the wall, then leaned forward and leveraged the considerable remainder of his person up. Though he could have simply lunged or rolled his way over the side, some ridiculous part of his ego—as though there was an unridiculous part—commanded him to stand and enter the water like a man. This took some doing, but he eventually was looking down at his own feet, then farther down to the greedy froth churning at the base of the concrete wall below, garishly lit by the streetlamp overhead: plastic bottles, beer cans, used condoms, candy wrappers, dead pigeons, mud, and other stuff floated in the water, topped by a sparkling blue bacterial foam. A whirlpool of junk, like your own life.

Someone yelled, and he jumped.

T
he subway car emerged from its tunnel with an operatic shriek and slid to a halt at the platform. Wet-looking mosaic on the wall read:
BLISS STREET.
Bliss Street, Sunnyside. He got the joke but wasn't in the mood. He'd gotten increasingly lost on the subway over the last two hours, until he'd finally asked an off-duty MTA employee who seemed to intuit the magnitude of the mental breakdown he was about to have and personally escorted him to the correct platform. From there, he'd only gotten lost once more, before backtracking and taking the correct 7 train to Queens.

Instead of mitigating his anger, the Odyssean journey had somehow concentrated and ratified it. Bouncing around somewhere on the Lower East Side or perhaps Harlem, watching a junkie contort himself in a gymnastic display of balance, bent backward on the nod, Vance felt the righteousness of the task before him in his bones. The task was this: he was going to find his father, and he was going to fuck him up. He wasn't sure exactly how, but he figured he'd figure it out when he got to Sunnyside. The important thing was getting there, and getting there with this cold, purifying rage unmelted in his gut. He exited the train and bounded up the station's concrete steps, accompanied by a blast of warm air, like a junior demon released from hell on his first assignment in the world.

He was soon lost again. He'd thought he was walking north, and it took him five blocks to figure out the cross-street numbers were going down, not up. He pivoted and nearly knocked over a small woman carrying two armfuls of groceries but did not apologize because he was through apologizing. Behind him, he faintly heard imprecations, spat out in some closed-mouth Asian tongue. He didn't care—fuck her, fuck everybody.
FUCK THE WORLD,
as per his brother John's tattoo, rendered on his bicep in cheery cartoon script.

Fuck his father: though this phrase had crossed his mind at various points throughout his young life, he'd never really meant it (his brother had often said it out loud, and meant it wholeheartedly). In the back of his mind, he'd always appended a
Yes, but…
to any perfectly justified anger at his father's failings. Fuck his father: yes, but he was a drunk and not entirely responsible for himself; yes, but Steven's own father—Vance's long-dead grandfather—had been a famous tyrant, next to whom even Steve looked kind and circumspect; yes, but he was doing his best; yes, but his best was just not very good. As recently as yesterday he'd done it, excusing the worthless asshole for pretending he was just some kid from work. Thinking about it now—standing in that living room, dumbly nodding, playing along, as he always had, wholly complicit in his own abandonment—made him livid, made him walk a little faster past brick row houses, past a bodega advertising ten-buck burners, past three little girls in a postcard-sized patch of green playing some obscure little-girl game. He had spent his entire childhood apologizing for adults who behaved like children, bearing their inadequacy and failure as his own due. Richard's deceit and general crumminess, while not directed at him, had somehow been the last straw. He was done playing the fool.

The fourth-floor, corner apartment of the
PIANO
building was brightly lit, a false lighthouse in the Sea of Queens. He jammed the button for 4C and waited, but there was no response. He jammed it again, this time holding it in for ten seconds and listening for a sound from upstairs. Still nothing. He could imagine his father—itinerant handyman that he was—unscrewing the front of the buzzer box and detaching the relevant wire. It would be easy. Just for while he was in town, no more surprise drop-ins.

The stoop and façade of the adjacent apartment complex were under construction. A passel of building supplies—rebar, some two-by-fours, and several boxes—had been left inside the gate behind the cordon. He entered the gate, ducked under the tape, and grabbed a handful of roofing shingles. One after another, he sailed them up, up, at his father's apartment. At first, they uselessly bounced off the wall or boomeranged backward into the tree behind him, but after the first few, he got the hang of it. They Frisbeed easily through the air and hit the window with a satisfying clatter. A teenage couple walked by, murmuring with trepid amusement. He felt other passersby watching him as he threw, but couldn't see them because his head was craned back. After the third or fourth hit, a window opened, and a pomaded head gleamed in the high shadows.

Twenty seconds later, Steve Allerby, wearing black track pants and a white V-neck T-shirt, slammed through the door. He didn't say anything, simply lunged forward and swiped the shingles away, scattering them against the wall with both hands. “I tried to be nice about it before,” he said, “but since you can't take a hint—get the fuck out of here and don't come back.”

Vance turned around and walked to where the car was parked, its cream-and-white coat gleaming like voluptuous fur. The thing sat on its whitewall tires with an air of contented self-regard, like a jungle cat licking its paws after a big meal. He climbed up on the hood, and for a moment just stood there, as shocked as his father at this development. He hadn't had any plan other than to confront Steve with the uncomfortable fact of his fatherhood, since he had spared him the night before. But this felt good, this felt right. With exploratory hesitance, he did a little impromptu jig, feeling the paint scuff and scratch under his feet. He danced more, leaping into the salty air once, twice, gratified by the look of amazed horror on his father's face. He kicked the windshield hard and was again shocked as it shattered beneath his heel. It took him a moment to free his foot from the steering wheel, and Steve was grabbing at his legs, but he extricated himself and danced away. Steve got ahold of his ankle, and Vance kicked again. His father fell backward, fresh blood lining the pursed O of his mouth like the slapdash lipstick of a little girl playing dress-up. He gazed up childishly from the sidewalk at his son. Vance danced his way up onto the roof of the car, jumped up and down a few times, and felt the metal buckle a little. He stomped on the rear window, breaking it out whole with a satisfying pop.

Through the clogged mist of his rage, he became aware a crowd had gathered, and of several people holding their phones in the air. His awareness of being photographed lent a performative quality to the destruction and a tidal urge to destroy bigger and more. He ran back to the building site, grabbed a piece of rebar, and again advanced on the car. The thing looked wrinkled and baggy, like a drunk the morning after an especially hairy night. Steve had gotten to his feet and assumed a defensive position next to the car, and he was shouting something, but Vance's ears seemed to have filled up with blood, and all he could hear was a dim echoing sound, like yelling heard from under the surface of a pool. And when his father saw the look on his face—or perhaps it was the piece of metal pipe in his hand—he reassumed his previous position on the sidewalk. In the back of the crowd stood Liselle, her hand over her mouth. Over the next two minutes, they all watched as Vance systematically beat the car to pieces. The windows, the headlights, the taillights, the side mirrors—even the radio antenna, which he bent to the ground. Having done as much damage as he could do to the exterior, he climbed back onto the hood and drove the rebar into the refurbished control panel, using it as a lever and prying out the speedometer and odometer. He was just uselessly banging the pipe off the top of the car, like a child with a tin drum, when the cops arrived. The crowd cheered. He did exactly as they said—got off the car and got down on the ground—but still the one yelled at him, still the heavy knee in his back, still they dragged him away and threw him in the car.

The backseat was dark, the vinyl smooth and cool. An ammoniac whiff, now and then, the stale piss of previous occupants, but it was otherwise surprisingly comfortable, and all things considered, he was enjoying the ride. The handcuffs were a bit tight, true, and his ears still rang, but it was fading and the sounds of the world—the police scanner in front, the hum of the engine—began returning.

The cop in the passenger seat, the one who had cuffed him, half turned and said, “Jesus, kid, did you ever do a number on that car. Do you know what that was?”

“No.”

“Fucking 'fifty-seven Bel Air.”

The cop driving said, “Oh, shut up, Jesse.”

The cop looked at the cop driving and said, “Man, you know what a classic that thing is? Was.”

“Eh, they're all the same to me.”

“Not to me.” He turned again to Vance. “Hey, next time you decide to take out some aggression, do it on a fucking K-car, huh? Do it on a Ford Escort, not a mint Bel Air, you dumb shit.”

“Sorry.”

He wasn't sorry—in fact, he felt very good about how the whole thing had gone and knew he would relish the memory of his father's bloody face looking up at him in terrified awe for years to come, probably forever. His feeling of self-satisfaction dwindled a bit, however, as the squad car pulled up in front of a hulking, gray institutional building.
QUEENS CRIMINAL COURT AND CENTRAL BOOKING
read the words embedded in the stonework by the front door, through which he was roughly escorted.

It occurred to him, at that moment, that he hadn't entirely thought through the consequences of his actions. He'd dimly known he was risking arrest and hadn't cared; that consideration had been dwarfed by the furious Goliath striding beside him. Now, as he was photographed and fingerprinted, the fury had absented itself and was replaced by fear and a large dose of regret. Not regret for destroying the car—he would never regret that. He regretted not running away from the scene of the crime when he could have. It had seemed important at the time to pry out the dashboard. As the enormity of his situation dawned on him, he also began to regret not thrashing his father with the pipe, really getting his money's worth.

His possessions were inventoried and baggied, and he was led into a holding cell, half full of the kinds of people you would expect to find in a New York City holding cell. Some obviously homeless, some probably homeless, some possible gang members, some random teenagers, most drunk and/or high on something. A couple of confused, normal-looking types that were probably DUI charges. A few of them looked up and registered the new arrival, but most didn't. He found a spot by himself in the far-right corner.

Sporadic conversations erupted in the silence, often in languages or patois or tones of voice that Vance couldn't understand. A man catty-corner to him—dreadlocked, with pitted scars on his face and eyes like smoked glass—was the most animated, periodically railing about the police, his lying bitch of a girlfriend, the condition of the cell, his mother's cooking. He was also clearly the most fucked up, and Vance willed the man not to notice him, arms between his knees, trembling in the corner. His fear, of course, attracted the man's attention in short order.

“And this one over here,” he shouted to no one. “What are you in for, robbing a library?” A few cackles rang out, spurring him on. “They're gonna eat your skinny ass up in Rikers. Probably cut you into three pieces, have you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You hear me? I'm talking to you, scarecrow motherfucker.”

Vance remained silent, head down, but his deference seemed to enrage the man. He bounded out of his seat toward Vance, fist cocked. Vance threw his hands up in an involuntary motion, and the man stopped.

“Damn,” he said. “All right, all right.”

Vance didn't understand, then he looked at his hands. He hadn't noticed them since being arrested. They were swollen, like miniature boxing gloves, covered in dried and half-dried blood risen from a cross-hatching of small cuts and abrasions. It was the piece of rebar, he realized, from unloading on the car. His grisly hands throbbed in front of him, and the man nodded with an air of respect. He reclaimed his spot on the bench, where he grew mostly silent, occasionally muttering to himself, his chin down against his chest, as if he was speaking to something in the middle of his person.

After eighteen hours—a thousand or so minutes spent dozing in the cold corner, jerking awake in terror, then drowsing painfully back into tortured nonsleep—Vance's name was called. He was led down many halls into a cold courtroom, where he sat with some of the other men with whom he'd shared the cell. He was asked if he wanted a court-appointed attorney and he said yes. A frazzled bald man in an ill-fitting suit, clutching a clipboard like an aegis, talked to him for thirty seconds and advised him to plead not guilty. It was another two hours before the judge—a small woman with a much-more-frightening demeanor than the man in the holding cell—called his name. After watching dozens of men called before him, he knew where to stand.

“Is your name Vance Joseph Allerby?”

The experience of standing in a courtroom, in handcuffs, being asked these questions by a judge wearing a big black robe was wholly unreal. He'd only ever seen the inside of a court, and this kind of proceeding, on television and in movies; the cognitive dissonance that this could really be happening to him was so intense it made him feel distant and faint, although that may have been the nearly twenty-four hours he'd gone without food.

“Yes,” he croaked out.

“Mr. Allerby, you're being charged with three counts of disturbing the peace, criminal mischief, and felony destruction of property. Mr. Carney,” she turned to the public defender at Vance's side, “how does your client plead?”

“Not guilty, Your Honor.”

“Bail is set at ten thousand dollars.”

The bailiff wordlessly led him to an area with pay phones. He stood dumb in front of it. The situation both magnified and particularized his panicked sense of utter disorientation and helplessness. The majority of his fellow prisoners conducted themselves with the confidence and lazy efficiency of men at a job they'd held for years, decades. There was a lot of familiar banter between the jailed and jailers, and if you took the guns and uniforms away from the guards, it would have been difficult to tell the difference. The guard behind him sighed and motioned vigorously at the phone. Not knowing what else to do, Vance picked it up.