Tell me: how would you feel if you saw yourself hanging by the neck from a crossbeam? How would you feel, confronted by those gasping dull eyes, that hanging slack jaw, that skin gone a pale shade of yellowish-gray, those palms turned outward as if to answer the question—why—with a shrug? The same love handles, the same knobby knees, the same flat, clumsy feet with the same long, crooked, widely-spaced toes, the same hairless arms, the same bony wrists. Even the facial hair—a month’s worth of hoary stubble—was the same. I might have been looking in a mirror except for three things: the gold wedding band on the ring finger of the right hand, the belt around the neck, and the fact that, unlike me, my double was dead.
I’d driven all day and night. Fifteen hours on the highway. I couldn’t afford motels, so I drove and drove, mostly through miserable weather, the wipers beating, heater blowing, the constellations of taillights shifting in the darkness before me, the red blurs contorted into lozenges by a combination of raindrops, a worthless defroster, and exhaustion.
And preoccupation. I was preoccupied. By the trip and by what instigated it. By other things, too. My life had come apart. My life! As I write those two words a smile worms its way into my lips, an ironic smile, though six months ago I wouldn’t have seen the irony any more than I would have entertained the possibility that “my life” could be exchanged, traded in for another the way you trade in a used car or a lousy poker hand.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I can’t help it. The urge to confess is strong. I have to resist an overwhelming urge to blurt things out of sequence, to dispense with the finer points (the devil, as they say, is in the details) and cut to the chase, when the whole point of this undertaking, assuming it has a point, is to put things into context, not to make allowances or excuses, but to explain, to shed a modicum of light on things that would otherwise be obscure forever. How else, dear reader, can I begin to hope to make you understand why I did what I did, how, far from being an act of madness, of diabolical duplicity, of hysterical greed (or whatever pejorative adjective-noun pair you care to throw at it), it was an act of mercy, of devotion, of redemption. Of salvation.
Again I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to slow down; I have a lead foot; I have to ease off the gas pedal. That’s right, I’m in a car. You and I, dear reader, are in a car, my car: a beat-up late model Toyota Celica headed down Interstate ———, taking the ——— route from Maine to —————. Of the two of us I alone am a corporeal entity; you’re only here in spirit. The opening paragraph you just read happened a day and a half ago. As I’ve already said, it rained much of the way there, with the first drops striking my cracked windshield a few miles north of Hartford, and some of the heaviest downpours occurring just beyond the state line in New Hampshire. Now all that rain has turned to snow. I am not a fan of driving in any kind of weather, or anytime at all, for that matter, having lived in New York City for over twenty-five years, most of my adult life. It was only two years ago that I “bought” the Toyota—used from a journalist friend who’d been offered and had accepted a job in Paris, one that paid so well she was more than willing to surrender her rent-controlled apartment and part with most of her friends and possessions. She offered me the Celica for a token $200. At first I demurred. What did I need a car for? I’ll have to move it twice a week or pay for a garage, I explained. I rarely leave the city, and when I do there’s always Avis. But then she convinced me. Why rent a car at $35 (then) dollars a day when you can own one for a couple hundred? In less than six trips it will pay for itself. Besides, she said, once you’ve got a car you’ll see: you’ll leave the city more often. You’ll take weekend jaunts. You’ll drive down to the Jersey Shore or out to the Hamptons. You’ll go to Vermont to watch the leaves turn. Who knows, she said, you may even decide to leave the city altogether when you realize it’s not surrounded by a mote full of dragons. My friend smiled; I smirked. Like most New Yorkers I was defensive about my special provincialism, one that refuses to recognize itself, feeling that, while true provincials ignore the wide world, New York City is its own world, or rather it is the world, the only one that counts. My friend was all too willing to point this out to me, she who had just landed this cushy job with the Paris bureau of a major news outlet and would be living in a city as cosmopolitan as New York, but with better food and more parks. Anyway I took the car; I don’t like to argue. In the end she didn’t even want the $200. When she handed me the keys the Toyota was still in good condition, with just a few scratches and dents. Within two months it would bear testimony to my inability to parallel park. A bottle fallen from the hindquarters of a sanitation truck cracked the windshield. I’d driven it less than a thousand miles when the clutch went; the muffler soon followed suit. A pen in my back pocket tore the driver’s seat upholstery; the vinyl dashboard split; the bright red paint faded to a dull diluted burgundy, the color of a wine-stained tablecloth; lurid pimples of rust erupted from both rocker panels. But the car still ran. It succeeded in carrying me to my fate.
