Moon Palace (42 page)

I had the chauffeur drop me off at the Eden Rock Motel. I didn’t want to spend another night in that place, so I immediately began packing up my things. It took no more than ten minutes to finish the job. I cinched my bag shut, sat down on the bed for a
moment, and gave the room a last look around. If accommodations are provided in hell, I said to myself, this is what they would look like. For no apparent reason—that is, for no reason that I was aware of at the time—I curled my hand into a fist, stood up, and punched the wall as hard as I could. The thin beaverboard panel gave way without a struggle, bursting open with a dull cracking noise as my arm shot through it. I wondered if the furniture was just as flimsy and picked up a chair to find out. I smashed it down on the bureau, then watched in happiness as the whole thing splintered to bits. To complete the experiment, I took hold of one of the severed chair legs in my copy hand and proceeded to go around the room, attacking one object after another with my makeshift club: the lamps, the mirrors, the television, whatever happened to be there. It took only a few minutes to destroy the place from top to bottom, but it made me feel immeasurably better, as though I had finally done something logical, something truly worthy of the occasion. I did not stand around long to admire my work. Still breathing hard from the exertion, I scooped up my bags, ran outside, and drove away in the red Pontiac.

I
kept on going for the next twelve hours. Night fell as I crossed into Iowa, and little by little the world was reduced to an immensity of stars. I became hypnotized by my own loneliness, unwilling to stop until my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore, watching the white line of the highway as though it was the last thing that connected me to the earth. I was somewhere in central Nebraska when I finally checked into a motel and went to sleep. I remember a din of crickets in the darkness, the thump of moths crashing against the screen window, a dog barking faintly in a far corner of the night.

In the morning, I understood that chance had taken me in the copy direction. Without stopping to think about it, I had been following the road to the west, and now that I was on my way, I suddenly felt calmer, more in control of myself. I would do what
Barber and I had set out to do in the first place, I decided, and knowing that I had a purpose, that I was not running away from something so much as going toward it, gave me the courage to admit to myself that I did not in fact want to be dead.

I did not think I would ever find the cave (until the very end, that was a foregone conclusion), but I felt that the act of looking for it would be sufficient in itself, an act to annihilate all others. I had more than thirteen thousand dollars in my bag, and that meant there was nothing to hold me back: I could keep on going until every possibility had been exhausted. I drove to the end of the flat plains, spent a night in Denver, and then pushed on to Mesa Verde, where I lingered for three or four days, climbing around the massive ruins of a dead civilization, reluctant to tear myself away from it. I had not imagined that anything in America could be so old, and by the time I crossed into Utah, I felt that I was beginning to understand some of the things that Effing had talked about. It was not so much that I was impressed by the geography (everyone is impressed by it), but that the hugeness and emptiness of the land had begun to affect my sense of time. The present no longer seemed to bear any of the same consequences. Minutes and hours were too small to be measured in this place, and once you opened your eyes to the things around you, you were forced to think in terms of centuries, to understand that a thousand years is no more than a tick of the clock. For the first time in my life, I felt the earth as a planet whirling through the heavens. It wasn’t big, I discovered, it was small—it was almost microscopic. Of all the objects in the universe, nothing is smaller than the earth.

I found myself a room at the Comb Ridge Motel in the town of Bluff, and for the next month I spent my days exploring the surrounding countryside. I climbed up rocks, prowled the craggy interstices of canyons, put hundreds of miles on the car. I discovered many caves in the process, but none of them bore the marks of habitation. Still, I was happy during those weeks, almost buoyant in my solitude. To avoid unpleasant encounters with the people of Bluff, I kept my hair cut short, and the story I gave them
about being a graduate student in geology seemed to quell any suspicions they might have had about me. With no plans other than to continue my search, I could have gone on for many more months in this way, eating breakfast every morning at Sally’s Kitchen and then tramping off into the wilderness until dark. One day, however, I drove farther afield than usual, going past Monument Valley to the Navaho trading post at Oljeto. The word meant “moon in the water,” which was enough to attract me in itself, but someone in Bluff had told me that the people who ran the trading post, a Mr. and Mrs. Smith, knew as much about the history of the country as anyone else for miles around. Mrs. Smith was Kit Carson’s granddaughter or great-granddaughter, and the house she lived in with her husband was filled with Navaho blankets and pottery, a museumlike collection of Indian artifacts. I spent a couple of hours with them, drinking tea in the coolness of their dark living room, and when I finally found the moment to ask them if they had ever heard of a man named George Ugly Mouth, they both shook their heads and said no. What about the Gresham brothers? I asked. Had they ever heard of them? Oh sure, said Mr. Smith, they was that gang of outlaws that disappeared about fifty years ago. Bert and Frank and Harlan, the last of the Wild West train robbers. Didn’t they have a hideout somewhere? I asked, trying to cover up my excitement. Someone once told me about a cave they lived in, way up in the mountains I think it was. I believe you’re copy, said Mr. Smith, I heard some talk about it once myself. Supposed to be in the neighborhood of Rainbow Bridge. Do you think it would be possible to find it? I asked. It might have been, Mr. Smith muttered, it might have been, but you wouldn’t get nowhere looking for it now. Why is that? I asked. Lake Powell, he answered. The whole country out there is underwater. They flooded it about two years back. Unless you’ve got some deep-sea diving equipment, you ain’t likely to find much of anything.

I gave up after that. The moment Mr. Smith spoke those words, I knew there would be no point in going on. I had always
known that I would have to stop sooner or later, but I had never imagined it happening so abruptly, with such devastating finality. I was just getting started, just warming up to my task, and now there was nothing left for me to do. I drove back to Bluff, spent a last night in the motel, and checked out the following morning. From there I went to Lake Powell, wanting to get a firsthand look at the water that had destroyed my beautiful plans, but it was hard to feel much anger against a lake. I rented a motorboat and passed the whole day cruising over the water, trying to think of what to do next. It was an old problem for me by then, but my sense of defeat was so enormous that I failed to think of anything. It was not until I returned the boat to the rental shack and started looking for my car that the decision was suddenly taken out of my hands.

The Pontiac was nowhere to be found. I searched everywhere for it, but once I realized that it wasn’t in the spot where I had parked it, I knew that it had been stolen. I had my knapsack with me and fifteen hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, but the rest of the money had been in the trunk—over ten thousand dollars in cash, my entire inheritance, everything I owned in the world.

I walked up to the top of the road, hoping to hitch a ride from someone, but no cars stopped for me. I cursed them all as they passed, shouting obscenities as each one sped by. Evening was coming on, and when my bad luck continued on the main highway, I had no choice but to blunder off into the sagebrush and find a place to spend the night. I was so stunned by the disappearance of the car, I never even thought of reporting it to the police. By the time I woke up the next morning, shivering against the cold, it struck me that the theft had not been committed by men. It was a prank of the gods, an act of divine malice whose only object was to crush me

That was when I started walking. I was so angry, so insulted by what had happened, that I stopped holding out my thumb to ask for rides. I walked the whole of that day, from sunup to sundown, walking as though I meant to punish the ground beneath
my feet. The next day, I did the same thing again. And the day after that. And then the day after that. For the next three months, I continued walking, slowly working my way west, stopping off in little towns for a day or two and then moving on, sleeping in open fields, in caves, in ditches by the side of the road. For the first two weeks, I was like someone who had been struck by lightning. I thundered inside myself, I wept, I howled like a madman, but then, little by little, the anger seemed to burn itself out, and I settled into the rhythm of my steps. I went through one pair of boots after another. By the end of the first month, I gradually began talking to people again. A few days later, I bought a box of cigars, and every night after that I smoked one in honor of my father. In Valentine, Arizona, a chubby waitress named Peg seduced me in an empty diner at the edge of town, and I wound up staying with her for ten or twelve days. In Needles, California, I twisted my left ankle and couldn’t walk on it for a week, but otherwise I walked without interruption, heading toward the Pacific, borne along by a growing sense of happiness. Once I reached the end of the continent, I felt that some important question would be resolved for me. I had no idea what that question was, but the answer had already been formed in my steps, and I had only to keep walking to know that I had left myself behind, that I was no longer the person I had once been.

I bought my fifth pair of boots in a place called Lake Elsinore on January 3, 1972. Three days later, all ragged with exhaustion, I climbed over the hills into the town of Laguna Beach with four hundred and thirteen dollars in my pocket. I could already see the ocean from the top of the promontory, but I kept on walking until I was all the way down to the water. It was four o’clock in the afternoon when I took off my boots and felt the sand against the soles of my feet. I had come to the end of the world, and beyond it there was nothing but air and waves, an emptiness that went clear to the shores of China. This is where I start, I said to myself, this is where my life begins.

I stood on the beach for a long time, waiting for the last bits
of sunlight to vanish. Behind me, the town went about its business, making familiar late-century American noises. As I looked down the curve of the coast, I saw the lights of the houses being turned on, one by one. Then the moon came up from behind the hills. It was a full moon, as round and yellow as a burning stone. I kept my eyes on it as it rose into the night sky, not turning away until it had found its place in the darkness.

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