The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) (30 page)

“‘You went back to the
firm?
’ he asked. With a wince I nodded. I had thought of going to Alaska, I remembered, after my work with the Navaho Council was done, but it hadn’t seemed practical. And after much deliberation I had returned to New York. In the end we pinned down the moment exactly: the morning I left for New York, driving before sunrise, there was a moment getting on Highway Forty when I couldn’t remember if the onramp was a simple left turn, or a cloverleaf circle to the right; and while I was still thinking about it I came to, already on the freeway headed east. The same thing had happened to my double, only he had gone west. ‘I always knew this car was magical,’ he said. ‘There’s two of it, too—but I sold mine in Seattle.’

“Well—there we were. The storm crashed over us, and we drove through little flurries of rain. Wind pushed the car around. After a time we got over our amazement, and we talked and talked. I told him what I had done in the last five years—mostly lawyering—and he shook his head like I was crazy. He told me what he had done, and it sounded great. Fishing in Alaska, mapping rivers in the Yukon, collecting animal skeletons for the fish and game service—hard work, out in the world. How his stories made me laugh! And from him I heard my laugh like other people heard it, and it only made me laugh the harder. What a crazy howl! Has it ever occurred to you that other people see you in the same way you see them, as a collection of appearances and habits and actions and words—that they never get to see your thoughts, to know how wonderful you really are? So that you seem as strange to them as they all appear to you? Well, that night I got to look at myself from the outside, and he sure was a funny guy.

“But the life he had lived! As we drove on, it gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach. See, he had lived a life right close to the one I had imagined living, there every winter in my little New York apartment. My life there—well, it was just sitting in boxes, one after the next, and watching people talk or talking myself. That was my life. But this Tom! He had gone and done what I wanted to do. And he didn’t know what the rest of his life was going to be like, laid out for him like the road in front of us. I realized that I loved my cross-country drives because I
crossed country
—that during the times when I wished that I could turn the car around in New Mexico and head back to New York, there to turn and come west again, and keep on like that, as if the Volvo were on a pendulum hanging from the North Pole—it was because I wanted to stay in the country, to be out in it. I began to feel the emptiness of my life, the emptiness I had felt when I looked in the shaving mirror in my apartment in New York, looking at the lines under my eyes and thinking I could have lived a different life, I could have made it better.

“I got to feeling so low that eventually I suggested to my double that maybe I was no more than a hallucination he was having. It seemed to make sense. He had made the strong choice, I the weak—didn’t it make sense that I was no more than a ghost come to haunt him, a vision of what would have happened if he had made the mistake of returning to New York?

“‘I don’t think so,’ he answered. ‘It’s likelier I’m a hallucination of yours, that you stopped and picked up along the way. You’d have to be a hell of a hallucination to ferry me all the way across New Mexico, after all. No, we’re both here all right.’ He punched me lightly in the arm, and the spot he hit got very warm.

“‘I guess we’re both here,’ I admitted. ‘But how?’

“‘There was too much of us for any one body to hold!’ he said. ‘That was why we had trouble sleeping.’

“‘I still get insomnia,’ I said. And I knew why—I had lived my life wrong, I had chosen to live in boxes.

“‘Me too,’ he said, surprising me. ‘Maybe from sleeping on the ground so much. But maybe from living such a life as mine.’ For a moment he looked as discouraged as I felt. He said, ‘I don’t feel like I’m doing anything real sometimes, ’cause no one else does. I’m against the grain, I guess. It can cut into your sleep all right.’

“So he had his troubles too. But they sounded like nothing compared to mine. He was healthier and happier than I, surely.

“The storm picked up and I put on the windshield wipers, adding their squeak to the hum of the engine and the hiss of the wet tires. Our headlights lit up gusts of rain, and on the other road trucks trailing long plumes of spray roared by, going east. We put Beethoven’s Third on the tape deck; the second movement was up, sounding like noises made by the storm. We sat and listened to it, and talked about when we were a kid. ‘Do you remember this?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘Do you remember that?’ ‘Oh man, I never wanted anyone else to find out about
that.
’ And so on. It was pretty friendly, but it wasn’t comfortable. We couldn’t talk about our different lives anymore, because there was something wrong there, a tension, a disagreement even though neither of us was satisfied.

“It was starting to rain harder, and the car was buffeted hard by wind. Very little was visible outside the cones of light from the headlights—the black mass of the earth, the black clouds above. The march from the second movement, music grander than you folks can imagine, poured out of the speakers, matching the storm stroke for stroke. And we talked and laughed, and we howled and pounded on the roof of the car, overwhelmed by all that was happening—because the two of us being there meant we were special, you see. It meant we were magical.

“But right in the middle of our howling the Volvo sputtered, at the top of another rise. I pressed on the gas, but the engine died. I coasted onto the shoulder and tried to start it. No luck. ‘Sounds like water in the distributor,’ my double said. ‘Didn’t you ever get that fixed?’

“I admitted I hadn’t. After some discussion we decided to try and dry it off. That wasn’t going to be easy, but it beat sitting in the car all night. We got out our ponchos, and luckily the rain diminished to a steady falling mist. By the time I got my poncho on, my companion had the hood up and was leaning over the engine. He had a small flashlight in one hand, and was pulling at the distributor with the other. I reached in and three Barnard hands went to work on it, taking the distributor cap off, pulling it apart, drying it, getting everything back together dry. My double ran to get a plastic bag while I hunched over the engine, feeling its warmth, my poncho extended like a cape. My double returned—we were working at emergency speed, you understand—and he leaned over the engine, and then all four of our hands were working on the distributor with uncanny coordination. When we were done clamping it down he dashed to the driver’s seat and started the engine. It caught and ran, and he revved it. We had fixed it! As I closed the hood my double got out of the car grinning. ‘All right!’ he cried, and slapped my hand, and suddenly he leaped up and spun in the air, howling out the vowel-y Navaho chant we had learned as a boy—and there I was spinning with him, swirling my poncho out like a Hopi dancing cape, screaming my lungs out. Oh it was a strange sight, the two of us dancing in front of that car, on that high ridge, hollering and spinning and stomping in puddles, and I felt—oh there isn’t the
word
for the way I felt at that moment, truly.

“The rain had stopped. On the horizon to the south little lines of lightning flashed from low clouds into the earth. We stood side by side and watched them, two or three every second. No thunder.

“‘My life feels like this,’ one of us said, but I wasn’t sure who. And my right arm was hot, where it touched his left arm. I looked at it—

“And saw our arms met to enter a single hand. We were becoming one again. But it was a left hand—his hand. Then I noticed our legs came down to the same boot, a right boot. My foot.

“On the forearm wavering between us I could make out the reddish tissue connecting our arms, like burn-scar tissue. And I could feel the hot pulling and plucking. We were melting together! Already we shared part of the upper arm, and soon we would be joined at the shoulder like Siamese twins, and I felt the same burning in my right leg, oh, our time was up! First arms and legs, then torso then
heads!

“I looked in his face and saw my mirror image, twisted with horror. I thought, that’s what I look like, that’s who I am, our time is over. Our eyes met.

“
‘Pull,’
he said.

“We pulled. He grabbed the fender with his right hand, and I stepped out with my left foot, trying for traction in the muddy gravel. I leaned out and pulled like I had never pulled before. That forearm stuck out between us like a claw. We gasped and grunted and pulled, and the scar tissue above the elbow burned, and stretched, and gave us back a little of our arms. It was as painful as if I held onto something and deliberately tried to pull my arm off. But it was working. We both had elbows of our own now.

“‘Hold on tight,’ I gasped, and dove for the road! Boom!
Rip!
—an instant of agony, and I crashed onto wet asphalt. I pushed myself up with both hands. My feet were both there, I shook my right hand violently, grabbed my right boot. I was whole again.

“I looked at my double. He was leaning against the car, holding his left forearm in his right hand, shaking. Seeing it I felt my own trembling. He was staring at me with a furious expression, and for a second I thought he would attack me. For a second I had a vision, and saw him leap on me and pummel me, fists sinking into me and never coming out, so that we struggled and bit and kicked and melded into each other with every blow, until we became a single figure hitting itself, prone on the gravel, jerking and twitching.

“But that was a vision I had. In actuality, he shook his head hard, his lip curled into a bitter look.

“‘I’d better go,’ he said.

“Said I, ‘I think you better.’ As I got to my feet he walked to the passenger door, and got his backpack out. He pulled his poncho off to get the pack on his back.

“‘Back to home for you, eh Thomas?’ he said. There was contempt in his voice, and suddenly I was angry.

“‘And you can hit the road again,’ I said. ‘And I’m glad to see you go. You had me feeling like my whole life was a mistake, like you did it right and I did it wrong. But I’m not doing it wrong! I’m living with people the way a human being should, and you’re just taking the escape, wandering the road. You’ll burn out quick enough.’

“He glared at me, and said, ‘You’ve got me wrong,
brother.
I’m trying to live my life the best I know how. And I’m not going to burn out, ever.’ He put his poncho back on. ‘You take the name,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if we live in the same world or not, but someone might notice. So you keep the name. I have the feeling you’re the real Tom Barnard, anyway.’

“So we had traded curses.

“He looked at me one last time. ‘Good luck,’ he said. Then he walked away from the road, up the ridge. Through the mist, under that poncho, he looked inhuman. But I knew who he was. And as I watched him fade into the dark and the shrubs my spirit sank, and I was filled with despair. That was my own self disappearing there; I was watching my own true self walk away in the rain. No one should have to watch that.

“When I couldn’t see him anymore I drove off in a panic. Creaks in the car made me jump into the steering wheel, and I was too scared to look back and see what it was. I drove faster and faster, and prayed the distributor would stay dry. The valleys of east Arizona rolled on and on, and for the first time, I think, I realized how gigantic the country really was. I couldn’t stop thinking of what had happened. Things we had said seemed to ring aloud in the air. I wished that we had had more time—that we had parted friends—that we had allowed the joining to take place! Why were we so afraid of wholeness? But I was afraid; the fear of that union washed over me, and I drove ever faster, as if he might be running down the highway after me, wet and exhausted, miles behind.”

*   *   *

Tom coughed a few times, and stared into the fire, remembering it. We watched him open mouthed.

“Did you ever see him again?” Rebel asked anxiously. That broke the spell and most of us laughed, including Tom. But then he frowned at her and nodded.

“Yes, I did see him again. And more than that.”

We settled back; the older folks, who had heard this story before, I guessed, looked surprised.

“It was several years later when I next saw him; you’ll know what year I mean. I was still a lawyer, older and slouchier and tubbier than ever. That was life in the old time—the years in the boxes took it out of you fast.” At that point Tom looked at me, as if to make sure I was listening. “It was a stupid life really, and that’s why I can’t see it when people talk about fighting to get back to that. People back then struggled at jobs in boxes so they could rent boxes and visit other boxes, and they spent their whole lives running in boxes like rats. I was doing it myself, and it made no sense.

“Part of me knew that it made no sense, and I fought back in a weak sort of way. At this time I was out west doing that again, hiking a little. I decided to hike to the top of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the United States. Weak as I was it was a killer task just to get up that ten mile trail, but after a couple days’ hard work I made it. Mount Whitney. Right before sunset, this was—again—so that I was the only person on the peak, which was rare.

“So I was walking around the top, which was broad, nearly an acre. The trail goes up the west side, which is nice and gradual. But the eastern face is almost sheer, and looking down it into the shadows made me feel funny. Then I noticed a climber. He was coming up that sheer face alone, up one of the cracks in the face. Old John Muir had climbed the face alone like that, but he was crazy for risks, and few climbers since had exposed themselves to such danger. It made me dizzy to look at this guy’s exposure, but I watched all the same, naturally. As he got higher he kept looking up, and at one point he saw me and waved. And I felt funny. The closer he got the more familiar he looked. And then I recognized him. It was my double, in climbing gear and full beard, looking as strong an animal as you could ask for. And there on that granite face!