They fled past fields of blue snow. The icy crust kept a stroke of moonlight the way rippled water does. The heater was going full blast. They had nowhere to be in the morning, only lectures and that didn’t count. Everything above the snow was black – trees, shacks, whole villages.
Moving at that speed they were not bound to anything. They could sample all the possibilities. They flashed by trees that took a hundred years to grow. They tore through towns where men lived their whole lives. They knew the land was old, the mountains the most ancient on earth. They covered it all at eighty miles an hour.
There was something disdainful in their speed, disdainful of the eons it took the mountains to smooth out, of the generations of muscle which had cleared the fields, of the labour which had gone into the modern road they rolled on. They were aware of the disdain. The barbarians must have ridden Roman highways with the same feeling. We have the power now. Who cares what went before?
And there was something frightened in their speed. Back in the city their families were growing like vines. Mistresses were teaching a sadness no longer lyrical but claustrophobic. The adult community was insisting that they choose an ugly particular from the range of beautiful generalities. They were flying from their majority, from the real bar mitzvah, the real initiation, the real and vicious circumcision which society was hovering to inflict through limits and dull routine.
They spoke gently to the French girls in the diners where they stopped. They were so pathetic, false-toothed and frail. They’d forget them in the next twenty miles. What were they doing behind the Arborite counters? Dreaming of Montreal neon?
The highway was empty. They were the only two in flight and that knowledge made them deeper friends than ever. It elated Breavman. He’d say, “Krantz, all they’ll ever find of us is a streak of oil on the garage floor without even rainbows in it.” Lately Krantz had been very silent, but Breavman was certain he was thinking the same things. Everyone they knew or who loved them was sleeping miles behind the exhaust. If the radio music was rock-and-roll, they understood the longing of it; if it was Handel, they understood the majesty.
At some point in these rides Breavman would proposition himself like this: Breavman, you’re eligible for many diverse experiences in this best of all possible worlds. There are many beautiful poems which you will write and be praised for, many desolate days when you won’t be able to lay pen to paper. There will be many lovely cunts to lie in, different colours of skin to kiss, various orgasms to encounter, and many nights you will walk out your lust, bitter and alone. There will be many heights of emotion, intense sunsets, exalting insights, creative pain, and many murderous plateaux of indifference where you won’t even own your personal despair. There will be many good hands of power you can play with ruthlessness or benevolence, many vast skies to lie under and congratulate yourself on humility, many galley rides of suffocating slavery. This is what waits for you. Now, Breavman, here is the proposition. Let us suppose that you could spend the rest of your life exactly as you are at this very minute, in this car hurtling towards brush country, at this precise stop on the road beside a row of white guide posts, always going past these posts at eighty, this juke-box song of rejection pumping, this particular sky of clouds and stars, your mind including this immediate cross-section of memory – which would you choose? Fifty-more years of this car ride, or fifty more of achievement and failure?
And Breavman never hesitated in his choice.
Let it go on as it is right now. Let the speed never diminish. Let the snow remain. Let me never be removed from this partnership with my friend. Let us never find different things to do. Let us never evaluate one another. Let the moon stay on one side of the road. Let the girls be a gold blur in my mind, like the haze of the moon, or the neon glow above the city. Let the compounded electric guitar keep throbbing under the declaration:
When I lost my baby
I almost lost my mind.
Let the edges of the hills be just about to brighten. Let the trees never fuzz with leaves. Let the black towns sleep in one long night like Lesbia’s lover. Let the monks in the half-built monasteries remain on their knees in the 4 a.m. Latin prayer. Let Pat Boone stand on the highest rung of the Hit Parade and tell all the factory night shifts:
I went to see the gypsy
To have my fortune read.
Let snow always dignify the auto graveyards on the road to Ayer’s Cliff. Let the nailed shacks of apple vendors never show polished apples and hints of cider.
But let me remember what I remember of orchards. Let me keep my tenth of a second’s worth of fantasy and recollection, showing all the layers like a geologist’s sample. Let the Caddie or the VW run like a charm, let it go like a bomb, let it blast. Let the tune make the commercial wait forever.
I can tell you, people,
The news was not so good.
The news is great. The news is sad but it’s in a song so it’s not so bad. Pat is doing all my poems for me. He’s got lines to a million people. It’s all I wanted to say. He’s distilled the sorrow, glorified it in an echo chamber. I don’t need my typewriter. It’s not the piece of luggage I suddenly remembered I forgot. No pencils, ball-pens, pad. I don’t even want to draw in the mist on the windshield. I can make up sagas in my head all the way to Baffin Island but I don’t have to write them down. Pat, you’ve
