time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.
The cars are thinned out to almost none, and the road is so black it seems as though the headlight can barely fight its way through the rain to reach it. Murderous. Anything can happen… a sudden rut, an oil slick, a dead animal. — But if you go too slow they’ll kill you from behind. I don’t know why we still go on in this. We should have stopped long ago. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I was looking for some sign of a motel, I guess, but not thinking about it and missing them. If we keep on like this they’ll all close.
We take the next exit from the freeway, hoping it will lead somewhere, and soon are on bumpy blacktop with ruts and loose gravel. I go slowly. Streetlamps overhead throw swinging arcs of sodium light through the sheets of rain. We pass from light into shadow into light into shadow again without a single sign of welcome anywhere. A sign announces “STOP” to our left, but does not tell which way to turn. One way looks as dark as the other. We could go endlessly through these streets and not find anything, and now not even find the freeway again.
“Where are we?” Chris shouts.
“I don’t know.” My mind has become tired and slow. I can’t seem to think of the right answer — or what to do next.
Now I see ahead a white glow and bright sign of a filling station far down the street.
It’s open. We pull up and go inside. The attendant, who looks Chris’s age, watches us strangely. He doesn’t know of any motel. I go to the telephone directory, find some and tell him the street addresses, and he tries to give directions but they’re poor. I call the motel he says is closest, make a reservation and confirm the directions.
In the rain and the dark streets, even with directions, we almost miss it. They have turned the light out, and when I register nothing is said.
The room is a remnant of the bleakness of the thirties, sordid, homemade by a person who didn’t know carpentry, but it’s dry and has a heater and beds and that’s all we want. I turn on the heater and we sit before it and soon the chills and shivers and damp start to leave our bones.
Chris doesn’t look up, just stares into the grille of the wall heater. Then, after a while, he says, “When are we going back home?”
Failure.
“When we get to San Francisco”, I say. “Why?”
“I’m so tired of just sitting and — ” His voice has trailed off.
“And what?”
“And — I don’t know. Just sitting — like we’re not really going anyplace.”
“Where should we go?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“I don’t know either”, I say.
“Well, why don’t you!” he says. He begins to cry.
He doesn’t answer. Then he puts his head in his hands and rocks back and forth. The way he does it gives me an eerie feeling. After a while he stops and says, “When I was little it was different.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. We always did things. That I wanted to do. Now I don’t want to do anything.”
He continues to rock back and forth in that eerie way, with his face in his hands, and I don’t know what to do. It’s a strange, unworldly rocking motion, a fetal self-enclosure that seems to shut me out, to shut everything out. A return to somewhere that I don’t know about — the bottom of the ocean.
Now I know where I have seen it before, on the floor of the hospital.
I don’t know of anything to do.
After a while we get in our beds and I try to sleep.
Then I ask Chris, “Was it better before we left Chicago?”
“Yes.”
“How? What do you remember?”
“That was fun.”
“Fun?”
“Yes”, he says, and is quiet. Then he says, “Remember the time we went to look for beds?”
“That was fun?”
“Sure”, he says, and is quiet for a long time. Then he says, “Don’t you remember? You made me find all the directions home. — You used to play games with us. You used to tell us all kinds of stories and we’d go on rides to do things and now you don’t do anything.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t! You just sit and stare and you don’t do anything!” I hear him crying again.
Outside the rain comes in gusts against the window, and I feel a kind of heavy pressure bear down on me. He’s crying for him. It’s him he misses. That’s what the dream is about. In the dream. —
For what seems like a long time I continue to listen to the cricking sound of the wall heater and the wind and the rain against the roof and window. Then the rain dies away and there is nothing left but a few drops of water from the trees moving in an occasional gust of wind.
31
In the morning I am stopped by the appearence of a green slug on the ground. It’s about six inches long, three-quarters inch wide and soft and almost rubbery and covered with slime like some internal organ of an animal.
All around me it’s damp and wet and foggy and cold, but clear enough to see that the motel we have stopped in is on a slope with apple trees down below and grass and small weeds under them covered with dew or just rain that hasn’t run off. I see another slug and then another… my God, the place is crawling with them.
When Chris comes out I show one to him. It moves slowly like a snail across a leaf. He has no comment.
We leave and breakfast in a town off the road called Weott, where I see he’s still in a distant mood. It’s a kind of looking-away mood and a not-talking mood, and I leave him alone.
Farther on at Leggett we see a tourist duck pond and we buy Cracker Jacks and throw them to the ducks and he does this in the most unhappy way I have ever seen. Then we pass into some of the twisting coastal range road and suddenly enter heavy fog. Then the temperature drops and I know we’re back at the ocean again.
When the fog lifts we can see the ocean from a high cliff, far out and so blue and so distant. As we ride I become colder, deep cold.
We stop and I get out the jacket and put it on. I see Chris go very close to the edge of the cliff. It’s at least one hundred feet to the rocks below. Way too close!
“CHRIS!” I holler. He doesn’t answer.
I go up, swiftly grab his shirt and pull him back. “Don’t do that”, I say.
He looks at me with a strange squint.
I get out extra clothes for him and hand them to him. He takes them but he dawdles and doesn’t put them on.
There’s no sense hurrying him. In this mood if he wants to wait, he can.
He waits and waits. Ten minutes, then fifteen minutes pass.
We’re going to have a waiting contest.
After thirty minutes of cold winds off the ocean he asks, “Which way are we going?”
“South, now, along the coast.”
“Let’s go back.”
“Where?”
“To where it’s warmer.”
That would add another hundred miles. “We have to go south now”, I say.
