Chapter Forty Seven

A turn of the key in the ignition, and his driveway diminished within the rearview mirror.  Likewise his house, a set of windows growing smaller as he drove his car away from there in the early morning.  So much for all that.  He couldn’t bear to think of the complications.  His father long dead, and his wife with no relations to speak of.  An island unto themselves.  So much for all that.  And if it was so much for all that, what was to come after?

        But he knew the answer.  The answer was in a book somewhere, on the other side of study.  The answer was in the world, and in the world the key to its own unmaking.  Yes, there had to be something to that.  There had to be some reality behind the myth.

        Driving, and somewhere along the road his feet left the ground.  He was on an airplane, looking down on Seattle for perhaps the last time.  He might have seen his house if he had only looked closely enough.  He might have seen himself in the details of that city, if he had had eyes for geography, and not for the history that he saw behind it all.  Generations of men and women, laboring under the weight of their own deceptions and self-deceptions.  Indians, whites, blacks, and yellows.  Nations within nations to be divided and conquered by time.

        He woke up from a nap and found himself in Canada, sitting in a library.  There were shelves of books and aboriginal carvings, the mixture of English and French that hinted at his location.  In the muddle of his exhaustion he could see the shining expanse of the Great Lakes where frontiersmen had intrigued and died over wood-hewn outposts, and farther off the Rockies, and beyond that Seattle persisted, and he knew that his house waited there, empty.  He turned again to one of his books.  He resumed the search.

        Up and over clouds beyond the Atlantic.  He was in the sight of Big Ben, speaking to an archaeologist over cups of coffee.  Londoners squinted at the rain.  Everything was overpriced, and drearily antiquated.  The archaeologist told him to visit a place in Turkey.  The archaeologist resembled his wife’s lover, handsome yet fighting a losing battle against obsolescence… or was it self-pity?

        He only knew that something fearsome boiled inside of him.  He only knew that he had to keep moving, that he had to find his book.  To stay in motion was the critical thing.  When he stood or sat too still he felt the weight of grief.  When he sat or stood still too long he began to feel angry and betrayed.  Oh his daughters.  His beautiful daughters.  Even if they hadn’t been his.

        Seattle on the horizon, and within Seattle a house that mocked him, and not far from the house on the hill overlooking a lake sat the library.  He hadn’t yet left the library.  It was possible that the library wouldn’t allow him to leave.  He could see what he had left behind, even though he was somewhere in Asia Minor, trapped inside a cab with another man who smelled of cigarettes and Turkish food.

        Out in the desert where tour buses passed along a dusty road.  But he was at another site, yet unvisited.  He was peering into a cave at a statue, and the statue had eyes that studied him from a time before Christ.  The young bull perhaps.  Her consort.  Her lover.  Her beloved.

        Her song of songs.

        Stepping out of a hotel in Hanoi with the typhoon in full sway.  The man in the lobby thought he was another bloated foreigner looking for boys or girls or drugs or all three.  His dollars converted into a stack of parti-colored currency, a brick of indefinite denomination.  And in a nearby lane, next to an old woman who sold noodles from a pot, he talked to a frail skeletal man about a set of Roman coins, and where these coins might have come from.

        He took a bus into China and drank water from a plastic bottle.  He learned the rudiments of Cantonese from another passenger.  Someone spoke of the Silk Road, and a few days later he was in Beijing, at yet another university, pouring over pictographs and trying to remember the reigns of various emperors.  Another man in the library attempted to compliment him on his Chinese.  He did not respond to the compliment.

        In Bangladesh he saw a foreign tourist, a white woman with golden hair.  No, not her.  Also not her.  Another.  He visited a mosque that stood on the remains of a much older temple, and he realized something.  He uncovered an important clue.

        The train through the Carpathians, but not in search of vampires.  He got off in a small town where he drank beer and soup, and then he walked straight out into the woods beyond the town, not to be seen again for several days.  The locals marveled at his lack of regard for personal safety.  They asked each other how he could have passed his time in those mountains, with winter coming on and no supplies.

        A larger library.  A book written in German.  Argentine Spanish spoken from an intercom beyond the confines of the stacks.  He hadn’t shaved in months and other patrons found his gaze upsetting.  Who was that crazed man?  What was his purpose?

        And then, for many weeks, a time that passed beyond the bounds of weeks, wherein days became centuries and seconds failed to account for all the minutes he had spent reading, and searching, and wondering.  The airports blurred together.  The taxis assumed the same monotonous overtones.  The train stations might have been one single train station, anchored to a question that followed him wherever he went.

        The book?  Where was the book?

        Almost all at once he found it.  He released it from its hiding place, and he began to read it.