Will’s possessions filled my car. The dumpster next to the unit was full, too, of mattresses and frames, Jack Sikma, pillows and cardboard. I would recycle some other day. I drove off, feeling a hollow around my eyes, knowing my hands were fists, wanting to swim, wanting to watch a lot of TV, wanting to masturbate for days, wanting to watch basketball on cable while drinking from a mug, wanting to have someone waiting for me at home, wanting a dog at the very least, wanting to go deep-sea diving, wanting to be seventeen again, before we left a time when our hands didn’t know how to pack up the possessions of the dead, wanting Will to rise, to refind human form in the thicket of his things in my backseat, to speak again so I could knock his fucking head off.
On the way home that day I thought about the perfect parallel of Will’s experience at Oconomowoc and mine, his fictional and metaphorical, mine so mundane and worthless. It’s my guess that what Will was describing was his packing up of his original house, the one he and his mother lived in until her death. I’m not sure there was a storage unit involved, but my guess is that he was extrapolating, using his own unit as a model, and because he couldn’t describe the shame in the disposal or sale of his own family’s heirlooms and incidentals, he created a stand-in setting, and for his mother, another stand-in: Jack.
For there was no Jack. As long as I have known Will, there was no Jack. Throughout the book Will talks of Jack, and the death of Jack, a death that in some circuitous way leads to both the beating at Oconomowoc and to this trip. But both of those things are fictions. I have addressed the second fiction, and now will address the first.
I can’t tell you how confused I was when I read that first paragraph, with all that shit about Jack. He’s in the first sentence, and he’s a lie. I thought at first that it was another cute little device by the ghostwriter,* like the implication that Will is writing from the grave, but then found all the references to Jack within, and was shaken to my core. Will and I had always been a duo—there is comfort in a mutually acknowledged and exclusive duo—so you can imagine my frustration when I see this manuscript and throughout there is this third person, missing but present, named Jack, who is painted on glass, with the sun forever shooting through. He’s a saint of some kind, better at everything—basketball, drafting, romance—and why the fuck why? I can’t understand it. He is, like any creation of friend-fiction, an amalgam of a bunch of people we know, and then an idealization of that amalgam. Worse, Will gives him more than a few of his own Will-characteristics, like the tendency to drive slowly, checking the speedometer by giving a double thumbs-up.
I don’t know why he would begin the book with such a premise, with the death of this third friend—or rather, I understand it all too well, and I’m disappointed in him. It’s my opinion that the book didn’t need the lies. This is something Mark Twain wrote, or Samuel Clemens wrote, or whatever: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.” And I like that—it invites Will to have just put the truth down, in order, and let the facts underline the absurdity in the situation, our motives, the results, everything. But Will chose instead to set things up in a more conventional way, and I guess it makes more sense, to some, to provide this kind of motivation for our trip, it thus seeming like a kind of fleeing. But the fact is that it wasn’t. There is no correlation between the trip we took and any particular death, I don’t think, but then again something must have given him that sense of urgency about things, and probably inspired the idea of such a quick but potent trip, with such tight parameters but with the outward gestures of his inner mix of confusion and love, the outward expression of an inward grace … but that’s another issue, the issue of the sacrament. More on that later.
I just want you to understand, though, how much it could piss a person off to have him supplanted by a fictional dead person. It’s already bad enough that Will’s cartooned me to the point where I’m half-insane and half-insufferable and always puerile, but it’s so much worse to have the object of his fraternal affections be some imaginary deceased person, who’s apparently so soft and saintly that he couldn’t survive in this world (the run-over by a truck seems to me a little heavy-handed, but whatever). It’s a comfort, a small one, that at least you few people who will read my comments will know that there were always just two of us, and our motivations were self-made and without tragic source.
It’s dark now and still raining. I forgot to even step outside today; I’ve scarcely left the couch. Living this way makes you feel both captive and complicit in your captivity. I could certainly walk outside, into the rain, and take some air in me. I could walk a bit on the porch, with its greasy-wet surface, with the rain still coming in vast armies never tiring. I could step from the porch onto the sand and continue, down to the water, and within a few hundred feet, walking straight to the ocean, I would come upon the body on the sand, which as I look out the window from the kitchen, I see has moved even closer, and now is equidistant between the house and the water, and now there’s no chance it’s there by chance.
* * *
THURSDAY
You don’t want to believe this, but it’s still raining here. You’re sick of hearing about it, I know, but still, isn’t it kind of weird? Are you with me now, believing that this country is promoting some vast tourism-hoax, pretending to all the world that their winters are inhabitable? These Kiwis are becoming ever-more mysterious, ever-more intriguing, ever-more likely, I’m thinking, to be the small nation probably hiding other secrets, like perhaps human clones, alien life-form tissue, cave paintings pre-dating those in France, whatever. It’s now been eight days, I think, and in that time we’ve had only six or seven damned daylight hours where the skies cleared. This morning the rain slowed for about twenty minutes, and in the mist and drizzle, blinking and shuddering, I took a walk.
I stepped down over the dunes, heading to the shore, and stopped. It was still there. It was closer this day than ever before—no more than fifty yards—but still I couldn’t make out just what it was. It looked, to me, like a human form, wearing something black, a black uniform, a jumpsuit maybe, with his back turned to me. It was a man, or a large woman. Its back was fleshy and wide, and so I assumed it was a man but now am thinking it’s just as likely a woman. It would be more likely, wouldn’t it, for a woman to be wearing a unitard of some kind? I went inside, and stayed inside while the sky remained dry for another few minutes, still swallowed by the interminable grey.
This morning, when I cracked from my bed and opened the curtain, first I laughed. I knew it would rain, and there it was again, rain. So I guess I’m a little surprised. Surprised that I’m right that it’s raining again. So I guess I actually figured it would stop. Then I wonder how the fuck I’ll spend the day, when there’s really nothing to see but some body on the beach, dead and getting soaked. But I have country music here—music kept by the owners of the house, who are gone indefinitely. I have Glen Campbell here; have you heard that “Galveston” song? It’s incredible. This stanza:
Galveston, oh Galveston
I am so afraid of dying
Before I dry the tears she’s crying
Before I watch your seabirds flying
In the sun, at Galveston, at Galveston
The song itself is very sad but somehow soars. Otherwise there’s some very early Johnny Cash here, and lots of Dolly Parton, and Roger Whittaker, and some Emmylou and Tammy. And then some Billy Joel, some Lionel Richie, a good deal of Tom Jones. The people who own this house, for the most part, know the good stuff, and the fact that Kiwis are listening to this much American country music is a comfort to me.
Today I want to talk about the idea of the trip in general. I will return to why and how Will’s many fibs fit in soon enough. I mentioned before that the germ of the notion of the trip wasn’t a result of any recent death. It wasn’t even a result of some recent cash influx. That money he’d had for eig
ht years, and I’ll explain how later. The fact is, since he’d run into the money, he’d never touched it, not a cent, it was in some kind of mutual fund plan, unchanging, really, even while every other fund in the world was making 15 to 20 percent a year. He had about $82,000 and wanted to get rid of roughly half of it. How he came up with the number $32k I have no idea, but it still seemed insane, at first. Insane that he should feel so strongly about ridding himself of so much cash in such a strange way, and insane also because it was my opinion that if you’re going to do it, to make a statement like that, sweeping and bold, why not go the entire way and give away every last penny? But maybe I’m picking nits here.
I do want to say that though the trip wasn’t remotely my idea, I never objected to it. Later in this text, just before Will supposedly collapses on the pavement of the Djemaa el-Fna—didn’t happen—I am made to object to the whole concept, or at least the carrying through of it. But this never occurred. I knew, when Will first called me about this notion, the idea of this week, that he was serious, and I knew that he would go through with it, to the end, or further. We had been talking about something like this for a few years, about taking a week, starting on a plane, traveling incessantly but randomly, pushing every button we could, acting on every impulse. For Will, part of the point of the trip was a means to break through the many social boundaries he lived within, or felt he lived within. He’d been born Catholic, as I had, and I guess that mattered in some way to him, actively or subliminally. His mother had been protective of him, and thus he’d been protective of him, too. That is, because his mother sheltered him from the cruelties and unpleasantnesses of the world—everything from the nightly news to coarse words at home—he did the opposite of what we’re inclined to believe a kid might do. Instead of rebelling, and seeking out the things kept from him, he kept himself from them. That’s a long way of saying that Will was shy and leaned not toward the dark but toward the light.
When the trip begins, he’d never been to a strip club, he’d never seen a violent act in person, he’d scarcely left the Midwest. And so his idea of trying to get around the world in a week, while acting on impulses along the way, was quite a big deal, and achievable, I think, only because he could gather and compartmentalize his courage—and he did act courageously—within this one week. Because for him, approaching strangers, or interacting with them much at all, took some good measure of strength. He was absolutely shy—without being strange, or agoraphobic—and he didn’t like this about himself. He longed to be more like I used to be, when I could walk into any room and ask anyone any question, would approach any woman anywhere and try anything in the way of conversation, without any sort of fear of rejection, likely as it was. But Will feared rejection of any kind, and would never purposely put himself in the path of the word No. He feared bouncers, and low-level gatekeepers of any kind, and I know for a fact that he avoided everyone of the kind with great success. That’s why—well, one of the reasons—why he was a reasonably happy person, at least on a day-to-day basis, at least on a person-to-person basis. He was friendly. He smiled a lot. He looked you in the eye when he shook your hand. He patted you on the back when there was fun being had. He knew how to relish something that was going well. And things had been going well for him, for a number of reasons, in a number of ways, and thus this trip was born not from tragedy—or rather, from a death—but from what I would like to call the shame of contentment.
I knew generally why he wanted to do this, and knew that he’d eventually write about it, even though, again, all the fictions were a surprise to me. Yes, I do object to much of this original text, because frankly I just don’t know why the little bastard—and he was shorter than the 6′1″ he claims—didn’t just tell the damned story the way it was. I want to find and slap around the people who told him—and it must have been someone; he never would have found it insufficient himself—that the story needed embellishment, needed all this background, all this Jack and Oconomowoc, a mother with Alzheimer’s, all of it as fictional as the day is long and drenched with grey filthy rain. It is and has been my vocal opinion for twenty-two months now, since the book first made its way into a semi-circulated final form, that a story about two friends leaving Milwaukee for Senegal to give away $32,000 would be good enough, back story be damned. I thought the story, as it unfolded, was, for one thing, a rather neat and tidy allegory for any sort of intervention, whether by governments or neighbors—but mostly the idea of humanitarian aid, on whatever scale, micro or macro—from NGOs to panhandlers and passersby. The story, when we lived it, was about economics, and about desperation, and about inequity brought to levels that are untenable. And more than that, as I will come to reveal, it was about what we called, in Sunday school, a sacrament. But more on that later.
On the surface the story is ludicrous, and all of its terms are absurd. It’s absurd, I believe, that humans can travel around the world in a matter of days. It’s absurd that some have the funds—as we did—to do so, while thousands go without necessities every day. It’s ridiculous that we still would go on such a trip, thinking it justifiable that if we gave back along the way, all would be somehow rectified. And of course it’s without logic or any sense of rightness that Will and I would be in a position to do this, given our unremarkableness in so many ways. That we would have this idea, and be able to act on it, simply because of the location of our birth, is itself absurd. In the face of this absurdity, there is Will, who not only turns to face it, but dives into it, with his $32,000, and with the intention of personally addressing the inequity, not from a distance, but from the nearest possible proximity—by handing large and random sums of money to as many people as possible.
But in telling about the dissemination, Will disappoints. If he was going to do it, and write about it, why fictionalize so many things? The odd thing is that I know for a fact that Will wanted more than anything, at the outset at least, that everyone should know that we actually did this, did precisely what is described in the book—stopped alongside the roads of West Africa and Eastern Europe, unloading $32,000 in cash, in local currency. He wanted to indicate that it could be done, and that it could be good. But even while we traveled he began to have misgivings about writing about this in a nonfictional format. He feared what people would say, to tell you the truth—he feared that people would accuse him of being reckless, misguided, stupid, showy, preachy, whatever. There were a thousand pitfalls to writing it as fact, because quite frankly, from a distance, it appears to be a monumentally silly idea.
But the strange thing about this business is that nonfiction, when written well, is unequivocally more powerful than fiction, because if all details and evocations are equal—meaning, if the writing brings alive the people and places described with equal skill, then the story that is true will evoke a stronger response in the reader, for the same reasons that we feel stronger about a real person than a fictional person, or a person we’ve met in person, versus a person we haven’t. I am a fan and reader of the occasional fiction, but a real book, like Guns and Germs and Steel, describing the movements of actual people, and their deaths, just has to hit us at a more visceral level. I am here to express the opinion, no one’s but mine—not Will’s, not this publisher’s, not the wretched ghostwriter’s—that those who prefer fiction to nonfiction prefer game shows to the news. It’s a decadent mind, a mind that has known ennui and passed through it to something more dangerous, that wants fictional contraptions over the more difficult—sometimes more obvious and clear, other times utterly incomprehensible—truth of fact. But this is the opinion of a man who knows nothing, and it’s an opinion that I throw at you to make you angry. Anyway, I read news and look for and collect facts because so far they haven’t added up to anything. I had pictured, as a younger man, that the things I knew and would know were bricks in something that would, effortlessly, eventually, shape itself into something recognizable, meaningful. A massive and spiritual sort of geometry—a ziggurat, a pyramid. But here I am now, so
many years on, and if there is a shape to all this, it hasn’t revealed itself. But no, thus far the things I know grow out, not up, and what might connect all these things, connective tissue or synapses, or just some sense of order, doesn’t exist, or isn’t functioning, and what I knew at twenty-seven can’t be found now.
I miss the things he left out.
I miss the time in Senegal, near Saly, when a group of young men, twelve or so of them, converged on us, as we did a tight three-point turn at a dead-end. We will have no idea what they were looking for, and I know why Will left the episode out, but it would have underlined how often things were genuinely fraught.
I miss the fact that we actually trounced those boys near Mbuu; we could both play basketball, Will and I, and we wiped that dusty court with eight of them at a time.