Edward Bryant

GOING WEST

HIS NAME was Lindsey.

They (mother, stepbrother, older sister) reared him on a farm in upstate New York. Raised from the potent germ plasm of a father lately dead in Cambodia, Lindsey endured a generally happy childhood. The stepbrother, product of an earlier marriage, served as a surrogate father until he was killed pulling a service-station holdup in Rochester. Eleven at the time, Lindsey cried in his mother’s arms, then returned to the woods behind the house to play with his soldiers.

In his infancy: Lindsey’s mother read some arcane predecessor of Dr. Spock and decided not to make the same mistake she had perpetuated through her first two children; she made a point of never holding Lindsey more than a minute, and then never rocking him. When it was too late, she read in the medical section of Time that physical contact is essential for the development of a child’s motor skills. She wondered, then shrugged off the knowledge. Lindsey grew older in a frangible world, wondering why he alone stumbled over obstacles others easily avoided.

In his childhood: Naturally shy, Lindsey found himself increasingly alone and lonely when he started town school. His stepbrother neglected to teach him how to play baseball or fight. His sister never taught him to dance. Lindsey inhabited the periphery of his peers’ world, and he felt the pain.

Every recess Lindsey went to the school bus parking lot. He played alone among the buses, their high, yellow flanks reminding him of animals. He gradually discovered the buses’ names and personalities.

Crosstown busing for integration came to Lindsey’s city. One night someone dynamited one of the buses at his school. When he saw the burned-out wreckage in the morning, Lindsey collapsed. The school nurse took him home and he spent the next week in bed with a high fever. The doctor diagnosed the cause as a virus.

When Lindsey returned to school, the bus parking lot was surrounded by a chain-link fence twice as high as he. All recess he looked through the mesh; the school buses returned his gaze from forlorn headlights.

In his youth: Lindsey won a Regent’s scholarship and went off to college to become a certified public accountant. It was actually his mother’s idea. Lindsey lived with three roommates in a sterile new apartment building across the street from campus. He bought a tenspeed Sohwinn and kept it chained to the outside stairs. After a month, Lindsey realized that someone was spitting on the seat of his bicycle.

His roommates suggested he was paranoid.

Lindsey grew to dread returning from class to discover the iridescent spittle on his bicycle. He carried a handkerchief used only to wipe off the seat. Lindsey stayed home from classes one entire morning, hoping to catch the phantom expectorator. Nothing happened until noon, when Lindsey left the window and went into the bathroom to relieve a painful bladder. When he returned, he checked the bike. Someone had spat on the seat.

A month later someone cut the locking chain with boltcutters and stole the bicycle.

“You see,” said Lindsey to his roommates. “You see!”

Stripes; they zip-zipped past the left side of his car, disappearing somewhere close under the front fender, then reappearing in the rear-view mirror, to recede into a vanishing perspective. Lindsey counted endlessly in his mind, all the way across Nebraska, about five hundred miles. Six feet of white stripe, six of black asphalt, six of white again, past Omaha and Lincoln, Grand Island and Hershey, North Platte. One day earlier it had been Newark and Allentown, McKeesport and Columbus. Stripes and stripes, cut along a hypnotic dotted line from coast to coast.

Out of habit, Lindsey turned on the radio. Interference from the power towers beside the highway dismembered the music, saw blade biting obliquely into wet wood.

It was early morning and enough sun up behind him so he could turn off the headlights. Lindsey inventoried stripes, but over ten the numbers became meaningless. “Zip, zippety zip,” he mumbled, counting the stripes individually as they slipped under and into the rear-view mirror. The great attraction of the stripes was their utter lack of variation. Thousands upon thousands during the night, and only a dozen seemed to have been deformed. He wasn’t sure he had been fully awake all the time.

Signs swept past, but Lindsey couldn’t integrate letters with meanings until he was jarred into alertness by a day-glo cowboy. HOWDY, PODNUH, read the sign. FOOD SIX MILES. Lindsey looked at the fuel gauge.

“Hay and water,” said Lindsey. “Curry him down, isn’t that right?”

“What?” said the filling station boy. “Fill her up?”

“Right, podnuh,” said Lindsey, walking off toward the sign FOOD. He leaned against the steel jamb of the door for a moment and took a deep breath. The clean prairie air scored his mind with a terrible clarity; Lindsey reeled. A Minnesota tourist couple seated at a table by the window thought he was drunk and ignored him.

Lindsey grinned and assumed a sober posture. The Minnesotans studied their plates of steaming buffalo sausage. The chill rigidity of the jamb passed into Lindsey’s fingers and down his backbone; he entered the restaurant.

The skeg: I’m Lindsey, he thought, looking around the dining room for an empty booth. Not Lindsay or Lindsy. Certainly not Veach. Veach was a fag who entered the office mornings with a flourish of violet—scent and shirts. Veach’s face, framed in the doorway of Lindsey’s office, said, “Hey Lindy, come home with me tonight and meet the wife?” Ritual, almost daily joke for two years. Lindsey said automatically into his ledger, “No thanks, not tonight. Mona’s having friends over.” For the first months Veach had frightened him. Veach took note and was amused.

Not Lindsay or Lindsay, old or young. The older Lindsay had founded the firm just after one of the Great Wars. There was never a question to whom he was referring—Lindsay or Lindsey. A Harvard man, unselfconscious aristocrat, his pronunciation always came down hard on the a. He tolerated Veach out of a perverse democratic fascination, and he thought Lindsey was a good solid worker.

The son Lindsay had attended the University of Southern California. He slurred his words, and his meanings all came from contextual clues. He would rather have been someone other than a CPA.

Lindsay, Lindsay, Linsey, and Veach. A firm firm, thought Lindsey, which is losing its grip. Veach always knew the difference between the Lindsays and the Lindsey; but Veach was—

“Guhmorninmistuhwhatcherwant?” like a garbled readout from the office terminal.

“Mona,” Veach learned to say. “Who the hell’s Mona?”

Persistent, the waitress hovered impatiently at Lindsey’s elbow. “Black coffee,” he said.

“Nothin’ else?”

It’s too quiet in this apartment. The stereo is up and the street buffets the windows, but it’s too silent. All sound sinks into the green-flowered wallpaper.

If there were movement, if there were warmth…

If she were in the kitchen, fixing breakfast.

If…

There is movement and there is warmth.

She is in the kitchen fixing breakfast.

Sure you don’t mind?

Of course not. I love making your breakfast.

Never mind; come here. I don’t want breakfast. Only you.

“You all right?” The waitress looked at him suspiciously.

“Just coffee,” said Lindsey. “Leave the pot.” The waitress left.

The coffee was hot and caustic. Lindsey patiently cooled it with his spoon, a steel hull constantly filling and sinking and carrying him to cooler depths. The two men in the next booth were talking, and Lindsey listened.

“Look at the headlines,” one declared, crackling the newspaper. “New York Man Sought in Nebraska.” He traversed the page with his finger. “Supposed Psychopath Sighted Near Omaha.”

They both studied the photograph.

Lindsey slouched low in his seat.

“What did he do?” said the nearer man in the next booth.

“Assault,” said the man with the paper. “Beat up a doctor.”

Lindsey surfaced from dreams raggedly, limbs jerking in small spasms. He awoke and Mona would be close, very warm and reassuring. Her stroking fingers calmed him. Her voice soothed, cradled him until he could sleep peacefully. No dreams then, not until morning when he awoke to dirty sunlight in the city.

The waitress slapped down the lime-green check. Lindsey reached for his wallet. “Pay the cashier.”

On his way out of the restaurant, Lindsey slipped a quarter into a vending machine and took out a copy of the newspaper. One headline read, NEW YORK AIR ALERT IN EIGHTH DAY. The other read, NO AGREEMENT IN YUCATAN. The front page photo was of the president of Mexico. Lindsey dropped the paper in the KEEP AMERICA CLEANER receptacle.

Again the stripes zip-zipped past, all the way across arid Wyoming. Lindsey surrendered to their peaceful procession. A hum rose loud and louder in his ears until it drowned the motor and road noise. The road ahead constricted to a view seen through a tunnel. Lindsey took another of the red pills his doctor had prescribed for appetite-suppression during college. It stuck in his throat and he had to swallow repeatedly.

Across the Utah border there were white airplane silhouettes painted on the pavement. With his limited knowledge of the Mormon culture, Lindsey assumed they were stylized seagulls. A public service billboard informed him that the road was under radar surveillance from aircraft. Lindsey reduced the ancient Camaro’s speed to five miles above the speed limit.

Just before sunset on the salt flats, Lindsey invented a new game. He focused his left eye on the line of stripes coming toward him from the west. He focused his right eye on the rear-view mirror where the stripes receded into the distance. A dozen times his peripheral vision barely saved him from death. Twelve angry drivers drove toward Salt Lake, shouting silent curses back across the desert.

“You idiot, you wanna get killed?”

There was a need for running. They were driving him crazy.

Go west, young man. So he went west.

In Wendover, on the Nevada state line, Lindsey discovered he had taken the wrong turn for Los Angeles.

“You wanted Interstate Fifteen,” said the wrinkled man, handing Lindsey a Chevron roadmap. “You’re headed for San Francisco.”

“So I’m lost,” Lindsey admitted. “Help me.”

They spread the map on the service-station counter above the gum and candy. “Bear south on U.S. Alternate Fifty. ‘Bout a hundred miles it runs into U.S. Ninety-three. That puts you right into Vegas and then it’s freeway all the way to LA. All downhill.”

“Thanks,” said Lindsey, folding the map along the wrong creases.

“You better get some rest.”

“I’m fine,” said Lindsey, “but I’m late.”

The service-station man called across the tarmac, “You remind me of that white rabbit in that kids’ book—sayin’ ‘I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.’ You got something important?”

“A very important date,” said Lindsey. He looked at his watch. It had stopped at three twenty; he had forgotten to wind it.

“What?” said the service-station man.

“I’m late,” said Lindsey, looking back at him blankly.

Left turn, right turn, Lindsey stopped his car at the junction and slumped forward, resting his forehead on the wheel. Choices—San Francisco and Los Angeles both meant California. San Francisco … something about fog and damp. He was too tired to consider more than simplicities; there was something mythic about Los Angeles. Hating decisions, he surged blindly into the intersection.

For the first time he drove along two-lane black-top. The constant white dashes were now supplemented on curves and hills by continuous yellow stripes. Lindsey marked the addition.

He encountered little traffic on the Nevada highway, yet the road was strewn with dead animals: rabbits, porcupines, even an occasional badger. Once he had to swerve to avoid something so massive it could only have been a dead cow. He opened his window to the cold night air and after many miles realized that the scent coming into the car was the odor of corruption.

Seventy miles south of Wendover he pulled off the road. He urinated in the barrow pit beneath the cold sky and stars. The desert tried to retain him. Lindsey thought of the highway department crew finding his frozen body in the morning, standing spraddle-legged and stiff, jutting a yellow rainbow into the east. When he got back into the car it was like slamming a refrigerator door. Lindsey turned the heater controls all the way up and the car began to smell of dust.

At a truckstop south of Ely, he stopped briefly for gasoline. As Lindsey pulled out of the service area, he passed a hitchhiker. The man waited on the shoulder of the highway beneath a mercury lamp and extended a tentative thumb. Lindsey’s foot hesitated on the accelerator. He looked through the window at the hitchhiker; the man looked back from shadowed, invisible eyes. The hitchhiker was tall and thin, with a dark tapered beard. He was wrapped in heavy, shabby clothing, and carried a canvas rucksack slung over one shoulder.

There was something naggingly familiar about the hitchhiker. Was he— Sorry, thought Lindsey, and drove away so fast that gravel scattered from the Camaro’s rear tires. Pebbles leaped and ticked around the hitchhiker’s feet.

Veach appeared unexpectedly on the passenger’s side of the seat. He looked across at Lindsey with a Cheshire grin. “Hey Lindy, come home with me tonight and meet the wife.”

What wife, thought Lindsey. Some nice boy you picked up on Forty-second? He instantly regretted the thought and felt ashamed; Veach had more taste. “No thanks, not tonight. Mona’s having friends over.”

“Mona,” said Veach. “Who the hell’s Mona? Lindy, baby, you ought to see a shrink.”

I love her, thought Lindsey.

“It won’t kill you,” Veach said, taking a cigarette from a gold case and tapping it against the dashboard.

“What?” Lindsey said vaguely.

Veach was disgusted. “You’re not listening.”

“I am. Why should I see a psychiatrist?”

“Are you unhappy?”

Lindsey admitted he was.

“Shrinks help. Trust me.”

“Psychiatrists fool around with things that aren’t their business.”

“That’s their business,” said Veach.

Later: the elder Lindsay, implacable. “You’re a good, solid man, Lindsey. An asset to the firm.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But I think perhaps you are upset. Lately your work has been uneven.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“I want you to take some time off. Maybe … seek some professional help.”

“I’m fine, sir. I’d rather not.”

“I’d rather you did, boy.”

“Sir …”

“Mr. Veach can recommend an extremely competent man.”

Sometime during the night, the sky above the hills to the southwest began to lighten. In an hour it became a white glow. Another hour: Las Vegas. Lindsey had never been to Las Vegas—he had never before been west of Pittsburgh—yet he had heard … The coins in his right trousers pocket pressed against his thigh. Lindsey unconsciously touched the wallet in his jacket. He realized it was too easy a dream and instantly denied it, laughing.

Lindsey took the freeway bypass to the west. On his left, the carnival glared and blared, merging his night with others from long before. Neon incandescence, flashing:

CAESAR’S PALACE

TILT-A-WHIRL

THE NUGGET

FREAK SHOW

DUNES HOTEL

COTTON CANDY

Dizzy, Lindsey hunched forward over the wheel and concentrated on the stripes. He heard a chorus of “In the Good Old Summer Time,” as though played by a distant calliope, the sound teasingly distorted by wind. He twisted the knob of the radio, but the radio was already off.

The sound, he realized, was distorted by time.

A sign of soft, reassuring green swept by on the right:

LOS ANGELES 280 MILES

It was an anchor of tangibility; a promise he could grasp.

“Where’s the ashtray in this thing,” said Veach.

“Under the radio.”

“How was the session with the shrink?”

‘That’s, uh—”

“None of my business, right?”

“The psychiatrist was quite pleasant.”

“Crap,” said Veach, “you hated it, right?”

“I didn’t hate it, no.”

Veach exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Don’t obscure your hostilities, chickie. Did you tell him about Mona?”

“He didn’t ask.”

“Stop and let me out,” said Veach. “I can get further with a desert cactus.”

As the road began to climb into the Sierras, Lindsey checked the fuel gauge. The needle rested well below E, so he exited at a station where the floodlit signs assured him ALL NIGHT, LOWEST PRICES, LIVE GILA MONSTERS, and CACTUS CANDY. The attendant told him the live gila monsters were asleep in their pens, not to be disturbed until morning.

On the access road to the highway, Lindsey passed a hitchhiker again. The hitchhiker. Lindsey stared as the hitchhiker put out his thumb. Unaccountably terrified, Lindsey swung wide into the left lane to avoid him and pressed the accelerator to the floor. He looked back in the mirror; there was only darkness.

Lindsey joined the westbound freeway and felt his panic subside. There was nothing frightening about a recurring hitchhiker. It was an anomaly, but nothing sinister. Lindsey concentrated on keeping his lane as the highway wound farther up the Sierra slope. At times traffic from the opposite direction swept down around the curves toward him, headlights strobbing between posts of the divider fence.

He wondered about the time. The luminous dial of his watch read three twenty. A uniformed man at the agricultural check station across the California border gave Lindsey the correct time.

“I have time and money enough to see a psychiatrist,” said Lindsey, “but not the inclination. What for? I know how things are.”

Do you have any citrus fruits, vegetables, or other plants?

Yes I have no bananas, Lindsey indicated. He had heard his mother say that.

Don’t give me a hard time, buddy.

Time, that’s all I want.

“You’ll love him,” said Veach. “His name is Dr. Van der Mark. He’s a pussycat.”

Coasting down the long grade into Barstow, Lindsey looked into the mirror and once again saw a glow. This time it was morning. A reddish sun edged above the mountains and the Mojave instantly turned incinerator. Having no air conditioner, Lindsey rolled his window down and suffered.

Dr. Van der Mark (Veach explained) spent a number of years interned by the Japanese in New Guinea. The experience gave him a profound insight into mankind; a great compassion for humanity. Only a child then, at war’s end he determined to become a psychiatrist.

Lindsey wondered aloud why his experience in the Japanese internment camp hadn’t caused Van der Mark to become a misanthrope.

Maybe he’s crazy, Veach suggested.

So why should I waste my money on a crazy person?

Because he’s a pussycat.

“I will want to see you again in one week,” said Dr. Van der Mark. His voice was precise. He smiled only slightly, allowing his lips little freedom to disturb the meticulously tended Vandyke.

Lindsey silently collected his hat and coat.

“Next week I should like an introduction to Mona.”

“Did Veach—”

“That would be unprofessional,” said Van der Mark.

“Then how—”

Van der Mark carefully touched his Vandyke with one finger. “You talk; I listen.”

The air temperature rose, all the way from Barstow into San Bernardino, where Los Angeles actually seemed to begin. Berdoo—Lindsey dinsinterred the word from a youthful memory of a motorcycle film. Berdoo was palms and lanai apartment buildings, light-to-medium industry spread along the freeway, and air that made Lindsey think of home. His lungs began to smart, his eyes to water. From time to time he glanced sidewise at the roadmap on the seat. The processional rolled past: Riverside, Ontario, Pomona, West Covina. He repeated the place-names, a potent incantation.

Lindsey felt a tangible relaxation, barely short of unconsciousness. The long drive was nearly ended; he was Here. But where was that? His reach and grasp were suddenly equivalent.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” said Lindsey. He wanted to pull over on the side of the highway and be sick or fall asleep, or both. He craned his neck stared out the windows and into the mirrors. There was no way. Lindsey’s Camaro was in the fourth lane from the right of six lanes westbound. Traffic chains of multicolored links bound him on both sides. Lindsey flashed his turn signals first one way, then the other. He pressed on the horn.

Some of the other drivers ignored Lindsey; some cursed him; some laughed.

Veach reached for the lighter. “Well, Lindy, you’re here.” He paused to light his cigarette. “Are you just going to drive indefinitely west in this lane?”

Lindsey looked helplessly across the hood of his car. Traffic in the lane immediately to his left was moving slightly faster than he; cars in the right lane were traveling slower.

“It may take an hour or two,” said Veach, “but you’ll run out of gas. Here you’ll be. Helpless and surrounded.”

“I’ll make it,” said Lindsey. “I’m here. Just give me time.”

“No time, bunny.”

Signs abounded on either side of the freeway and overhead: guidance for the lame and halt, or for strangers.

SAN GABRIEL RIVER FREEWAY

POMONA FREEWAY NEXT

NEXT RIGHT

RIGHT

SAN BERNARDINO FREEWAY

LEFT LANES

TO SANTA ANA FREEWAY

YORTY SKYWAY CENTER

KEEP LEFT

LANE

LOS ANGELES LEFT

LANES

“I can help,” said Dr. Van der Mark, “but for me to help you, you must help me.”

“What?” said Lindsey.

“You must help me.” Dr. Van der Mark slumped in the tan leather chair. He was tall and stoop-shouldered, with the unconscious slouch of the tall man who doesn’t wish to intimidate men of shorter stature. “I wonder if you could tell me your goals.”“

The Rorschach inkblots had been easier. Finally Lindsey said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I want to be warm and safe.”

“And loved?”

“There’s a difference?”

From interchange to interchange the traffic fragmented and reformed, shifting Lindsey from lane to lane.

“This is scary,” said Lindsey aloud. “I didn’t expect this.” The sun was nearly overhead and he looked at his watch: the hands stood at three twenty. Lindsey turned on the radio.

“—ee-twenty in the afternoon, this is KLA in Pasadena with a Wild Wax Weekend in store—”

He could see Mona, blurred. Hard to focus, Lindsey thought.

Eyes deep in shadow, Dr. Van der Mark regarded him. “It’s not uncommon for a child to invent an imaginary playmate.”

You fool! “I am twenty-six years old,” said Lindsey.

”Please, I meant no—”

“Listen,” said Lindsey almost pleading. “Please don’t fuck around with reality.”

“Mr. Lindsey, will you listen—”

You stupid, irresponsible—

“—to reason?”

—bastard. Nothing gives you the right.

“I can only help you with your full cooperation.”

Nothing.

The radio: “—sule News. Today Los Angeles inaugurates its new multimillion-dollar traffic control plan. Acco—”

At the apex of a four-level traffic stack, Lindsey saw an opening on the right and cut in. The new signs read HOLLYWOOD FREEWAY.

“—rding to LA Traffic Czar Chase, the new system will cut freeway congestion ten percent in the first month of operation. Further—”

Quickly, quickly! Lindsey cut to the left. The VENTURA FREEWAY. He glanced at the map; red freeways tangled in an unstrung skein.

“You don’t need that map,” said Veach.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” Lindsey said.

Veach nodded. “You feel it. The map won’t help.”

The radio: “—ozen random exit ramps and sites selected for maximum disposa—”

The freeway rose to the penultimate level of a five-layered interchange and Lindsey looked down at California from a dizzying height. “It’s got to be here somewhere,” he said. “It’s got to be.” The route divided and Lindsey drove the San Diego Freeway south. To the right the sun glittered on water. “The Pacific,” Lindsey said. “I’ve never seen it.” He strained his eyes but saw nothing but hard glitter.

The freeways forked and spread like lovers’ legs, and Lindsey followed them. The map was nearly useless, but in time he came to believe he was driving widdershins around the golden city of the golden state. The ocean to the west gleamed closer.

The radio: “—oday’s QLI Report. QLI Authority reports smog concentration moderate, eye irritation severe, potential respiratory damage moderate. High temperatures today will range to the hundred-degree mark. Traffic levels are maximum. The retail price index is up four-tenths of a percent. All factors considered, the Quality of Life Index has receded to an all-time low of six. In oth—”

“Can’t you describe her?” Dr. Van der Mark asked.

“Of course,” said Lindsey. “As easily as my own face.”

He heard the long-drawn thunder of waves rake the beach.

Blaring horns shocked him up one level of consciousness. The Camaro swerved back into its own lane. Lindsey gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles began to ache.

“Just watch the stripes,” said Veach. “They’ll guide you. Watch the stripes.”

The radio: “—ily as my own fa—”

“The quality of life is strained,” said Lindsey. Immensely satisfied with his own cleverness, he said it again.

“We’re here,” said Veach, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray.

The sign blocked out the sun:

TEMP. ALTERNATE EXIT

SANTA MONICA FREEWAY

FAR RIGHT LANE

Lindsey found himself in the far right lane. The main body of traffic broke and flowed away to the left. The Camaro climbed an exit ramp describing a wide, asymptotic curve into the west.

The radio: “—ongratulations. You have opted for participation in the Los Angeles Traffic Control Plan.”

The road angled free from the shadows of the interchange and Lindsey saw the ocean. The ramp arched high out over the beach.

“Just follow the stripes,” Veach said.

East to west, the line was complete. Lindsey followed the ramp as it curved downward, followed as the stripes disappeared in a swirl of white water, as the waves of the Pacific broke above the roof of his car.

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