FINCH
Day 7 of the Awake
I climb into my mom’s old Saturn VUE, better known as Little Bastard, and
head to Violet Markey’s on the farm road that runs parallel to National Road,
the main artery that cuts through town. I slam my foot against the gas pedal,
and there’s the rush as the speedometer climbs to sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety,
the needle shaking the higher it gets, the Saturn doing its best in that moment
to be a sports car instead of a five-year-old minivan.
On March 23, 1950, Italian poet Cesare Pavese wrote:
“Love is truly the
great manifesto; the urge to
be,
to count for something, and, if death must
come, to die valiantly, with acclamation—in short, to remain a memory.”
Five
months later, he walked into a newspaper office and chose his obituary
photograph from the photo archive. He checked himself into a hotel, and days
later an employee found him stretched out on the bed, dead.
He was fully
dressed except for his shoes. On the bedside table were sixteen empty packets
of sleeping pills and a note:
“I forgive everyone and ask forgiveness of
everyone. OK? Not too much gossip, please.”
Cesare Pavese has nothing to do with driving fast on an Indiana farm road,
but I understand the urge to be and to count for something. While I’m not sure
taking off your shoes in a strange hotel room and swallowing too many
sleeping pills is what I would call dying
valiantly and with acclamation, it’s
the thought that counts.
I push the Saturn to ninety-five. I will ease off only when I reach one
hundred. Not ninety-seven. Not ninety-eight. It’s one hundred or nothing.
I lean forward, like I’m a rocket, like I. Am. The. Car. And I start yelling
because I’m getting more awake by the second. I feel the rush and then some
—I feel everything around me and in me, the road and my blood and my heart
beating up into my throat, and I could end right now, in a valiant acclamation
of crushed metal and explosive fire. I slam the gas harder, and now I can’t
stop because I am faster than anything on earth. The only thing that matters is
the forward thrust and the way I feel as I hurtle toward the Great Manifesto.
Then,
in that exact, precise fraction of a moment before my heart might
explode or the engine might explode, I lift my foot up and off and go sailing
across the old, rutted pavement, Little Bastard carrying me on its own as we
41
fly up over the ground and land hard, several feet away, half in, half out of the
ditch, where I sit catching my breath. I hold up my hands and they aren’t
shaking at all. They’re steady as can be, and I look around me, at the starry
sky and the fields, and the dark, sleeping houses, and I’m here, motherf—–s. I
am here.
Violet lives one street away from Suze Haines in a large white house with a
red chimney in a neighborhood on the opposite side of town. I roll up in Little
Bastard, and she’s sitting on the front step,
wrapped in a giant coat, looking
small and alone. She jumps up and meets me halfway down the sidewalk,
then immediately glances past me like she’s looking for someone or
something. “You didn’t need to come all the way over here.” She’s
whispering, as if we might wake up the neighborhood.
I whisper back, “It’s not like we live in L.A. or even Cincinnati. It took me,
like, five minutes to get here. Nice house, by the way.”
“Look,
thanks for coming, but I don’t need to talk about anything.” Her
hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and wisps of it are falling down around her
face. She tucks a piece behind her ear. “I’m totally fine.”
“Never bullshit a bullshitter. I know a cry for help when I see one, and I’d
say being talked off a ledge overqualifies. Are your parents home?”
“Yes.”
“Too bad. Want to walk?” I start walking.
“Not that way.” She pulls on my arm and drags me in the other direction.
“Are we avoiding something?”
“No. It’s just, uh—nicer over here.”
I put on my best Embryo voice. “So, how long have you been having these
suicidal feelings?”
“God, don’t talk so loud. And I’m not … I’m not …”
“Suicidal. You can say it.”
“Well, anyway, I’m not.”
“Unlike me.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You were up on the ledge because you didn’t know where else to turn and
what else to do. You’d lost all hope. And then, like a gallant knight, I saved
your life. By the way, you look totally different without makeup. Not bad
necessarily, but different. Maybe even better. So what’s up with this website
of yours? Have you always wanted to write? Tell me about yourself,
Violet
Markey.”
She answers like a robot:
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