Sunday, September 2, 2012

Homecoming


Homecoming 

By Matthew Ciarvella 

I drive with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road, trying to navigate with the other eye on the GPS. You would think you wouldn’t forget how to find your way home, but navigating by memory only works when you get to a place that you actually remember and the world you remember as a child is so much smaller. It just stops in your mind after a certain point and even though you know logically that there is more to the world beyond that point in memory, you don’t remember what it looks like. You can’t, really. You’re asking for an adult’s responsibility of a child’s memory.

So that’s what the GPS is for. Its faux-female voice is my only companion in an otherwise silent car. “In one point two miles, turn left!” the GPS exclaims with a sort of automated enthusiasm, as if it care whether or not I ever reach my destination.

I miss the turn. It comes up on me suddenly as I’m glancing at the tiny GPS screen and it’s too late for me to get over in time.
“Goddamnit!” I snarl as the turn blows past me.

“You’ve gone a different way,” the GPS chirps helpfully.

“Yeah, no shit,” I growl.

“Tap anywhere on the screen to get new directions?” the GPS asks in a hopeful tone. I wonder if the false hope in its false voice is to prevent the urge to see how far a GPS thrown from a borrowed sedan moving at sixty-five miles per hour will fly before shattering on the ground somewhere. I resist, barely, the urge to commit gadgetcide. I tap anywhere on the screen to get new directions.

“Calculating alternate route,” the GPS says soothingly.

After a moment, it decides that a U-turn was in order. U-turns are illegal in this particular state.

“I am going to murder you,” I say to my small plastic nemesis. I am still driving in the increasingly wrong direction.

“You’ve gone a different way,” the GPS retorts.

“Your death will be painful and slow,” I say.

“Tap anywhere on the screen to get new directions?” it asks, oblivious.

I tap anywhere. Again.

This time, it suggests that I continue on my present course, then turn left, then left again, then left again, then straight. It feels like too many lefts to make up for one missed left turn, but what do I know.

In the fading light, I see a family gathered in their front yard. The smell of wood smoke rolls in through the open window, mixed with the scent of damp leaves and the steady chirp of crickets. It hasn’t rained for going on a few days now, but there is always a dampness to the air in this part of the world. It is the kind of place where, if you didn’t towel dry it, your hair would still be wet for hours after a shower.

A sound like a gunshot splits the air, followed a moment later by the bright glow of fireworks over the horizon. It is the day before a holiday. It is the last weekend in summer. After this, pools will be closed up, outdoor grills rolled back into the garage, baseball diamonds in the neighborhood parks will go neglected till spring. Summer is a corpse here, one that is freshly dead. On the evening air, autumn’s chill is already lingering, circling ever closer.

I come around another turn. I am convinced I am going in circles. The trees have a maddening way of breaking up the sight lines here. It’s impossible to know what locations and roads exist in relation to you unless you have a helicopter. Or a GPS. At least in theory.

“In zero point five miles, turn left,” the GPS advises me.

I drive zero point five miles and do exactly that. I pass another street. More houses. More families enjoying or mourning summer’s last gasps.

The realization is like a jolt of electricity through me. I begin to see the world around me with the clarity of childhood memory. This is the point: a weird, triangular intersection flanked on one side by a stretch of marshland that I knew so well from childhood memories. This is the point that always said to me, as a child: don’t worry, you’re almost there. You’re almost home.

The GPS makes another suggestion. I ignore it. After a moment, I click it off and place it in the cup-holder. I don’t need it now. 

I’m eight years old again and this time, it’s my father who is in the driver’s seat and it’s our old station wagon, sturdy, reliable, and ugly as sin, instead of the sleek, modern ergonomics of my borrowed luxury car. We’re on our way home, it doesn’t matter from where. In those memories, it never matters where you’re coming from, only where you’re going, because you’re always going home in those memories. You hope you’ll get home before it’s dark but as you watch the light bleed out of the sky, you know you won’t. The trees all around your road home become dark silhouettes long before the first stars emerge. 

It’s something unique to this part of the world. Even now, fifteen years after I left this place, there is a feeling of dread that creeps into my thoughts as the forest silhouette looms over me. Darkness means something e lse here. In the Southwest, a summer night is a feeling of relief from the scorching heat of the day. It is something to be welcomed. 

Here, though, the night is a frightening thing. Perhaps it is part of our ancestral memory, an aspect of instinctual self that can recall a time when we huddled beneath those silhouettes of trees around a campfire to keep the night at bay. Perhaps it is because I still see those silhouettes in my dreams; in my nightmares, I never really left this place. 

Perhaps these are just the lonely thoughts of a young man who wonders who he might have become had he stayed. 

The dark is quickly approaching, but it doesn’t matter now, because I know where I am. I cross the railroad tracks without looking, without stopping. Is it because there is no train in my memory of this crossing and so by some strange logic, there cannot be one now? Or is it because this place feels safe; protected by the permanency of memory? I can’t die here; this is (was) home. This is a safe place. 

I drive past familiar houses and signs that haven’t changed in fifteen years. I make another turn and I’m back on the old block. I remember all of these houses now. There’s the one that used to dominate the unofficial Christmas-light competition that middle class suburbia seems so intent on waging each year. There’s the house where an old babysitter lived. I wonder who lives there now. Is it the same family? I can’t remember their last names. 

Another bit of road, another stretch of forest. There’s a pond hidden beyond those trees, not much really, just a muddy pool of water and a little island in the middle that nevertheless seemed like a faraway land of wonder and mystery when first I laid eyes onto it as a child. I would dream of building a raft to make my way out to that island. Or maybe I would swim out to it. Some day. I always planned on doing those things some day.

I never did either.

There was another pond, and another island, even deeper in those woods, made all the more mysterious because I only ever reached it once in my youthful explorations. Nobody else in my family ever found it; years later, I wondered if perhaps I just imagined the whole thing until I looked at this little bit of forest years later, from the outer space based vantage point of a GPS satellite image and saw that there were indeed two ponds, each with their own island. 

The woods seem so much smaller from space. I wondered if that was just the effect of growing older, becoming a man. I’ve been to many places now, far beyond the woods that surrounded my old home. I have stood upon the summits of mountains and crawled through dark caves. The world is a smaller place now. 

But now, sitting in a car and looking out at those woods, I realize that the trees still loom over me, just as they did when I was a child. The woods are still dark. The songs of crickets are at once both a comfort and a subtle threat. I am old enough to know that there are no monsters in those woods, even at night. 

And yet. 

And yet. . . 

And yet there is part of me that recoils at the thought of going into those woods. I open my door and slide one foot onto the road, a road that I have not walked upon since I was small. I could go there again. I could see those places again, places that I see now only in dreams. There is nothing that can threaten me now in those woods. There are no monsters. 

I slide my foot back into the car and close the door, turn the key and start the engine. I will not be going back into the old woods. I will tell myself that it is because I do not want to look ridiculous, a grown man wandering around in the dark in a sleepy neighborhood in a forgotten corner of a decaying town that is no longer his, that has not been his for more than a decade. 

I did not come here for the woods. My destination is near; the GPS would have told me in its artificially happy voice, but without power, it’s just an expensive piece of silent plastic, the latest in technology that brings us all together even as it gives us the excuse we need to go further and further apart.

I realize I have never been alone in a car on this street. I have ridden down it many times. I have never driven it. I look over at the passenger seat. It feels wrong, that that seat should be empty. Somebody should be sitting there. It should be me sitting there, my head just barely high enough to gaze out the window and it should be my father driving or my mother or my brother or my… 

It should be somebody else in the driver seat. It shouldn’t be me. I shouldn’t be alone here. It feels wrong. It feels perverse. It goes in opposition to every memory I have of driving down this street, except for that one nightmare I had when I was six and I dreamt that I stole my older brother’s van and drove it onto the interstate only to find that I couldn’t reach the pedals and I didn’t know how to drive and I crashed it into a ditch and died. 

The engine is running. Nobody is coming in either direction. Everybody who lives here has already gone home for the day; night is very nearly here. The sky is a dark blue; the trees are devouring the sun on the horizon. 

I drive the last bit of distance, a few hundred feet to the deepest reaches of the neighborhood. The trees loom more closely around the street here. They don’t match my memory anymore; even though I’ve grown taller, so have they and now I have the surreal feeling of finding myself in a waking dream, of being a place that is strange and familiar all at the same time. 

The final turn and before I have time to arrange myself for it, to prepare for the meeting of memory and reality in a suitable fashion worthy of this journey that I have flown and driven a combined total well in excess of two thousand miles for, I’m just . . . there. It’s my childhood home, exactly as I remember it. Except, not exactly; the tree in front has been cut down and there’s a fence visible in the back yard that didn’t used to be there. An unfamiliar car is in the drive way, a nice, sleek modern car, just like mine. The other houses are different too, in little ways, but those little wrongs don’t matter; the details of those places were less clear. What matters is that house. My house. 

I pull up to the side opposite my house and park the car. I don’t worry about what I look like now. Let them think I’m a lost traveler trying to find my way, perhaps struggling with an uncooperative GPS. And in some ways, I am lost, aren’t I. I’ve come all this way to come home and now that I’m here, well . . . 

Before I realize what I’m doing, I’m getting out of the car. The air is cold with summer’s death knell. I walk across the street, the movement achingly familiar even though the street seems so much smaller now. The yard was so much bigger. I remember snow forts on that yard in winter. I remember an ill-advised attempt at a lemonade stand. I remember trying to play baseball with teams of exactly two people. 

I remember the family that used to live here. 

I walk up the old driveway, my driveway, and remember chalk drawings and the leash for our long-dead Rottweiler and I remember dancing in the rain on a warm summer day. My mother told me later that it was a sun shower.

The porch is still the same porch where I fell down and broke my chin; the scar is still there to prove that story, though I don’t remember it myself. 

I’m knocking on the door without knowing why. The last light of day is all but gone. Even the tree silhouettes are merging with the night now. 

I’m knocking on the door to my childhood home and I’m filled with the memories of being small and coming home from school and standing here in this same place, knocking on this same door with my backpack held in one hand, waiting for my mother to come and open the door and – 

A stranger answers my door. 

He’s in his late thirties, too old to be me and too young to be my parents now. He’s reasonably fit, dark hair that I can’t quite see in the fading light. He’s wearing a grey shirt and jeans, like me. 

“Can I help you?” he asks. 

I can smell dinner cooking from inside. People around here still like to eat late during the summer. It doesn’t match any of the dinner smells I remember. 

I don’t say anything. He repeats the question, in the patiently annoyed way that all people do when they’re trying to be polite and don’t want to be. 

“I used to live here,” I say. I sound dazed. I look too clean and well dressed to be one of those “drug people,” but you never know around these parts, do you? This used to be such a nice town; people looked out for each other, back in the old days. Now, though? Who knows. 

“Well,” the strange man who is standing on the inside of my doorway says slowly, measuring his words, “that must be real nice for you, buddy, but you don’t live here now, do you?” 

I don’t answer; the question is rhetorical. 

“If you think I’m going to let you in,” the stranger in my house says. 

“No,” I interrupt. “No, I don’t want to come in.” 

I don’t explain myself. I can’t. He’ll think it’s because I’m know I’m not welcome here, and he’s right; I’m not, but that’s not the reason. The reason is because I can’t stand to see what else has changed; can’t bear the thought of going into my house and see that it’s not mine, that the pictures on the walls are of people I don’t recognize, that the pretty young woman with long blondish hair who has one happy baby bouncing in a high chair and another squirming on her hip as she tries to make dinner is not my mother and I’m not one of those babies and it’s not my father walking in the door after a long, hard day and the realization hits me fast and hard like a bullet, the sickening understand that it’s true what they say, what Thomas Wolfe was the first to write: you can’t go home again. 

“Listen, buddy,” the stranger says. He’s about my size and it’s hard to say how things would go in a fight between if it turns out that I’m a crazy person. I can see his shoulders tense, the way they do in all men when that instinct to protect one’s family is awakened. I can hear voices inside. A woman calls out: “Honey? Who is it?” The television is on, familiar background noise. I imagine that I can hear babies and all the sounds of family. 

“Sorry to bother you,” I say. I go, without another word. I leave a stranger standing in my doorway, looking confused and annoyed. He watches me go. I don’t hear the door slam shut until I’m halfway down the driveway.

I imagine him watching me from a window as I cross the street and climb back into my borrowed car. It’s too dark to read the license plate anyway. 

The street is dark and silent. The GPS is still dead. I don’t need it. 

I sit alone in the cool darkness of the borrowed car and listen to the night, the crickets and all the distant sounds of a place that used to be mine once, but no longer is. 


You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. –Thomas Wolfe

No comments: