Renata Adler - Pitch Dark

I stopped. I pulled over on the left. Driving on the left had been so much of the problem until then. I got out and, in the dark, under the headlights, I looked at a map of Ireland. There was no sign, no mention whatever, of a tiny intersection I had just passed. The words on the roadside marker, R.9 Lockarnagh, did not appear on the map at all. But I concluded, from the time passed and the mileage, that I had, in fact, missed the turnoff. So I turned, and raced back in the direction I had been coming from. A car, now, coming toward me, lowered his headlights and went by. But I could not make out his license plates, or even the color or contours of his car. I had to assume he could not make mine out, either. He had arrived too late to see me stop and turn around. If he had been following me, then, he was going the wrong way. Miles passed, more miles. The road no longer looked familiar. What were the odds, I thought, what were the odds that my mother’s daughter, the descendant of my ancestors, should be lost like this, late one night in Ireland, fearing what was after all the law, under this sickle moon? Well, I’d been with Yemenite servants and the wives of nuclear physicists in a bomb shelter in Rehovoth, with Ibo tribesmen at a military installation in a nameless town. As much as this is the age of crime, after all, this is the century of dislocation. Not just for journalists or refugees; for everyone. I was by no means the first in my family to have reason to fear the law of a nation, or to seek furtively to escape from its jurisdiction and its police. But it was cold. I was alone, and it was dark. I thought I was lost, and then I looked at my gas gauge. A quarter of a tank. I would have to look out for gas stations, not that I recalled having passed any that were open. On the highway to Dublin, surely, there would be one. If I could find the highway. Headlights appeared in my rearview mirror, distant at first, and then closer. I pulled over to the left, off the road again, got out and flagged down what turned out to be an enormous truck. I’m sorry, I said, I seem to be lost. Could you tell me how I get on N.5 to Dublin. He hesitated. A shifty, wily look of suspicion, which I thought I’d seen innumerable times since I arrived in this strange country, passed over his face. Then he said, I’m going to Dublin. You can follow me. He drove off, and I followed. What was that look of suspicion, I wondered, could he have taken this nightrider who flagged him down for a terrorist? Why not. Who else would be out, at this hour, flagging people down? Then I wondered what load he was transporting in that immense truck. Come to think of it, I had seen no other trucks on the road that night since Cihrbradàn, certainly none of that size and weight. Could he be carrying gelignite, at this hour? Was he, perhaps, a terrorist, and did that look of suspicion cross his face because he feared for a moment that I was the police? Strange odds, those, too, for my ancestors.

But there we were, he and I, haring single file through the Southern Irish countryside. I was no longer alone. A new fear, a sort of paranoia, crossed my mind: had he hesitated because he planned to mislead me, was he heading, not toward Dublin at all but straight back to that place named, come to think of it, like some hybrid out of Freud and Kafka, Castlebar? Miles and miles. No signs that I could see. Irish road signs, in any case, are grey-black on grey-white, and in print so small that they are virtually illegible to any driver on the road. From time to time, I kept looking at my gas gauge. Then, I sped past him, drove, slowed, stopped, switched on my hazard lights and stood in the road to flag him down again. Patience, no look at all of What is it this time? on his face. I said I was running out of gas. I secretly hoped he had some, but I did not mention it. Is there likely to be a gas station pretty soon? I asked. Not till nine-thirty in the morning, he said. How much gas did you have when you started out? Three-quarters full, I said. Well, then you ought to be all right, he said. Of course, like so many things that were said to me in Ireland, this seemed to make no sense. I mean, surely it depended, not on how much gas I had when I set out, but on how much would be required for the distance that remained, or at least how much I had where I was starting from.

Maybe what we have here is Mayerling for one. Maybe Mayerling always was for one.

There we stood, though, this tall broad man and I, in the sleet, on the road, in the beam of his enormous headlights. I asked how much farther it was to Dublin. He said, About a hundred twenty miles. Are there no all-night gas stations in Ireland? I asked. He said no. Well, then I guess I won’t make it, I said. My flight from Dublin leaves at ten. A pause. We stand, not looking at each other. The sleet has abated. His headlights are muted now, and diffused by mist. Do you suppose, I ask, speaking as slowly as the thought evolves, that I could drive till I run out of fuel, and then ride the rest of the way with you? He reflects. He looks toward his truck. He seems less surprised by the question than I am. That would be all right, he says. I ask, Where shall I leave my car, at some closed gas station, or just any place where it runs down. Oh, he says, locked, I think, on the street at Ballyhairness. I find it difficult to understand what he says, not just because he speaks softly and I am unfamiliar with his accent, but because, as I now notice, he has a stammer. In any event, I have grown by now to love him. I wonder whether he is going to leave me after all. But as we drive, miles and miles, at speed, the sky is sometimes black, with that clear moon and stars, sometimes mauve, sometimes filled with rain; though my gas gauge has gone well beyond the red and rests firmly now on empty; though I have no clear plan, and I’m in my way alone again; in due course, a sign appears. What it says is Ballyhaunis 10. And though I have a moment of free-fall panic, what if he doesn’t stop? on the whole I trust him now, and what I think is, Well met, teamster.

The truth was, there was something in the ice cube.

The turning point at the paper was the introduction of the byline.

Here’s who I knew in those days: everyone.

Everyone?

Well, not everyone in the world, of course. But a surprising number and variety, considering the lonely soul I was when I was young, and the sort of recluse I have since become.

“It’s really too much. I can’t tell you who they’ll seat next to you,” Claire said, after dinner, at the guarded island villa. “Wives, Canadians. They sit you next to anyone.” Also, “The daughter married an octoroon. A baboon. I don’t know.”

It began at the airline ticket counter. No, it began with another lorry driver, three days earlier, at midday, in a small town, on the road from Shannon. No, with the fact that we were brought up to be honest, or the fact that my parents fled. Well, wherever it began, the ambassador, a great and kind man, in his youth a poet and a war hero, now a banker and owner of vast farms in Iowa, had offered me his house, a castle really, empty now but for its little staff, on the Irish coast at Cihrbradàn. In his absence, the house, the grounds, the staff, especially, were forlorn. Talk to them, he said, as he spoke of Celia, Paddy, Pat, and Kathleen. They are lonely and a friendly people. Celia, the cook, missed having guests at table, and preparing picnics for them. Paddy missed shooting parties. Ask Paddy where to shoot, if shooting was what I wanted. Otherwise, ask him where to go for walks. Talk to them. Stay all of November if I liked. The offer was not only kind; it seemed providential. I am a reader of horoscopes in tabloids. Even at the best of times, I look for portents. Within hours, I had set out, standby, on a crowded flight to London. All night over the Atlantic, beside me, a coughing man, evidently feverish. In the morning, at Heathrow, the shady business at the airline ticket counter. But, when I got to Shannon, and had crossed the tarmac in the rain to a dim hangar marked Baggage Claim, I thought, Well, at least, at last I have done something. I have come this far. I found a booth, and a pale operator, who put me through to Cihrbradàn. I asked Paddy for directions; he said, just follow the signs, it is all quite clearly marked. I passed down a long corridor, through customs, and entered the airport itself. The stalls for the car-rental agencies were lined up in a row. It was like a Levantine bazaar, a bazaar in Baghdad, Cairo, or Damascus. The men in the stalls were shouting, hawking, gesticulating, hissing at me, psst, psst, as though I were a cat, or (but this is another story) a woman who has inadvertently wandered, in Manhattan, into the wrong room of the Century Club. For some reason, I was apparently the only likely customer. The other passengers had already left, or were walking with a clearer sense of destination. I stood, hesitant, at some distance from the stalls. The wheedling and hectoring so surprised me that I headed toward the exit, and the taxi stand. I reconsidered. I approached the youngest man in the row of stalls, a frail dark-haired fellow of about eighteen. How much would it cost, I asked, to rent his smallest car for about a week. He named a sum. I paused. He cut the price by nine dollars a day. I said all right. But then he both miscomputed the amount and drew up the sum in Irish pounds instead of dollars. When I mentioned it, he tore up the form and began again, with an air of exasperation and absent-mindedness, as though he had never done anything so practical as to rent a car before. There’s no charge for mileage, he said. He crossed out Mileage, and wrote in Fuel: $35, and added a line: Misc. Tax: $19. Finally, he asked whether I would like insurance. I wavered. My sense of the transaction somehow gave me no confidence in the quality, or even the fact of this insurance. I said, No, thank you, I am insured. Why, so are we, he said. This is just for the initial liability, eight hundred dollars. I would normally take this kind of insurance without question, but there was something makeshift about even the piece of paper, which he now held out to me as if it were a raffle ticket; and, in fact, I was insured, as a driver, for major accidents. So I signed the waiver of insurance, and the contract for the rental of the car.