Christopher Boucher - How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

That morning I was late as usual — I’d been driving a VeggieCar over the previous months that had begun to rot, and I’d gone downstairs around 5:45 and found the steering column too lumpy and soft to turn over. I opened the hood, disconnected the tendrils, poured some water in and turned the stem manually. Finally, it struggled to life. But by then I was fifteen minutes behind schedule.

My father had arrived at Atkin’s early, just as the country market — a wooden-faced building with a grocery section, a deli and a sunlit wing filled with tables and chairs — was opening. My Dad locked his Invisible Pickup Truck, went into the market and found our table by the corner — the place where we always sat. Besides a handful of Atkin’s employees who were opening up the store there were only two other people in the place — the Cooley-Dickinson Hospital, doing some early grocery shopping, and the old Conway Inn, ordering a breakfast sandwich from the deli counter.

The way the Invisible Pickup Truck described it, the Tree that attacked my father was poor and hungry, a wanderbus following sound. I don’t know if he targeted my Dad as he pulled into the parking lot, or if he could hear his heart through the window at Atkin’s, or what, but I like to think that he at least heard something unique — a particular rhythm, a tempting yarn, an abnormally loud or loving pulse — coming from my father’s chest. The Truck said that he remembered seeing the Tree stumble through the fields and cross the parking lot, his lips chapped and his jeans dirty and faded, and I can imagine him stepping up to the full-length pane of glass next to our table and staring at my father as he leaned over his clipboard and scribbled notes in large, loose cursive. Maybe my father heard the Tree breathing, or noticed his shadow, and maybe he looked up to see the Tree salivating at the window. Before he could move or do anything, though, the Tree attacked — slamming his fist through the glass and into my father’s chest and pulling all of the stories out of his heart.

You see? This is the reason I’d stopped booking: I didn’t, couldn’t, understand this machine — the system of parts and action that was western Massachusetts. It seemed far too big, and it had shown me too many conflicting things. How could the same place pave the roads that brought me to my family and Atkin’s Farm and pave the roads that allowed the Tree to deheart my father? Who even knew that there were such things as trees that fed on stories, or that would kill an innocent man for a meal? No one did, because the rules kept changing and changing back, with no warning. How could I be expected to navigate such a place?

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

Even after I was told that my father was dead, I believed (I still believe!) that I could fix everything — that if I logged enough miles in my VW and kept telling stories through the countless dead ends and breakdowns, I could undo the terrible tree events that begin this version. I thought I could write everything right, reach a better place than this one, a new Northampton — one with reinforced mountains, sturdy condoms, trustworthy leaves. I’ve heard about, read about, these other dimensions, other worlds. Sometimes I can hear them, even. But I can’t ever seem to get there.

Not that I should have expected to with this particular power, which is incomplete (as I was forced to sell a few stories and procedures for time-of-money), full of holes. Sure, the book turns on, lights up; its fans whirr and the bookenginecrunches. But some of the pages are completely blank; others hang by a thread. The book’s transmission is shot, too, so don’t be surprised if the book slips from one versionto the next as you’re reading. Finally, the thermostat’s misked, so you should expect sudden changes in temperature—the pages may get cold, or it may begin to snow between paragraphs, or you may turn the page and get hit with a faceful of rain or blinding beams of sunlight.

And even if it were complete, in tipping shape, the power’s range is limited. There are pulses it can catch and others it can’t. It’ll render Main Street and 47 just fine, but my father —my real father? He’s just too complex — too kind and smart (and handsome, he would say) for any book. He can’t be compressed — after so many years of money, morning after morning of forging words that sprung leaks or went unconscious mid-story, I’ve conclured that it can’t be done. When it comes to the people I love — my patient mother, my golfing brother, my father/best friend — the best I could do here is fraction them, roscoe them into Memories, Promisesor Sides.

As you read, though, keep an eye on the book’s combustion spark—that moment where the experience is separated, refracted, amplified. And if you ever lose it, or can’t spot it, just lift up the lines of type and look behind them — you’ll see something shivering, or something laughing, or something looking back at you and sticking out its tongue.

HARMONIC BALANCER PULLER

I’ve made several time-based concessions here, such as using offnotes, generic tones, where I might have used customs instead. In most cases, the cur is self-over: It’s obvious, I think, that everest yields griff or that zoff causes curious or inquisitive. Other zutes aren’t quite as clear — it’s hard to catch visk as scaffolding, or to know that a scone is a type of a muffin, unless you can reese it into context. It might help to remember, though, that I’m operating on the word’s scourge — on the count that in every case, the word will strike the same chord (or a better one, ideally!) as the one you expect.

Nevertheless, don’t forget to listen—to put your ear to the book at least once a page . Hear the hill-and-dales? There are different levels and layers to Volkswagen repair, and some of them can only be heard, the gap between each note (or each frequency within the note) experienced firstflight. I would transmute it for you if I could, but to do so I’d have to be in the same room with you, and to lean in close to you and hum the prayers into your ear.

PROCEDURE PRAYERS

Prayers, by the way, can be an invaluable reading tool. The roads will get dark, will detach, will fold over us, digest us, break us down, change us for good. You might get crossfaced and think about turning back. And that’s precisely what western Massachusetts wants you to do — it wants you to give up, to quit narrating and recording, to go home and let your father go.

But you can’t — you cannot. There is too much at stake. Instead of turning around and tracing your way back through the sentences (Good luck with that ! Who can say if the route’ll still be there?), first try pulling over for a moment and saying a quick Volksie verse. Let that prayer spread across the page, into the paper, down through the pages below it and into the chapters that follow. Sooner or later your psong will be heard — by a friend or a family member, if you sent it to them, or by Volkswagen, who’ll send out a nomad if need be. See, every cul-de-sac here is a prayer — a crooked, ’71 plea to something bigger than itself (my father, his father, his father’s father), a know-how that these spareparts and sparethoughts (the battens of pre-mourning I’d collected, the gallons of Fear of Death I’d stacked in the basement) were worth something. When it was all over, I didn’t know what to do with all of this life! I had to put it somewhere, so I put it here, converted it into Volkswagen roads, father-to-sons and procedure-songs.