Christopher Boucher - How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

I looked back at him.

“That,” he said, pointing.

“It’s a power,” I said.

“A power?”

“—book,” I said. “I call it How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. ”

The piano shook his head and hunched over the riff’s steering wheel. “It’s pretty dischordant out here,” he said.

“What’s it do?” the drums said.

“Oh,” I said. I looked down at the book. “I don’t know. I always carry it with me. It holds stories.”

“Does it project them, or—”

I shook my head.

“Does it do calculations or solve problems?” the drums asked.

“No — it just stores the experience.”

“Converted?”

“No, raw,” I said. I looked down at the book. “So it doesn’t do much of anything, I guess.”

The drums looked at the book with disdain.

“Sturdy,” I said quietly.

“I’m sorry?” said the piano.

This book was a true friend — I wasn’t going to be embarrassed about what it did and didn’t do.

“That’s the other thing about this book,” I told the drums. “It’s sturdy.”

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURIS

But no one told me this when I was raising my son, when he was sick, when I was working frantically to heal his skincrust, fix his failing memory, his weak axles and wheels. I didn’t know about Jaws or the dump until later — at first I was ordering all of my parts new, which cost me hundreds of years ! Finally, when the VW was two and a half and sick as a forest, I clutch-cabled. I’d lost my job at the newspaper and wasn’t making an income from my father’s house, and I’d already sold everything I had of value: my banjo, my mountain bike, a few pieces of history that I wasn’t using anymore (I sold all of my experiences with the Lady from the Land of the Beans one Sunday for an hour and a half, and a thief projector scene-talked me into selling the Cape Cod Wedding — fast dancing with the Other Side of My Mother — for a measly forty minutes.)

I had to do something —the storypumps were no longer accepting my promises of false future-time — so I walked downtown one afternoon and went into the store called Faces. I told the VW that he could look around as long as he stayed close, and I went to the counter and spoke to an old kiosk with a beard. I told him that I wanted to sell my name, and he laid it out on the glass counter. I remember how much he liked it, how his eyes lit up as he ran his hands across it.

I remember asking him, “If I do sell it to you, can I get it back?”

He grimaced. “Hard to say. Some of these names sell the same day,” he said. “Others we can’t give away. Tricky business, naming.”

“This is only temporary,” I told him. “Within a few weeks I should be finished with my new power, a road called—”

“Boy — what a name ,” he said. He wasn’t listening.

“Anyway, I should be able to sell that route for a hundred-fifty, two hundred years,” I said. “And then I’ll be back for this.”

Just then the VW spit up. I heard him retch and turned around to see him standing by a face-adjustment booth, his eyes receding in embarrassment. I went over and picked him up. “What happened, buddy?”

“I think I threw up,” he said.

I looked into the oil and its images, spreading out on the carpet. “You OK now?”

“I’m tired,” he said.

“OK. Just a few more minutes, alright?”

He nodded.

I went back to the counter. The kiosk was still studying the name — turning it over and over in his hands. “It’s long, so that might keep people away. But who can tell? It really depends on what people are looking for. I can’t make any promises,” he said.

I nodded sadly. “I certainly understand the impossibility of promises,” I said.

The kiosk paid me twenty-two hours, and then he took my name off the table and put it in the glass case. I remember looking through the glass and seeing it there, the sudden pang in my chest.

This was my name —my father’s name, Old Forever’s too!

“I’ll be back soon,” I told him.

That was so long ago. For years I castawayed and faithed, believing that someday I would save enough hours to go back into that story and slap my time on the table. “When they give me my name back?” I used to say, “I’m going to wear it like a Saturday.”

But I’m no longer the person I was, and I know for certain that I’ll never be that person again. I couldn’t find him/her if I wanted to, even if I had a map of words to go by. The booking has taken everything from me and left me an integer, an underline, a noface.

There isn’t a word on the planet that I would want to be called by.

VOLKSWAGEN DOESN’T STOP!

I can’t say how far the four of us drove in that riff — how many chords or choruses, or how long it took — but I do remember that the night itself seemed to age. The starlit mountain-notes seemed to turn grey around the edges. The moon grew a beard.

I aged, too. Sometime during that riff my hair started falling off my head, and the skin of my hands softened and took on language-lines. My back slumped and my vision blurred. Was this the cost of my worry? My Fear of Death, translated? This was a different kind of learning — the attainment of knowledge that can only be gained from crushing loss after crushing loss. That fucking highway took years of time of money off my life, during which all of my memories were executed. Several choruses later, I woke up and could no longer see the edges of letters. Further down the road, an old Bean Woman returned to Northampton to visit me as I soured in the Northampton State Hospital — she put her hand on my knee and said, “I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” I said.

“For this,” she said, gesturing to the room around me. “For all that you’ve lost.”

After she left, I looked out the window and I didn’t even remember that she’d visited, or how we knew each other. I didn’t remember any of the people that I loved — Emily, or the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, or my brother, or the Two Sides of My Mother.

I forgot I ever even had a father.

• • •

I’m not sure how much time had passed — one hour or several — when the bioleggers and vegetables around us started slowing down, but soon the traffic was dirging and we were stuck in a noisejam. Inside the riff I was frantic, and I wondered aloud if it made sense for me to get out and run ahead on foot. The piano tried to calm me down. “I’m sure this will clear up soon,” he said. A minute or two later he pointed through the windshield. “See? The traffic’s speeding up over there.”

It was true; in a distant moment, the bioleggers and vegetables were passing the obstruction and regaining speed.

We eased towards the source of the jam. The bass said, “What is it — an accident?”

“Fucking construction, probably,” said the drums.

But I could see what it was: Something was stopped in the center of the highway — the cars were moving around it.

“Someone broke down,” said the drums.

When I leaned forward, I could see a blue and silver shape in the center of the song. It appeared to have both wheels and wings — silver wings.

Tin wings.

No.

“What’s—” said the piano.

No.

Inside me, a wave crashed on the shore and carried everything away.

“Holy shit,” said the drumset.

“Is that—?” said the bass.

“No,” I said. I said that word forever — I have never stopped saying it.

“That’s a Volkswagen, isn’t it?” said the piano.

“No,” I said again.

“It is,” the bass said.