Christopher Boucher - How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

“But he’ll die if you don’t help me right now. ”

The hospital pursed his lips.

I put an oily, plastic garbage bag on the counter.

“What’s this?” he said.

I pointed at it. “Look inside,” I said.

He opened the bag and peered inside. “You must be kidding me,” he said. He reached down to the bottom of the bag and pulled out the VW’s engineheart. It was small, rust-free and still beating. “This is—”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“It still holds stories,” I said. “A lot of them.”

“A transplant?”

I nodded.

“You want me to—”

“Yes. Please. Yes.”

His eyes were waiting rooms. “I should sit here and do nothing. I should let you watch your father die.”

“Please,” I said again. “I’ve already lost a son.”

HEART SUTURE

TOOLS

One engineheart

Questionhope, one bushel

One book of power

As many stories as you can find

PROCEDURE

Do as much as you possibly can.

DIAGNOSTIC

I wish I could have shown you that engineheart — the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still.

One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took the bolts off the casing and opened it up. Just to see how it worked. Opening that heart was like opening the first page of a book — there were characters (me, the Memory of My Father), there were themes (engineering, money, journalism), there was rhythm and chronology. I saw, in the images, old roads I’d forgotten — Huntington, Bird’s Pit, Loudville — and scenes from stories where the VW was just a newborn.

I can’t pretend to tell you how it worked. I tried to understand the science of it — the songs which ran from story to story, the small, multi-geared motors, the coils of wire — but it was too complex, too difficult to name.

But I do know that it held a true translation: miles to words, words to notes, notes to time. It was the heart that converted the pedestrian song of Northampton to something meaningful, and it did so via some sort of fusion: The turtle that howls a bluegrass tune at the edge of Bow Lake becomes a warning in the Volkswagen heart (Fear of Death + turtle = The Tale of the Fear-of-Death Turtle).

And that’s just the beginning — the first heart layer. It will take years and years of study, and the energy of every single living thing, to understand the tiny minds and roads in the subsequent layers, the relationship between the music of one layer and the topography of another, the mechanics at work to make every single heartmoment turn together.

The world has just begun to understand the mysteries of the Volkswagen heart!

The point is, this was always the way it was supposed to be. Even I could see that the Volkswagen Heart was wired for travel — genetically coded, in this case, to track that untrackable farm. His pages were already written — as are mine and yours.

Yes, yours too! I am looking into your eyes right now and I am reading your life, and I am excited/sorry for what the road holds for you. It’s going to be amazing/really difficult. You’ll love/loathe every minute of it!

THE STORY

The surgery on my father took twenty-four hours, most of which I spent in the waiting room, floating in anxiety. Early the next morning, the Memory of My Father appeared in the chair across from me, studying the wall clock and writing notes on scraps of paper. After a few hours of waiting he said, “I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry?”

“No, I said, my body floating above the chair.

“I’m starving,” he said.

Then he checked his watch, stood up and walked out of the waiting room. And that was the last time I saw him — he never came back from the cafeteria. He may be in Springfield or Canada, or he may still be waiting in line for hospital food.

A few minutes after that, a doctorcoat I didn’t recognize stepped into the waiting room and called my name. I turned to face him. His coat had been white before the surgery, but now it was technicolored — he looked like he’d just been through some sort of colorwar, and lost.

“Good news,” he told me. “The story goes on.”

My feet landed on the carpet. “It does?”

“Thanks to the heart,” he said. “Was that yours ?”

I shook my head. “It’s a Volkswagen heart,” I said.

“But who wrote those stories?”

“I did,” I said.

“The ones about Colorado? About Bingo?”

“Yup,” I said.

“You know, those are some of the loneliest stories I’ve ever read,” he said. “Have you ever thought about seeing a therapist? I have a colleague — he’s very good. He uses a — I think it’s called a therapy machine ? So the therapy is very precise.”

A few days later, after my father was restoried and speaking, I started up the Atkin’s Farm and drove it to the old, empty site of the Cooley-Dickinson Hospital. I parked it there and left it. The farm stands there still, as a Memory-All for the BayState’s son.

Now my father and I go there every Sunday. We sit at a table near the window and look out at the convenience store across the street and the vegetables crossing between Northampton and Florence. I tell my father about the 1971 Volkswagen Beetle — about our summit-mountain transmissions and our bingo-bio-breakdowns, about the quabbins and the junkfarms and the podium productions. I know he probably gets tired of the stories, but they’re the only way for him to know who the VW was — they’re all I can do to keep the Volkswagen alive.

And he tells me stories, too — farmtales, mostly, about the Heart Attack Tree commandeering Atkin’s up the Deerfield River, the Conway Inn telling anec after dote. Sometimes he’ll be mid-adventure and I’ll realize that the story he’s telling me (a trip into Hatfield or Pelham) isn’t his — that he never took that drive. He’s describing one of the Volkswagen’s experiences, a leftover in his engineheart, and he doesn’t know the difference. But I never correct him or say anything about it. No matter who’s telling it, I’m happy that the story is being told.

Every once in a while there will be some confusion while we’re sitting there: An ambulance or an injury will step into Atkin’s because they believe it’s the hospital. They’ll be bleeding, or screaming, or about to give birth. Someone will take them by the hand, lead them to a table and chair, and give them a donut. They will feel better immediately — they will no longer be ill, or pregnant, or in pain.

Here’s how this works: At Atkin’s, the donuts are homemade. Their outside is powdery, but when you split them open you find blood, and a heart. This, I know, is how everything works. Everything — the morning, the trees, every single page! — has a soft and plentiful center.

I have seen the future, and it is Atkin’s Farm, where every road is a Route 47.

Oh God! There is so much to look forward to.

* Later I would sell those legs for a few hours, which I used to buy a new intentioner for the Crescent Street house.

Christopher Boucher was born and raised in western Massachusetts, and he received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 2002. He currently lives in the Boston area and teaches writing and literature at Boston College . How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is his first novel .