John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

So, Reader/Listener/Fellow Traveler: You know now who I am and where I'm coming from, right? What in the storytelling business we call the Exposition. And you've learned where I'm at at the time I tell of and what my capital-P Problem is — my Ground Situation, if you will: "a more or less voltaged state of affairs pre-existing the tale's Present Action," as they say in Taletelling 101. So you needn't be in the biz yourself to guess what's supposed to happen next: the famous And then one day that shifts narrative gears from the general and habitual to the specific and different; the novel element, character, or turn of events that introduces what we old hands call the Dramatic Vehicle, whose job (pardon the tech talk) is to precipitate a Story out of that afore-established Ground Situation.

Ready? You couldn't be more so than was Call-Me-Fred, whose all-'round out-of-it-hood reaches the point (now it can be told) where he packs his Narrative Bags (a-moldering on the shelf for lo these many seasons) and bids family and disaffected citizenry bye-bye. Hits the figurative road, does Figurative Fred; slips incognito out of town, as it were, looking not unlike that Seedy Senior on the interstate afore-invoked. But he gets no farther than — oh, some Place Where Three Roads Meet, shall we figuratively say? Pauses there to scratch head/arse/whatever; sits himself down (on a handy rock-seat smack in the middle of that fabled intersection) to Consider — and here I sit yet, as if at a bus stop in mid-Nowhere, talking to myself whilst awaiting my Dramatic Vehicle. Back yonder, the once-impressive ramparts of my City, cruddy now from deferred maintenance. Somewhere off either thataway or this, that consummatory Hilltop where et cetera. And over thisaway or that? Don't ask me, folks; I'm a stranger here myself.

And then one day …nothing happened? Nah, that was yesterday. Too many yesterdays.

And then one day …a certain Who-Knows-Whom chugs up in as high-mileage a queer old brokedown buggy as ever clunked down the narrative road. Sees me sitting there a-twiddling my thumbs and asks me, Need a lift? Depends, says I, all the while giving him and his beat-up three-wheeler (yup) the once-over, as did he me: Where you bound for? I couldn't tell for sure, vis-à-vis that idling not-so-hotrod, whether it was some antique Real McCoy or a high-tech trike in rattletrap drag. No two ways about its idling driver, though: a graybeard geezer like Yours Truly, plaid flannel shirt and worn-but-clean blue jeans; one whose experience and know-how, if such he had, might or might not make up for slowed-down reflexes and loss of muscle.

Damned if I know, says he — maybe honestly, maybe not, as his expression included a twinkle among its seams and creases. You look like a fellow who's been around the block a time or two: I was hoping you could tell me which road leads where.

To which I heard myself reply, Check out our job descriptions, Stranger: Telling's not my department. Anyhow, if you and these wheels are what I take you-all for, and if I'm what it suits you to have me be, then we both know what lies ahead no matter which way we go.

By which I meant, of course, Complication of Conflict, Escalation of Stakes, and general up-ratcheting of Action toward Climax and Denouement. In a word, the usual.

"I swear," swears he, with sigh and headshake as if I'd said that last aloud instead of to myself (and speaking now 'twixt quote marks as if to keep that distinction clear): "Just thinking about all that hassle's enough to tempt a guy to say Screw it, you know?" Left hand still on the wheel, he scrabbles with his right through the junk on his buggy's floor. "Once upon a time I had me a six-pack in this old wreck somewhere. If I can find that sucker, I say let's set our butts down right here, pop ourselves a cool one, and shoot the shit a bit, okay? Let the Dragons and Princesses come to us for a change."

Says I, "Count me in, amigo" — no more quite meaning it than he did, was my guess — and I hauled over to his rolled-down window and stuck out my hand. "Name's Fred, by the way."

"Yeah, right." But gave it a squeeze. "Like mine's Isidore."

" Isidore? "

Grin: "Izzy for short — or Isn't he? You get the idea. And hey—" Opens half-stuck creaky driver's door with left hand while right holds aloft (like old Perseus brandishing Medusa's head, as I recall the scene) four-sixths of a pack of… uh, some cloudydark brew in unlabeled bottles with unmarked caps? Two of which — once he'd climbed out of his queer clunker and set himself and his trophy down on my bench-rock — he offed with the appropriate thingie on his Swiss Army knife. Then hands one bottle to me, a good fourth of it already foaming over from being either not chilled enough or not aged enough.

"Unlike you'n me, huh?" says he with stage wink behind his wire-rim specs, as if he could… well, read me like a book. "Some country boy's home brew, I reckon. Found it in that borrowed Vee-hickle. Here's to us?"

"Whoever that might be this time around. You leave your engine running?" For he'd made no move to turn it off.

Shrug. "More'n likely she'll run out of gas. Like us? But once you shut down an old fossil like that, who knows if it'll ever start up again." Raising his bottle, "You joining the party?" and takes a proper pull. As did I then, and resumed my place on the bench, the now two-pack between us.

Not a bad brew, considering.

"Thought you might think so. And on the bench pretty much sums us up, right?"

Speak for yourself, Isidore, said I to myself, there being evidently no need to speak aloud: Me, I've got an inning or two yet to play before I leave the field.

"Sez you," says he, but amiably, and adds, "Sez me too, pal. And like as not we're a brace of bullshitters, but I for one am in no rush to find that out."

Says you, pal, says I, likewise amiably: If I'm not mistaken, that's mainly why you're here.

"Mistaken you're not," allows he, and takes another pull of that yeasty world-temp brew. "No more'n half, anyhow. I'm here to find out where we go from here, same as you, but be damned if I'm in any hurry."

"Same as me" — speaking in quotes now, I see, same as he — and did same as he, and there we sat: Old-Fart Tale and ditto Teller, the one retold so many times that he doubts he has an encore left in him, the other having told so many that he doubts the same, but both with a half-assed hankering for Just One More before the narrative bar shuts down for keeps.

"Speaking whereof," says Mr. Call-Me-Izzy, and fishes out his handy-dandy again to uncap "what we can't rightly call our Last Drafts, can we now, seeing's how they 're not on tap and you'n I are still in First Draft. If you follow me?"

Well, I didn't at first, but then did, sort of; enough anyhow to pick up on that follow me business and say, "This time you got the job descriptions right, bro: I go where you tell me, so I'm told."

"Beg to disagree." But cordial clink of bottles, swig of contents, and wipe of mouth on back of hand before declaring, "Seems to me it's you go and I tell you: tell the folks Out There where you went, and went next after that, and what did en route."

Says I, "Whatever" — whereupon Pal Izzy intones, " And there they sat, and maybe sit yet: two bumps on the narrative log. Seems to me," still him talking, "that like it or not, we're what they call made for each other? "

I considered that proposition. Whatever it'd been before, the landscape round about our intersection was a flat plain now, as featureless as—

"A Samuel Beckett stage set?" offered my—

"Self-Appointed Sidekick?"

Yes, well. As I was remarking, there were only the two roads forking oblique left and oblique right, straight to the bare horizon, at equal angles to each other and to the road behind — which once upon a time had led to and from Home Base, but now (when I glanced back that way), to my surprise, stretched likewise to the three-hundred-sixty-degree Out Yonder.