Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Once in a while one gives a quick glance and then looks away expressionlessly, as if minding his own business, as if embarrassed that we might have noticed he was looking at us. I see it now because we’ve been away from it for a long time. The driving is different too. The cars seem to be moving at a steady maximum speed for in-town driving, as though they want to get somewhere, as though what’s here right now is just something to get through. The drivers seem to be thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are.

I know what it is! We’ve arrived at the West Coast! We’re all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody’s in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. We’ve been out of it for so long I’d forgotten all about it.

We get into the stream of traffic going south and I can feel the hyped-up danger close in. I see in the mirror some bastard is tailgating me and won’t pass. I move it up to seventy-five and he still hangs in there. Ninety-five and we pull away from him. I don’t like this at all.

At Bend we stop and have supper in a modern restaurant in which people also come and go without looking at each other. The service is excellent but impersonal.

Farther south we find a forest of scrubby trees, subdivided into ridiculous little lots. Some developer’s scheme apparently. At one of the lots far off the main highway we spread out our sleeping bags and discover that the pine needles just barely cover what must be many feet of soft spongy dust. I’ve never seen anything like it. We have to be careful not to kick up the needles or the dust flies up over everything.

We spread out the tarps and put the sleeping bags on them. That seems to work. Chris and I talk for a while about where we are and where we are going. I look at the map in the twilight, and then look at it some more with the flashlight. We’ve covered 325 miles today. That’s a lot. Chris seems as completely tired as I am, and as ready as I am to fall asleep.

Why don’t you come out of the shadows? What do you really look like? You’re afraid of something aren’t you? What is it you’re afraid of?

Beyond the figure in the shadows is the glass door. Chris is behind it, motioning me to open it. He’s older now, but his face still has a pleading expression. “What do I do now?” he wants to know. “What do I do next?” He’s waiting for my instructions.

It’s time to act.

I study the figure in the shadows. It’s not as omnipotent as it once seemed. “Who are you?” I ask.

No answer.

“By what right is that door closed?”

Still no answer. The figure is silent, but it is also cowering. It’s afraid! Of me.

“There are worse things than hiding in the shadows. Is that it? Is that why you don’t speak?”

It seems to be quivering, retreating, as though sensing what I am about to do.

I wait, and then move closer to it. Loathsome, dark, evil thing. Closer, looking not at it but at the glass door, so as not to warn it. I pause again, brace myself and then lunge!

My hands sink into something soft where its neck should be. It writhes, and I tighten the grip, as one holds a serpent. And now holding it tighter and tighter we’ll get it into the light. Here it comes! NOW WE’LL SEE ITS FACE!

“Dad!”

“Dad!” I hear Chris’s voice through the door?

Yes! The first time! “Dad! Dad!”

“Dad! Dad!” Chris tugs on my shirt. “Dad! Wake up! Dad!”

He’s crying, sobbing now. “Stop, Dad! Wake up!”

“It’s all right, Chris.”

“Dad! Wake up!”

“I’m awake.” I can just barely make out his face in the dawn light. We’re in trees somewhere outside. There’s a motorcycle here. I think we’re in Oregon somewhere.

“I’m all right, it was just a nightmare.”

He continues to cry and I sit quietly with him for a while. “It’s all right”, I say, but he doesn’t stop. He’s badly frightened.

So am I.

What were you dreaming about?”

“I was trying to see someone’s face.”

“You shouted you were going to kill me.”

“No, not you.”

“Who?”

“The person in the dream.”

“Who was it?”

“I’m not sure.”

Chris’s crying stops, but he continues to shake from the cold. “Did you see the face?”

“Yes.”

“What did it look like?”

“It was my own face, Chris, that’s when I shouted. — It was just a bad dream.” I tell him he’s shivering and should get back into the sleeping bag.

He does this. “It’s so cold”, he says.

“Yes.” By the dawn light I can see the vapor from our breaths. Then he crawls under the cover of the sleeping bag and I can see only my own.

I don’t sleep.

The dreamer isn’t me at all.

It’s Phædrus.

He’s waking up.

A mind divided against itself — me — I’m the evil figure in the shadows. I’m the loathsome one. —

I always knew he would come back. —

It’s a matter now of preparing for it. —

The sky under the trees looks so grey and hopeless.

Poor Chris.

The despair grows now.

Like one of those movie dissolves in which you know you’re not in the real world but it seems that way anyway.

It’s a cold, snowless November day. The wind blows dirt through the cracks of the windows of an old car with soot on the windows, and Chris, six, sits beside him, with sweaters on because the heater doesn’t work, and through the dirty windows of the windblown car they see that they move forward toward a grey snowless sky between walls of grey and greyish-brown buildings with brick fronts, with broken glass between the brick fronts and debris in the streets.

“Where are we?” Chris says, and Phædrus says, “I don’t know”, and he really doesn’t, his mind is all but gone. He is lost, drifting through the grey streets.

“Where are we going?” says Phædrus.

“To the bunk-bedders”, says Chris.

“Where are they?” asks Phædrus.

“I don’t know”, says Chris. “Maybe if we just keep going we’ll see them.”

And so the two drive and drive through the endless streets looking for the bunk-bedders. Phædrus wants to stop and put his head on the steering wheel and just rest. The soot and the grey have penetrated his eyes and all but blotted cognizance from his brain. One street sign is like another. One grey-brown building is like the next. On and on they drive, looking for the bunk-bedders. But the bunk-bedders, Phædrus knows, he will never find.

Chris begins to realize slowly and by degrees that something is strange, that the person guiding the car is no longer really guiding it, that the captain is dead and the car is pilotless and he doesn’t know this but only feels it and says stop and Phædrus stops.

A car behind honks, but Phædrus does not move. Other cars honk, and then others, and Chris in panic says, “GO!” and Phædrus slowly with agony pushes his foot on the clutch and puts the car in gear. Slowly, in dream-motion, the car moves in low through the streets.

“Where do we live?” Phædrus asks a frightened Chris.

Chris remembers an address, but doesn’t know how to get there, but reasons that if he asks enough people he will find the way and so says, “Stop the car”, and gets out and asks directions and leads a demented Phædrus through the endless walls of brick and broken glass.

Hours later they arrive and the mother is furious that they are so late. She cannot understand why they have not found the bunk-bedders. Chris says, “We looked everywhere”, but looks at Phædrus with a quick glance of fright, of terror at something unknown. That, for Chris, is where it started.