Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

Josie had known the man, the bicycle man. He’d been a patient. When he’d first come in, a few years earlier, he’d had an agenda, saying, Can we skip the cleaning? I know what I want . He wanted to replace his six silver fillings with ceramics. The silver was near-black now and he’d married a young woman who found his mouth in need of improvement, so he scheduled two appointments on successive Friday afternoons, biked to the office in full florid regalia, clicking his way across the stone floor in his special orange shoes and spandex leggings, his racing shirt sweet with sweat. He was a diminutive and tightly wound man who checked his phone as his new ceramic fillings dried, who asked that the music in the office — it was Oklahoma! that day — be turned down a notch, thanks. He was an abomination and did no time in jail after the maiming. He was facing some civil charges but no one expected him to suffer much.

Josie had biked to work for a while, hoping her commute would be transformed in some way. For a week or so it was. But then it wasn’t. She tried taking a bus, which left her half a mile away, and she had to walk along the highway like some quixotic hitchhiker. But no matter how she traveled she was still passing the same buildings, the same parking lots. How does anyone stand it? After her parents and their atomization, she had always identified with the stayers, the homesteaders. But she knew no one who stayed anywhere. Even in Panama, most of the locals she met would just as soon live somewhere else, and most of them asked her casually or directly about getting visas to come to the U.S. So who stayed? Were you crazy to stay anywhere? The stayers were either of the salt of the earth, the reason there are families and communities and continuity of culture and country, or they were plain idiots. We change! We change! And virtue is not only for the changeless. You can change your mind, or your setting, and still possess integrity. You can move away without becoming a quitter, a ghost.

That Ohio town, then, was in Josie’s past. The past could be a delicious thing, to be done with something, with some place. To be finished and able to package it, beginning, middle, end, box it and shelve it. The town had once held hippies, Ohio hippies, all of whom seemed to Josie preternaturally grateful people, who were happy for the trees, happy for the rivers and the streams and birds, and the fact of their lives, and the existence of their weed and ready sex. They built their homes from mud and twigs, here and there a dome, here and there a hot tub. But now they were older, and were moving or dying, being replaced by these bicyclists, these fast-driving women in ponytails who desired everything, who so wanted the world that they would not accept limitations, interruptions, babies at restaurants or scooters on the sidewalks. Ohio, birthplace of most of the country’s presidents, was now home to most of its assholes.

IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO? Another one of those signs. This one was hand-painted, stuck on the embankment. Was there danger of forest fires here, too? Josie could see Sam’s house up ahead. It looked like a happy home, and her heart expanded as it grew closer. IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO? Josie smiled at the beautiful stupidity of the question. How about you and me? Me and you? Why the negativity? Why divide us? She was suddenly overcome by the cool wind, the granite sky, the fast-moving clouds, and she felt firmly placed in the world. Sam’s world was solid, was new to her but was solid, deeply rooted, logical. Josie’s children were inside that solid house, ecstatic with their cousins. They would stay a few days. She could park the Chateau on Sam’s block. Her kids and Sam’s would eat breakfast together. They could have many contented weeks, months. It was too soon to think of school here, but still. Sam could be her anchor. Tonight was a fluke, was just some thing. More important to remember was their long history together, their common narrative. How many young women are emancipated as they were? She was petty and crazed to give up so easily on Sam, wasn’t she? She needed to attach herself to this world, this hardy and rational world Sam had created. She could and would. But what was that rushing sound, that unholy white light?

LEONARD COHEN WAS WATCHING her children. This seemed to be what Sam was telling her, holding her hand like she was dying. Evidently they were in a hospital.

“Is it cancer?” Josie asked.

“You were in a ditch,” Sam said.

Now Josie remembered. She was run off the road by a truck, and she skidded down the road embankment and then…Then she didn’t know what. Something else must have happened. Her arm was wrapped in gauze and Sam was saying that Robert was at home with the kids. With Josie’s children. Who was Robert? Then Leonard Cohen’s face appeared before her.

“They’ve been asleep for hours,” Sam said. “It’s four a.m. They don’t know you’re here. You were asleep or passed out.”

“Is Leonard Cohen molesting my children?” Josie asked, and Sam assured her no, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, that he was a grandfather of six. Josie laughed. It hurt. Sam, who was married, was dating a grandfather.

“Did I break anything?” Josie asked, thinking it must be her ribs. Breathing was painful.

“I don’t think so,” Sam said, and now it was obvious she was still drunk. While Josie was being struck by a delivery truck and sent into a ditch, Sam had been at the bar, getting plowed.

Josie looked at Sam’s sweet face and wanted to punch it. Sam squeezed her arm, thinking they were having a moment. She hadn’t said anything about sorry yet. In her life Josie had heard only one or two people apologize. Wasn’t that something? Wouldn’t that be significant to future anthropologists? This was a time in history when no one was sorry. Even Ana, whose nickname for a year was Sorry, was still never sorry. Sorry took too much courage, too much strength and faith and rightness to have a place in this cowardly century.

“Am I on any drugs?” Josie asked.

“I don’t think so,” Sam said.

Josie figured it out. She was next to that IF NOT YOU, THEN WHO? sign when the truck swerved too close. She’d turned too quickly, and had slammed her head into the corner of the sign. Thus the laceration on the side of her head.

“Can I leave?”

“I don’t know. Let me ask.”

Soon there was a doctor by Josie’s side, a bald and bearded man with a worry-free face. He looked like everyone’s ideal high-school counselor. He introduced himself, but Josie couldn’t decipher the name. Dr. Blahblah. She asked him to repeat it, and he did, and now there seemed to be a hocking sound in the middle. Dr. Blachblah?

He asked her how she felt.

She told him she felt wonderful.

He told her they’d checked her neuros, they were fine, no sign of concussion, no dilated pupils.

“Did your sister tell you about the stitches?”

“No.” Josie looked at Sam, but Sam was looking out the window.

“Eight in your head. Over here,” Dr. Blachblah said, and touched an area above her ear. Now Sam’s eyes were back to Josie and were welling. “We were initially worried about a concussion,” he said, “because the EMTs said you were singing when they found you.”

Now Sam’s face hardened, as if Josie had dropped from pitiful to something lesser, something untouchable. Singing in a ditch — that had been the turning point.

“I understand you’re a dentist?” Dr. Blachblah asked. “I think your teeth are okay, but that’s your field.” He smiled, thinking he’d made a joke.

They got back to Sam’s house at five a.m. Leonard Cohen was sitting up on the couch, asleep, like one of those statues they put on public benches to scare children. Hearing the front door close, Sam’s grandfather — sex partner opened his eyes and looked around as if the world, and his limbs, had been replaced with new, unfamiliar versions during his slumber. When he got his bearings he stood up, a scarecrow given the gift of life, and kissed Sam on the cheek.