Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

He had gone back to Cleveland for his grandmother’s funeral. He’d flown east for the funeral, but he hadn’t wanted to fly back so he’d bought the car in Cleveland. He planned to drive straight back, but first he drove down to Dayton to visit an old college buddy. He stayed three days, and from the buddy’s house he called an old girlfriend, divorced now and living in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. He stayed at her apartment and they spent three days drinking chilled Beaujolais and fucking like weasels, and on the third night he asked her to marry him.

“Let’s not move too fast, Jerry,” she said. “You’ve never been married. I have. I’m still getting over the divorce. Let’s live together, you can move right in here or I’ll come out to L.A., whichever you’d rather. I don’t really care where I live. And then, you know, we’ll take it from there.”

The next morning she went to work. As soon as her car was out of the driveway he threw all his things in his suitcase, jumped in the Ford, and got the hell out of there.

Jesus, talk about your narrow escapes.

He drove across the country, but he kept getting off the Interstate and just driving around. When he got back to L.A. he’d step back into his life, but he didn’t seem willing to do that. In Grand Junction, Colorado, he took a room at a Ramada Inn and couldn’t leave the room. The first day he went downstairs to the coffee shop for his meals, but then he stopped being able to do that, and he would call up Domino’s Pizza two or three times a day and have a pizza and a couple of Cokes delivered. There was a Coke machine on his floor, next to the elevator, but he didn’t even want to go that far.

After four days of Coke and pizza he got in his car and split. He didn’t even stop at the desk to check out. They had run a slip with his credit card, they could take care of it, and he didn’t want to talk to anybody. He hadn’t eaten since noon the previous day because he hadn’t wanted to talk to the girl at Domino’s Pizza, not even over the phone.

At Salt Lake City something made him head north. At Baker, Oregon, something made him get off 1-84 and take roads without even consulting a map or paying heed to the highway markers. He had known something was coming moments before he saw them walking at the side of the road. He had felt something waiting for him, feared it, and yet was drawn to rush forward to meet it. He had thought it might be a car wreck, an accident waiting for him to happen into it, and so he had failed to recognize them as he sped past them, but something must have registered, because he had almost wrecked the car, braking savagely to a stop, swinging around, and racing back after them.

Now he was quiet most of the time, his silence pierced periodically by manic episodes and furious rambling monologues. Several members of the group had had experiences similar to Martha’s, with a siege of physical or mental agitation leading them spontaneously into hyperventilation, at which point someone would get them to lie down and breathe in a fluid rhythm, with no pause between one breath and the next. The breathing seemed to produce a cleansing energy in the body. Already Jerry had gone into hyperventilation three times. The first time he panicked and couldn’t breathe, but Martha talked him through it. The other times were easier, and in each instance he maintained the breathing rhythm for about an hour, rested for an hour afterward, and emerged from the experience refreshed and lighter, cleaner, clearer.

Now, after walking in silence for a mile or so alongside Lissa and Georgia Burdine, he looked off to his left and was struck by the way a long cigar-shaped cloud was just floating across the face of a snowcapped mountain.

It was as if he had never seen a cloud before, or a mountain.

“My God!” he cried. “Will you look at that. You don’t see a thing when you drive, do you? Even if you’re not watching the road, even if somebody else is driving. Even if you look out the window, even if you see all this, you don’t really see it, you know? You get a movie, you never get a still photo. You just move through it, you say how beautiful it all is and you remember how it looked and you never really saw it.”

He walked off the shoulder of the road, clambered up onto a small outcropping of rock. “Just look!” he commanded. “Everything is different. Every step you take you see a different thing. Every cloud is different. You look at a cloud, I mean really look at it, and it floats off and you’ll never see a cloud exactly like it again. They say every snowflake’s different. Billions and billions of snowflakes and there’s never two identical. I always thought how do they know? Who keeps tabs on the snowflakes? How many billion billions of them fall and melt away and no one ever sees them, let alone holds a magnifying glass to them? How could each and every one of them really be different? Because how much variation is possible in a simple fucking thing like a snowflake?