The miranda, p.4
The Miranda, page 4
Speer’s walk is an interesting case. As his feet trod the path in the Spandau Prison garden, his mind took him to places in the real world outside the prison, the places he’d have gone to if he’d actually been walking in that world. He even persuaded the prison library to buy him maps and travel guides so he could imagine his journey more accurately.
I wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea. In one way, sure, there was pleasure to be had in imagining yourself to be walking in places you’d never been and had only seen in books. But it seemed to me that a lot of frustration must go with it too. Speer could imagine himself anywhere he liked, but the moment he stopped imagining, which is to say the moment he stopped walking, he was back in the garden, back in the prison yard, in the place he’d never left. That surely must have made things worse. For me it was different. I didn’t regard my own yard as a prison, though I’m sure some people might have thought it was. More than that, I was content to walk in the here and now. I didn’t need my mind to transport me to some faraway place or time.
According to Speer’s published diary, he and Hess had some discussions about whether his walking was inherently sane. Speer at first claimed it wasn’t and wrote, “I insisted on my claim to have a screw loose.” This is a translation obviously, but still a strange thing for anybody to insist on, I’d have thought, unless he calculated that symptoms of insanity might speed up his release. Hess, however, wasn’t buying it. “That just happens to be your pastime,” he said, quite reasonably it seems to me, and this is surely one of the very rarest moments in history when a person is tempted to side with Rudolf Hess rather than Albert Speer.
By September 18, 1956, Speer had come around to Hess’s point of view and didn’t think his walking was so crazy after all. In fact he saw it as a sign of sanity. He wrote in his diary on that day, “I have walked 3,326 kilometers; counting the winter that makes a daily average of 9.1 kilometers. As long as I continue my tramping, I shall remain on an even keel.”
Apart from the walking, I’ve never had any desire to emulate Albert Speer in any possible way. Equally it never occurred to me that walking would be the means of either proving or disproving my sanity. I’ve always been well aware, both personally and professionally, that trying to prove your sanity to other people is a fool’s game. Proving it to yourself strikes me as even more of a problem. And proving it to your ex-wife may turn out to be just about impossible.
NINE
My cell phone was not a very smart one, but I didn’t need or want it to be. I didn’t use it for e-mail, or to listen to music or podcasts, or to do online banking; I didn’t use it as a pedometer or map or GPS. I used it only for phone calls, and I knew there wouldn’t be many of those. But the best thing about my cell phone, about any cell phone I guess, is that you can talk to the person on the other end and you don’t have to interrupt your walking.
On Day 14 I got a phone call from Carole. I wasn’t entirely surprised. She called me every now and then to make sure I was “all right,” whatever that meant. I found this understandable, even welcome on occasions. It was good to know that, for better or worse, she still cared about me, and the truth was I still cared about her too, even though I was the one who’d insisted on the divorce. She had been angry and wounded at the time, often tearful, occasionally threatening savage revenge.
But she had, in some sense, come to accept it: you can’t keep insisting that you want to stay married to somebody who doesn’t want to stay married to you. She had consoled herself by believing that I was in the middle of some deep personal crisis, and I was happy enough to let her believe that. So she called me every now and again, to keep the lines of communication open, to make sure I was “all right,” and to assure me that she was all right too. She had apparently given me two weeks to settle into the new house, and now it was time to talk.
I answered the call and kept on walking.
“How are you?” Carole asked, a little too earnestly for my tastes.
I could picture her leaning against the counter in the kitchen—what had once been our kitchen, a place where we’d talked and eaten and drunk, and sometimes argued, and once in a while had sex. Now it was her kitchen. Try as I might, I couldn’t stop myself from feeling a small, sharp pang of loss.
“I’m all right,” I said.
“You got the basket of fruit?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
“You’re settled into the new house?”
“Not really. Not yet.”
“It takes a while.”
“For sure.”
“So how are you filling your time?”
I had no reason to lie to her. “I’m doing a lot of walking,” I said.
“Really?” she said. “Really?”
I wasn’t surprised that she sounded surprised. Obviously she knew I’d once been an enthusiastic walker, but she also knew that at a certain point, for reasons she didn’t understand, I’d stopped walking completely. The fact that I was walking again might possibly be taken as an indication that I was better than just “all right,” though naturally, at that point, she knew nothing about my decision to walk around the world.
“I only walk in my own backyard,” I said.
“Well, you have to start somewhere,” said Carole.
“And end somewhere too,” I said.
“Are you walking alone or with other people?”
The way she said it suggested that she thought solitary walking was evidence of psychological disturbance. Tell that to Rousseau. But I didn’t mention Rousseau. She knew I had long been a solitary walker, and although she accepted it, she didn’t really get it. Carole was enthusiastic about “exercise” (that strange word). She worked out in the gym, went swimming, rode a bike, but she had never been much of a walker. Some people just aren’t. When we were married I did all my serious walking alone. I suppose I could say that had something to do with why we split up, and it wouldn’t be a complete lie.
“I’ve been walking with Albert Speer,” I said, admittedly not all that helpfully. My ex-wife wasn’t a student of twentieth-century history.
“I don’t know him, do I?” she said. “Is he a new friend?”
“He’s not a real friend,” I said.
There must have been something wrong with the way I said that. Carole was instantly suspicious.
“He’s not an imaginary friend is he, for Christ’s sake?”
“No,” I said. Just how crazy did she think I was? “He was perfectly real. But he died thirty some years ago.”
There was some equally dead air at the other end of the phone. Maybe Carole thought I was walking with ghosts, but then maybe I was; maybe we all are.
“He was a high-ranking Nazi,” I said, “but he was a ‘good Nazi.’ Even the Allies said that.”
“Are you mocking me, Joe?”
I didn’t think I was, but I also knew I wasn’t the best judge of these things.
In retrospect I can see it may have been stupid and unnecessarily provocative to tell my ex-wife that I was walking with a dead Nazi. Possibly she imagined I was striding around in jackboots, with swastikas painted on my cheeks. I could perhaps have told her instead that I was walking with, or in the spirit and tradition of, some of the world’s greatest travelers, adventurers, writers, artists, saints, sages, and nomads. I could have said that I was walking with Thoreau and Whitman, Blake and Coleridge, Dorothy and William Wordsworth; with explorers like Oates and Amundsen, like Speke and Burton; with Paul the Hermit and John Bunyan, James Joyce, Emma Sharp, Guy Debord, et al. I could have said I was the spiritual descendant of a whole gang of pedestrians, pilgrims, fire walkers, moon walkers, tightrope walkers, labyrinth walkers, flâneurs flaneurs, psychogeographers, and so on. It would all have been more or less true, but I’m not sure that Carole would have found it a whole lot less troubling than talk of Albert Speer.
“I’m not mocking you,” I said, trying to sound all sweet reason, and then, in as sincere and unironic a way as possible, I told her what I was doing. It was, obviously, the first time I’d told anybody about my grand project, and I didn’t have my explanation down pat, but I told her what I’ve told you, about the ellipsoidal nature of Earth, the problems of literally walking around it, and how I intended to walk twenty-five miles a day for a thousand days. The explanation didn’t take me very long, and I wasn’t nearly as articulate as I’d have liked to be, but I got the job done.
“You’re walking around the world,” Carole said when I’d finished.
“Yes.”
“Without leaving your own yard.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I considered a number of smart replies, “because it’s not there” among them, but in the end I said, “I don’t think I need a reason.”
She was wise enough not to argue about that.
“You don’t think this is a little . . . eccentric?”
“Sure,” I said, “but not crazy.”
“I never said you were crazy. I never said that. But don’t you think it would be better if you walked with other people, you know, actual people? Rather than imaginary Nazis? You could join a hiking club or something: make friends, have a social life, maybe meet a new woman.”
Did she not know me at all? Well, no, in many ways I’d made sure that she didn’t.
“I have so very many reasons for not wanting to join a hiking club,” I said, but I didn’t feel the need to explain what they were.
There was a long silence, which enabled me to cover a full circuit of my path.
“Look, Joe,” my ex said at last, “don’t be afraid to ask for help.”
I said I wasn’t. She probably didn’t believe me. She was probably right not to.
TEN
Of course I did things other than walk, but not many, and not with much enthusiasm. I tried to put my house in order, do some unpacking, but my heart wasn’t in it, and it didn’t seem like a priority, and of course I didn’t have any shelves to put my books on even if I unpacked them. Otherwise my spare time was spent reading or watching a little basic cable. That was enough. I had decided to live without the Internet—not a Luddite decision, but rather that, like any sane person, I knew the Internet was full of snoopers and eavesdroppers and betrayers. I didn’t want anyone peering over my shoulder, scrutinizing my habits and needs, virtually or otherwise. I didn’t want to leave a trail, didn’t want persons unknown to know too much about me, not even my tastes in cat videos or pornography.
I didn’t go out in the evenings. I didn’t want to go to a bar or a restaurant or the movies, and besides, those things weren’t exactly abundant in the area. It did occur to me that I might be turning into a sad, lonely shut-in, but the fact was that after walking twenty-five miles in a day, I was usually pretty tired, if also profoundly content, and I didn’t want to do much of anything, although I certainly did plenty of sleeping.
And of course I had to feed myself. I had to get groceries. The nearest place to buy food was a mile and a half away, not exactly a long way, a five-minute drive. A mile and a half was even walking distance, a mere nothing for a man who was planning to cover twenty-five thousand miles, but in fact I was already feeling resentful at having to do any walking anywhere except in my own yard. Walking through the aisles in the store, walking across the parking lot, even walking from my own front door to my car and back again seemed like a waste of time and energy since they weren’t part of the grand project.
The supermarket, on the far edge of the village, was named Nature’s Cornucopia, a name that said more about its ambitions than its reality. In its dreams this was an “alternative” enterprise, and sure, it had hand-painted signs over the various sections, and it sold organic this, artisanal that, and heirloom the other, and the people who worked there seemed to be some kind of collective, maybe even a cult. The place ensured that a man wouldn’t starve, but once you’d been inside for a while you noticed a rising feline stink, you saw that some of the produce was so natural that it had begun the all too natural processes of decay, and you also became aware that basic items like bread and milk and breakfast cereal were ridiculously expensive.
There was a big-name, corporate supermarket about fifteen miles down the highway, where things were no doubt fresher and cheaper, but a fifteen-mile drive struck me as an intolerable distraction. Online shopping was, of course, not an option.
I’d first gone to Nature’s Cornucopia on Day 8, done a week’s shopping and hated the process. I gritted my teeth and went again on Day 15, and the hatred grew. I shopped there again on Day 22 and found it all completely intolerable, and I felt I might go insane if I ever had to go back in there. But as I said, life sometimes brings you what you need, or think you do.
As I was escaping from the store with my load of overpriced, not very fresh groceries on Day 22, I saw it had a community noticeboard. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? And there were postcards and flyers offering all kinds of services—computer repair, tax preparation, pet sitting, massage, personal training—but nobody was offering anything as simple and useful as grocery shopping.
I was disappointed, but then as I walked out to my car, and as I was putting my groceries into the trunk, I noticed somebody slipping flyers under the windshield wipers of the cars in the parking lot. It was a youngish woman, thin but by no means waifish, energetic, serious looking, determined, displaying elements of miscellaneous fashionability, from punk to Goth to rock chick to hippie: a leather jacket, tiger-print leggings, hair yanked up in a top knot and dyed an improbable purple black.
As she came alongside my car, I took a flyer directly from her. The paper was canary yellow, and the font was big and strident:
NEED HELP?
CLERICAL? DOMESTIC? LIGHT MANUAL?
BASIC HOUSE MAINTENANCE?
SIMPLE GARDENING? CAR WASH?
HEY, THAT’S WHAT I DO!!!
(PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING LEGAL)
MIRANDA
And then there was a phone number. I was a little surprised that she stood there while I read the flyer, and when I’d finished I saw she was staring at me with big, eager, persuasive eyes. She had the kind of face that told you she was interestingly troubled. I saw no harm in that. Which of us isn’t troubled? But so few of us are interesting. She also looked like quite a tough cookie, and I didn’t mind that. If she’d appeared more harmless I might have been more suspicious.
“Does ‘anything’ include grocery shopping?” I asked.
“Sure. That’s legal, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is.”
“Any more questions, give me a call,” she said.
“Are you Miranda?”
“Yeah. You think maybe I’m fronting for a consortium?”
I said, “No, I didn’t think that.”
When I got home I called the number and spoke to her again, and I asked if she could come over to discuss work. She said she could probably fit me in the next afternoon. I said that would probably be fine. I guess neither of us wanted to appear too eager.
Next day she arrived in a noisy red truck, and she was now wearing black vinyl pants and a T-shirt for a rock band I’d never heard of. She had a couple of tattoos visible, one on each arm, an orchid and a martini glass. I thought this probably wasn’t the way many people would have presented themselves for a job interview, but once we started talking it wasn’t clear whether I was interviewing her or she was interviewing me. I could work with that. I know how to charm people when I need to, and I thought I was a good judge of character. Well, no doubt everybody thinks that.
During the interview Miranda walked with me while I did circuits of the path. This wasn’t meant to be any kind of test: I could happily have employed somebody who didn’t care about walking, although I couldn’t have employed somebody who found it absurd. Miranda didn’t. She was perfectly willing to walk along with me.
By the time we’d completed a handful of circuits, she’d already told me a lot more about herself than I needed to know, about having made some bad choices in life, involving men and recreational drugs mostly, she said, but she was trying to put all that behind her, and now she was getting her life in order, planning to go to college, and she calculated that some regular but occasional and not too demanding work was what she needed to stay “straight” and get a little money together before enrollment. I wasn’t especially interested in knowing these things, but I was glad she wasn’t trying to be mysterious.
“What are you going to study?” I asked, keeping up my end of the bargain.
“Bartending,” she said.
In general I think education is a good thing, at least for those who want it. And I didn’t intend to appear snobbish or disapproving at the mention of bartending college, but maybe I failed in that.
“Actually mixology,” Miranda said. “Handcrafted cocktails. That’s what they call them these days.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Yes, it is fine. And I know what you’re thinking, that in the old days you’d just walk into a bar and ask if they needed any help, and they’d take you on, and then you could learn on the job. But these days you need a college degree for everything. Or at least a diploma.”
“I understand that,” I said.
I’d already decided I wanted to take her on, and I told her so somewhere toward the end of our twentieth circuit. Then we did a few more as I told her what I needed her to do: basically go grocery shopping for me so that I didn’t have to leave my yard.
“Why don’t you want to leave your yard?” she asked, and I appreciated her directness, even if I could have done without it.
“Because if I leave my yard I won’t be able to do my walking,” I said.
“You must really like walking.”
“More than like,” I said.
“Walking’s good,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“I should probably do more of it.”
“Only if you want to,” I said.
