As for him: This is one thing I’ll remember, he thinks, sitting with Julia at a dirty concrete picnic table at the Walt Whitman service area on the New Jersey Turnpike, with 150 miles of silence still ahead of them before reaching Washington, D.C., where they’ll spend their first night on the road. He’s watching a trio of goth kids with black-painted fingernails chain-smoking and eating from the same red cone of French fries—no other food, nothing to drink. Black hair, black frock coats, their bloodless ghost faces shiny in the sun.
For a moment, he wonders if the kids are as depressed as he is.
Look, he wants to say to Julia. Why do you think they’re sitting in the sun when there’s a table in the shade close by? It’s August. The air is thick with fumes.
But Julia is occupied. She’s amusing herself by alternately pressing the lock and unlock buttons on the remote key to her Lexus. The Beast is parked beneath some trees on the opposite side of the lot, so she can watch the car’s signal lights flash on and off.
He coaxed her here to show her the Press-a-Penny machine in the lobby of the Travel Mart. “First you insert a penny,” he explained. “Then you turn a crank that flattens the penny and embosses it with the Lord’s Prayer.” He didn’t tell her that he and his older brother, Peter, had loved the Press-a-Penny when they were children, had collected a dozen of the flattened souvenir coins. But this time, the Press-a-Penny was broken. When he saw it, he just stood there for a moment, wondering where the coins that he and Peter collected had gone off to, now that Peter was dead.
Julia was irritated. “What’s next?” she asked. “A snow globe from the gift shop?”
He watches now as the goth kids stand up from their French fry lunch and start off toward the parking lot—looking for the life of them like ravens in lace-up boots, trailing smoke. A single-file procession, back to their valley of ashes. If I were writing a dissertation on them, he thinks, I might call it “Funerary Rites of the New Jersey Turnpike.”
Of course, he has funerary rites of his own to tend to, though he isn’t sure how well he can perform them. That’s why he and Julia are stopping in Washington, D.C., to spend a night with Brian, Peter’s partner—“life partner,” Peter would have corrected him—whom he has not seen since Peter’s funeral.
“Please, stop in D.C.,” Brian urged him when he phoned to announce that he and Julia were driving to California. “Spend the night. You’re family.”
I’m family? Terence thought. No, my family was Peter.
His only family, in some ways. After their father had died of a heart attack, when they were kids, their mother began her long series of remarriages, first to a surgeon in Chicago, then to an artist in Santa Fe, and finally to a businessman in Dallas. With each, she declared that she’d finally found happiness, that she was starting what she called her “new life.”
By the time he and Peter were teenagers, they were sharing a room in a boarding school north of Boston. What would he have done without Peter—the older brother, always confident, star of the debate club, captain of the rugby team—to steer him into the world?
“We should hit the road,” Julia tells him, touching him on the shoulder.
And then, as they cross the parking lot, it occurs to him: Julia is his family now. This is his new life, as his mother would have put it.
It’s a long ride, past Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore. The mood between them in the belly of the Beast is strained but not entirely uncordial—almost like a marriage, he thinks. For a while, they even chat, safely: she praises the car’s leather-trimmed seats; he praises the sound system. By the time they reach the outskirts of Washington, he finds himself remembering how it was the night they met, at a grad student party, not long after Peter’s death. It was she who made the first move, walking straight across the room toward him. “So,” she said. “You’re the guy who loves cannibals.”
It thrilled him to think that someone could see him this way—as The Man Who Loves Cannibals, as an adventurer making his fearless way through the world, not as The Man Whose Brother Just Died.
“I’m studying a tribe in New Guinea,” he said, and heard himself add, “They’re not really cannibals. That’s a rumor they spread about themselves, to attract the shock tourism trade.”
She looked at him directly. “No,” she said. “I think they’re cannibals.”
The car’s navigation system alerts them: turn right in 200 yards. Then he sees the familiar corner of Peter’s block and soon Julia is parking the car.
But he’s not ready. What can he tell her? For a moment, he thinks he should tell her about New Guinea, how really he never liked it there—not the muddy Ndeiram Kabur River, not the endless, wet trek into the rain forest, loud with screeching parrots and the shrill clicking of cicadas. The only thing he liked at all was sleeping on the thatched floor of the tree houses among the tribespeople, and the way he sometimes woke at night to hear them breathing in unison, and he felt safer then than he ever had since childhood.
Fearless Julia is opening her car door. “Come on,” she says. And because he’s not sure what else to do, he follows her up the sidewalk to the house, where he sees Brian standing alone at the window. And this is another thing I’ll remember , he thinks as he mounts the steps: That I came to find Peter. That Peter is dead.