months and months and months when he felt certain that he’d finally reached the very bottom of his life.
All that would be erased, he thought. He remembered the way his grandfather had described the death of Jonah’s grandmother, years and years before Jonah was born. “Excaping this world,” Jonah’s grandfather had said with wistful admiration, as if the grandmother’s death had involved something masterful and Houdini-like instead of a mere car accident. It was an idea that Jonah felt friendly toward. “Excaping,” he murmured under his breath as he crossed the Missouri River into Iowa. And then he corrected himself. “Escaping,” he said. “
Es
caping.”
He’d made a list of ways that he could improve himself, just to start out with. Grammar, posture. Training himself to say “library” instead of “lieberry,” “picture” instead of “pitcher.” Straightening his cowardly stoop and squaring his shoulders when he walked. Looking people in the eye when they spoke to him. Smiling. Easy stuff. As he drove along I-80, as glowing green-and-white signs caught his headlights and shimmered with the names of exit numbers and towns, he listened to a tape he had borrowed permanently from the Little Bow Public Library.
Fifteen Steps on the Ladder of Success,
it was called, and as he edged the speedometer up toward eighty, a man with a resonant, vowel-thick voice read aloud. Happiness and Unhappiness were choices that we made, the man said. They were states of mind. “ ‘Problems’ have no life of their own,” the man explained. “ ‘Problems’ are mirages that seem to exist from a low state of mind, and they gain importance only because we choose to give it to them.” Jonah listened, running his tongue over his dry lips, the glare of westbound headlights passing over his car, over his face, sliding up the body of the old Mustang like the palm of a hand, his mother’s ashes in an urn in the passenger seat beside him. The stuff the man was reading sounded a bit like bullshit to him, but he hoped it wasn’t.
——
Of course there were things he couldn’t change about himself, things he couldn’t slip loose of. There were, for example, the scars that had been left on him by the dog Elizabeth all those years ago, and every time he walked into a gas station or a wayside cafe, he was aware of the way people lifted their heads, turning their eyes sidelong to observe him, tracing over his skin. He tried to nod firmly at particularly frank gapers—an old farmer in coveralls, sipping his watery coffee, a tattooed motorcycle man, a little boy. He dipped his head, let his bangs fall into his eyes as he walked down the rows of vinyl booths, following a waitress he had flustered by his attempt to smile and make eye contact. There was a flutter among the people, as among grazing animals who sense a predator, and they glance away quickly when he nodded at them.
Jesus Christ,
they thought.
What happened to him?
The scar they noticed first ran along his cheek from the edge of his eye to his lip. A keloid: a smooth, raised line of healed skin which they might associate with a cesarean section or appendectomy but not with a face. Not in America, not in the twentieth century. It made them think of a pirate, a thug from a pulp novel, a hideous blind beggar in a third-world country, and though there had been several revisions over the years, attempts at plastic surgery, the scar remained Jonah’s most prominent feature. He had grown used to certain looks and their variations: the small-mouthed, wide-eyed gaze of frightened, judgmental middle-aged women who associated him with crime; the assessing once-over of macho worker guys who wondered if he’d had harder fights than they; the liberal-benevolent assumptions that he’d had a tragic life, and the subsequent game of pretend, the shifty act of direct eye contact, the ones who tried to make believe they hadn’t noticed. But no matter where they looked they
All that would be erased, he thought. He remembered the way his grandfather had described the death of Jonah’s grandmother, years and years before Jonah was born. “Excaping this world,” Jonah’s grandfather had said with wistful admiration, as if the grandmother’s death had involved something masterful and Houdini-like instead of a mere car accident. It was an idea that Jonah felt friendly toward. “Excaping,” he murmured under his breath as he crossed the Missouri River into Iowa. And then he corrected himself. “Escaping,” he said. “
Es
caping.”
He’d made a list of ways that he could improve himself, just to start out with. Grammar, posture. Training himself to say “library” instead of “lieberry,” “picture” instead of “pitcher.” Straightening his cowardly stoop and squaring his shoulders when he walked. Looking people in the eye when they spoke to him. Smiling. Easy stuff. As he drove along I-80, as glowing green-and-white signs caught his headlights and shimmered with the names of exit numbers and towns, he listened to a tape he had borrowed permanently from the Little Bow Public Library.
Fifteen Steps on the Ladder of Success,
it was called, and as he edged the speedometer up toward eighty, a man with a resonant, vowel-thick voice read aloud. Happiness and Unhappiness were choices that we made, the man said. They were states of mind. “ ‘Problems’ have no life of their own,” the man explained. “ ‘Problems’ are mirages that seem to exist from a low state of mind, and they gain importance only because we choose to give it to them.” Jonah listened, running his tongue over his dry lips, the glare of westbound headlights passing over his car, over his face, sliding up the body of the old Mustang like the palm of a hand, his mother’s ashes in an urn in the passenger seat beside him. The stuff the man was reading sounded a bit like bullshit to him, but he hoped it wasn’t.
——
Of course there were things he couldn’t change about himself, things he couldn’t slip loose of. There were, for example, the scars that had been left on him by the dog Elizabeth all those years ago, and every time he walked into a gas station or a wayside cafe, he was aware of the way people lifted their heads, turning their eyes sidelong to observe him, tracing over his skin. He tried to nod firmly at particularly frank gapers—an old farmer in coveralls, sipping his watery coffee, a tattooed motorcycle man, a little boy. He dipped his head, let his bangs fall into his eyes as he walked down the rows of vinyl booths, following a waitress he had flustered by his attempt to smile and make eye contact. There was a flutter among the people, as among grazing animals who sense a predator, and they glance away quickly when he nodded at them.
Jesus Christ,
they thought.
What happened to him?
The scar they noticed first ran along his cheek from the edge of his eye to his lip. A keloid: a smooth, raised line of healed skin which they might associate with a cesarean section or appendectomy but not with a face. Not in America, not in the twentieth century. It made them think of a pirate, a thug from a pulp novel, a hideous blind beggar in a third-world country, and though there had been several revisions over the years, attempts at plastic surgery, the scar remained Jonah’s most prominent feature. He had grown used to certain looks and their variations: the small-mouthed, wide-eyed gaze of frightened, judgmental middle-aged women who associated him with crime; the assessing once-over of macho worker guys who wondered if he’d had harder fights than they; the liberal-benevolent assumptions that he’d had a tragic life, and the subsequent game of pretend, the shifty act of direct eye contact, the ones who tried to make believe they hadn’t noticed. But no matter where they looked they
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