(from Book VI, Morphametosis)

Life as an imaginary author named Sol Luckman carried on much the same as when I was an imaginary character named Luke Soloman—with a handful of noteworthy exceptions. First, as a native of South America, I developed an instinctual craving for tapioca. Second, I noticed my Portuguese sounded more clipped, more “Spanish,” an equatorial sotaque with subtle Amazonian intonations. Third, I remarked my posture improved, that I tended to hold myself more erect as my overall bearing became more—for lack of a better word—noble. Fourth and finally, I began to pick up on a marked difference in people’s attitudes toward me.

No longer “white,” I came to realize I wasn’t just dispossessed in the first impressions of the ruling class, wasn’t just another human being temporarily out of luck maybe but a fellow Homo sapiens all the same. I was another species entirely, a distant genetic cousin, one measurably lower on the evolutionary ladder—an inequality not even money, which I now had enough of to last me a while, could erase.

But fortunately, dinheiro did have a way of opening closed doors. I was able to move into a furnished penthouse (third-floor) apartment in a quaint little building in Gávea with picturesque views of the jungle out my bedroom and study windows and a landlord willing to overlook the fact I was indigenous (as opposed to indigent)—for three months’ rent in advance plus my security deposit.

And so it was with Luke Soloman steadily becoming a figment of the past that I, Sol Luckman, a figment of the present, took up independent residence for the first time. Like any pseudonym worth his salt, I focused my new existence on writing. I bought a used laptop with a printer and picked up where I’d left off when distrações got the best of me: Chapter Three of Book IV, “Le Dépanneur,” for now writing as Sol writing about Luke, though knowing I’d eventually be writing as Sol writing about Sol, even though I’d still be author and protagonist of the Beginner’s Luke Series ...

It may sound confusing, but in reality it was childishly simple: as author of my authorial self, I was merely drawing a circle.


If I could have designed my ideal workspace, it would have been my study. The natural lighting, the white stucco walls, the gentle whirring of the ceiling fan, the antique roller chair, the little brazil-wood desk facing the large French window opening outward onto the mata from where I could peer out over my laptop at diminutive furry-faced monkeys called micos playing, where for a refresher I could drift away from the digitized  screen and admire the rolling and frothing in swell after swell of dense tropical vegetation complete with enormous humanoid sunflowers bowing and swaying. I often fancied myself a latter-day Hemingway scribbling stories on safari, and was always a little dépaysé emerging from my remote African bungalow into the chic hustle and bustle of Rio.

I soon began to entertain hopes of a more sustained, more focused life in letters. Not counting Carnaval week and, later, several days when I was ill, I entered a period of unparalleled productivity that lasted through April during which I finished Book IV, capping it off with “The Last Métro,” and forged ahead into Book V, The Accidental Gringo—transitioning Luke from France to Brazil, staging his farce in emigration, then landing him in the Sasquema household with its multiple layers of intrigue. Initially, I wasn’t sure how to extract him from such a fix. But I had faith if I just kept writing, I’d figure out a way to construct an appropriate dénouement.

Speaking of the Sasquema household, Rita found me before January was out, showing up early one morning as I was slicing a pineapple for breakfast, clutching a tattered suitcase in one bony hand and the boom-box I’d given her for Christmas in the other.

“Meu filho, you’ve changed!” she said tearfully as we embraced.

“How do I look?”

“Better.”

“Your timing, Rita, if not your tact, is impecavel. Por favor, won’t you join me for breakfast?”

“I couldn’t possibly do that, Senhor Luckman.”

“Por favor, call me Sol.”

“I couldn’t possibly do that, Sol.”

I finally prevailed on her to be my guest, which didn’t stop her from trying to wait on me hand and foot. But I’d already made up my mind Rita’s indentured servant days were over. She was getting frail and, though she never complained, you could tell she had a bad back by the way she held her hand over her hip as if her sacrum would fold like an accordion otherwise.

After much lobbying over the course of several days, I succeeded in persuading her to move out of the little dependência (where she’d already set up her shrine to Juscelino, which stayed put) into the spare bedroom. I even offered to hire a maid, a maid for the maid, but that was where Rita drew the line. I think I actually hurt her pride.

“This old bird can still pull her weight, Senhor Luckman.”

“Por favor, call me Sol.”

“This old bird can still pull her weight, Sol.”

In the end we settled on a compromise: I would do the bulk of the shopping and help her clean the apartment every other week, and she would do the cooking, washing and laundry. “But no excessive ironing,” I insisted. “I don’t need my underwear or socks ironed, entendeu?”

“Entendi, Senhor Luckman.”

“Por favor, Rita, call me Sol.”

“Entendi, Sol.”


Not counting the inherent debauchery of Carnaval week with its institutionalized strategies for decadence, which I must say I enjoyed firsthand (even though in more sober moments I agree with those who contend Carnaval is just a big smokescreen designed to hide Brazil’s misery behind a drunken, orgiastic haze of “alegria”)—I say, the mayhem of Carnaval aside, while making major strides on my novel I also came to feel more “balanced” as Sol Luckman than I ever had as Luke Soloman.

I purchased a membership to the Clube do Flamengo with its complex of outdoor Olympic pools and started exercising again, stroking back and forth under the crisp azure sky, emerging from the meditative waters to behold the Cristo Redentor atop Corcovado above the amendoeiras, arms outstretched poised for a spectacular high dive, then reclining exhausted and remade all chiseled and tan on the bleachers in the sunshine admiring the occasional toffee-colored Brasileira dripping wet fresh from her own swim.

When I didn’t feel like swimming, I went running around Lagoa, nearly ten kilometers in a circle door-to-door from my building over the course of which I often traveled back in my mind’s eye to Pulpit Hill, to all the times I, or rather Luke, went running from himself that fall when he was just beginning to connect with his lonely calling, crunching the dry leaves as he zipped around the Gargoyle Castle Loop in the chill fall afternoons ...

But filled with bittersweet nostalgia, delicious saudade as such memories were, I liked it better when it rained and washed away Luke’s past, when I, Sol, became temporarily immersed in my own vibrant present—braving the lightning, cool rain feathering down on my hot skin, running with mounting excitement through an exotic landscape peopled with thousands of strangers I longed to befriend.

Rain, even the facsimile thereof, always had that kind of energizing effect on me. I could be sitting on my bed reading, for instance, as a hard rain came pelting down outside on the mata, and suddenly, inexplicably, I’d feel breathtakingly alive. Or I could be woken up in the middle of the night by the rain and experience a massive adrenaline rush of that same wild, lyrical, hedonistic, nose-following energy characteristic of my imaginary life from the outset—only to realize it wasn’t rain but merely the sound of wind in the palms or newspapers blowing across someone’s tile balcony ... It never ceased to amaze me how many things can sound for all the world just like rain.

But back to balance. My newfound sense of equilibrium had something to do with my unfolding relationship with time. Before, as Luke, it had always seemed there was never enough time. Time was a sore spot with me, I was always running out of it.

But now, as Sol—I guess this was another difference between us—I seemed to have an abundance of time, a plethora, enough to do all the things I wanted and more: sleep late, eat well, do my chores, write, exercise, take walks, pay strict attention to ritual by slipping on my Speedo and heading to the beach. I usually grabbed a book and walked down to Posto 9 in Ipanema, a beach that sizzled with enough well-oiled flesh to fulfill even the hungriest carnivore.

Not that I was feeling particularly carnivorous. I typically had more pressing things than chasing tail on my mind. Still, lounging on the soft sand under the hot sun, the world comfortably spinning, I occasionally put down my book and spent the afternoon daydreaming sex—pushed over the edge of desire by a magnificent set of seios, one fine brown bunda too many. I always wished I could bottle the essence of a few of those beauties to take back home and enjoy at my leisure, without all the trouble and interruption of having a real woman in the house.

Most evenings I went out for a nightcap, sometimes in my neighborhood to a placed called the Skipper, sometimes walking back down to Ipanema or even occasionally as far as Copacabana before settling in somewhere and unwinding over a few chopps. Usually, I kept to myself. But every now and then, I’d strike up a conversation with someone. It was easy to tell when a Carioca was making moves on you. The way her words cut simultaneously in both directions, the way her generalizations suggested the particular Moment.

I’m not being vain—just honest. You’d be amazed how many women are tired of the standard macho fare and will practically throw themselves at someone with a little sensitivity. I rarely responded in kind to such advances, but I did come up with many interesting observations on my nights out. I often noticed, for example, how the average Brazilian man was constantly playing with his crotch in public. Did he mean to call attention to it, I wondered, or was he reaching for it like a wallet he feared had been stolen?

I always looked forward to the walk back along the beach, illuminated at intervals by floodlights, making the ocean appear green and unfathomable, liquid emerald. In many ways this was the best part of my day, better even than the morning spent writing, the part where I reconnected with the other half of myself, the half born not of words but of motion.

Even at midnight the beach was packed—a sensory overload of cars, taxis, pedestrians, joggers, bikers, Rollerbladers, tourists, whores, pimps, vendors, dealers, soccer jocks and, of course, your occasional wayward mariner. Feasting on the sights, sounds and smells, catching glimpses of the Redentor floating on a magic carpet of underlit clouds high overhead, listening to snippets of distant pagode as the waves crashed close by, enjoying the mingled scents of caramelo, cigarro and cerveja, I plugged back into the part of me that was and would always be a wanderer, a drifter, a stranger in a strange land, a flâneur strolling through life’s crowded cities.

“Meu coração vagabundo ...” Caetano Veloso’s lyrics often found their way into my thoughts during those pleasantly buzzed strolls. I did have a vagabondish heart, a heart filled with wanderlust—and also just plain lust. My signature desire for Experience, to be a pilgrim on the Experience Trail, to follow the twisted, mapless, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet path my soul had called me to, had never been greater. Becoming Sol had revived my passionate inner explorer, reawoken the Bunyanesque traveler in me, injected my spirit again with dreams both wet and dry.

Even after so many changes and challenges, I still longed for the Adventure, I still yearned to play in the Magic. That was the romantic in me. I was twenty-seven and it was almost too easy to get caught up in romance with oneself in Rio.

There were times, hardly rare, when it seemed I’d never grow old, never tire, never die. And though romance be illusory, a construct that has nothing to do with reality per se, I vowed to maintain it alive and well in me, vowed to preserve that one fragment of wholeness even as wholeness, in a world falling apart at the seams, was itself fragmented. This was my Keatsian project for my new incarnation, my own Negative Capability. Amid the slings and arrows of the steady decline of Western “civilization,” I would insist on dreaming myself whole until, like Adam, I awoke to find my dream come true.


But to be fair, my dreams (sometimes cleverly disguised as nightmares) had always had a way of coming true—mostly because I was stubborn enough to keep dreaming, but at least in part because the universe was generally willing to lend a hand. Thus it was that yet another dream of mine came true when I least expected it.

Starting around Carnaval, I began running into this one particular fellow on a regular basis. In most ways he was utterly nondescript—so nondescript, in fact, he was altogether remarkable.

He was probably, I don’t know, in his forties, though he could have been decades older or decades younger. His build was somewhere between average and—depending on the lighting—slightly stout or somewhat slight. His hair wasn’t especially short or long. His facial features were both highly distinctive and belonging to no one. In fact, he didn’t seem to possess the defining characteristics of any race and stood out in my mind as a sort of unique gray.

There was something of the chameleon in his nature with which I identified when I thought about it—which I didn’t until I started encountering him everywhere: dancing in the Sambódromo during one of Carnaval’s big desfiles when he handed me a handkerchief dipped in a mild hallucinogen for sniffing called lança perfume ... coming to my senses on the beach in Leme the following sunrise beside a buxom mulatta to find him, whoever he was, asleep beside another mulatta nearby ... hanging out drinking a chilled coco recharging my dead batteries in preparation for another evening of fun that Fat Tuesday at a barraca in Arpoador when life had temporarily grown calm again like a wave that had crashed and fantailed out across the sand ... at the appetizer table during a ritzy post-Carnaval birthday party in Botafogo I’d been invited to by a stranger when I spent the evening chatting with a female veterinarian with an ugly face but a killer body, about dogs ... dining alone a couple weeks later on a Candomblé night (when Rita didn’t cook) at my favorite restaurant, Bozo, in Leblon, when I discovered him (also by himself) seated at an adjacent table having exactly the same meal I was having: baked badejo, quiabo casserole and ice-cold chopp.

The last time I ran into him, and the only time we ever actually spoke, was at a strip joint in my old stomping ground, Avenida Prado Júnior in Copacabana. This was in late April a good two months after Carnaval. That very day I’d completed the final chapter of Book V, “The Vendetta,” and begun this the first chapter of Book VI, tentatively entitled Morphametosis.

There was some kind of kinky black-leather orgy thing happening onstage that had me gripped with a morbid fascination. All of a sudden, this same nondescript guy shows up, sits down at my table grinning like he could be anybody and we could be any old friends, and introduces himself as none other than the author-protagonist, the eponymous Ralfo, of my all-time favorite novel, As Confissões de Ralfo.

“Or if you like, ‘Sol,’ you can call me Sérgio.”

“Sérgio? As in Sant’Anna?”

“As in.”

“Are you for real?” I blurted out, somewhere between incredulous and star-struck like a teenage boy whose life revolves around basketball watching Michael Jordan casually stroll through the door.

“No. That’s precisely the point.”

I admit it was strange—but then what about my imaginary life isn’t strange? Strange and filled with impossible Magic, with absurdly profound stories taking place in the written world true as only fiction can be.

“You’re, like, my hero!” I gushed.

“No, Sol, you’re, like, mine.”

This was almost too much. My hero was actually calling me his hero. For an aspiring writer, it was like having Jack Kerouac come up and awkwardly beg for your autograph. I pinched myself to verify it was really happening. It wasn’t, of course, but its impact on me was no less validating.

“Or should I call you Luke?”

“It doesn’t matter. Call me whatever you like. It’s all the same.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Yes, I imagine you do.”

“I just wanted to give you my personal parabéns on your masterpiece-in-progress before you move on.”

“Before I—move on?”

“As you’re going to be doing any day now.”

“I see.”

“And please forgive me for kibitzing in the middle of your narrative, but I especially enjoyed ‘Doutor Soloman Enters Brazil.’ I was quite flattered, in fact. It was so obviously a takeoff of that chapter in my novel where Ralfo is interrogated by the Goddamn City police. No one has ever paid me homage like that.”

“Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.”

“Well said.”

“Really, when it comes right down to it, there are only copies.”

“Indeed.”

We ordered the first of many rounds of coqueteis and spent the rest of the evening talking literature, or rather lamenting the sorry state of it, commiserating the way realism had bedded down with capitalism and pseudo-science to relegate the likes of fictitious entities such as ourselves to the status (or lack thereof) of marginal figures, curiosities at best.

“But the times are changing, Sol. Mark my words. The day will soon come when people wake up to the fact that the only true reality lies in the imagination.”

“I sure hope you’re right.”

“I am. Trust me.”

We were both bombed when, hours later, we parted with a hug and a fraternal “Boa sorte” on the sidewalk. It must have been four in the morning. I watched him wobble into a taxi headed for his home in Laranjeiras, then turned and strolled up Prado Júnior, hanging a right onto Nossa Senhora de Copacabana with the heat lightning flickering silently in the reddish sky in a way that struck me as—somehow—already a poignant reminder of itself, a mnemonic device with which someday to recall my time in Rio.

No, it didn’t make sense—but the feeling things were about to change was almost palpable. I imagined I could hear the Voice of the Road calling my name as I crossed a strangely deserted Avenida Atlântica and, removing my shoes, walked close along the empty shoreline contemplating, in the wake of my tête-à-tête with Sérgio/Ralfo, my own dual career as a writer and fictional human being.

I realized there was actually precious little that separated the two, that as a human being I was learning to be a writer, and as a writer I was learning to be a human being ... And then it occurred to me, approaching Ponta de Arpoador, I’d spent my entire imaginary life learning how to take a walk.

This is a metaphor, of course. The beauty of a metaphor, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. When I say I’d spent my whole life learning how to take a walk, I’m aiming at something a little larger than putting the leash on Fido and taking him out for his daily spin. I really mean I’d been learning how to take a walk. I still wasn’t very good at it. As Luke I’d become such an expert at doing I’d never truly learned how to go about being.

Now, as Sol, I was working on—or playing at—just being. The next morning, undoubtedly, I would return to doing—but when I did, I hoped I wouldn’t forget how to be, hoped I might find a way to marry the doing with the being, transcend dialectics, combine Art and Life in the singular act of existing.

I lit a cigarette, a clove I happened to have in my pocket, and walked in the water smoking it, thinking how I was indeed extremely happy with this person I’d become, thinking how if I died right then and there, if thieves murdered me in cold blood and my body bobbed trailing red ink out to sea, it had been a terrific imaginary life. Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

A waning gibbous was sailing in and out of sparse clouds, a swollen ruby banana of a moon like a strobe in the heat lightning radiating the limitless possibilities of the Moment, a coagulated spheroid like a living cell under a microscope teeming with enzymes, ribosomes and DNA hovering above the dark brooding ocean. Every time I gazed up at it, my own blood coursed faster through my veins, as if I’d just stuck my finger into the socket of the world, into the Magic of it all. Electric Luke. Rather: electric Sol.

I seemed to have lost none of my receptive powers, not even an inch off the old internal antennae that had so many times before put me in contact with the Adventure, the sparkling effervescent stuff of life itself: in a word, in my dear dead friend Malcolm’s word, with It.

If anything, It now played a larger role than It ever had—if only because I’d allowed myself to experience It’s underside, the dark subterranean complement to the shiny happy semisphere above. Again, to borrow a Malcolmism, I’d permitted myself to C the Big Picture. For better or for worse, for better and for worse, I’d been C-ing the Big Picture through a combination of self-motivated eye-opening and seemingly random events spawned by chaos itself that had slapped me into consciousness like a newborn receiving his first cruel whack across the bottom.

Of course, the biggest slap had been Malcolm himself. No whimpers there—he’d gone out with a bang. I was just glad I could remember him now without so much pain, though every now and then I got to thinking, for one reason or another, he’d never died, that it was getting time I should visit him again in the Funhouse ... Then all of a sudden it was as if he’d fallen off that ledge only yesterday ... Then I realized he actually lived on in me, that I’d not only internalized but externalized him, emulating not only his attitudes but his very person.

And what would Malcolm have done on such a glorious night but precisely what I did? What would he have done, feeling It enter him like one of Zeus’s thunderbolts, suddenly feeling at one with It, feeling so far out there, so in the middle of nowhere, yet at the same time so at the center of It all, so now here—I say, what would Malcolm have done but spontaneously strip off his clothes, streak naked across the cool night sand, and jump like a madman into the unseen ocean?

Resurfacing, I stood lit up like a Christmas tree in the middle of the surging waves, gazing up at that miracle of a moon, vowing to take some of It with me, inside, so I could nibble on It whenever I was especially in need of an upper, whenever I found myself drowning like Davie Jones in the seaweed of monotony and tedium.

Inspired, I breathed in the Moment and was breathed by it, by It, Tonight, tonight on my lips, a wayward mariner on the wave-washed prow of my little life’s ship navigating the cosmos ... Feeling something like sandpaper brush against my thigh, I instinctively reached down and fished up a huge curling starfish out of the sea.

When I finally struggled up onto the beach with my starfish, I discovered the current had taken me down a ways from where I’d abandoned my clothes. I was standing in my birthday suit beside the hump of a makeshift sand altar to Iemanjá—flowers, shells, extinguished candles and burnt incense precisely arranged on a manmade dune. Having no other offering, there with the moon flickering down showering the scene with mystical dust, I knelt beside the altar and, with a simple prayer of thanks, placed the starfish exactly in the middle.


The following afternoon, having slept late and written little, I ventured down to Posto 9. While I was there, a giant stingray came swimming along close to shore, an enormous silent shadow gliding by just beneath the water’s surface, and everybody stood up to watch.

At first people thought it was a shark or maybe a whale. But then up and down the beach you could hear the shouting: “Raia! Raia!” All the surfers and favela kids went crazy and started swimming after it and throwing empty coconuts at it.

But I just stood there at the crossroads of the Moment, conscious It was about to propel me back into motion and onto the road again—conscious that the dark figure wasn’t a shark or a whale or really even, truth be known, a stingray. It was Iemanjá showing up to wish her protégé a boa viagem. And até logo.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

(from Book V, The Accidental Gringo)

“One ticket to ... Rio de Janeiro,” I stammered, self-consciously, given the rate at which I was visibly (or invisibly) dematerializing, to the Varig representative waiting behind the counter. Was it just my imagination, or did she actually shudder at the sight of my missing appendage? Was I already that grotesque?

Luckily, being November and the off-season for travel between Europe and South America, there were still last-minute seats. “Will you be traveling first, business or economy class, Monsieur?” the representative asked, in French with a slight Portuguese accent.

“First.”

“Bien sûr.”

After months of rotting away like a banana long forgotten in a drawer, months of decomposing—after a wasted spring, a squandered summer and a fall I frittered away in the most anaesthetized creative paralysis—suddenly I was alive and moving at light speed again, running (literally) for my imaginary life. What had transpired since my melodramatic epiphany in the Métro, my rediscovery of my true identity and theatrical release by Malcolm in the rain, was, in a nutshell:

Nothing.

That’s not entirely accurate. In a sense a great deal had happened. For starters, the roles had reversed. My return to Amanda, followed by our emotional reconciliation, had effected an astonishing change in her. She became a totally different person. Overnight our dynamic switched polarity, swung magnetically into an opposite scenario, one in which Amanda suddenly loved more than she hated me—loved me, in fact, more than she loved herself.

This time, it was she not I who offered to compromise, put her Art on the back burner, sell her soul by going to work as an underpaid computer graphics lackey in the real world so I could stay home in our cozy penthouse apartment on rue Phoque and write my little heart out, so I might have time and space to finish the series of novels that would make me famous and us independently wealthy—the series, enfin, that would set us both free.

But contrary to plan, I didn’t perk right up at the opportunity to create again, didn’t forge boldly ahead into Book IV, Luke in Exile, didn’t stay true to my vision of myself as a man of letters in a brave new world of literature ... Instead, I spent my days in a bathrobe and slippers getting fatter and dumber while eating TV dinners and watching French soap operas, a lifetime pleasantly removed from my odious job at the Lobotomist, yes, but as yet uncommitted to a new course of action, a fresh direction.

I became a lounge lizard, a couch potato, less than worthless from a narrative perspective, sometimes with the evanescent thought of sitting down to write but never sufficient motivation (even with Amanda cheering me on) to do so.

Thus I wasted her sacrifice, pissed away her enormous gift as I discovered (to our mutual disappointment) no one can ever do it for you. After everything, after Malcolm, after the Métro, after all the teas, cakes, ices and a platter full of crises, I still wasn’t back to living my own imaginary life—I was still, in essence, living someone else’s—and now had neither motion nor language to sustain my textual existence ... until, at last, I started to disappear.

“Window or aisle?”

“Sorry?”

“Would you like a window or aisle seat, Monsieur?”

“Window.”

“Checked baggage?”

“Non merci.”

“Do you have any checked baggage?”

“No.”

“Carry-ons?”

“Just my trusty old buffalo leather duffel bag here.”

“Could I please see your passport?”

“Certainly.”

Then one day, the day I unexpectedly ended up at Orly International Airport, my thumb just vanished. It happened completely out of the blue when, having finished watching the French version of The Young and the Restless, having cried my little tear or two, I’d miraculously summoned the energy to drag my lazy tub of lard up off the couch and wash the leaning towers of dishes that had accumulated during my pampered desuetude.

Significantly, it was my right thumb. But strangely, there was no pain. There wasn’t even any blood. I couldn’t find my thumb anywhere in the sudsy water—not even after draining the sink. Nor had, I verified in a growing panic, the disposal chewed it off. I searched for it everywhere, my thumb, combing every nook and cranny at a fever pitch. But the simple, unavoidable fact of the matter was: my poor thumb was gone.

In hindsight it’s patently obvious this was a most natural consequence for a picaresque character such as I, a creature, as I’ve elsewhere explained, born of the road and of words. And the thumb, it must be admitted, was a nice touch—being a symbol of the road I’d abandoned as well as the thumb on my writing hand.

So it didn’t take me long, after I calmed down enough to get my bearings, after I sat down at the kitchen table and poured myself a double scotch then another and drank enough to stop shaking, to figure out what was happening, to understand I was disappearing because the conditions of my existence, the very terms of my survival, had been neglected. Not that this offered much consolation when the rest of my right-hand fingers began to dissolve one by one and the invisible ink covered my wrist and began to creep up, ever so weirdly, toward my elbow ...

“Monsieur Soloman, I must ask you a few routine questions.”

“Go right ahead.”

“Did you pack your own bag?”

“Oui.”

“Are you carrying any objects that do not personally belong to you?”

“None that I know of.”

“Are you carrying any weapon or object that might in any way be used or construed as a weapon?”

“No.”

I was lying through my teeth. I still had my Swiss army knife somewhere in my bag. I prayed it would be overlooked.

“One moment, s’il vous plaît.”

But you know, I’d had intimations something like this was coming. Following weeks of sleeping peacefully at night, from my regular profound repose in which, if I dreamed of anything, I dreamed of profound repose—I say, at some point in my extended vacation from life’s pages, I’d started to hear the Voice of the Road in my dreams, first whispering then calling then shouting my name.

“What do you want?” I finally demanded, annoyed.

“EVERYTHING.”

Then one day in the midst of my bourgeois househusband “bliss,” there it suddenly was again—this thing that at first felt like an itch, then a rash, then a pustular inflammation. The old wanderlust erupting. The burning desire to go everywhere, meet everyone and do everything—then write it all down—cracking me back open after all this time. Trying to ignore it was like trying to ignore a case of herpes. Not that I would know. I scratched until I bled, but the wanderlust just kept itching.

“FOLLOW ME,” the road insisted.

“Where?”

“ANYWHERE.”

I was indecisive, though. I couldn’t seem to make up my mind about anything—where I wanted to go, how I wanted to go, even (reflecting on my personal comfort, how coddled and cloyed I was) if I wanted to go. I kept processing possible scenarios for the future the way a high-speed computer flies through different combinations trying to crack a code. But I still had no idea whether I was going or staying. The only thing I could say with relative assurance was either one day I’d leave, or I wouldn’t.

Eventually, between soaps, I got around to making lists of possible destinations, detailed lists of theoretical itineraries that crisscrossed the globe like rubber bands—yet in the end I remained unable, of my own volition, without something dramatic like starting to disappear by degrees happening to me, to set myself adrift again on the old High Seas where anything, anything at all, could happen. Which, despite being precisely the point of sailing, the point of navigating the uncharted waters of Chance and Possibility rather than growing down predictable roots in the Backyard of Mediocrity, was also precisely what scared the devil out of me.

But after being a castaway so long, shore-locked on my tiny one-man island, the surrounding sea frozen in a real-world winter, at least I was finally listing again—listing, listing, listing in my little life’s ship, preparing (if only speculatively) to resume my destiny as a wayward mariner. Though I found myself waffling between embracing the uncertainty of a mapless existence and being totally, thoroughly terrified by it, at least I was waffling, going through the motions, undergoing a slow but steady sea change. I knew I had to regain some sense of plugging back into the Adventure even if it meant throwing the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater. Again.

“The total price of your ticket, Monsieur, including airport tax, comes to 7,777 francs.”

“Curious.”

“How would you like to pay?”

“Cash.”

I was on the verge of a radical move, no doubt about it. I’d intuited as much the night before I started to vanish, when Amanda came home from work to a disaster of dirty dishes spilling Dr. Seuss-like out of the sink, saucers used as ashtrays, cigarette burns on the couch, the floor covered with so many food fragments we could have cooked the whole thing and eaten it like a giant pizza—when she returned exhausted and empty to find not dinner piping-hot on the table but me seated comfortably, having not written a word, having not so much as lifted a pencil, amid it all like a retarded baby content in its messy playpen—when I watched the tears well up in her eyes at the sight of this mirrorball of contradictions, this talented do-nothing, this uninspired genius she couldn’t (for all her martyrdom) change—when, my pity for her aroused, I stood and took her in my arms and made love to her there on the scummy floor, our bare asses steamrolling pasta shells and dried bits of steak hâché—when, afterward, I tried to explain what was happening to me even though I didn’t understand it myself, tried to explain why I couldn’t possibly accept so large a gift as her whole person—when in the middle of my blabbering I gazed into her still-red eyes scalloped beneath with dark rings and suddenly felt hot tears spilling down my own cheeks—

“Nobody forced you to stay with me, Luke.”

“I know. I’ve been your prisoner entirely by choice.”

Sincere tears, crocodile tears, rummy tears, tears of recognition? Recognition of what? that all-or-nothing meant nothing? or that it meant all?

I lifted her geisha face and stared into her almond eyes. Sadness infused her with a special beauty, bittersweet in quality, like a late-blooming flower spreading its delicate petals on the eve of a killing frost. Desirous to protect such a frail flower, I pulled her to me and held her warmly in my arms.

In making love to her, I realized the next day as I watched my elbow fade like an ember, I’d been saying goodbye. I was saying goodbye to her even as I said goodbye to myself, my old self, threw dirt on my coffin and placed a wreath on my tombstone. For no sooner had I finished my third double scotch than I knew exactly what I had to do to avoid annihilation: I had to leave. Immediately.

There was no time to call Amanda, no time to scribble a note, no time to pack my bag. Who wanted a bunch of stuff anyway? For all its unsettling abruptness, this might be the greatest opportunity of my imaginary existence to follow my nose down unexpectedly fulfilling paths, travel the Experience Trail unencumbered, carrying only the essential baggage.

Without further ado I quickly changed into street clothes (covering my invisibility as best I could under my leather jacket), pocketed Amanda’s stash of cash in the atelier (telling myself I’d pay her back later), then grabbed my duffel containing (I made sure to check) my to-be-continued series manuscript, Swiss army knife and passport, as I headed out the door with only one arm.


By the time my taxi pulled up at Orly, I was missing my right shoulder entirely. But it seemed I was disappearing less rapidly thanks to the taxi’s movement. With difficulty, feeling unbalanced, I shouldered my bag and paid the driver, tipping him handsomely, then entered the main terminal and scanned the Départs screen. For a few seconds I waffled between hemispheres, but when I finally settled on the Western, it didn’t take long to select my destination: Rio de Janeiro.

Or maybe I should say it didn’t take Rio (“Last call for passengers to Rio de Janeiro,” a voice announced over the airport speakers) long to select me. In any case the name was like sugarcane alcohol on my tongue.

Rio. Just whispering it filled me with sweetly intoxicating images of graceful palm trees lining white crescent beaches, turquoise water and lapis lazuli skies, wavelike sidewalks and sunlight dancing with shadows in sweltering Latin streets, sultry mulattas shaking honey-colored flesh to mouthwatering samba rhythms. Images, in short, wherein a future me was already in progress ...

“Your ticket and boarding pass, Monsieur. Have a pleasant flight.”

“Merci. I will.”

Or would I? It occurred to me then I’d never flown before, not that I could recall (which, as always, wasn’t saying much)—and that, in fact, I had a bona fide phobia of flying. Flashes of footage of incendiary death gripped me at the mere thought of takeoff. “I’m afraid we’re experiencing minor technical problems,” I could hear the panicking captain announce as one of the wings broke off in a deafening explosion.

Then there was the very real possibility I’d acted too late and, despite my efforts, was about to disappear completely. Discretely feeling inside my jacket with my left hand as I passed through security, I was relieved to discover that, though my shoulder remained missing, my collarbone was still holding.

And then I was walking to my terminal, then approaching my gate, then handing another representative my boarding pass, then walking down the carpeted tunnel, then watching a bent crone in a wheelchair being wheeled past only to spring up out of the chair like a gazelle and briskly board the plane, then timidly boarding myself and stashing my bag in the overhead and sitting down in my comfortable first-class window seat with lots of gizmos beside an Asian man in a tailored suit engrossed in an illegible newspaper.

No sooner had I settled in than a stewardess stopped and politely inquired whether I’d like something to drink. I politely asked for champagne. When she politely brought a glass, I politely drank it and politely asked for another. We repeated this, politely, twice more before takeoff.

I stared out the window into the early darkness as the plane taxied down the runway, the little white lights on the ground blipping by like fireflies on a timer. Engines roaring, the g-force sucked me back as the plane shuddered up into the air and everything started jumping around like epileptic videotape.

Briefly, I experienced the urge in the pit of my clenching bowels to spew scotch and champagne all over the forward cabin. I was staring down the barrel at twelve hours of pungent socks, tasteless movies and babies crying, and had every excuse to be jetting along with every care in the world ... But it suddenly seemed my destiny, the sky. To soar on eagle’s wings. Skywalker—that was one of Blue’s nicknames for me.

I mustered the courage to peer out the window again as the earth spilled away. The plane ascended sharply and, dizzyingly, seemed to fold back into itself as it oriented its trajectory. For about ten seconds, Paris revealed itself below one last time, a vast illuminated starfish, the Sacré-Coeur, Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, Orsay, Beaubourg ... my old city from the days of my old self. Even as I was borne away into another incarnation, I wanted the scene, like a lover’s face, to imprint itself permanently in my fluid brain.


An hour later, pale cloud carpet below, stars all around, I found myself slicing through international airspace at the start of yet another installment of the Adventure. Even God didn’t know where I was. Somewhere over the Atlantic. Where Europe becomes the Americas. And vice versa.

What realizations and revelations would result from this voyage I didn’t presume to guess. I could arrive only to turn around in my tracks and head back. Or I could never head back, could disappear into the Amazon like a wayward Horatio Alger.

I could go AWOL from society, slide off civilization’s map, compose my masterpiece under tent eaves in the rainforest. I could violate common sense in most unseemly fashion, throw it to the winds for the umpteenth time. I could spontaneously transform, wake up famous, turn amnesiac again, become the Wandering Jew, be abducted by aliens ... Burning the bridge when you get there. Or better yet: burning the bridge while you’re still on it. Learning to fly of necessity, while in the act of falling.

Inebriated and making perfectly lucid nonsense, I was again sailing the old High Seas bound for a destination that might never have existed, that might never exist except in the turning pages of my mind. Discovering the plane’s motion had restored me, that my arm had returned and I was good as new, that Luke was back and more justified than ever in pushing boldly ahead into the singular fictitious existence I kept creating for myself, I acknowledged (before sinking into a drooling stupor for the duration of the flight) how reappearing was only a metaphor for the totality of my imaginary life—that, as with everything else, if I would only believe in it sincerely enough, I could succeed in making my destination, if not strictly factual, at least undeniably true.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

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