Complete Failure
by Joel Dane
When I couldn’t find a job in California, I decided to walk across the country. From the Santa Monica Pier to Coney Island. Things were going really well for me.
I imagine one of my ankles turning on the ice-plant, and beach sand clinging to my white tube socks. I imagine cigarette butts and seagulls but no people. No swimmers, no sunbathers, no car blasting I Left My Wallet In El Segundo.
This I remember: crouching at the Pacific waterline and waiting for the tide to touch my fingers. I wanted someone to ask why. That’s what I wanted. Someone to ask me why.
At that age, intention meant everything to me. You don’t start walking across the country without money or training or a single goddamn map if you’re running low on meaning.
I don’t remember why, though. Perhaps because I was nineteen and male and healthy, and had nothing to fear. Perhaps that’s what I wanted to prove.
I was raised in the shadow of trains and smokestacks and ovens. Like all children, I learned words without ever hearing them for a first time. When I mentioned ‘Zyklon-B’ to my friend Colin, he said he didn’t read much science fiction.
After the ocean wetted my fingers I walked into the city. I don’t remember that day but that evening I found a small park of surprising greenness in a neighborhood that felt shabbily industrial. I propped my backpack on a bench as a pillow then watched the street, waiting for nightfall in the days before smartphones.
The first telephones didn’t have software; their purpose was built into their wires and switches. Early tech didn’t provide context, it required context. It transmitted secrets, arguments, prices, pledges; information saturated in agendas, which the recipients then developed into meaning.
Meaning requires incomprehension. Meaning requires fluidity, interpretation, disagreement, confusion. The perfectly comprehensible is perfectly inexpressible.
That night in the park, a bearded guy spotted me on the bench and called, “You got no bed to sleep in?”
I said no.
His younger brother teased me for using a beach towel as a blanket.
I said, “I can sleep in your house.”
The other brother said, “Yallah.”
Their apartment was a few hundred square feet. There was a picture of Reagan on the wall. The younger brother made me a jam sandwich on Wonder Bread. I slept on the peeling linoleum kitchen floor between pots of soaking chickpeas.
I woke embarrassed and slunk away without thanking them.
That lack of interaction meant something to me at the time, but meanings change.
Before we met the brothers in that LA park—you and I, in this essay—they’d meant nothing to us. However, as our exposure to ideas and people increases, so does our misunderstanding of them. What do they mean to us now?
I’d spent half the previous summer in the Coney Island projects, silk-screening with kids in sweltering concrete courtyards, learning to drop my bullshit for a few seconds a day. Maybe that explains my choice of destinations.
I’d spent the other half of that summer in East New York, a few blocks from where my mother lived as a child, from where she’d dedicated herself to the care of her brother.
Communication is receptive, not transmissive.
What does that mean?
You tell me.
I wrote a novel about walking across the country without money or a map, about finding meaning in the gaps, about a warm and welcoming apocalypse, but until starting this essay I’d never connected the dots.
Drivers offered me rides five or six times a day. I thanked them and continued walking: my goal wasn’t to arrive, after all. I didn’t want to come to a conclusion.
When my wife laughs at me for trying to walk across the country, I laugh along and say, “Nobody told me there was a desert.”
I can’t remember if I genuinely expected to complete the journey. I can’t imagine I thought I’d succeed in anything except proving to myself that the world wasn’t so terrible beyond the pale. Maybe I longed for a call to adventure like in the stories I read. Maybe I wanted to write a story of my own, a story that I’ve never fully told.
No story is fully told.
On the fourth afternoon, after the blisters broke, I asked the manager of a motel if I could exchange a day’s labor for a night’s rest.
I don’t remember what I ate.
I don’t remember if I brought a canteen.
I remember sitting on a concrete planter on a sidewalk in a mountain town, a few miles from the motel. I remember the shops, two stories of reflective glass, the entrances above me atop the wide stairs and below me in the shaded gallery.
I don’t remember if that memory is real.
A convertible Chevy pulled in front of me. The driver had a lot of yellow hair. She looked old to me, with fine wrinkles around her eyes and lipstick in a grandmotherly red, but she was younger then than I am now.
She told me I was limping. She asked where I was headed, and I said—mysteriously, I’d hoped—east.
“Aren’t we all?” she said, and offered me a tangerine.
She wasn’t in any rush. When a van honked at her for parking on the shoulder, she flipped them off with a fluency that impressed me. When her shirt gaped, I kept my gaze on her face.
“Vitamin C,” she said. “I lost another hat yesterday, driving with the top down.”
“Oh,” I said, and then, “Thanks.”
“The cost of doing business,” she told me. “You heading toward something, or running away?”
That was exactly the kind of question I’d longed for, but I didn’t know how to answer. “I, uh, don’t think either.”
“You’ve got to choose. As ye reap so shall ye sow.”
She sounded wise and cryptic, like the blowsy mentor in an independent film. Her hair whipped in the wind of a passing truck and I remember her bright mouth moving, but her words merged with the sound of the traffic.
I didn’t ask her to repeat herself. I should’ve understood the first time.
She poured a handful of aspirin from a baggie into my palm, then gave me the six pack of Corona on the passenger seat beside the half-empty handle of Bacardi.
“Stay liquid,” she told me.
I didn’t realize until years later that she’d been drunk.
I slept in a ditch beside a field pungent with Brussel sprouts. I remember lines and rows of pebbled stalks, like prehistoric plants. I remember the sharp leaves and purple flowers of artichokes, too. I’m not sure how much I’m misremembering and how much I never knew.
“Can I help you?” the cashier asked, in the chill of air-conditioning.
I’d rehearsed my offer: I’d clean the loading zone behind the gas station in exchange for expired food.
She wasn’t starting a conversation, though, she was asking me to leave. Her meaning was unmistakable, economical, simple enough for a child yet too rich for automation; if we rely upon language models that can’t parse subtext, we’re forced to abandon meaning. Training tech to communicate like humans requires training ourselves to accept autocompletion in place of intent.
I fantasized about the yellow-haired woman. My memory shaped her younger, smoother, breathier. As I invented the words I’d missed—the invitations she’d issued, the pleasures of my acceptance—the terrain changed, or I starting noticing it in a new way.
I remember hills with exposed shale and trees with orange, fibrous trunks. I remember a country highway, without houses or farms, and I remember a pickup pulling a U-turn across gravel to greet me.
A white Parks Department or Park Ranger pickup with an official seal and a blue blaze and a dirty blonde man behind the wheel, with a square unshaven jaw and light untroubled eyes. I want to say that his shoulders filled his ranger uniform, but I also remember him wearing an unbuttoned plaid shirt and wonder if I’m thinking of Kurt Cobain.
In my memory, he looks exactly like a ranger—rugged, competent, outdoorsy—and his first words were: “Have you got a hatchet?”
I assured him that I did not, feeling relief at my innocence.
“There’s packs of coyotes in the hills,” he told me. “The landfill attracts them. You’ll want to get yourself a nice hefty stick.”
I don’t remember what I said.
“Hop in,” he told me. “I’ll drive you to the ranger’s station.”
So I climbed into the passenger seat, because of the coyotes, because he was beautiful. I asked about the picture on the dashboard, a faded photo of a pale woman with long black hair and a solemn expression.
“My wife,” he said. “She’s eight months pregnant.”
I must’ve congratulated him.
“Been a long time,” he told me, and when I didn’t response he said: “When your wife’s pregnant, you treat her with kid gloves, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, though I still didn’t understand.
He pulled into the ranger station, or the forestry offices—I’m chasing a memory of wood-paneled buildings roofed with pine needles. He parked between a grill and a tractor shed. He stretched his arm across the back of my seat and without looking at me he asked if he could give me a blowjob.
I said yes.
I tried to imagine the woman with yellow hair but I kept imagining the ranger instead. Then my gaze caught movement at the building, and I saw, or imagined I saw, a pale face watching through the window.
When he finished, I considered returning the favor. I didn’t think of myself as bi, but in tenth grade, I’d given Colin a blowjob to impress a girl. Before I decided, the ranger stepped from the pickup and greeted the long-haired woman standing outside the door of the nearest building. Her pale skin was luminescent. I know we’re supposed to say that pregnant women glow, but my memory insists that she did.
The ranger told me that after an hour or so on the main road, I should take the right-hand forking when I came to a split.
By the time I refilled my water bottle, the ranger was standing with the woman while she rested her hands on her belly.
“She says feel free to take a shower,” the ranger told me.
She spoke, too softly for me to hear.
“Around back,” he said.
I took a shower, then he brought me a bowl of Spaghetti-Os and a jar of Tabasco sauce and said that his wife offered me the bed of the pickup to sleep in that night, because she didn’t like the thought of me out with the coyotes.
“She’s sorry we can’t offer the couch,” he told me. “In her condition, a stranger in the house, you know.”
I told him I knew and woke the next morning with one of his hands around my wrists and the other tugging at my underwear. He put his mouth on me and when he finished that time he gave me an unopened package of Pepperidge Farms Milano cookies that he said his wife wanted me to have.
I don’t understand why we want what we want. Our wires and switches, of course, our nature and nurture; but still, our desires require meaning with such strange specificity. Yet while technology that serves my desire is my definition of good, technology that accommodates everyone’s desire is catastrophic atomization. Increasingly-satiated individuals in an increasingly-atomized society destroy the possibility of community, yet this particular atomized individual ate his Milanos and took the right-hand forking of the road.
I’m not sure what any of this means: what happened in that pickup truck, what happened on my walk. I’m the author of twenty-nine novels. As I’m writing this, I struggle to repress my urge to impose shape onto the narrative, to divert this silted river into an aqueduct.
I long for a midpoint twist, a painful reversal, a climax. Yet commercial narratives increasingly feel to me like autocompletion. So I’ll draw no conclusions except that this means something; perhaps the muddiness is the message.
I wonder if that is the definition of hope.
We are striving for the opposite.
We are striving for fluency without meaning.
This is not the climax:
The next afternoon, I passed a mobile home with a corrugated tin overhang. The concrete slab beneath the overhang was cluttered with machine parts, and three girls about my age were sitting in a circle on mismatched chairs, smoking cigarettes around a glass ashtray.
I felt myself tense like a gazelle at the lion enclosure. One of the girls asked if I wanted a cigarette and I didn’t but I said yes. I joined them and a different girl told me, You don’t smoke a cigarette like a joint. She took my cigarette and gave me a joint and after that I only remember four things:
We ate pizza.
I slept on concrete between machine parts.
One of the girls told me that her neighbor was always looking for help. She said he was a drunk but harmless and I should knock on his door the next morning, not too early, and he’d pay me ten, fifteen bucks a day and let me stay in the Ponderosa, no charge.
A call to adventure doesn’t come much clearer than that, but the fourth thing I remember was rousing that night to see one of the girls squatting at the edge of the concrete, watching me as she peed.
When I woke the next morning I wondered if I’d dreamed the intensity of her watchfulness, the sound of piss on hardpacked soil.
An AI hallucination is a false or misleading response presented as fact, yet the flaw of artificial intelligence isn’t hallucinations; we hallucinate. Was girl really watching me? What truly happened beneath those orange-trunked trees? My hallucinations are what make my intelligence real. The question is not which meaning will triumph. The question is not even why.
A day after I reached the desert, my body failed.
Nothing hurt, but nothing worked.
I collapsed in relief: I’d walked as far as physically possible. I couldn’t continue my walk, I couldn’t complete my journey. I’d failed, and coming to that conclusion felt like a kind of victory.
I haven’t visited Coney Island since, which I guess means I’m still walking.
Joel Dane is the author of twenty-four novels across several genres—and pseudonyms. He’s written for TV and podcasts, including a dozen episodes of a Netflix Original Series and an audio drama starring Jameela Jamil and Manny Jacinto. As Joel Dane, he wrote the Cry Pilot trilogy for Ace Books, and Marigold Breach for Realm.
This essay is part of Joel Dane’s blog tour for the novel The Ragpicker, published by Meerkat Press. Meerkat Press is also holding a giveaway for a $25 gift card as part of the tour.
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