Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

On Being

B

"So I have sailed the seas and come… to B…. a small town fastened to a field in Indiana." So begins "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," a story by William H. Gass. He began writing it about fifty years ago, while he was living in the town of Brookston, Indiana, about the time I came to be, born in another corner of that state. Years later, I read the story for the first time in a classroom on the third floor of Jordan Hall, on the campus of Butler University, in Indianapolis. I didn't know then that Gass had lived in Brookston. He reveals that much later, in the preface for a paperback reprint of his story collection, where he also admits to B. being an allusion, in his thoughts, to William B. Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium" and to the pun imbedded in B. of "be." And he writes that the town of B., finally, is not anywhere, not any place, really. The story's setting is to be read as an artifice-see "Sailing to Byzantium"-a model, an abstraction at best. This story was not to be confused as biography, auto- or otherwise.

But what did I know? I was a sophomore in Indiana, enamored by the artifice I was reading in the huge limestone ship of Jordan Hall, these words about the place I had inhabited since birth. Gass does say that a former student of his at Purdue University, just up the road from where I sat reading, working as an editor, prompted what became "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by asking Gass to write what it was like to live in the Midwest. What it was like. It would be years before I read this. When I read the story, though, I was a literalist, so the first chance I got, I went looking for B.

Bypass

I was on my way to B., entering or leaving Kokomo on US 31, or scalloping around Huntington, Wabash, Peru, Logansport on US 24, or inching along Eighty-sixth Street, Ninety-sixth Street on what was once the outskirts of Indianapolis. I drove on these bypasses that bypass nothing now. It was the landscape of cartoon backgrounds, repeated endlessly as the animated characters amble along, but jazzier, with an asymmetrical syncopation, arrhythmic but still percussive, anticipatory. Gas station, drivein (hamburger), mall, motel, new car lot, gas station, drive-in (roast beef), mall, bank, new car lot, motel, Wal-Mart, shopping center, drive-in (pizza), drive-in (hamburger), motel, used car lot, gas station, K-mart, mall, drive-in (chicken), motel, mobile homes, drive-in (subs), Target, car lot, mall, gas station, drivein (hamburger), drive-in (hamburger), drive-in (fish). This was "mature clustering," the marketing strategy whereby a place became a place not specifically but generally. A place to go to, to wander through, around in, in a car, until someone decides to stop. I'll get gas, get food. I'll pull in at that next light, the next block. I imagine a time when all of this will connect, when the real estate along every highway that forgot to limit access (why limit access?) organizes itself into one endless corridor of chance and light and existential buildings designed to announce their purpose, their reason for being. "Ducks" architects call them. The duck-shaped building that sells ducks, the doughnut-shaped building that sells doughnuts. My car slid along, impelled by a kind of magnetic levitation, from one franchise to the next, seamlessly, so that after a while it did seem that the background was moving. I simply sat still, took in this endless pageant of desire to desire. The placeless place. The artifice of eternity.

B

Bainbridge, Bargersville, Bass Lake, Batesville, Battle Ground, Bedford, Beech Grove, Berne, Beverly Shores, Bicknell, Birdseye, Black Hawk, Blanford, Bloomfield, Bloomington, Bluffton, Boggstown, Boonville, Boswell, Bourbon, Brazil, Bremen, Bristol, Brook, Brooklyn, Brookston, Brookville, Brownsburg, Brownstown, Bruceville, Bunker Hill, Burlington, Burlington Beach, Burns Harbor, Butler.

Beta

There is no "bee" sound in Greek. No, that's not right. There is a "bee" sound but the letter b does not make it. Think of that-a letter making a sound. The word we know as beta, the "bee" of the Greek alphabet, the "beta" compounded in the word "alphabet," the fragmented "bet" of the word "alphabet," is pronounced "veta." The "vee" sound. To make the "bee" sound one must use mu and pi. I have no idea why. What great phonic shift took place over centuries and miles? Sound is the geography of the mouth. The language itself drifts and wanders, sheep clouding a trackless field. The sound shades into the other regions of the mouth, different articulations of tongue, teeth, palate, and lips. The "bah" lulls up against the "whaa" of the w. "Basil" is the English parallax of "Vasilli," its slightly outof-sync double. Our even more English "William" derives from "Vasilli," and from there, its corruption, the strange diminutive, our Bill. Bill. That will bring us back to b. Language is all babble in the beginning. Then a sense emerges from the sounds we make. Making sense by making sounds. Bah-ed into life. Balled. Or wailed.

Battlefields

Names of. The South named theirs after the nearest town. The Union stuck with bodies of water. Battle Ground, Indiana, settled on the generic name, taking its name not from the name of the battle (which was named the Battle of Tippecanoe) but from the existential description of the place where the battle occurred. Prophetstown had been the town where the Battle of Tippecanoe took place, at the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers. Prophetstown, an Indian enclave of thousands, was destroyed by William Henry Harrison, later known as 01' Tippecanoe, after the battle.

The town of Battle Ground grew up after the battle. Its founders seemed not to be able to muster the energy for a more accurate name. Or perhaps the battle itself struck them as so significant. It seemed to them the ultimate battle. It went without saying. It would not need to be distinguished from all the other fields on which other battles had been fought, are fought, will be fought.

For a long time I thought Battle Ground was the B. of "The Heart of the Heart of the Country." Its understatement worked on both a literal and metaphorical plane. Here the internal and intimate struggles of the narrator could be played out in a spot characterized as the address for battles. A town named Battle Ground. Its business was strife, every house a battlefield, every hour a new skirmish, everyone and everything conflicted.

Bypass

My father hadn't listened when his doctor explained what they were going to do to him. I told him as he recovered that it had been a good sign when the surgeon switched his heart back on, that it started up again without a stutter. "Boom," I think I said, "it kicked right on." I had mentioned this as a good thing, as an indication of how strong he was, his heart was, how successful the operation had been.

"They stopped my heart?" my father asked. He couldn't, didn't believe it.

"They can't quilt on the organ with it flopping in your chest."

"How long?" he asked.

"Hours," I told him.

On the other side of the curtain, my father's roommate, who also had had a bypass, was teasing his young doctor. He asked how long before he could have sex again with his wife. The doctor had been sketching out the regimen of recovery, exercises, dosages of pills. He seemed unprepared for the question. The patient's wife giggled. The patient said he couldn't wait to start up again. His wife continued to laugh and snort. My father ignored them. He was concentrating on his own heart, its simple mechanics and none of its poetry.

B-Side

This essay is an accumulation of fragments. It is on the flip side of the hit story "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," which is itself, by design, a fragmentary accumulation of data. What was left out when Gass selected and amplified his observations? I would love to discover the left-out outtakes, the takes not taken, the rejected jam sessions, the negligible leavings from the other side of the track. In the story, a railroad track guts the town of B., the track that sings. In Brookston, at the time Gass wrote the story, the tracks were owned by The Monon, the Hoosier Line. No map can ever map a place exactly. All maps are distortions. The Monon. I am more interested in the trash left over, the stuff that doesn't fit, like all the junk genetic sequencing discovered in the genome. The thrown away. The empty place that must be filled. The space that holds open a place. The nothing that does not fit. Monon. Monon. Monon.

Battlefields

In elementary school, when I first had to memorize Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, I confused "hallowed ground" with "hollowed ground." The graves were a kind of hollow, I figured. The ground did appear to be hollowed out of the rest of the world. These precincts are set aside, allowed to lay fallow as a result of armies, often accidentally, fighting each other at these coordinates, crossroads, campsites. If a hidden component of place is always time, preserved battlefields are ways to stop time. But in doing that, they do more. Places that were, for a moment, so briefly populated, so violently inhabited, are now so often empty of people. Especially the battlefields with more obscure histories like Tippecanoe. They seem like the dead zones of seas at the mouths of rivers, where sustaining oxygen has been sucked out of the water. Who remembers? In busy Europe, wars plowed the same fields over and over. The few battlefields that exist in North America suffer under the pressure of the present catching up. The survival of these dead regions seems more likely in the parts of the world that were remote on the occasion of their violent and definitive occupation.

After the battles, the history, the facts of the matter, are done, gone, over. We are left with the residue-the roadside marker, reduced to the inscribed steel plate bolted to a boulder. And this absence of anything. Something happened here, and because it did, nothing can ever happen here again. A sign marks Prophetstown with a paragraph, no longer than this one, of history. A mile down the road, Tippecanoe's obelisk is in a fenced grove of trees, a monument to its own insignificance. The fence allows for a notice that reads Entry Is Prohibited each night forever more after sunset.

Bonneville

I first went looking for B. in my parent's big green Bonneville. I left from Butler soon after reading "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" in my literature class. The car handled like a boat, wallowed along the secondary roads I followed toward West Lafayette and the archipelago of B-beginning towns within commuting distance of Purdue, where Gass had taught. Battle Ground, Burrows, Buck Creek, Brookston, Bringhurst, Boylestown. After thinking B. was Battle Ground, I settled on Brookston and searched its back streets, navigating by means of prose, on the lookout for landmarks. I never found the row of headless trees, the sidewalk that crumbles into dust. Consulting a ragged phonebook in a phone booth outside the phone company, I found a few names of characters, and, for a second, considered calling the Motts, but stopped myself. The author, I assumed, had consulted the same or similar phonebook during composition, borrowing a real name for the story's reality. Mott, who could top that?

The lights were coming on in the houses as I cruised the streets. It was a pale Indiana winter, with the diminished sun a long way off to the west. In the gloaming, I continued to look for that stand of headless trees until I picked up a tail-a local police car-who trailed me, as curious of me as I was of his town, at a respectful distance until I crossed the city limits on Indiana 43 heading south toward Indianapolis.

Bypass

Jigsaw puzzle pieces look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each have the telling knobs and corresponding scoops, the bulges and depressions save for the welcome exceptions of the edge and corners. Apart they look almost alike. I like the particular jig that cuts that notch, heart-shaped, a wedge more defined than the simple swelling fingers and peninsulas of other, less radical cuts and curves. My father began to piece together puzzles to pass the time while he recovered from his surgery. His heart had been puzzled back together, and he, of course, in his convalescence pondered the puzzle of the heart.

"You will be sad," his doctor had told him, including among the prescriptions antidepressants, mood enhancers.

The puzzle picture of a bucolic landscape or a placid river that he pieced together made him weep. Exhausted by the effort of manipulating the cardboard chips and processing the sentimental narrative coming together on the table before him, my father had me walk him down the driveway, a journey of a thousand miles, where he fixated on the crackled crazing of cement in a square of sidewalk. It brought tears to his eyes. I gave him a puzzle I ordered from the catalog of the Museum of Modern Art. No picture, just each piece a different primary color and each piece brightly colored on both sides, the heads and tails. It looked easy, but it was harder than it looked.

Butterflies

Indiana rests in the lee of Lake Michigan. As far south as Indianapolis, the clouds produced by this coincidence cast the state in shadow. Gass acknowledges the phenomenon in a section called "Weather":

In the Midwest, around the lower Lakes, the sky in the winter is heavy and close, and it is a rare day, a day to remark on, when the sky lifts and allows the heart up. I am keeping count, and as I write this page, it is eleven days since I have seen the sun.

In the Gothic gloom of Jordan Hall, whose limestone facade mirrored the veneer of limestone clouds, I read those words and was comforted to imagine that weather mine, particular to me, a map of my own interior state. I stood at a specific intersection of climate and topography. Chemistry too.

Indianapolis had been a sad town then, but years later, when I stopped en route, on my way again to B., the old ramparts, stockyards, and warehouses seemed transformed. Even veiled in its usual shroud of haze, it felt different to be here. I remarked to my host, Susan Neville, "What gives?" Without missing a beat she responded, "Prozac money," referring to the pill, locally formulated, that seeded the weather of the heart while, at the same time, made glad the pocketbooks of the heartland. Naptown awoke in spite of the weather.

It reminded me of another local miracle I witnessed years before, while trudging across the bleak campus. A cloud of Monarch butterflies navigating their migration to Mexico suddenly saturated that grassy strip of mall, oriented north to south, where I slouched toward class. I was, for a moment, completely engulfed, cocooned by their swarming. The raining fall of spring flower blossoms. But they didn't land, continuing instead to swirl and dance, so many I thought the flutter of their wings had reached a mass critical enough to create an entirely new sound only I could hear. A flap perhaps. Magic seems to lodge somewhere else for those who live in the lee of the lower Lakes.

Blue Bridge

When I was home, I borrowed my mother's car, a bright red Volkswagen Beetle, and drove it along the end moraine of the last continental glacier from the most recent Ice Age. I left my father convalescing in Fort Wayne, bent over a thousand-piece puzzle, depicting, when complete, a still life of fruit and flowers. In the borrowed Beetle, my mother had arranged her own bouquet of plastic black-eyed Susans in a vase that was strange standard dashboard equipment. The road, like a river, skirted the floodplain of the Wabash, meandering from the moraine, down into the valley, over the running stream, then out onto the black bottomland and back. I was sailing.

Once, this was the bed of an ancient inland sea, a vast washout field from a stalled glacier, a sheet of water spreading out. I tacked; I reached. I thought of stories. Of "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," of course, my destination, the landscape, which I was again reading and reiterating on my way to Brookston. I thought of a story I wrote years ago, under that other story's influence, about a dairy farmer on this very road heading toward, in mind and body, an absent lover, his absent love. The daisies clouded the dash, obscuring the dials. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. Suddenly I came to a truss bridge, freshly painted a cheerful primary blue, the only color in the landscape save for my little red car, its cargo of yellow daisies. The bridge was only wide enough for one car. I waited at its entrance. A traffic light regulated the one-way flow, the one-at-a-time passage. I waited. No car was waiting on the other side. I thought of the valves of the heart, the hydraulics of locks and dams, alternating current, the magnetism of love. I imagined a ghost car approaching, an alternate universe, another journey from another time. My farmer in his Continental. Gass on his way to class, on his way home. Me, returning from another mission through the same pages of these familiar fields. The light turned green and I eased out the clutch, weighed anchor, made way into this parade of other possibilities.

Bernoulli

What did I know of sailing? I am from Indiana, land-locked and a long way from the sea. Yes, there is that pesky easement to Lake Michigan, a seeping valve in its heart, but I grew up a long way from water. I like the ending to the Odyssey, where the hero is ordered to walk inland with an oar until the natives he meets no longer recognize it for what it is, mistaking it for a flail. Why are you carrying a flail? That would be me, the land-locked boy, asking. I knew nothing about sailing, nothing about tacking or heeling or coming about. I figured that a sail caught the wind, that the boat got pushed from behind. You could only sail one way, in the direction the wind was blowing. I knew nothing of the principle of lift, of wing. Not until later did I understand that you could sail into the wind, or almost in that direction, in any direction, really, as long as you had a wind. I finally understood the paradox of the wind. When it is most difficult to move, when the wind is in your face, it feels as if you are moving the most, an illusion created in the confusion of your senses. Inching forward, almost standing still, makes for the most interesting sailing; such tacking amplifies the sensation of motion, moving to get into the position to move.

One must read "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" in a tactful way, sometimes skipping, forward and back, from one square of prose to the next. It isn't so much a series of moments, but a set, a slide show, a contact sheet, a webpage of thumbnails. They can be shuffled, reordered, repeated. I swear when I read the story in different anthologies, sections are missing, and new ones added. Each section floats independent of the others, yet all are borne by the same breeze, the conflicting currents. Paragraphs, like continents, drift apart and together from reading to reading. That can't be right. But it does feel right.

Boston

Once, I found William H. Gass. I was working in Boston, and he was visiting to lecture. I had been recruited to introduce the concluding session of his two-day gig. I was from Indiana, an oddity, and had told everyone in Boston about wandering around that state in search of B., a small town fastened to a cornfield. This admission made me stranger still to my colleagues in Boston, which is the hub of the universe. Quaint to be from such a place, Indiana. It might as well be India. And strangely touching, this quixotic search for an imaginary place. "You simply must introduce our guest," they said and put me on the spot.

Gass was nothing like I had imagined. He had bored the local audience with his current passion, a slide show of amateur snapshots glossed, glazed with his lovely language about the language. Each slide launched an elaborate essay about itself, prompted by a pedestrian picture of, say, an anonymous doorway in some nameless street of an unidentified town in a vague country. I think he was promoting an aesthetic of the ordinary, an anti-aesthetic, but he couldn't help himself. There was a world in each photograph as there are worlds within each word. I have sailed the seas to see.

By the second night, the crowd had contracted to stragglers and hardcore fans. In my introduction, I related the history of my voyages in search of B. I sailed the seas, I said. And I drew their attention to one of the last sections of "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." Entitled "Church," it recreates a moment of a high-school basketball game in Indiana.

Then the yelling begins again, and then continues: fathers, mothers, neighbors joining in to form a single pulsing ululation-a cry of the whole community-for in the gymnasium each body becomes the bodies beside it, pressed as they are together, thigh to thigh, and the same shudder runs through all of them, and runs toward the same release. Only the ball moves serenely through this dazzling din. Obedient to law it scarcely speaks but caroms quietly and lives at peace.

I had wanted to make a point, I guess, pointing out the contrast between the things in rest and in motion, the agitation of rest and the quiescence of movement. It's how I feel I felt driving aimlessly and with an aim through the space of Indiana. It is how I felt, I feel, reading the story in which nothing and everything seems, seemed to happen. I sing of what is past, or passing, or to come.

On the way to the reception, Gass told me that my expeditions in search of B. might be beside the point, that the place did not exist. Or existed only in the story, like a variable in an equation. X. B.

"I knew that," I said, "I knew, know that."

Baptism

Robert Indiana, the artist who sculpted LOVE, lives on the island of Vinalhaven, a jigsaw puzzle piece of rock off the coast of Maine. Hidden in that rusting fragment of the alphabet that stands for LOVE is the heart-shaped cutout in the sculpture's heart. It is made by the V-ed rays of the V's angled legs and their curving serifed caps curving inward to form that other, shallower V. What was his real name, Robert Indiana, like Gass, another architect of loose associations between the state of Indiana and the state of love, of longing?

Breast

On the first day of classes I always ask my students where they are from. Force of habit and habitat. "Where you from?" There are always the ones, more than you would guess, who answer that they are from nowhere and everywhere, usually self-described brats of the military, the conglomerate, the academy. Once a woman, anticipating the question, I suppose, or homesick, or both, pointed to a spot on her chest. She was wearing a T-shirt printed with a map of her state. She pressed her finger down indicating the region above her heart. "I'm from right here," she said, turning left and right so that the entire class could see.

Battlefield

My frail father sat, a paltry thing, at the card table sorting the puzzle pieces by color. He had defined the boundary of the puzzle, piecing together the edge. Inside the edge, he added to the mounds of separate hues. Each individual piece was nothing but an abstraction, a cloud of color. He tossed a piece into one pile and another piece onto another. He chewed on what looked like a bit of the sky, considering. He read the terrain, the declivities and defiles. He surveyed the shattered landscape before him, nowhere near the moment when the landscape pictured on the box art becomes the tiled landscape on the table.

Basketball

My father played guard. There is a picture in his yearbook. He is posed in that antique stance, the underhanded free throw. It is a composition of curves. His oval face. The arch of his bowed legs. The parabolic cradle of his arms around the ball. The squashed ovoid of the foul circle inscribed at his feet. The 0 his mouth is forming. The eggs of his eyes. The twin black scallops of their irises. And on his jersey, double zero.

Baptism

After the Battle of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison became 01' Tippecanoe. The history of a piece of ground is recorded in a deed. Here, the deed was deeded to the man. Of all my addresses, not one has attached itself to me. Nor have I made any place memorable. There are times I want to lose myself in this place or, better yet, confound all that I find while looking. I want to be the fixed point and the vector, the tangent. I want to wrap myself in this field as if it were a robe, rob it of its name, and then roam.

Byzantium

Today Sparta looks so midwestern. Cornfields, fastened all around, surround it. Its streets are arranged in a tidy grid; a green or red tractor putts by. The famous Sparta of antiquity was long ago laid to waste. The present city was built only in the last century along modern functional lines. But up in the hills, in the mountains outside Sparta, above the neat order, I stumbled on what is left of the red brick walls and buildings of a provin cial Byzantine outpost, Mystras. The Ottomans sacked it last, in 1453. It isn't touristed much; the crowds more are attracted to the famous marble sites, the classics. Even in ruin it's a backwater, the B. of the Holy Eastern Roman Empire. The afternoon was hot, and I wandered the dusty streets between the intricate piles of rubble, thinking of drowsy emperors.

The few restored churches came equipped with their own featherbedded guards who, honestly, sang for me when they turned away, magnanimously ignoring my prohibited picture taking of their faded frescoes. A convent stood extant in the heart of town, and through the bars of the gate, I watched one old tattered nun sweep the same stone square of the courtyard for the rest of the afternoon.

Bug

I took a break from tending my father, who was tending his heart, to meander around Indiana searching for B. That neck of the woods, pretty much woodless, beckons. Its expanse invites me, its infinite regression of the horizon, its pulled focus pulling me deeper into depth and distance. I get restless after I travel so far to return home. My parents have come to expect it. Tank up a car. I bug out. I never know what I'll find when I don't even know what I am looking for. There isn't much to find.

Here I was going to try to do something with the seventeenyear cicada hatches. Picture myself driving through the hatch as I did one year a few years ago.

Here, I was going to force a connection with their spent shells scaling the tulip poplars and golden rain trees in New Harmony and me tooling through their sawing music, encased in my own carapace.

A friend writes that this last summer the Midwest was plagued with lady beetles blooming when the aphids they feed on bloomed. When the soybeans were cut and the aphid population crashed, the predators moved indoors. "Still in the corners of most rooms in our house," he writes, "you can see them masquerading as innocent specks, trying to hole up here all winter." Innocent specks. In "Order of Insects," Gass's narrator also contemplates the insects that appear in her home, gradually falling in love with the infestation. There is here in Indiana an abundance of almost nothings, no-see-ems, gnats, and midges. An abundance of almost nothing. This is plane geometry. The infinite number of points in a finite space.

Business

"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" ends with "Business." It is about Christmas in the town of B. The narrator is alone, outside, downtown, listening to barely audible carols being broadcast to set a festive and, it is hoped, profitable mood. I am not sure anymore of how places inform or deflect us.

I sailed to B. again and drifted down the streets, mildly interested by what was happening in each neat house-what recovery, what quiet desperation, what stories were being recounted, what lives lived. But it is more the wrack and spindrift that draws my attention now. It isn't seas so much I ply but their edges. Indiana is an ocean of backwater. It is the vast and empty shingle where everything I can imagine washes up, the beach I comb alone. I got out of the car in Brookston and loitered on the corner downtown where I could picture Gass long ago loitering. Listen: the muffled thuds, the heartbeat of the town. There, the breaking waves of traffic rushing disguised the undertow of silence. My ear was cocked. Blood pulsed through my body. I heard that, too. Cars beat on a tack, heading south, heading north, heading east, heading west. I heard the wind. In the trees. I heard it scour the dust in the gutters, rattle a tin sign. I was. I am. Be. I stood there, as I lost the light, thought of home, and waited for the wind to come about.