From the publisher's press release:
The Vanishing Point is about disappearance, trauma and memory, and the possibilities of redemption through a great American road trip and a peek into a mid-western childhood. It is a meditation on Karma and the way we lose and find ourselves over and over again.
How did Henry Dolan end up here, heading to Santa Fe, New Mexico? The one place in the world he swore he would never set foot in again—the town where he lost his wife and daughter nearly a decade ago. Maybe it’s the eleven pounds of high-grade weed in the trunk of his car that he can’t sell anywhere else. Maybe it is something much deeper.
It is time for him to finally meet his daughter and reckon with the harm he caused. Cadence, now ten, helps Henry open his long locked-away heart, exposing the wounds he has kept concealed. In healing, he finds a mysterious connection between his daughter and his own tragic childhood . . .
From the publisher's press release:
The Vanishing Point is about disappearance, trauma and memory, and the possibilities of redemption through a great American road trip and a peek into a mid-western childhood. It is a meditation on Karma and the way we lose and find ourselves over and over again.
How did Henry Dolan end up here, heading to Santa Fe, New Mexico? The one place in the world he swore he would never set foot in again—the town where he lost his wife and daughter nearly a decade ago. Maybe it’s the eleven pounds of high-grade weed in the trunk of his car that he can’t sell anywhere else. Maybe it is something much deeper.
It is time for him to finally meet his daughter and reckon with the harm he caused. Cadence, now ten, helps Henry open his long locked-away heart, exposing the wounds he has kept concealed. In healing, he finds a mysterious connection between his daughter and his own tragic childhood . . .
Henry
I wasn’t always like this.
For our honeymoon, Jane Renee Philips and I drove 500 miles
south and west to a farming town of three hundred people where
three days earlier, Annie Steel had killed her four children (Gina,
Jenny, Nathan, Fern) and herself. When the paper reported the
killings, both of us cut it out and rushed home in anticipation of
telling the other and we decided on the spot to get married.
I drove the interstate half of the trip. By the time we switched to
Philips driving for the two-lane highways, we were charged, cutting
a dangerous swath through the landscape. When she pushed down
on the accelerator, the clouds above parted, the front end of the car
lifted, wind noise screamed in our ears, children covered their faces
as we passed, a rabbit froze in the road, then darted—too slow!,
birds panicked and beat the wind with their wings, pickup trucks
skidded sideways to avoid us. I unbuttoned her jeans and lay my
cheek on the line where pubic hair meets stomach, she bent down
and blew her breath on my face, a smell as familiar as my own,
drying the sweat. Her lips brushed my eyelids. It felt like flying.
We blew into that town, which was nothing more than a circular
collection of houses—like wagons drawn together for protection—
surrounded by corn and soybean fields. We believed we were doing
something important, getting at basic truths about why people act
the way they do, that we had the courage and the insight to look into
the darkest places and come out with knowledge. And that we had
answers, that’s the funny part. When I think back on it now, I’m not
sure any of it was real. It’s difficult for me to believe a lot of what I
remember. It gets harder all the time to be sure about anything.
Leaving
Then I lose my job, which I didn’t see coming. Though I suspect
it might be for the best, I still make a half-hearted attempt to argue.
“Are you kidding me?” I say to Larry, the owner of the cab
company.
“There've been complaints lately. A lot of complaints.”
“Country of whiners.”
“I have documentation.”
“Yeah?” I say, against my better judgment. “Tell me one.”
“Mrs. Koppel says you threw dog-shit at her.”
“Her dog did it in my cab. What would you do?”
“Clean it up?” He suggests so politely it infuriates me.
“Well fuck me for being human.”
“A lady out on West Avenue says her teenage daughter came
home stoned out of her mind and she claimed the cab driver got
her stoned. According to the logs, that driver was you.”
“It was her joint,” I say helplessly. “I was just being friendly.”
“A Mr. Cordova called to tell us you chased him into his house
and forced him to give you his wallet.”
“He only had three bucks for a four-dollar fare. That’s procedure.”
“Mugging clients is not procedure.”
“Semantic bullshit. I was retrieving a fare, putting money in
your pocket, doing what you want me to do, no matter what the
book says.”
“He said you went in his fridge, ate his pickles, drank right
from the milk carton and stole a bag of home-made tamales.”
“First off, the tamales were greasy and I tossed them. The pickles
were good,” I say, then remember why we’re talking. “I was
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just, well, you know...I thought of it as a tip.” But by now, I know
it’s hopeless and frankly, I’m shocked by the accumulation of
details and by the time I leave, I’m actually grateful he hasn’t
brought up several other incidents that, no doubt, were also
reported.
I can’t say I’ll miss it. Two years of sitting in the same cab,
parked more or less in the same spot in a deserted area of downtown
near the train station, waiting for some depressed, drunken
college student to call the dispatcher is no one’s idea of fun. It’s just
that the other work occasionally available in town—coffee shop
counter man, bookstore clerk, day (never night) bartender—pays
less and is far more potentially humiliating than driving a cab. I’d
moved to this medium-sized New Hampshire college town out of
some instinct, a way of thinking that made sense at the time. I no
longer remember how it made sense, just that it did. Maybe I came
thinking I might be able to get adjunct work teaching the occasional
film production or history class, but I’ve never felt further away
from teaching than I do now. Besides, if I’d done even the most
cursory bit of internet research two years ago, I would’ve discovered
this college has no film production classes at all and only a
single “overview” history class in its most perfunctory form
(Edison to Lumiere to Melies to Porter to Griffith to the Germans to
the Soviets to sound to Citizen Kane, ad nauseum), a class I swore
I’d never lower myself to teach again. Cab driving was far preferable
to spewing easy-to-teach bullshit, a moral stand that was never
tested because the college’s Humanities chair didn’t respond to my
CV and cover letter which, in retrospect, might’ve been more
combative than was necessary.
At home, I sit at my kitchen table and roll and smoke a joint
and start in on shots of tequila. I have a pad of paper and a pen,
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ready to make a list. This is something I used to do. “Write it down”
was once my mantra, the first of many steps towards figuring it
out, but it’d been years since I could see the point of implementing
a process. What have I ever solved this way? Still, I write My
Options at the top, then underline it twice and follow it with 1), 2),
and 3), three seeming a non-intimidating number, but even this is
too much.
A couple of years after Philips disappeared, a year after I fled
Santa Fe vowing to go somewhere, anywhere, I took a job teaching
film at a commuter college in downtown Chicago. Going back to the
city where Philips and I had spent most of our life together wasn't
perfect, but I had no better ideas. In the beginning, I liked the
relationship with the students, everything was so on the surface. I
was one piece of a much larger machine and occasionally an eager
student might move by on the conveyor belt, and I'd impart my bit
of knowledge, make my adjustment, and send them on. I liked the
way students zoomed through my classes, mine was just one point
on the map equal to every other point, not much was really at
stake.
And after Philips' disappearance and the resulting investigation,
with a child who was an infant when her mother left, a
toddler when I last saw her, I carried myself in Chicago like I had a
secret, an impossibly complex back story too painful to bring to
light. I liked playing the sensitive shell of a man routine. It kept
people away while hinting at a deeper, darker, possibly dangerous
self. No one bothered me and I was calm and in control in a way I
never was the last few years with Philips. I felt like a murderer
paroled out of prison after years, someone who had been shaped
by violence and ugliness. A survivor. Triumphant.
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But somewhere it all disappeared without me realizing it and I
became the kind of person I least wanted to be, someone who
teaches, someone who can’t do—someone who won’t—and it
seemed to me every single human I met every day understood this.
After years of brooding, holding myself separate, I found every
relationship in my life was the same. I carried on meaningful tensecond
friendships with a variety of people around town – the
woman with purple hair at the donut shop where I'd get coffee, the
newspaper vendor, the gas mini-mart clerk, the health food store
cashier, the blond woman in the Saab next to me at a traffic light.
Finally I quit teaching and left, heading east, vowing to keep as
much of the continent as I could between me and Santa Fe, settling
in New Hampshire for no better reason than I'd visited the college
when I was 18 thinking I might want to attend. And I took up cab
driving again, the perfect job for five-minute relationships.
I no longer own the ability to connect with people on a deeper,
more satisfactory level, like it’s an organ gone vestigial after 10
million years of disuse. When I see two people together now—and
I know how this sounds—I don’t believe it, not really. I think
they’re kidding themselves and they’ll come to understand the way
I do, they’ll come to their senses. All love is a delusion and those
most in love are in fact most delusional. And as each year passes, I
become less a human being than a collection of strange tics,
bizarre reactions, unusual ideas, uncommon fears, as if I am
developing into a subspecies with a population of one.
I can’t imagine the path I might take to getting close to another
person, it is as mysterious as cancer. All life is subtext, I used to tell
my students, everything important anyway, but somewhere along
the line, I lost the text, and I don’t have a clue how to get it back.
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Finally I give up on the list altogether and turn on the television.
One of my favorite movies is on, the central film in a couple of
classes I taught, and I recognize this as a cosmic sign though I’m
not at all sure what it might mean. It’s the scene where Martin
Sheen walks out into a seemingly endless prairie at dusk, the rifle
on his shoulders makes him look haunted like a scarecrow, watching
lightning illuminate an immense, distant bank of storm clouds;
a signal there is another world, another life, but one that’s magically,
impossibly far away, like a city in the clouds, like a comet
passing the earth.
I snort a bit of the opium-speed mix I get from a former cabbie
I know living in a survivalist compound north towards Canada. He
grows opium poppies out there, dries them, grinds the -seedpods
to dust—there's a boiling-water steeping step I'm unclear about—
and mixes it with methamphetamine. It’s a tiny habit I’ve picked
up. I can take it or leave it and when I say that I’m not kidding
myself. I’m old enough to know a real problem when I see it. Old
enough to know, but that never helps with the doing. Knowledge is
overrated. Introspection is simply a mocking voice repeating the
same words over and over but always withholding that single most
crucial bit of information; what to do with all the knowledge. For
the millionth time, I promise myself my life starts changing in the
morning and even as I say it, I don’t believe it, knowing as I do, but
it still has just enough power, along with the opium, to push me to
fall asleep in front of the television.
I dream I'm stoned and falling asleep in front of the television,
then I fall asleep and dream within my dream, this time of sitting
in front of a different, newer, much larger television in the same
room. It has fantastic sound which I say in the dream the way a
proud new owner might say it. “This has fantastic sound!” I can
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hear helicopters behind me and the roar of tornadoes in front,
birds chirping above and crickets buzzing all around and I’m
insulated and pleasantly spinning, completely content.
When I first wake to that druggy blue glow, I'm disappointed to
see my same old 13-inch color TV in its usual spot. Then the
content of the dream sinks in. Is this what it has come to; has my
subconscious simply given up? Couldn’t it try a little harder; would
one half-nude teenaged girl lying on the floor begging me to come
to her be so out of the question? Or even a nice flying dream, no
hard-on required? You get the dreams you deserve, I guess.
“This life cannot continue,” I say out loud, having already forgotten
my vow of the night before, then I laugh at the seriousness
of my pronouncement. Yet one more useless declaration. Think of
a word to describe an emotional state—despair, cynicism, exhilaration,
antipathy, expectation, whatever—and now tell me each of
these has its own distinct feeling and flavor and I’ll call you a poor,
mawkish fool who’s deluded himself into believing in the “wonder”
of his own life. Is this what people mean when they argue all life is
illusion? The triumph of the subjective, life being whatever a
person wants to say it is? I say no thanks to that. I trust in my
brain-as-food-processor approach, blending all emotions to a fine,
easy-to-digest paste.
Maybe it's not much of a way of living (though I suspect quality-
of-life arguments are beside the point), but I figure at least
dying will be about the same; just one more thing not to get too
excited about. Or it could be the opposite; it’ll be scary as shit, and
you absolutely fail to control your fear and thus spend the last
moments on earth out of your mind and in torment. But if that's
the truth, then there's really a very good reason not to dwell on it,
no point in going through that more than once, so in a way the
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opposing arguments come to the same place; the world made up of
nothing but gray area. Which would make a fine gravestone
epitaph, His World was all Gray Area. Much more fitting now than
Philips’ suggestion years ago of “What the fuck are you looking at?”
made during a time when she still believed my death would be
bad.
Saying this life has to stop now is exactly the same as deciding I
don't care if it stops. I look for another job or I don’t. Either way. So
I eeny-meeny-minie-moe it and pick stop now, then decide I'll try
and think of a way out of this but can only come up with the idea
that I have to make a plan, the actual plan will follow later. Getting
cable comes to mind.
I forced myself to finish this book. By that I mean it was a grueling slug through to the end. It was not something that I enjoyed but it also was not something that I would despise. I read it because it was an easy read and sometimes it is good to read things that take my mind off of the other things in my life.
The reason that it was a difficult read for me was not because the word choice was something that required a dictionary. No, in fact this is written at a level that a ninth grade student could comprehend. The reason that it was difficult for me to finish this book was the plot line. The characters developed nicely and could relate those in the book with people in my own life experiences. I am not sure if it was the way that it was written or what, but the plot line did not move fast enough for me at places.
I thought the entire story line could have been split in half and we would have still managed to have the story. Coming to this conclusion is a difficult decision. On one hand the author has managed to do something that I have never completed and turned out a novel; however, I cannot help but think that this one could have been shortened. The fact that there were a few surprises in the story was a nice surprise amongst all of the words.
Overall I would say that this one is just something that is alright. Like I mentioned, I have changes that I would make but it is not that everyone will come to the same conclusion. I believe that you should at least try this book. You will know early on whether or not you like it and can then determine whether or not you want to continue reading.