THE IDOL WHO JUST WANTED TO MAKE MONEY

VOLUME 5: NOBODY'S PERFECT

PART ONE

Jax woke up knowing how to make French sauce.

He did not know why. He did not know how he knew it. He knew the words bechamel and espagnole and veloute and he knew the ratios of butter to flour to milk the way he knew the distance from his bed to the window, which was six steps. He lay in the dark for a while and listened to the desert wind against the thin walls of the bunkhouse and thought about whether he wanted to know this thing. The answer was no. He did not want to know it. He wanted to wake up and go to the drive-in and open the windows and let the cold air in and stand by the speaker posts and wait for cars to pull up.

But the knowledge was there, sitting in his head like a tool he had not asked for and could not put down.

Jake Harlan. Cole had given him the name Jax when they worked together at the hospital in Santa Fe, and Jax had kept it because it was shorter and because Cole had given it to him and Cole was the only person Jax trusted to call him anything. Cole had left the hospital six months ago and Jax had come out to the desert and taken the job at the drive-in because it was the kind of job that asked nothing and gave you space to think about things you did not want to think about.

The drive-in was dying. It had been dying for ten years. The screen was patched in three places. The speaker cords were frayed. The concessions machine had been broken since last winter. Jax fixed things when they broke. He fixed them the way he knew things: without meaning to.

PART TWO

The bar in town had a piano in the corner and Jax did not play it until a Friday in March when the bar was empty except for an old man in the back booth and a woman at the counter who was drinking alone. The piano was out of tune. Jax played it anyway and it sounded like the desert sounded at night, which was to say it sounded like silence trying to be a sound.

He did not know how he knew to put his fingers on the keys the way he did. He had never taken a lesson in his life. He had never even held a piano before the keys were under his hands and the notes were coming out in a sequence that was not random and was not music in any sense that the old man in the booth could identify, but was close enough to music that the old man stopped reading his newspaper and watched.

When Jax finished, the old man did not say anything. He finished his drink and left a five on the table and walked out into the desert night without looking back.

Jax washed glasses for the rest of the evening. He thought about the sauce he knew how to make and the piano he knew how to play and the languages he knew without knowing how he knew them. He knew French, which made sense because of the sauce. He knew a little Spanish, which made sense because of the desert. He knew a little German, which did not make sense at all. He knew a few words in a language that had no name he could recognize, the way you recognize a face you have seen before but cannot place.

He thought about this and washed the same glass three times and the woman at the counter looked at him once and looked away.

PART THREE

Cole called from Santa Fe and said he had a patient who reminded him of Jax.

She came in last week, Cole said. ER. Burned hands. Said she got them cooking over a camp stove. But she cooked like a professional. I watched her make a soup in five minutes that would have taken me an hour. She had the knife work down. She did not know she had it down. She just did it.

Jax sat on the steps of the drive-in and held the phone and listened to the wind.

What happened to her?

Cole was quiet for a long time. She left before the stitches were done. I asked her to stay and talk to me and she said no. I asked her where she was going and she said east. She walked out of the hospital and into the desert and I did not stop her.

Jax looked at his own hands. They were burned in places that did not make sense. He had not told Cole about them. He had not told anyone about them. They were old burns and new burns at the same time, scars from fires he did not remember starting.

Do you think she is like me? he asked.

Like what?

Like me.

Cole said, I think everyone is like you, Jax. That is the problem. Everyone wakes up one day knowing something they should not know and it ruins the simple things and it makes the complicated things easy and they do not know what to do with that.

Jax was silent.

What are you going to do? Cole asked.

I do not know.

That is something.

PART FOUR

Nathan taught at the community college two hours west of the drive-in. He was a linguistics professor with a ponytail and a beard and a habit of asking questions that had no answers and enjoying the questions more than the answers. Jax had met him through a customer who came into the drive-in one night and asked for a sandwich in German. Jax made the sandwich in German. The customer asked if he had taken classes and Jax said no and the customer asked where he had learned and Jax said he did not know and the customer said he needed to meet Nathan.

Nathan sat Jax down in his office and spoke to him in French and Spanish and German and a language that Jax understood without knowing the name of it. Nathan wrote down what Jax said and nodded and wrote more.

You have a passive fluency, Nathan said. You understand and you can produce, but you do not have the memory of learning. It is like remembering how to ride a bike without remembering learning to ride.

What does it mean?

It means you are not who you think you are. Or it means you are everyone. Or it means the world is bigger than you have been told. I do not know which one is true. They may all be true.

Jax sat in the office and looked at the books on the walls and the papers on the desk and the world outside the window, which was just desert and sky and the same desert continuing beyond the sky. He thought about the sauce and the piano and the burns and Cole's patient who had walked into the desert heading east.

He thought about the drive-in and the screen and the speakers and the cars that pulled up and the people who sat inside them and watched movies on a patched screen and ate popcorn from a broken machine and did not think about sauce or piano or languages or burns or desert or the fact that the world was bigger than they had been told.

He thought about this for a long time and then he went home and packed a bag.

PART FIVE

He drove east on Route 84 with the windows down and the desert air coming in and the piano music still in his fingers and the sauce recipe still in his head and the languages still in his mouth and the burns still on his hands and the knowledge of things he had not learned and the absence of anything to prove or achieve or win.

There was nothing to win. There never had been. The story was not about victory or defeat. It was about identity and choice, which are the same thing when you strip them down to what they actually are, which is the question you ask yourself in the dark before you go to sleep and the answer you give yourself in the light when you get up.

He had asked the question for months. He was still giving the answer.

The desert opened up around him, flat and wide and indifferent in the way that only desert can be. It did not care about his names or his talents or his burns or his knowledge. It did not care about the drive-in or the piano or the hospital or the professor or the woman with the burned hands or Cole or the old man in the booth or the woman at the counter or the German customer or the wind against the bunkhouse walls.

It just was. And Jax was just driving.

He did not know where he was going. He knew that he was going east. That was enough. East was a direction and direction was a kind of answer and he had been asking questions for a long time and he was ready to stop and follow the one that led somewhere.

The road went on. The desert went on. The sky went on.

Jax kept driving.

He had nothing but what he had learned. That was everything.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: