"Everybody Gets Somewhere Eventually" by Jeff Wilson
This chapter, entitled “Everybody Gets Somewhere Eventually”, is from Jeff Wilson’s novel Making Our Way to the Zigzag House.
There came a point in our story, between the Hearsemobile and the house, when the characters, as they painstakingly lifted their shoes out of the mud, taking one strained step forward at a time, engaged in a conversation I hesitated to include at that point because I wanted to keep the narrative moving ahead at a fast clip. But I hated to leave it out, so I’m going back now. Picture everyone moving so slowly that it was painful to watch them. Every movement was strained, and with the wind whipping their hair around while the mud gripped their feet, they looked like they were stuck inside a glue factory. Anna was at the front of the group, and she filled in the characters on some of the caprices of their narrator.
“I’ve been in his novels before—”
“Why on earth did you come back?” Erica asked.
“There’s something he said once,” Anna said. “Actually, he says it before every novel, when he’s trying to persuade me to act in another one of his books.”
“Is this acting?” Erica said.
“Or whatever you call it. Whenever he’s sketching out the next plot, he says Everyone gets somewhere eventually, and that’s always been the case.”
“It sounds like you know him pretty well,” Erica said.
“Actually, the more I work with him the more confused I get,” she said. “One time he was explaining a character once who was wigging everybody out, and he told me She’s batshit crazy and she’s the second coming of Christ. You can’t be both, I said, and he texted back Ye of little faith.”
The group groaned because of the narrator and the lousy weather and the slippery yet sticky lawn. If only they could be in the same space-time continuum as the narrator, they thought—then there’d be some payback. Only Anna could find anything good to say about the story writer.
“Still, there’s something I like about his books,” she said. “Sometimes when you go somewhere it’s kind of fun. In one novel there were only seven characters, and all of us were young women around my age. He put us on a ship, and this was a real wooden ship, you know, with a fore and an aft and sails that stayed laundry white no matter how hard it rained. It was hard work sailing that ship with only seven people, but we managed to do it, and we floated all the way across the ocean.”
“No men?” Richard said.
“That’s right.”
“I wished he’d called me about that,” Richard said boisterously. “Seven women, one man, out on the high seas—that sounds like a real adventure.”
Stacey poked Richard in the ribs before making this request:
“Would you proceed with your story, Anna?”
“We weren’t searching for the City of Gold or anything,” Anna continued. “Basically, our mission was—he told us that whenever he saw land to get off the ship and ask Are we there yet? That’s all. Are we there yet?”
“Why?” Erica asked.
“I have no idea.”
“The man is bonkers.”
“That book was fun at first, but then the plot started to drag,” Anna continued. “We’d get to an island and there was nobody there, and we’d grab enough coconuts and mangos to take with us so we could stay alive until the next island. On some islands there’d be people but they couldn’t speak English, and it took days for them to figure out what we were asking. Are we there yet, we’d ask them after they’d learned some English. Where, they’d say. There, we’d say. What does there mean, they’d say. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to explained to someone who doesn’t know English what there means, but it isn’t easy.”
A lightning bolt in the distance reminded everyone that walking to the house was not only difficult, it was unsafe, which launched an inquiry into characters’ rights in works of fiction. After the narrator put the kibosh on that discussion Anna resumed her narrative.
“Then we went to an island where the only people who lived there were seven good-looking guys who happened to be the same age as us,” she said. “He throws in lots of coincidences, but that coincidence I liked.”
“Why couldn’t I have been in that novel?” Erica asked.
“We stayed there awhile,” Anna said, “and we took our time teaching them the language. Unfortunately, they were quick studies. Language they were good at, but in other ways they weren’t so smart. They wanted us to stay, and we said We can live here the rest of our lives if you answer our question correctly. We practiced a few times. We said really slowly over and over again Are we there yet? We said This is really simple Just say yes. But we don’t know what you’re getting at, they said. This almost seems like trick question. We struggle with abstract concepts. We kept trying, but these guys were too smart and too dumb at the same time and they never figured out how to answer the question correctly. So we sailed on.”
“Men make everything so difficult,” Erica said.
The group kept trudging toward the house. At times someone would lose their balance and go plunging into the mud (everyone except Anna, that is, who also managed to keep the box clean and dry). After falling down in the mud Erica laid on her back and reflected on how the setting she was promised never appeared.
“The Earnshaws never faced weather like this,” she said. “They had a couple storm clouds, but that was about it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stacey said. “This is totally Wuthering Heights. Maybe you don’t like the Brontes as much as you think you do.”
Richard tried to pull Erica out of the mud, but after a burst of strength that caught everyone by surprise she ended up yanking him into the mud and going down with him. Staring down at her boyfriend/ex-boyfriend, girlfriend/ ex-girlfriend, etc. (even though there were only two people down there it seemed like there were many more people writhing around in the mud) Stacey wondered why everyone down there laughing. And why were they gazing at each other affectionately, the way lovers do after they’ve just had sex? It seemed like the past was summarized in that single image, and she was surprised that, instead of staying in the mud, the two sex fiends eventually got up and continued walking.
“So how did that novel end that you were telling us about?” Stacey asked Anna.
“It was kind of abrupt. All of a sudden we were in this strange country. We weren’t sure where we were, and nobody would tell us. Most of the people knew English, but for some reason they were really secretive. One day we stole a car, and we got on a back road and drove aimlessly, and suddenly we saw a sign that said Welcome to The Town of There. Finally, we thought.”
“All six of you? I thought there were seven,” Erica said.
“One of us stayed on the island.”
“That’s what I would have done,” Erica said.
“We walked into town and met all the townspeople,” Anna said. “Even though the name of the town was There, the narrator still wanted us to ask the question, which seemed kind of silly because we knew how they would answer, or we thought we did anyway. Everyone spoke excellent English, so it seemed like we finally reached the end of the story. So I walked up to someone in a coffee shop and said, Are we there yet? Where, he asked. There, I said. Do you mean there or do you mean There, he asked. there, I said. It got all convoluted, and finally I ended up writing down the question, and I think after a while he understood what I was asking, but this guy was like a philosopher or something. He kept saying Where is there and I kept saying Wherever you want it to be Just say yes and we’ll be sail back to America or stay here or whatever. I said We sailed across the ocean to find the answer to that question and once we get it we can wrap up this novel we’ve been starring in. He found what I said really strange which makes sense it kind of was and they ended up locking us in an asylum which wasn’t all bad there were lots of other people our age and lots of good-looking guys and we played volleyball and badminton and there were free drinks and they let us leave whenever we wanted and come back so it was alright, and that’s where the novel ended.”
“So there was a There there but not a there there?” Erica asked.
“I think there was a there there too,” Anna said, “but no one confirmed it for us.”
“Have you read the novel?” Richard asked.
“He sends copies after they get published,” Anna said. “I’ll warn you, though, he changes things around after he compiles all his notes. It’s not like he cuts things out, but let’s just say he has his own way of interpreting what happened. Six months after our story ended he sent me a copy of the novel. It was a thick hardback book with a beautiful cover—there’s our ship at full mast and we’re all there, all seven of us in our sailor outfits, our long hair flowing beautifully in the wind, all of us are leaning against the front of the ship with our binoculars—and I was excited about reading it. He’s not much of a writer, but if you’ve got a good story it’s hard to ruin it.”
“What was the book called?” Erica asked.
“There Is No There There,” Anna replied.
“There Is No There?” Erica asked.
“No, There Is No There There. Two Theres.
“No, three Theres,” Stacey said.
“You’re right, three Theres,” Anna said. “I was thinking the two Theres at the end, but you’re right, there’s another There at the beginning. So three Theres in all, although if you think about it there weren’t any theres at all in the title, or in the book for that matter.”
The foursome still had a long way to go to get to the house, and it’s not like things were getting any easier. Rain, wind, and the occasional lightning bolt made their lives miserable since they began their walk. Now the mud was so sticky it was almost like quicksand, but this wasn’t a Western, so no one worried too much about that part.
“That was a strange book,” Anna said, “but there were parts of it I liked. At times it was like going through a diary, and you know how that is, where you relive the fun parts. The other day I wanted to reread it, but I guess I misplaced the novel.”
Seeking clarification, Erica posited, “So there is no There Is No There There there?”
“It’s frustrating,” Anna said. “But we had a good time out there on the high seas.”
“I’ll have to ask him about that island,” Erica said. “Does he write sequels?”
Jeff Wilson is the music editor of The Absolute Sound and once edited a literary magazine called Evil Dog. He published stories and novel excerpts in Forklift Ohio, The Licking River Review, and other publications back in the day—then took a break from fiction writing until early last year. Since then he’s more prolific than ever, and recently published a short story in Spectrum (out of UC Santa Barbara). Find him at www.jeffwilsonwriter.wordpress.com.