Tom Austin’s disappearance had been all-too-easily explained. Just three weeks after he abruptly walked off the job, The Mail ran a lengthy accounting of all the frauds he had perpetrated in his last two years at the paper, documenting a dozen of them in detail. Tom was on page 1 for the last time, albeit for the first time as the subject of a story, this one headlined, Mail Reporter Fabricated Articles, complete with his mug shot.
The story reported that Tom had not been seen since the day his employment was terminated, and that while the paper would have liked to interrogate him in concluding its investigation, it had not been necessary. New quality control measures had already been implemented to guarantee that no reporter in the future could do what Tom had done, tarnishing the reputation of a major American institution. As was the case six years later, when Ray Walker disappeared, there hadn’t been much percentage for anyone to try to find him. There was a Tom Austin scandal, but no crime of interest to law enforcement; the Mail could sue him, but to what end? The damage was done and his career in journalism was finished in any case.
Tom read the story online from the Florida Keys, where he had fled after tossing a few clothes into a bag, riding the train to Logan Airport and boarding a plane to Miami, without so much as making a phone call to his mother or leaving a note for Miranda. He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to foresee that he would never be back to the apartment he and Miranda had shared. His disappearance, to the two women who cared about him – three, if he counted his sister – was every bit as hurtful as Ray Walker’s. But this was something Tom was slow to comprehend, finally grasping it only when he witnessed the pain caused by Ray Walker’s sudden absence. Caught up in his own personal drama, Tom assumed at the time that he was doing Miranda and his family a favor by vanishing, sparing them the humiliation of being associated with him and his scandal. It was a collateral benefit that he spared himself their opprobrium. Their sympathy, if they had extended it, would have been even more intolerable than that.
Moreover, Tom knew that by the time the story of his malfeasance broke, those he abandoned would know why he had left. By then, he had begun a new life as a bartender in an aging Holiday Inn near Marathon, a motel that had been a fabulous resort in the 1960s and had comfortably settled into existence as a vacation alternative for the budget-minded. He grew out his hair and his beard to suit his new identity as a Keys eccentric and imagined that sooner or later he would apply his facility for fabrication to a novel. He had always been an effortless writer, too effortless as it happened, but it was easier to drink than write and easier still to accept his apparent destiny as a beach bum. Wisecracks and small talk with strangers at the bar was a tolerable proxy for friendship. When he felt a little lonely, or had a yearning for body contact, with no effort at all he could bed one of the tourists for whom he poured an endless supply of rum drinks. A hotel guest could always be trusted to check out and be gone within a few days.
“I could extend my vacation by a week or two,” one of his conquests once proposed after he had made love to her with so much lust that she was reduced to sobs.
To be cut off from his past and to have no serious aspirations for the future was not all bad, Tom had learned. When he seduced a woman, as was the case with this particular woman, who was in her late 20s and only a few pounds overweight, he was able to give himself completely to her. In return, she gave herself back fully to him. When it all worked, the woman cried.
“But if you stayed,” Tom said, choosing his words carefully, “you know that the next time we fucked could never be the same.” He did not say that they had just made love, which would have been both tactically and literally wrong.
She looked at him quizzically. She worked for an insurance company in Indianapolis and was named Lucy.
“Maybe it would be even better,” she ventured.
“No,” he said. “You know it wouldn’t be. Isn’t that why you cried?”
Lucy went home the next day, as scheduled.
Tom was almost happy, or felt that he could have achieved a variant on happiness, if not for an inexplicable mind game he started playing. The mere thought of suicide was initially so frightening that he let it pass without trying to hold on to it. But then it would flit past again, and he would ask himself, clinically, Is this a suicidal thought? I’m not contemplating suicide, but am merely thinking about suicide, so does this constitute a suicidal thought?
If so, then: Am I suicidal? Are there degrees of suicidal inclinations? Can a person be a little bit suicidal, or is that like having a little bit of cancer?
From there: If I were suicidal, how would I kill myself? Would I have the courage to pull it off?
And then: Here are some easy ways I could kill myself. And he imagined swimming out to sea to the point where he was too far to return to shore or crashing his car off a bridge or shooting himself in a display of machismo. All of this was abstract, as if he were considering suicide from a strictly theoretical vantage point. It was all conditional, each discrete thought taking the form of an if/then statement. And what was most unusual about the whole episode, which was taking place strictly as an interior monologue, even as he casually popped the tops off longnecks and handed them to tourists and talked sports and the weather, is that Tom wasn’t depressed or even a little sad, just very matter-of-fact about the reality that he could and indeed might end his own life. He wouldn’t describe himself as unhappy, and yet the thoughts became increasingly insistent, pressing in on him, occupying more and more of his thinking capacity, driving out other thoughts or perhaps filling the vacuum created by the absence of any other thoughts. If he tried to not think about suicide, then, in fact, he was thinking about it, and the more he tried to not think about suicide, the more he was thinking about it. He was in the habit of swimming almost every night after work, and he started going further and further from shore, and then one dark night he swam so far that he could barely see the beach. If he swam just a bit further and then swam in a circle, he would not know for certain which way to head to reach safety. He wavered, almost did it, and then started back. But his arms grew heavy, sooner than they should have. He faltered and gulped some seawater. He found himself coughing so violently that he had to struggle to keep his head above water.
Am I drowning? If I am, is it suicide?
The thought panicked him and then, unexpectedly, the panic produced a sense of resolve. He suddenly had a purpose: Making it back to shore alive. He kicked forcefully to lift himself up as high as he could out of the water and reorient himself to the beach. He could see the island, far, far off, or at least he thought it was land he saw, and he realized that he had actually been swimming in the wrong direction, parallel to the beach instead of toward it.
He remembered childhood tests of stamina: waiting at a bus stop in suburban Boston, the wind chill 35 below, thinking he would freeze to death, but then the entirely rational thought, I’m not going to die here, and sure enough the bus would come. Then he knew it was a self-dramatization, a mind game whose purpose was to chase away panic, but this time it was a mind game that had become unexpectedly real. He truly might die here. His arms were heavier with each stroke, the land so distant even after it came into view that it looked like a mirage. He had not known that his will to survive was so strong, and yet it seemed that all the will he could muster might not be enough. One ocean swell could sink him.
Somehow he made it, painfully crawling on the beach near where he’d parked his car. He lay on the sand looking up at the dark night sky, the planets and the stars glowing brighter in the absence of a moon. The question was answered. He was not suicidal.
Once, when he was a child, Tom saw a snowflake precipitate out of the clear frigid air in front of his eyes. Just so, as he lay panting and gazing up at the sky, crystallized the awareness that there was no good answer to the mystery that had driven him to the brink of self-annihilation. He might answer that it had been simple hubris, but that only begged the question. What, then, were the origins of his deadly vanity? If it was a correspondingly outsized insecurity, then where did that originate?
If Tom did not know why he had sabotaged his career and had chosen to live on the margins of society, friendless and loveless, perhaps the reason was that there was no reason at all, or that there were too many reasons. He had been too lazy to do the work required and clever enough to get away with cheating. He had been weak and he drank too much. He did not love Miranda enough. Or he loved her too much. His father had died too suddenly, when he was too young. He had never accepted religion or yielded to any other form of authority. In short, he’d had enough of a life that a shrink chosen randomly out of the yellow pages could uncover a dozen more reasons why he had been so self-destructive.
And so what? And to what end? Mere carelessness is more than enough to shatter lives. There are mysteries of human nature, even of one’s own nature, that can never be resolved by looking inward. That way, clearly, led only to despair. Answers were more likely to be found by looking out, precisely why he had become a reporter in the first place.
A week after he crawled out of the ocean, cleanly shaven, his hair neatly trimmed, looking fit and youthful thanks to his swimming regimen, Tom was on the West End. In the back of his mind, he had filed a story away, something he imagined he’d get to after he won the Pulitzer and had garnered enough prestige to write his own ticket: the underreported legacy of uranium mining in the West. Of course, now he had nobody to report it for. But it interested him, this apparent fact that in developing the bomb for the inarguable purpose of ending a world war America had poisoned some of her own, and moreover that cleaning up the waste was to this day a story of corporate and government collusion. There was a health angle and an environmental angle and a human angle. Once, his goal in being a reporter was always to be published. Now he found himself in the astonishingly naïve position of believing that reporting the story was its own reward. He had no idea where it would lead, probably nowhere, but he was still far better off than he was just a few days before. He was moving forward.
Uranium country was more beautiful, and more desolate, than he had imagined it would be. Moab had become a tourist mecca, but one reason for it was the thousands of square miles of emptiness all around. The enormous landscape swallowed up the tourists, leaving more remote former mining towns entirely to themselves. In the hierarchy of the natural wonders of the Colorado Plateau, the San Miguel Canyon was barely notable, but to Tom’s eye it was spectacular. He saw a kind of decadent beauty even in the broken-down town of Radium, which announced itself with a vast auto graveyard at its outskirts, the hundreds of vehicles slowly rusting into the rock and scrub. The town sat at the bottom of the canyon on either side of the river and consisted of a few businesses stretched out along the highway, the West End Merc, the Maverick, the Radium School, the West End Clinic, the bank and an insurance company office, a couple of churches, a couple of gas stations, the Forum newspaper office, the Slickrock Motel, and a collection of maybe two hundred shacks and doublewides and a handful of fifties-era split-levels in bad need of paint, houses that would comfortably fit into an aging Denver suburb.
He drove through the town in a just a few minutes and started up into the Disappointment Valley, or so the highway sign indicated, when he saw the marquee for the Uranium Drive-In. The sign was weathered and crumbling, its center – where the current attraction would have been posted – entirely broken out. The word Uranium was written in script and was painted in an electric aquamarine that when it was fresh had been meant to evoke glow-in-the-dark radioactivity. The sign’s outline formed an arrow pointing up a rutted dirt track. Tom wrenched the wheel of his car in the direction the arrow pointed.
The road climbed over a small rise and then, behind a screen as decrepit as the marquee, the relatively flat expanse of the abandoned drive-in parking lot lay before him.
The operation had never been large. Like the marquee, the screen was undersized, and there were parking spaces for no more than thirty or forty cars. What had once been the concession stand and projection booth was a small two-story cinderblock building with its windows boarded up. A few of the posts that once held speakers at each parking space were still standing. Only a modest effort had been made to grade the area, which was strewn with rocks. The Uranium Drive-In had been scratched into the earth at the edge of a small mesa overlooking the San Miguel River and the town on its banks, and going to the movies in Radium, even when it was at its peak of prosperity and miners earned good wages, would have felt more like roughing it than a night on the town. While mining companies built imposing mills and rail lines, their workers built towns of impermanence. Years after the ore was mined out or ceased to be profitable to mine, all of the works of the miners and mine companies rotted away at the same implacable rate, but there were people left behind, living in flimsy houses and trailers.
Tom got out of his car and walked to the rim of the mesa, where he could survey the town below
Who lived here still? How did they survive? A few tourists traveled the highway from Telluride, eighty tortuous miles to the east in the San Miguel Mountains, to Moab, sixty even more tortuous miles to the west. Some stopped to fill their tank, buy a soda, or even to make a meal of a chili cheeseburger at the Maverick. There was some ranching. Off in the distance, Tom could see green fields, obviously irrigated. A few miles before he’d reached Radium, he had seen a sign indicating the entrance to a power plant. He would soon learn that more and more inhabitants of the doublewides followed the route of the transmission line along the highway from the power plant all the way to Telluride. There they made hotel beds and served breakfast to wealthy tourists who came to the region from modern places like Boston, places so far away they could have been on another planet.
The air was dry and crisp, a bracing rejoinder to the humidity of the Keys.
An hour later, Tom had checked into the Slickrock Motel. He went for a stroll and found himself standing in front of the West End Forum newspaper office; it occupied a homely A-frame with a sheet-metal roof and a rectangular shed attached to the rear. When you are a national reporter covering a story far from home, you generally start by making a friend at the local paper. Tom for a moment felt like the Tom of old, full of confidence and promise. He opened the door and let himself in.
Tom extended a hand to the man who stood up from a desk behind a counter and approached him.
“Tom Austin.”
“Howard Knapp,” said a slight man in his late-sixties or early-seventies. “What can I do for you?”
The question was so obvious and Tom’s lack of a good answer was so unlikely that he laughed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m a reporter. Working freelance. I was thinking I might do some journalism. I got the idea somehow that there might be a lot of good stories around here.”
“Oh, we’ve got stories, all right. Plenny of stories. I’ve written hundreds of ’em myself. More like thousands.”
Howard shrugged as if it had occurred to him only then what he had done with his life.
“I guess you saw my ad. With the Colorado Press Association.” Before Tom could answer, Howard continued: “Paper’s for sale. Ad’s been running for over a year. You’re the first one to reply.”
Tom laughed and said, “I hope you’re a better newspaperman than you are a salesman.”
Clearly lacking any sense of irony and frankly desperate, Howard just blinked.
Two weeks later, after Howard personally guaranteed the loan from the West End Bank, essentially mortgaging his meager retirement savings against Tom’s unproven ability to keep up with the payments, Tom owned the Forum. Better yet, it came with the real estate, which included, on the second floor of the A-frame, a small apartment equipped with a bed, bathroom and small kitchen: everything Tom needed.