How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Christopher Boucher Read Free Book Online

room with a metal table attached to a ten-foot-long tube-shaped machine. The nurse had me take off my clothes and lay down on the table. Two needles came in and stood over me.
    “Good morning—Mr. _____?” said the needle to my right. “Ready to go?”
    “Will this hurt?” I said.
    The needle made a guardrail face. “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,” he said.
    I didn’t have a chance to ask him what that meant. The needles strapped my wrists and ankles in place, told me to brace myself, and drove small clusters of needles into my fingernails.
    My mind went white, no-word, with pain. I screamed and wept. The needle chuckled. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Is it that bad?”
    The other needle drove a cluster of needles into the bottom of my testicles. My white mind shuddered and turned. I pulled against the straps. “Easy, easy,” the needle to my right said. “Just imagine how you’ll feel when this is over. Like a new man, right?”
    “Right,” I gasped.
    “Just two more, OK?”
    I nodded. He drove a lengthy needle into one of my ears and then the other.
    Then he was leaning over me. “Mr. _____?” he said.
    I opened my eyes.
    “This table’s going to slide forward now, into this tube,” he said, and he put his hand on the machine behind my head.
    “I can’t take any more needles,” I begged.
    “No more needles,” he said, smiling. “This part’s easy—it’s just like a tanning salon.”
    I nodded.
    “OK, here we go.” He pressed a button and the tube slid forward.
    Inside the chamber, the walls lit up and I was bathed in a strange-smelling light. I could feel that light communicating in some way with the needles that the needle had driven in; I felt a uniform pressure in my legs and chest and head, and a singing in my balls, hands and brain.
    My breath began to slow down, and I became numb to the pressure. At some point I drifted off. I didn’t wake up until the table slid out of the tube. I opened my eyes and the needle was standing over me.
    “I fell asleep,” I said.
    “That happens,” the needle said, pulling the needles out of my hands. Then he held up a thick plastic bag. It was filled with an opaque, silvery liquid. “There it is.”
    “That’s the writing?”
    He nodded. “You’re all set, my friend. No more writing for you,” he said.
    “Not even checks?” I joked.
    He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.
    •  •  •
    As it turns out, though, Emily wasn’t a real woman. I’d written her, compiled from women I’d seen and wished I could know, plus some that had been my friends or partners along the way. I walked out into the waiting room and there was no one there—no woman, no book on Ireland.
    After a few months, though, I came to accept this. In fact, I filed it as further evidence to support the decision I’d made. I mean, I’d
created
a woman, just as I had a terrible tree and the death of a loved one.
    But then, in the year that followed, my father really did die, of a second heart attack, while working on the Pachysandra Trail, and it split open
my
chest: I lost my job, stopped going outside, didn’t want contact with anyone. All I wanted to do was write, to make something, something wonderfully fake, a power made of dust and blood that I could turn on when I needed it and turn off when I’d had enough. If I could write myself away from my own life, get lost, even fucking better.
    So I went back to the clinic, spoke again to the needle. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “It’s a one-way procedure—we discard the writing immediately. The state requires that we do so.”
    “What about a transplant—someone else’s writing?”
    He rubbed his head.
    “There’s so much I haven’t done yet,” I told him. “My mother—I haven’t written about her, or any of the great friends I’ve had. I’ve loved so many people, and I want to power every one of them.
    “There