This is the Trailer of Life

This is the Trailer of Life

by

David Michael Conner

This is my holy grail. This is all I have left to hold onto. To search for.

I am traveling alone, without my husband. He didn’t think it was a good idea for me—a woman whose only son is now dead—to travel alone to a foreign country. I’ll be honest; I’ve barely left the house for the last three decades.

That was my sacrifice.

I rushed the passport through, and I thanked the kind woman at Kinko’s for retaking my picture four times, at no charge to me, until I had one that would hold up for ten years. Honestly, it’s the best picture ever taken of me. I wonder how a woman can mask the death of a child from her face so shortly after he’s gone from her life.

“Good lighting,” the woman said.

There you have it. Good lighting, a Polaroid and a lot of luck will do it for you. It will hide everything, so that all of your feelings are lost in the expanse of time, lost in the time it takes to wave the black and white film square in the air.

One, two…ten. The other numbers didn’t register.

The photograph was nearly there, still a little milky, but I knew it was going to be a good one.

I remember when I got my son his Polaroid camera. It was like magic to him; he loved to run around the house snapping pictures, fanning them in the air to see if he captured what he was seeing with his own eyes. I don’t think he ever did.

“You know,” he’d say, shaking his hand vigorously, “shaking the pictures doesn’t make them show up any faster. It just takes time.”

“Why do you shake them then?” I would ask.

“What else am I supposed to do while I wait for them to develop?”

Sometimes there was no real point to our conversations. Usually the point was for him to tell me something I didn’t already know. I suppose that’s my fault.

“Look it up,” I’d say, all through his childhood, any time he asked me a question. Sometimes I knew the answers, sometimes I didn’t.

“Why is the sky blue?” he once asked me, around age seven or so, I’d say.

“Look it up,” I said. But he already had the answer. He was testing me.

Sometimes I told him to look it up because I knew that my answers were outdated. Like when he asked about race, and he had already looked it up, and then he challenged me.

“Do you know?” he asked.

“Yes, I know.”

“Then what?”

“There are three races.”

He laughed. “Three huh.”

“Yes,” I said, confident. “Caucasian, Negroid and Oriental.”

“What!” he said incredulously, accusingly. We really got into it.

I looked up the answer in the encyclopedia to show him. There it was. He flipped to the title page of the maroon volume labeled “R” and indicated where it said © 1964.

“So?”

“So?”

“So?” I said again.

“You can’t seriously believe that. That’s old, Mom. You’re old.”

“I’m not old.”

He laughed.

“I’m not. And I know what you’re thinking. And I may be racist, but I’m not old.” I don’t think he understood that that was supposed to be a joke. I was never very good at jokes.

I don’t think my son ever got tired of looking things up, but after a while he got really good at making things up, too. He got that from his father.

I feel like I’ve been traveling forever. I’m just not used to this, and I am old. I really am, now. And I’m going stir crazy.

Did you know that to get to England you have to fly over Iceland? It doesn’t make any sense to me—the plane flies in this huge arch instead of straight over the Atlantic. It seems like such a waste of time. I suppose it’s the jet stream or something. I’ll look it up when I get home.

I am usually afraid to fly. Actually, I’ve only been on a plane twice before, and the last time was when his father and I took him to Florida. That was a rough trip. I held onto my baby—my nineteen year-old baby—the whole time, and he held onto me. It’s a small miracle that we got on another airplane after the layover; it took two Cinnabons to make him sleepy enough to forget that we knew that we were going to die on that airplane. We knew we were going to die.

At least we were going to die together.

Coming here, I didn’t care if I died. I hoped the huge 747 jumbo jet would spiral downward in flames and smoke, drawing a spiral of incinerated jet fuel and incinerated bodies straight down to the ocean. Tethered to the sky, then wafting away into the atmosphere. Like nothing.

But it didn’t. I’m still here, still on my journey to find the Trailer of Life.

“Care for a crisp?” offered a dapper British gentleman sitting across from me on the train.

I waved it away.

“You look hungry.”

If only I had taken one. My stomach is revolting against me as I walk these cobblestone streets. Such a long walk, such a long way to travel with luggage. The streets were not made for hard plastic wheels.

“No thank you,” I said.

The man offset his mouth in a slight grin and nodded. “All right, mum, suit yourself.” He tilted his head and peered at me from under the brim of his derby. I couldn’t help but notice. He was staring.

“Yes?” I said impatiently. He shook his head. He was still staring. “Sir, can I help you with something?”

Miles of fields of deep yellow grain flew by outside, catching the corner of my eye. Nevertheless, I stared back at the gentleman.

“No, mum, my apologies. You just look…” He sounded disconsolate, worried. For me.

“I look…?”

“You look like you’ve lost your best friend,” he said sadly.

“No,” I said. “I’ve lost my son.”

“Oh, Dear.” His eyes bulged.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” I said, slipping into a foreign manner. I’ve never been very mannered. Very well mannered.

“What a horror. Have you lost…him, or has he…”

“He’s dead,” I said. It seemed almost easier for me to say the words than to put him through having to say it.

“Heavens, I am so sorry, Madam.”

“Yes. Thank you.” Thank you? What a thing to say.

“You’re American.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

My new acquaintance snorted when he laughed, then he excused himself and snorted again. I really didn’t mean to thank him for calling me American. It’s not actually something that I’m generally very proud of. I tried to apologize, but he was nearly in the aisle, rolling in his own ebullience.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no,” he said, “no madam, really.” He tried to catch his breath. Finally, after a few tries, he had regained his breath. “Really, it’s all right. I know what you meant. I’m quite sorry to have…I just needed a good laugh is all.”

“Oh, please, don’t call me madam. It makes me feel so old.”

“Yes, you’re quite American. Quite. What shall I call you, then?”

He wanted to know my name. I had never met another person while traveling, I realized, which is why it seemed so strange. I’d seen it in movies plenty of times. So many times.

“Ariel.” From The Little Mermaid? What was I thinking?

“Ariel!” he yelled, throwing his arms up in an animated flourish. “Ah, Ariel, Milton’s silent rebel! You gave the Bard the air, you sylph, you who trumped Sycorax and Caliban. You, you…”

“Excuse me?”

“Ha ha! It is a pleasure to meet you Ariel. If it please you, you should call me John.”

“He-hello,” I said. “John.” John nodded and smiled. “I am a married woman!” I said. What had come over me?

“Oh, madam, I hope I didn’t—”

“No! No, I’m sorry, please. I’m just—I’m just going through a lot right now.”

I could tell by the look on John’s face that he had just remembered by troubles. “Yes, I’m quite sorry. If you don’t mind my asking, what has brought you across the pond at such a time in your life. You are…alone?”

I nodded. “I’m all alone.”

“I see. Well, East Anglia is not a troubled place. A woman can wander alone here for years without complications of any sort.”

“That’s good to know.” I sat upright. I was paying more attention to John’s diction than his words. He made me very self-conscious.

“Though, I daresay, after years of wandering alone, a woman might be tempted to seek out somekind of complication.”

I laughed in short, quick breaths through my nose, mostly to myself. I am pretty sure what he said was a joke, but I didn’t want to be too obvious if I was mistaken.

“And you’re looking for some sort of complication, my Dear.”

“Is that a question?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Sir…John. John. I am here on personal business. That is all,” I said, sounding very proper indeed.

“Oh, I behg your pahduh, Maddam.”

He was mocking me!

I couldn’t help but laugh. John laughed with me.

“Well, Ariel, Dear, I wish you the best of luck in whatever personal business you have to attend to.”

Aha!

“You ended your sentence with a preposition!”

Now it was John’s turn to adjust himself to a more erect position. His back, I mean. He snorted, not laughing. “Yes, I suppose even we have our bad habits sometimes.”

“We?”

“Editorial.”

“No, I mean who, Brits?” Was ‘Brits’ a derogatory term? Oh well, I’d never see him again.

“Well, of course, mum, you’ve obviously never been to the East End or Livvahpool.”

Liverpool. I knew that one. The Beatles. The East End though? “OK,” I said, not knowing what John was really talking about.

“I’m a lecturer at Cambridge.”

Oh. That explained it.

“Are you really?”

John looked around the train. “Really, I am,” he whispered.

“That’s where I’m headed,” I said.

John reached a hand into his coat and dug around. He pulled out his train ticket and looked at the back, then started back into his seat. “Heavens! I believe I am, too.”

Blimey, what an ass. I think I probably rolled my eyes at him.

“So you have personal business in Cambs, do you, Love?”

I probably nodded. I don’t know. It gets kind of blurry here, from the tears.

“All right, I suppose you would prefer not to talk about it.”

I said nothing.

“I suppose it has to do with your son.”

I said nothing.

“With your son’s death.” He had said too much.

I lost control of all of my emotions right there, and lost myself in the golden wheat rushing past my window. My head was suddenly filled with grain, a silo, towering above the world. It was dizzying. I had vertigo. I had motion sickness from the train. I had a broken heart.

“You are alone,” he said. It was all I heard. He only said it once, but I heard it many, many times, magnified over and over.

It was true. I was alone. I am alone. I can feel the stones beneath my feet, curving and cutting under the soles of my shoes.

Thank God I don’t wear heels.

“Yes,” I said, nodding. “Yes, John, I am alone. I am.” Mucus drained from my sinuses down the back of my throat.

I looked up at him.

John had an interesting face, full of character, something like the face of Oscar Wilde on the cover of one of my son’s books back at home. It was interesting, not pretty, like Alfred E. Newman if he had been grabbed at the jaw and pulled down for decades by gravity until it threatened to drag along the ground.

That was the type of face John had.

“You’re not alone,” he said, and he smiled at me. I believed him, but I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. It’s not true.

If you don’t believe me, ask someone who has lost a child. Their only child, especially a mother who has lost her son. Ask her if she feels comforted by people telling her she is not alone.

You’ll hear only one answer.

“I must read Oscar Wilde when I get home,” I said.

“Oh, he’s marvelous! Marvelous!”

“Absolutely fabulous?”

“Yes, Ariel, even that!”

“What does he write about?” I asked.

“Life.”

“Life?”

“Glorious Life!”

That wasn’t enough. “Just life?”

“Glorious, marvelous, dirty, faithless, pointless, mannered, metered, broken and irascible Life,” he said with such a passion that I really do want to read Oscar Wilde. I was just looking at one of his books in a window, but now I am too close to concentrate.

“Can you be more specific?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “He wrote about all of the important things.”

“All of them?”

“Yes, and about homosexuality.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, Madam?”

“Back then? In, what, the eighteen hundreds?” John grinned slightly, parting his lips enough to show off his loosely arranged Island teeth. “Or whatever.”

“Yes,” he said, “back then. Whenever it was, in the eighteen hundreds.”

I was right!

“And we killed him for it.”

“What?”

“Jailed.”

“For what?”

“Being a homosexual, of course.”

Of course?

“Of course, that’s what they did back then, you know. Lucky to make it past puberty, those lads were. Faggots for them.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered to myself. And maybe to my God.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Ariel. I forget. Fags to us are cigarettes, burning sticks. Just timber, that’s all. I didn’t mean to slur…”

“My son…”

“Sorry?”

“My son, he was gay. He was gay.” It was irrelevant, but it was important. It was a reason to hang on, not to resent myself, not to blame myself. It wasn’t bad mothering; it was something that I couldn’t have helped. It drove him over the edge. They killed him, just like they did to Oscar Wilde. Maybe he was the next Oscar Wilde. Maybe he was more.

He was no more.

John was dumbfounded. For once. Thank God.

“He was. He was. He came here, you know,” I said, wondering if I said too much.

“Came…where, Cambridge?”

“Yes,” I sighed, “to the university for a summer.”

“Ah, our lovely little summer school.”

“Yes,” I said, tears running from their ducts like masses of lemmings, but running from wet and safe to dry and deadly. The salt crusted my cheeks. “Yes, he came here,” I said, “he came to Cambridge and he studied for a summer. For three weeks, then to London. He said—he said it was the best time of his life.” I could barely speak.

“Oh, I’m sure it was, Ariel. It is such a gift—such a wonderful gift, education, learning.”

“No, that wasn’t it. He was away from me.”

“What?”

“He was away from home. From me. That was it; he was free.”

“Oh, no, you mustn’t think that…”

“No,” I said, “it’s true. He told me.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did.”

“He wouldn’t,” John said, almost convincing me. Then he said something to convince me.

John leaned forward, looking casual—almost American—for the first time on the train ride. He took my hands, wet with tears, and held them. Tightly. I held on. I didn’t know where this train was going, not really.

“Ariel,” John said, looking into my eyes. “Ariel, listen. Listen to me and heed these words, for they are the words of many hundreds of men over the years, over thousands of years, from verse to prose to oral tradition. It’s important that you hear it, because I’ve never told anyone before, and I’ll never tell anyone again.

“It’s a secret, Ariel.”

Suddenly, I felt like a little girl again. I was excited. A secret. For me. One that only I would know. I knew it was just silliness—an old man trying to make a grieving mother feel better—but it was exactly what I needed.

It’s what got me this far.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“What?”

“English.”

“Oh my Dear, that’s even more perfect than anything else that you could have said. Don’t you see? Your son was working toward the truth about all things. He was in our little cult of romantics and romanticisers. He was a lover.”

“What?” I said, coming out of my trance. This wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

“He loved you, don’t you see? All men, Freud said, were hopelessly in love with their mothers. Shakespeare said it, too. And Homer.”

This really wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

“Um, no.”

“No, of course not,” John said, “those men were perverts with psychological problems.”

Uh.

“My point, Love, is that the study of the word—I say the word, you understand, and I mean literature, writing, not the Word—is the study of life. Which is the study of love.”

“No. I don’t understand.”

“Maybe, Ariel—and I don’t know your son at all—but maybe there’s a chance he just loved too much. He did love you. No man who has no love for his mother can sort through the texts that we teach at Cambridge. It just doesn’t happen.”

I don’t know what point John was trying to make, but it worked. It worked, and that was enough.

“Do you know where I can find the Trailer of Life?”

He sat up. “What?”

“The Trailer of Life.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure I follow.”

“That’s what I am looking for. I’m looking for the Trailer of Life. It’s in Cambridge.”

“Is it?”

“You don’t know?”

John gripped his chin between his forefinger and his thumb. “No, I’m sorry, but I can’t say I’m familiar with this trailer…of life, you say?”

“Well, that’s quite a shame, John, because that’s what I am looking for. If you can’t help me, I guess I will have to find it myself.”

I think John thought I was crazy. He didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the trip.

I really thought he’d at least offer me a ride in his cab. Nope.

So here I am. I’ve walked miles—just a few—to the city center of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

I’ve found my way.

On my own, with his heart guiding me.

The worn, warm brown stones beneath my feet feel so heavy, and they’re under me. Under me, and they feel heavy. It’s the strangest sensation. Maybe there really is something different about this place. I can almost feel it.

Or maybe I am just tired. I should have taken a chip—sorry, crisp—from John when he offered. I came here with almost no money, thinking I’d go through what my baby went through—thinking I’d be able to squeeze one last bit of joy out of my life before I forgot him completely.

I know I’ll never forget him, but I carry his picture with me in my pocket wherever I go, in case I forget the frozen frame in my mind. How could I ever forget that smile?

It’s not here. I’ve been all over the place, and I’ve seen no sign of the Trailer of Life. No sign of anything of the sort. Just beautiful, white Roman architecture and grotesque, gothic churches and cathedrals with the blood red glass that I’ve always feared. That’s all.

The sun has gone down behind St. Catharine’s College, where he stayed—it’s in the picture—and will rise again in the morning. I can only hope I’m not here to see it. But how can I fade away overnight with so many bells marking each hour. The bells, the bells, the bells. I swear I am trapped in an Edgar Allen Poe story.

He’s nice to read, not to live.

And then, a voice.

“My Dear. Ariel?”

“John?”

“Yes, Love. I’ve been thinking. About your trailer. About your life.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I have. Quite. I believe I have your answer.”

“Did I have a question?”

“Yes, you did. You asked if I know where to find the trailer of life.”

“I did.”

“I think you are being too literal. I’ve been thinking, and I think that your son may have been speaking…metaphorically. Perhaps the trailer of his memory was never a trailer at all…perhaps it’s a vehicle that he…that he carries around with him. Perhaps it is his way of carrying love with him, hitched to his belt, as it were.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, no, of course not; it’s a bad metaphor.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, well, he was a student, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, well, that’s your explanation. It was a poorly crafted metaphor. A bad play on words. Substituting concrete for concrete. That sort of thing. The trailer is not concrete.””

“He was a good student.”

“Even better. Good students make the worst metaphors of them all. Always concocting connections that never belong together. Always mixing their metaphors.”

“Maybe.”

“Well I think that you must accept that I am—what is it, Dear? Ariel?”

“My name is not Ariel. A trailer would be out of place in a place like this, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, I’m afraid it would.”

“Then I must be dreaming, because I think there’s a trailer behind you. In King’s Promenade.”

“Good Heavens, I believe you’re right. And—oh! Oh my!—that sign does read ‘This is the Trailer of Life,’ doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Well, Ari—er, who are you if not Ariel?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“It never even occurred to me that we had a trailer park here in the middle of Cambridge.”

“No. I’m sure it didn’t.”

“But I really don’t think you should go to it.”

“You don’t?”

“I fear you will be sadly disappointed. Let me take you for a proper meal. You look extraordinarily gaunt.”

“I am hungry.”

“Yes, that’s what gaunt means, Love.”

“It means skinny.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re right, I think. I can’t face it. What is it? What could be in the Trailer of Life that saved my son while he was here? And made him so sick for this place when he came home? I can’t take it. I can’t.

“I should eat. Yes, that’s what I should do. And when I get back, the Trailer of Life will be gone, and I can go home. I can go home knowing I saw it, knowing that I made this trip for him.

“I don’t think I could make the walk to the trailer, anyway. I am too tired, too hungry.”

“It’s only a few hundred yards, Ariel.”

“It’s too far. It’s out of reach.”

“You weren’t so…hungry…just a few minutes past, Ariel.”

“It just hit me. There’s no point in looking for him. It’s not like Michael is going to come down from heaven and show me the way. It’s not like I am suddenly going to be able to carry on. There’s no point. All I need is food.”

“I do think you should look.”

“You just told me I shouldn’t.”

“What you need is closer to you now than you have ever imagined. I thought you would be disappointed, but now—now I think you should see. Let me lead you.”

“Lead me? To what?”

“To the Trailer.”

“Let us go.”

“Where?”

“To the Trailer of Life.”

He had already been walking me to the Trailer of Life. I just shut down. I didn’t even realize we were walking. He floated me over to the rectangular white box with the box lettering that read This Is The Trailer Of Life.

What I saw in the Trailer of Life could have gone either way, to fuel my faith or to destroy it.

It did neither.

This is the Trailer of Life? I thought. This!

This was it. It was what I had traveled all this way for. What I had forsaken food for since the loss of my son.

It was his last joke.

His best gift to me, in life or death.

That night, standing before the Trailer of Life, under a hazy fluorescent glow in the middle of King’s Promenade in the heart of the City of Cambridge, I breathed in the burning flesh of English beef, charred over hot coals in a kitchen of wheels—wheeled out nightly to kill the ravenous appetites of starving students after nights out drinking. It was the Trailer of Life, and it was there that I had the best hamburger of my entire life.