The Music of Chance Read Free Page A

many resolutions he made to stop, he could not bring himself to do it. Every morning he would go to sleep telling himself that he had had enough, that there would be no more of it, and every afternoon he would wake up with the same desire, the same irresistible urge to crawl back into the car. He wanted that solitude again, that nightlong rush through the emptiness, that rumbling of the road along his skin. He kept it up for the whole two weeks, and each day he pushed himself a little farther, each day he tried to go a little longer than the day before. He covered the entire western part of the country, zigzagging back and forth from Oregon to Texas, charging down the enormous, vacant highways that cut through Arizona, Montana, and Utah, but it wasn’t as though he looked at anything or cared where he was, and except for the odd sentence that he was compelled to speak when buying gas or ordering food, he did not utter a single word. When Nashe finally returned to Boston, he told himself that he was on the verge of a mental breakdown, but that was only because he couldn’t think of anything else to account for what he had done. As he eventually discovered, the truth was far less dramatic. He was simply ashamed of himself for having enjoyed it so much.
    Nashe assumed that it would stop there, that he had managed to work out the odd little bug that had been caught in his system, and now he would slip back into his old life. At first, everything seemed to go well. On the day of his return, they teased him at the fire house for not showing up with a tan (“What did you do, Nashe, spend your vacation in a cave?”), and by midmorning he was laughing at the usual wisecracks and dirty jokes. There was a big fire in Roxbury that night, and when the alarm came for a couple of backup engines, Nashe even went so far as to tell someone that he was glad to be home, that he had missed being away from all the action. But those feelings did not continue, and by the endof the week he found that he was growing restless, that he could not close his eyes at night without remembering the car. On his day off, he drove up to Maine and back, but that only seemed to make it worse, for it left him unsatisfied, itching for more time behind the wheel. He struggled to settle down again, but his mind kept wandering back to the road, to the exhilaration he had felt for those two weeks, and little by little he began to give himself up for lost. It wasn’t that he wanted to quit his job, but with no more time coming to him, what else was he supposed to do? Nashe had been with the fire department for seven years, and it struck him as perverse that he should even consider such a possibility—to throw it away on the strength of an impulse, because of some nameless agitation. It was the only job that had ever meant anything to him, and he had always felt lucky to have stumbled into it. After quitting college, he had knocked around at a number of things for the next few years—bookstore salesman, furniture mover, bartender, taxi driver—and he had only taken the fire exam on a whim, because someone he had met in his cab one night was about to do it and he talked Nashe into giving it a try. That man was turned down, but Nashe wound up receiving the highest grade given that year, and all of a sudden he was being offered a job that he had last thought about when he was four years old. Donna laughed when he called and told her the news, but he went ahead and took the training anyway. There was no question that it was a curious choice, but the work absorbed him and continued to make him happy, and he had never second-guessed himself for sticking with it. Just a few months earlier, it would have been impossible for him to imagine leaving the department, but that was before his life had turned into a soap opera, before the earth had opened around him and swallowed him up. Maybe it was time for a change. He still had over sixty thousand dollars in the bank, and