A Summer in Nowhere (Part I)

Davis was having a hell of a time in college, but Sophomore year is over and his dad's sentenced him to a summer internship in a no-name town. Little does he know, his life will soon have new meaning.

When I started The Wayfarer, I said I’d make some of my stories exclusive to paid subscribers to show appreciation for the people who sacrifice some of their hard-earned income to support my work. Of course, I have a job, don’t expect to earn a livable income from writing, and will write regardless of whether I make money from it. It’s what I must do. Nevertheless, I’m open to patronage, and beyond grateful for any reader who believes my writing is worth supporting financially. That being said, I intend to turn paid subscriptions on very soon.

I wrote A Summer in Nowhere two summers ago when I first started writing short stories. Of the first few stories I wrote, it’s one of my favorites. However, it’s very long, almost 10,000 words. I felt it would be best, therefore, to split it up into multiple parts. I intend to keep this first part available to everyone. The subsequent parts, I will make exclusive to paid subscribers.

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

- C.S. Lewis

My mind rewrites the story of my life as my father's car turns into the driveway of my home for the summer, my forehead pressed against the cold glass of the driver's seat window, and I remember what I've left behind. 

All of it was going so well, but then I had to leave. It would only be ten weeks, but ten weeks was enough to throw a wrench in the fun I was having and that I'd hoped to continue to have. It was enough to trick my mind into forgetting about how well things once were and even into thinking that things had never been so well to begin with. 

After all, one's mind is inclined to project its present experience on all things - wear one's current feelings, attitudes, perceptions, and preoccupations as a lens to examine the past and anticipate the future. 

That is what my mind is doing as my father puts the car in park, and I unbuckle my seatbelt. 

A couple waits for me, standing side-by-side in front of the white, retractable garage door. The man is tall and grey-headed with one of those short-sleeved button-up collared shirts only geezers wear tucked into a pair of slacks held up by a brown belt three inches above his waist. He waves at us. The woman smiles.

When we are out of the car, my father greets them first. "Bobby Billiard," he says, shaking hands with the man, who is a foot taller than him. The sun, with nothing in its way, reflects off my father’s Costas.

"Walter Mathers," the old man responds, squinting because, unlike my dad, he either has no sunglasses or isn't wearing them. "And this is my wife, Catherine."

My father shakes her hand too, and I stand there with a bookbag on my back and a duffel bag over my shoulder. There is a weight somewhere in my stomach. It is not a real weight, but made of a feeling that I think is dread, although it could be disappointment, but I have not made up my mind. It sinks like a heavy stone in a dense puddle of mud, weighing me down just as effectively as the luggage slung over my shoulder. The asphalt underneath me is hot. I can feel it under the rubber soles of my tennis shoes. 

"Davis, why don't you introduce yourself?"

Davis is my name. It was my name because it was my mother's maiden name, and my father’s name had already been given to my older brother, Robert Billiard, Jr., i.e., Rob Billiard, attorney at law. His name is on billboards all over the state of Georgia, and there are some in Alabama too. "Injured on the Job? Call Rob," the billboards say, and I have to look at my big brother's smug face every time I drive on the interstate.

I nod at the couple, who are my landlords for the summer. I will be living in their basement for ten weeks, which I am still convinced will disrupt the flow of the hell of a time I was having in school before the year came to a close. Some of my acquaintances went home. Others went on trips to tropical islands in the Caribbean and old cities in Europe, and I have to intern at a real estate brokerage for $10 an hour because my father says I have to if I want him to keep paying my tuition. 

"Nice to meet you," I say, but I don't think it's so nice. I do not shake their hands. I still stand on the other side of the car waiting for my dad to open the trunk so I can get my suitcase and take a look at my room for the summer, my cell.

My father gives Mr. Mathers a check. "This should cover first month's rent," he says. "I hope you don't mind me expecting him to pay the rest." 

Oh, yes. Of the $4,000 I will make this summer, $800 will go to taxes and $1,000 will go to rent. After groceries, and whatever else I can manage to spend while I am here, that leaves at least $1,750 left for my father to lay claim to when I am finally liberated from my sentence. I won't be pocketing the change.

"I've been soft on him for far too long, and I hope he can learn a thing or two about the real world while he's here."

Adults always speak of this "real world" as if the only thing real about the world is having a boss and a job and waking up every morning at six o'clock to count down the hours until five. They say "real world" as if reality itself is a tragedy, and anything that's not tragic is a fantasy. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps reality is a tragedy, but why rip one out of ignorant bliss, and beat him aside the head with reality - with this "real world" sense of tragedy? For, if the "real world" was such a tragedy, why can't we just pretend it isn't? I was happy outside of the so-called "real world," and it was just as real to me. Now, this "real world" was taking a fistful of my t-shirt and throwing me on the floor. And what business did it have doing that?

When I have my suitcase, I say goodbye to my father and he returns to Atlanta to bill hours all day at his office on Peachtree Street like a "real world" someone does. I stand watching with all the weight on my shoulders and in my stomach, and my suitcase leans against my thigh as his Mercedes backs out of the driveway and disappears down the street. 

Then, the Mathers escort me through the gate of their wooden privacy fence and show me the door to the basement suite, which is on the back of the house below the patio. And they give me my key, and leave me alone to get settled in.

The suite has a bed, bath and a kitchen. It is completely furnished with an old leather loveseat at the end of the bed, facing a box T.V. (an artifact from a time I am too young to remember) on a dark-wood T.V. stand filled with used paperbacks. The kitchen is old with a white electric stove and one of those refrigerators with a freezer that pulls out like a drawer, and the bathroom has a bathtub on legs. Someone has installed a showerhead and a rod. The curtains are green with a pink floral pattern. 

It is within walking distance of the brokerage, which is in some small town in South Georgia I have never heard of, the perfect place to be my prison for the summer. I don't need a car and there is nothing to do but work. It is even a dry county, one of the few remaining in the state. 

I set my suitcase by the couch and fall back on the bed. I hover my smart phone six inches from my face to see if anyone has texted me since this time yesterday. No one has. Yet, I see she posted a picture on social media of her and her girlfriends at some bar in the city. It has a filter on it that makes them look orange.

Who is she? She is Beth. Beth is from Texas, and I met her last month at a bar. We were both there underage, but we have fake ID's and were drunk anyway. We kissed there, and neither of us really remembered it behind the liquor-induced haze that we college students frequently enter. But I got her number, nonetheless, and I remembered her enough to text her the next day and ask her to a fraternity party to which I needed a date. 

She agreed to go, and we spent the last celebratory hurrah before finals week together. She woke up next to me the following morning. I had a headache, and my stomach was uneasy. Her dress draped over my desk chair, and her purse was on the carpet. I slid out of bed and made her breakfast: an omelet with two sausage links. Meanwhile, my roommate moped out of his own room, his thick head of hair going about in every direction and a smirk on his own tired, hungover face. I told him to get lost, and he did. Beth woke up and ate her breakfast, and I admired her, even as she sat there in last night's makeup, wearing one of my t-shirts and a pair of my boxer shorts. 

I was convinced at that moment that I wanted to see her again. But I never got the chance.

She went back to her apartment. We texted every day during finals week, but neither of us could find the time to see each other. She was fighting for a 4.0, so she could apply to law school. I was just vying for a 2.5, so my dad wouldn’t take me out of undergrad.

Beth went home immediately after finals, and I began my bender.  It lasted from the moment I walked out of my last test at noon on a Friday until the following Thursday. I slept until 1 p.m. every day and stayed out until 4 a.m. every night, frequenting the bars and clubs with my buddies and doing shots and chugging beer, all the sorts of dumb things college students are supposed to do, and I thought I was king of the world. I thought I had it all figured out, and had everything I needed, for I was going to be an upperclassman and had friends and thought I had a woman, but as the week went on, the time Beth took to respond to my texts grew longer.

She left for the Gulf that Tuesday, and I didn't hear from her for two days. I got my grades back, discovered I failed business calculus and got in my car to drive home two days later. I heard back from her on the way there, and she apologized for how busy she'd been and asked me how I was. Over the next week, while I was home battling my father over my poor academic performance, she called me twice. Each time we talked for hours. 

But that week was lost to time, and she distanced herself again. Meanwhile, my dad plotted his master plan to right the wrongs he perceived he had done by me as a child: his failure to make me into a man, to get me to accept responsibility and to take my life and my role in it seriously. He plotted to thrust me into this brutal "real world" reality because, in his mind, exposing me to the reality that adult life is uneventful will make me want to be an adult. It is as if he thinks he can teach me how to swim by tossing me into the ocean. 

My one distraction, Beth, who I relied on for some semblance of hope, was slipping between my fingers. And my dad was checking boxes: landing me an internship, looking for a furnished apartment with a ten-week lease, pinpointing the perfect location to serve as my prison, a place I could neither escape physically, nor through the use of substance. 

And he found it. He found the last place left in the world where all there is for a young man to do is work and be in misery. And here I am. My only other options are to work to pay for my own tuition (which would be counterintuitive, in my opinion, given that I am only in school for the social aspect, not actually there to learn, and working would interfere with that objective) or go to trade school and live at home (equally counterintuitive). My dad said I had to demonstrate a work ethic this summer, or I was out for good - out of school and out of the fraternity.

So here I am, lying on my bed, my phone hovering above my face, and she has not responded. I am losing hope. I am not the king of the world anymore. I am the world's jester. I am a joke. My life is a prank, a trick played on me by some cruel god who I do not know. He gives me hope just to rip it away in one swift motion, piling on misfortune after misfortune. And he laughs. At least if I were poor or debilitated and never knew hope to begin with, I would not have to be tormented by its loss. But I have tasted it. And one has to have something in order to know what he doesn't have. So, I lie here marinating in what I once had, but is now lost. And the only thing that I have to distract me is this damn piece of glass, metal, and plastic that shows me how much fun everyone else is having while I am stuck here being laughed at by an unrevealed, unsympathetic, and unreasonable deity. 

I fall asleep at 9 p.m. The sun has only been down for an hour. But I would have nothing to do but scroll through the same pictures I have already seen three times today and remind myself more of the undesirable circumstances that have abducted me, hauled me away to some foreign land against my will and kept me trapped in a cage disguised as a home. 

So, I sleep ten hours and walk to my first day of work on an empty stomach. I get there and introduce myself to the receptionist, and she introduces me to my boss. He is a young guy with gel in his hair and a slim-fitted suit, a stark contrast to my golf shirt, cowboy boots and khakis. He shows me to my cubicle and tells me what I'll be doing for the summer: writing descriptions of properties for the brokerage website. They should be 100 to 300 words, and I should complete at least six a day. The more I do, the better. I'll even get a gift card if I do 100 in one week, but I don't care. 

I sit down, and I do the bare minimum. I have my headphones in and listen to podcasts all day, then leave for home, stopping at the Dairy Queen on the way to eat a cheeseburger, dip fries into a Blizzard, and stare at my phone. Beth has still not responded. 

I keep floating through this miserable existence. I am haunted by noises which I think are notifications. I sit at work and hear the faintest semblance of a buzz, then reach for my phone only to see the same old empty lock screen: a picture of me and my buddies at a halloween party dressed as cowboys. On the occasion I actually do get a notification, it is either a fraternity brother discussing the upcoming football season in our group chat or it is my dad asking how everything is going. I tell him everything is fine to demonstrate that I am miserable, for "fine" is not good, and not good is awful.

On Wednesday, the CEO of the brokerage comes and introduces himself. He is a short man with bags under his eyes, and he sits in a chair backwards while he talks to me. He thinks he is teaching me some profound wisdom. Rather, he is explaining to me how success in business comes down to voice inflection. That's what the science says, at least. I am not interested, but I act like I'm listening and nod my head until he leaves me alone. I work Thursday and Friday, and he comes back to tell me about the self-help book he's listening to on Audible before I am supposed to get up and leave. I end up staying an extra half-hour because I am trapped, and I know I am not getting paid for it. 

But when he releases me, I make it home. My weekend begins, and I choose to spend my Friday night the way I've spent every night in this nowhere town: on my bed, on my phone, hoping my summer will turn around and Beth with answer me. 

But somewhere between waking up on Saturday and rolling out of bed for the first time two hours later to pee, I have given up on Beth. I tell myself that if she wants to talk to me, she will. Texting her again would only make things worse. It would demonstrate what little dignity I have left. It would show her that I am more interested in her than she is interested in me. So, I give up on her and wish I could find someone else to replace her. I wish I could return to the abundance of a college town, where females filled the bars and the classrooms, and failure with one was no serious loss because there were always others. But I do not get my wish. I am here.

So, I roll back in bed, and I scroll through my phone some more to continue showing myself what I am missing. I see pictures of parties and white-sand beaches and rustic European city streets. I see boutique pastries from expensive restaurants, cocktails on fire, and girls in bikinis by the lake. How can it be that everyone else is having fun, and I am here? A week-and-a-half ago, I was having fun with them. What changed? 

I lock my phone and I let it fall on my stomach. It claps as the screen slaps my bare skin. I rub my eyes. Surely, there is something I can do on a Saturday? That T.V. does not have Netflix. I do not have any way to get beer. Video games would be the classic choice, but there is no Xbox either. Only books, and good old-fashioned cable.

For the next hour, I lay face-down on the loveseat, my feet dangling over the armrest and my cheek clinging to the leather. I watch SportsCenter, but it is not football season. It's not basketball either. And I don't like baseball. I am bored to death. My boredom forces me against my will to sit up and turn off the T.V. with the remote. Reluctantly, I mope over to the bookshelf and skim through my options. They all seem like literary-type novels, which aren't exactly my first choice. But it may be all I have to do. I have slept too much to sleep all day, and when my mind is still, I end up reverting back to Beth, and I don't want to think about her anymore. 

So, I find a book I think might be tolerable. I gather that it is about an attorney in the 40s who's forced to rethink his priorities after his wife leaves him and takes his two young children with her. It takes place in Savannah, and there is a pastel picture of an old oak tree on the cover. Spanish moss hangs from its limbs over a tombstone with a Confederate battle flag etched into its surface. I wonder what that has to do with the description on the back. Alderman's Trial is the title. The attorney, I come to find out as I sit down and start reading, is Alderman.

And, as I come to know Alderman, I discover he is an attorney like my brother, one whose job isn't to help, but to win. Alderman is good at winning, which earns him a lot of money, because bad people come to him for help getting away with bad things. He is not an ambulance chaser like Rob, but he does not believe in fairness or hold any sacred view of the law. He justifies what he does by telling himself that "business is business" and "good and evil is not always black and white," and he runs away from the truth by doing cocaine and cheating on his wife with hookers, and when his little brother dies on the beaches of Normandy, he goes off the deep end and is caught in an underground casino by the police. He has to get bailed out of jail by one of his powerful bad-guy clients who is the head honcho of a loose crime syndicate referred to provisionally as the Dixie Mafia. 

In spite of the name "mafia," which suggests a Sicilian connection, the Dixie Mafia is comprised of white Protestants. In fact, they were white Protestants who very much despised the Italians (and the Jewish and the Chinese and the black folks). 

When Alderman returns home, he finds his wife is gone, and so are the kids. There is a letter from her that says she couldn’t take it anymore and he wasn't the man she knew when she married him. Now, she wants nothing to do with him, and hopes he'll not come looking for her. 

So, he cries and cries and holds a gun to his head and almost ends it all right then and there, but decides not to, for no particular reason, or at least for no particular reason he is consciously aware. And he realizes what he just did was make a choice, a choice of life over death, a choice to live on in agony as opposed to pulling the trigger and cease to exist. He made that choice because he saw that all the suffering was worth it. But that begs the question: Why? 

I finish a chapter in which Alderman speaks to a Catholic priest. He asks him questions about religion and still can't bring himself to understand. He is trying to find an answer to his question. He wants to know what there is beyond the suffering that makes life so worth enduring. And the priest suggests an answer: Jesus Christ. Alderman wonders how that can be. Jesus was a Jew. He died almost two millennia ago. The priest tells him that Jesus is Love. 

Alderman doesn't know what that means, so he goes to a therapist for answers instead, but the therapist tells him everything he's dealing with must stem from childhood trauma, and in order to feel content again, he needs to go through psychotherapy. Alderman tells him he doesn't want to feel content again. He just wants an answer to his question. The therapist tells him everyone has their own answer to that question, and Alderman asks what if someone's answer is nothing. What if someone does not believe that life has any value? Then something is wrong with him, the therapist says. He needs help from a licensed professional. 

And that insufficient answer leads Alderman right back to the Cathedral doorsteps, eager to ask more questions to the priest. But when he is about to walk inside, one of his clients spots him, and warns him away from the "Papists."

I finish that chapter and my stomach growls. I have not eaten anything since the cheeseburger, fries, and desert I ate yesterday after work. I close the book (I am now at least half-way through), and I set it on my bedside table. That's when I notice the author's name. Intent on walking down the street to the store and purchasing some groceries, I see his name at the bottom of the page in bright yellow letters, all caps, and it stops me in my tracks: W.H. Mathers. I remember my host's name: Walter Mathers. I ease my curiosity by checking more of the books under the T.V. Several of them are his. There is even a collection of short stories with his name on it. I wonder why he's still here if he's written as many books as good as Alderman's Trial. Perhaps all the other ones are boring.

I leave for the store and arrive back on the sidewalk with two yellow grocery bags in each hand. I have eggs, milk, bread, several bags of chips and some hotdogs. I have to set one of the bags on the ground to unlatch the gate to the back yard.

Mr. Mathers is there kneeling over a flower bed just outside my door. He is wearing yellow rubber gloves and holds a garden trowel. A tan bucket hat protects his white neck from the sun. When he sees me, he stands up.

"Finding everything alright?" he asks, rubbing the back of his neck with his gloved palm as I set the bags down by the door and fumble through my keychain.

"Yes sir," I said. "Everything is fine."

I think to ask him about Alderman's Trial, but I somehow convince myself that asking him about it would be too personal. I am just their tenant and should maintain my distance. I also fear telling anyone I have discovered a potential outlet to escape my misery because I fear my father will find out, and I must have him think he's made a mistake by sending me here in the first place. My pride depends on it.

"Cat's cooking up a pot roast tonight," he says. "We'll have plenty to spare if you'd like to join us."

"I wouldn't want these groceries to go to waste," I say. 

Mr. Mathers laughed. "You've got a fridge, don't you? Please, I insist. It would be inhospitable of us to not have you for dinner at least once."

Hospitable? Since when did landlords have to be hospitable? I've lived in two different "luxury" apartment complexes since I graduated high school, and I have never seen one of my landlord's faces, nor heard their voice. And they surely did not think to cook me dinner. Why would they? My money (my dad's money, but I call it mine) was theirs regardless.  

But Mr. Mathers insists. So, I agree to join. I shut the door and put my groceries in the fridge. 

I have nothing better to do for the next three hours but finish that book.

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L.W. Blakely is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Wayfarer, a newsletter where he publishes literary fiction, criticism, and musings. Learn more about L.W. and The Wayfarer on the About page, or (if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read) consider subscribing and sharing his work.