Chutes and Ladders

Once in the early days of the internet I made the mistake of using Yahoo Maps to find the Grog Shop in Cleveland, Ohio. Andy and I were driving to Cleveland from Pittsburgh on a Tuesday to see Cinerama, an obscure british band that I loved. It was a cool night in early spring and we watched the sun set on the road as we listened to Doolittle in the car. Andy was soft spoken and had long curly hair. We didn't talk a lot. He smoked a cigarette or two as he drove his old Civic north-west on 76. He was polite and always cracked the window.

The sun set, but we had a few hours yet until the show. As we neared the city, it became clear that our directions were gibberish. We were directed to route numbers instead of street names, and the numbers were not printed on any of the big green signs that we saw. I had been to the Grog Shop once before, but I hadn't driven and I didn't remember the way. We gave up after a while and pulled off past downtown, near the lake.

We pulled into a busy neighborhood street. There were a lot of people walking around. The cars were old and the radios were loud. We didn't recognize any street signs so we parked at the nearest gas station and got out to ask directions. The station was lit from within by bright, cold fluorescent lights. It wasn't part of a chain - not a Shell or an Exxon. I don't remember what it was called. Outside the convenience store, there was a stooped, older man by a pay phone wearing a dirty white hooded sweatshirt and holding a white plastic bag. He was talking to himself about something. We walked inside.

Inside the station there was a man in a black jacket facing the clerk. I couldn't really see the clerk, but I could see that he was behind a wall of bullet-proof glass. The man bellowed, as if the clerk hadn't heard him the first time, "EXCUSE ME, DO YOU HAVE ANY EX-LAX?" That caught my ear. Then I noticed the flies swarming across the ceiling, covering the lights. There were thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands. Somebody behind us said "mayflies." I shot Andy a look. We quickly walked out the door and got in the car and started to drive.

At the next intersection, there was a Target across from an abandoned store with a lot that was empty save for a cop car. Andy pulled in next to the cop with the cruiser on my side. I rolled down the window and asked for directions. Thankfully, the cop knew where we needed to go. He got out of his car and started to explain as the radio in the cruiser began to crackle. Just as he finished giving us instructions, his partner said something and he said "sorry guys, we gotta go. Somebody set something on fire in the Target." The cop got in the passenger side of the cruiser, and they lit up their lights and siren. Then they peeled out through the intersection, crossed the street and pulled into the Target that had been less than 100 yards away.

The directions we got were good. We ended up at the show without further complication and enjoyed our evening. But I couldn't help but feel that somehow, I had been playing Chutes and Ladders. I had rolled a one, hit a chute and ended up somewhere else, in a different world maybe. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in that world, with the mayflies and loud radios and the fires at the Target. I'm sure if you lived there, it would all seem normal and fine - comfortable.

When I was a younger I would ride trains from time to time. Sometimes the trains would be elevated above street level. My favorite thing to do was to look down and out at the passing houses - wooden and brick, orange and green and blue or brown, all weathered and worn - and imagine time stopping. With time stopped, I would have explored each and every house, every apartment, every store. I imagined the people being gone, or being frozen in place. I would have looked out every window and in every drawer and read every slip of paper on every kitchen table. How many worlds were there, out there? How could there be so many lives, so many stories taking place at once, and how is it that we can possibly know so little of them all?

I drove home yesterday in a light rain. It was one of the first cold nights of fall after daylight savings time had ended. I wondered where all of the pairs of red tail lights were going. How many drivers were stressed, in a hurry to get home? How many had had bad days, how many good? Which songs were playing, and how many people were listening to Nada Surf, like me?

Later that night, my wife and I shared a bottle of red wine at dinner. By the time we left, I was sleepy. As we walked out to the street, the cars seemed to be moving too fast. I was momentarily taken aback by their speed. My pace had changed, and I couldn't keep up. I walked to the driver's side door and felt the rush of cool, moist air as the cars passed me by. I imagined standing at the mouth of an exit ramp on the highway, looking at the cars coming on at 50, 60, 80 miles an hour. Some whizzed past me, rocketing down the freeway. Others swerved to exit. I imagined how terrifying it would be, standing there at that fork. I would know that the cars would not hit me, that they would either turn off the road or pass, but as they came on at such tremendous speed, how could I not be afraid? It would only take one mistake, one slip, for a car to not turn quite enough and plow right into me.

Later in the evening, we went bowling at Pin-up bowl, a fancy bowling alley in a fancy outlet mall on the west side of town. The alley was empty save for one other couple seven or eight lanes down. The vacancy wasn't surprising on a cold, wet Monday night. Games were only $2, on special. The normal, non-fancy alley on Mission drive would have been packed tonight, and more expensive. It was league night, there. As I bowled, I thought again of how I was out of time and out of step simply because I was out on a Monday, rather than a Friday or Saturday. How much easier it all was, and how solitary. The TVs were playing cartoons from my childhood: Voltron and Batman. The animation was terrible. How could it have looked so good, so exciting to me, once?

On the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins, there is a large statue that sort of resembles a donut. You can walk through it. When I've been there with friends, walking at night, I always call it the dimensional portal. I stress, with urgency, the importance of all of us passing through it, or of none passing through it. We can't take different paths, or we'll be out of phase with each-other. We'll be in different dimensions, never to be reunited again. And if we all pass through the portal on our way to wherever we're going, we must also pass through it on the way back, lest we forever be lost from our original world. I don't really believe it all, but I do. One night, somebody didn't play along, and it made me uncomfortable. I do not think it's a coincidence that I can't remember who it was.

When I was a kid, the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons haunted and captivated me. In the show, a group of teenagers get sucked through a dimensional portal when they ride a roller coaster. They end up in a land of swords, wizards and dragons - exciting! - but they spend every episode trying to get home. Once, some of them managed to make it, but one of them didn't, or maybe he had the head of a boar or something and needed a wizard to cure him. In any case, they never made it back all at once, and they would never abandon each-other, which allowed the series to continue indefinitely. I always wondered what had happened to their parents, to their brothers and sisters, to their friends. Were they missed back in the real world? Had time stopped? What was happening, while they were stuck in this parallel world?

Andy recently found me on Facebook. Maybe that's what reminded me of the trip to Cleveland and the mayflies, though I had never forgotten them. I don't know yet where he's been, and what he's been doing. He lives in NYC now and is going to grad school at Columbia - a different world, twice removed from my midwestern life and corporate day job, and he's single - three times removed from my marriage and child. I suppose it's possible that we didn't both make it out of that neighborhood. Maybe when we both walked out of the car and went into that convenience store, one of us left the wrong way. Maybe we got out of phase. Maybe I compounded things some night when I went through the dimensional portal on the lawn of the Nelson one too many times.

But the trick is, I don't think the portals and the chutes are as obvious as a brightly lit gas station or a fire at the Target. I think sometimes they sneak up on you. Maybe you went a different way when you didn't make that elevator, when you chose to go out alone, when you decided to talk to that person out of the blue who caught your eye. Maybe the most we can hope for with anyone is a short amount of time when we're in synch, an episode or two when we're in the same plane, on the same page.