ATLAS OF BOLTON AND ENVIRONS by Megan Harlan
I. Notlob
A tall man enters a pet shop with brown 1970s decor. He is carrying a bird cage.
“Hello, I wish to register a complaint,” says the man. He explains to the pet shop owner that the parrot he just bought from the store is dead.
The owner disagrees. “He’s not dead,” he says. “He’s . . . he’s resting!”
The customer insists the Norwegian blue parrot is dead; the owner explains the bird is just “pining for the fjords.”
After several minutes of arguing, the owner finally agrees to replace the parrot. But he has no more parrots. He tells the customer to go to his brother’s pet shop in Bolton, where there’s sure to be a parrot.
The man agrees to this and leaves. He then enters the same shop, sees the same owner, now wearing a fake mustache.
Confused, the man asks if this is Bolton. The owner answers, “No, it’s Ipswich.”
The man leaves again. He goes to the complaint desk of the train system, to complain that he’s somehow arrived in Ipswich. The worker there assures him that he is in Bolton.
The man returns to the store and says to the owner, “I understand that this is Bolton, but you told me it was Ipswich.”
The owner claims he was just making a pun. Or no, not a pun – a palindrome.
The man cries, “It’s not a palindrome! The palindrome of Bolton would be Notlob!”
The man then gives up, exclaiming that their conversation has gotten too silly. Graham Chapman bursts into the store in his Colonel outfit, shouting, “Quite agree, too silly!”
Your dad tells you this is his favorite Monty Python sketch. Your dad adores Monty Python. As a girl in the 1970s, you view the Pythons as something akin to oracles, who will teach you, yes, the meaning of life that your father already knows but has no time to explain. He is always flying off to someplace far away – Pakistan, London, Kuwait, Paris. But there is this tall man, John Cleese, who looks like your dad, and is deadpan funny like your dad – so people say – and your dad laughs like he might hurt himself when he watches this sketch.
Its point is distinctly British: Here is the absurd, where there is a complaint desk. No one can help you, but someone might pretend the answer you seek is a palindrome.
And: It is not stupid to be distracted by any of this.
II. W. 4th and W. 11th
There will be a street corner in New York where you last see your dad.
It will be near your home of many years, outside your favorite restaurant, Tartine, where you just had lunch together, on his last day in New York.
You will hug him goodbye and he will get into a taxi that is waiting on the cobblestoned corner of West 4th and West 11th Streets. These streets shouldn’t cross but do, since numbered streets in Manhattan are always parallel, except here. You will love the West Village for how the grid never took, instead bringing to life a design of wandering and randomness. And making that experience feel cozy, not terrorizing.
You dad takes the taxi to JFK, where he will catch a flight to – well, why not? – Algeria.
His destination is a city on the Mediterranean called Oran, whose name you’ve circled in pencil in your much-loved but already out-of‑date Hammond World Atlas.
You still use that atlas today. It’s in your son’s room, on the bottom book shelf, though “Czechoslovakia” exists as a country in it, and though its pages fall out in chunks, are shoved back into the covers, reemerge with China next to Italy, New England facing the Kazakh Republic.
But in 1995, the atlas’s binding is intact, and Algeria is undergoing a civil war. People like your dad – businessmen, Westerners – are often being kidnapped there. Your dad will be paid a huge amount of money to take the job. Finances are tight for your parents, investments back home in California have gone terribly wrong. He will be moving to Algeria for the money; your mother will stay in the States.
Sure enough, your dad will be kidnapped in Algeria, but only briefly, on a van filled with coworkers stopped and threatened by men in masks with machine guns, forced to get out into the desert, be shouted at, and then – no one knows why – allowed to return, unscathed, into the van.
Maybe it is incidents like this one in Oran that will push your father over the edge. For a while, he hides it – being a calm, clever, high-functioning alcoholic.
It had been thirteen years since your dad had taken a drink. But it is in Algeria, a country where alcohol was forbidden under Islamic law, that he starts drinking again. And then he doesn’t stop. He tries to stop: After returning to the States, he will check himself into five different treatment centers. But none of them take. After two years, he will die of drink. You will view that last phrase as merciful, the whole story in a few alliterative syllables, clinking like ice.
At age 27, attending his funeral in a wintry Lake Tahoe, you will feel like a woman so ancient all her wisdom is lost. How many times in those two years did you beg him to – no other way to put it – live? All those phone calls he didn’t answer, so maybe not that many times. Every day you imagined his pain, visited it in your mind like a crime scene before the crime. Along the way, you hollowed yourself out into muteness, whistling bones.
From there, like a dead parrot, you fly home to New York.
III. 269 W. 12th St., Apt. 3‑2
A day or two before your dad gets into the taxi for Algeria, he will read – for the first time, and last – one of your book reviews. Despite having no money at all, no back‑up funds, despite earning every penny you’ve spent since you were 18 (when your parents lost all their money), you’ve decided to make a living as a freelance writer, squeezing out rent from piecemeal checks. This is all the writing you are doing, and you pour yourself into each piece. Your dad is not much of a reader, but he reads one of your book reviews, of a collection of linked stories about the AIDS epidemic.
When your dad finishes, he will look at you – there in your tiny, hundred-year-old tenement living room – and say: “You are a real writer.” Not that your dad is an expert on what a “real writer” is; but from where he stands, you are one, and it matters to him. This moment vibrates from that apartment to you still, the words knocking against the wood floors, the pale grey paint on those walls, as alive and invisible as a throbbing heart.
Here is the absurd: Like a fairy tale, you will be granted thirteen good years of having a father who sees you. But only thirteen, those years your dad didn’t drink, from the time you are 12 until you are 25. Then you will have to learn to live with the pain, and without medication. Because numb will never be your thing.
IV. Oran
The name rang a tiny bell, but you thought, Well, it’s like Iran, misspelled. You don’t look into it for many years, and then you do, and learn – remember – that Oran is the city where Albert Camus set his novel, The Plague.
You recall whole sentences of the book, though refracted through the slow, deafening pace it took you to get through the original French. Verb tenses translated themselves dubiously within that trapped, sun-baked, death-filled city. You were a sophomore in college, taking a French literature class that was well beyond your French language skills. But what better book to embrace the meaning of struggle than La Peste.
“The town itself, let us admit, is ugly. It has a smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes it different from so many business centers in other parts of the world.”
With The Plague, you enter your existentialist phase. You never really leave it. You like it because it feels optimistic, though you suspect you may have gotten something wrong.
“In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.”
Here is the absurd, and it looks just like life. The plague cannot be understood. Your family’s plague will strike down your dad, his dad, his uncle, his aunt, his great-uncle with the Scottish last name that was your father’s middle name, and who knows who else, going how far back. By chance your genes are clean of that illness, but not of its anguish.
How French to come out and say: The answer you seek is not in heaven, or fate. To truly live, you must be braver than that.
How French to think absurdism is philosophy, not comedy.
Yourself, you prefer them jumbled together whenever possible.
V. Ancient Greece
Last year, you walked into your six-year-old son’s room and found him looking at the falling-apart Hammond World Atlas, trying to find “Ancient Greece” after a discussion at school. But the pages were all mixed up, so you spread them out like a deck of cards on the floor. Together, you put the atlas back in order, as you told your son about different maps and their incidents – the monkeys in Bali (“One peed on your dad!”), the Sahara Desert in Tunisia (“You wouldn’t believe how cold it is at night!”), the books of Edinburgh (“J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter in a cafe that looks right onto the castle!”).
Right then it all seems to fit together, merely by noticing how it has ordered and disordered itself around you, so many breakneck architectures zip-lining through the immediate eras.
You find the map of Greece.
Your son says, “No, I mean Ancient Greece.”
“Ancient Greece in’t a place anymore,” you say.
He insists Ancient Greece is a place, because his teacher said so. You explain there is a country called Greece, and it used to be Ancient, but that was a long time ago, and now it’s just Greece.
He disagrees. He wants to go to Ancient Greece. He’s seen the photos.
“Mommy,” he says to you firmly. “Ms. Trevor showed us islands in Ancient Greece. The water is so blue!”
He points to an island on the map. “We’ll go there,” he decides. “The beaches have white sand and the trees have olives. Ms. Trevor said so.”
“Okay,” you relent. “Maybe someday we can do that.”
So you have tentative plans to go to Ancient Greece as a family.
At the complaint desk is Terry Jones, and he confirms you are at the right station. You are not in Ipswich, after all. You are exactly where you wanted to be, which now seems more important than the fact that you were sold a late parrot.
Megan Harlan has contributed nonfiction to The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon. She is the author of a collection of poems, Mapmaking (BkMk Press, 2010); her poems have appeared in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, American Poetry Review, PBS NewsHour’s Poetry Series, and Poetry Daily.