The Road to You: a novel

The Road

"He was my North, my South, my East and West."

-- W. H. Auden

"Love removes the world for you... just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly."

-- Alice Munro 

Growing up in semi-squalor is an excellent preparation for finding beauty in the world, in both its sublime and grotesque manifestations. In such crude surroundings, often the most beautiful thing in your immediate environment will be your own body, and you may be forgiven for being seduced by it.

At twenty-eight years of age, Jude Kagan was bathing himself in the basement of his parents' modest, somewhat dilapidated little home. Taking a bird bath, he called it in his head.

He had just returned from a half-hour jog through the streets and parks of a neighborhood made strange by the absence of childhood friends, and now the flight of most of their parents to low maintenance condos and far-flung retirement communities. New neighbors had moved in, of course, but Jude hadn't gone to the effort of getting to know them. He hadn't grown up with their children, hadn't attended birthday parties at their homes, hadn't been scolded by them for pranks gone awry: caught in the midst of setting fire to a toy jammed in the elbow of a tree, torturing an insect, manhandling a dead bird or rodent. No, bereft of their familiar inhabitants, these houses had gone dead to Jude's imagination, like jack-o-lanterns the day after Hallowe'en, their animating flame extinguished.

But this absence of familiar faces was also liberating in its way. There was almost no one with whom to have awkward, nostalgic encounters on Jude's thrice-weekly runs, no one before whom to feel ashamed for not being able to say more for the decade of his life just past. As a not untypically skinny teenager (but, to him, intolerably so), Jude had taken up jogging and weightlifting, both of which he sought to carry out in absolute privacy. He'd go for his jog just before sun-up in hopes of remaining safely anonymous. He put himself through a painfully public expedition to a catalogue store to buy the cheapest bench and weight set available, and turned the cellar into a chamber of incubation – the place from which his new self would be born. Somehow, it never quite worked out that way. However the exterior changed, inside he was still the same.

Jude had moved back to his parents' narrow, post-war row house eight months earlier. Unwilling to reoccupy his childhood bedroom, he had constructed a shabby second bedroom for himself below ground level. Two new walls were framed in; rigid, prefab sheets of plaster had been tacked up over the skeleton of two-by-fours; and the foundation walls of raw, untreated cinderblocks completed the enclosure. He bought and lay down a cheap but ample rectangle of thin gray broadloom, but the new walls remained unspackled and unpainted. The aesthetic poverty and impermanence of this new chamber constituted the bulk of its charm. It imposed a Spartan discipline on him, prevented him from getting too comfortable.

Eight months later, Jude had plotted his escape, liquidating the weight set and anything else of resalable value to help finance his getaway.

In the basement he enjoyed a privacy more complete than anything he could have aspired to when he was growing up and sharing the second floor with his parents. The only problem was: no bathroom. Having enjoyed a brief career as a star high-school athlete, Jude had of necessity developed the requisite comfort with locker rooms and nudity before his peers, much as it grated against his other instincts. But it was a fastidious modesty with respect to one person, and one person only, that prevented him from showering in his parents' home, since he would then have to traipse – in a towel – down two flights of stairs to his underground cell, during which interval his mother was sure to accost him. She had a vexing, Freudian way of imposing her hang-ups on others through deceptively good-natured jokes. Even now, at twenty-eight, Jude winced in retrospective and anticipatory horror at his mother's allusions to playing with himself. A mortifying mainstay of his adolescence, he could no longer tolerate her falsely jocular teasing about the assumed cause of his habitually prolonged showers.