He was born east, though he had no conception of it until he was much older.  In his earliest years, there were only two cardinal points:  towards the sea, and into town.  The first spelled liberty, long nights, fish that could be caught and eaten, and occasional stormy menace; the second spelled school, hospital, misery.  He could not remember when he first heard the word 'west', but it held a powerful grip on him even then.  It sounded like a whisper, a quiet expulsion of a wonderful secret, and it became clear to him that it signified something amazing.  It was one of the ways to go that was not towards the sea, towards its freedom and licence, nor towards town, the place of sickness and restriction.  For many years, the other directions for him were only places where there was nothing, but soon west came to mean a place that was unknown. 

What was known, that was misery.  What was unknown must be wonder.

 ***

In 1975 he went west consciously for the first time.  Nine years old and with legs that were beginning to work on their own, he set off, khaki shorts and a sweater his mother made no help against cold September, for a new world.  Seaward no longer meant freedom but the place where she had drowned.  Town still meant school and doctors' frowns.  Home meant his father, crawled inside of himself leaving a hairy hunched chitin, resentful of his sickness.  North meant nothing, of which he had had enough prior to being born.

The patrolman who picked him up as he stumbled, goosefleshed and squinting, along the side of the main road, was a Abenaki.  He'd called him 'son', which his own father did not.

"Where were you going, son?", the patrolman had asked.  It took him a long time to answer, because no one had ever asked him before where he was going; he had never gone anywhere on his own.

"West," he said, finally.  "West."

He was surprised when this did not end the conversation:  "What's west?" followed from the patrolman.

"I don't know," he responded, after a fair chance at looking for an answer in his underfed mind.  "Something different than here.  Something better."

"To my people," the patrolman told him, "west is where we will go when the great hunter Glooscap returns us to the golden age.  Men and animals will be one again and will all go to the west."

"Do you think that's true?", he'd asked, and he could not feel his hands because of the cold and the anticipation of the answer.

"No," the Abenaki policeman had said.   It was too late and too week.  Inside him something woke, something ancient and patient that wanted to go west to the golden age.

 ***

Soon enough he mastered his traitor legs.  He hid his strength from his father and played sullen and slow in classes, so the old man would not put him out.  By this time the drinking had taken most of the old man's memories of his seasunk mother and he was too busy walking the arrow line to his grave to wonder why the hospital bills didn't come anymore.  He read every night, and when the old man was asleep he went out the front door and turned left.  The ancient thing inside looked west, and he waited for his father to die.  It took only another few years.

He sold the yellow house for a fragment of its worth but it was a fortune to him.  The car he kept and pointed it in the proper direction.  In the back seat he threw clothes that were warm and books, maps and science and how to behave, and myths.  He knew the Egyptians by now, knew that west was their way past death.  He didn't care.  He didn't know what it was, only that he had to go there.

 ***

"You know why I'm leaving," she said.

He said that he didn't know why.  He said that he didn't know anything anymore.  In his voice he put the same practiced innocence, the same wounded confusion, that he'd once used on his teachers when he wanted to be thought a dullard.  It had kept him then from having to leave his father too soon.  Now he hoped it would put a lock on the inside of his front door.

He thought to make her explain herself, to spell out what he'd done wrong.  This was a trick by which he could argue his way to a state of graceful innocence but she was too clever for it.  She knew the trick better than his teachers and employers. 

"You know.  And if you don't I guess you'll just have to not know."  That was the end of the things she would ever say to him, and she drove off.  North.  That was an unimportant direction and it belonged to the past, to nothing, to the known.  Good, he thought.  North is where she should be.  North removes her from my responsibility.

It was then that he decided to seek the aid of the bottle for the first time, to invert himself like his father had done, to see what the old man had seen all those nights in his rocking chair after north took his wife.  To his astonishment, the first he had ever experienced, it was only himself.  How the old man had lived a full thirteen years with only his interior for company was nearly beyond his comprehension. 

It was no good.  There was still west to go to.

 ***

This time, the man who picked him up was no Abenaki, but an overfed southerner, transplanted here by easy money and the chance to flex muscles.  It was a common type in California.  He was wandering, stumbling and chilled again, but this time not by cold.  He was playing the fool again, but he made sure the cop saw the needle tracks on his arms. 

"Where are you going, pal?", the big black-uniformed mass had asked, after telling him where he couldn't be.  There would be no revelation of the western lands this time so he answered straight.

"The beach," he said.  There was nothing else to say, so he didn't.

"Don't linger," the officer warned.  He stumbled away from the car towards the lonely pier.  He had spent a long time trying to learn why his mother had drowned, and he finally stood to find out.

He had thought, in times of despair, that he had reached the terminus, that at the meeting of land and sky and sea there was no more west.  But there was much more.  All he had to do was what she had done.  All he had to do was walk to it, as she had walked east.

They might meet in the middle, he thought, as the water smacked at his arms.

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