LUDIC LOG

He's been driving for a long time. It's seemed to me, a few times, that we're lost, because all the buildings look the same. But he shows me the map, and it turns out we're not seeing the same ones over and over again after all: they just look that way. We aren't getting anywhere, but at least we aren't lost.

"Tell me again what we're looking for," I ask him. I take a pull at my bottled water. It's warm. I suppose I can't really blame him for that, except through a really convoluted chain of circumstance, but I do anyway. Thanks for making my water warm, asshole.

"We're looking for an honest man," he says. He never looks at me when we're driving. He says it's because he has to keep his eyes on the road, but right now it's wall-to-wall traffic. We're hardly even moving. "Like Diogenes."

"Who's that?" I ask. I don't really care, but I'm tired of listening to talk radio. That's all he listens to in the car. He says music distracts him. "The last honest man?"

He glances in his rear-view, then straight ahead again. He looks at the Connecticut plates on the car ahead like it's a Russian novel. "Sort of," he says. "He was a Greek philosopher. A Cynic."

"No wonder you like him."

"Not that kind of cynic," he says. There's something nasty in his voice. It's an angry man waiting in line at the bank. "Capital-C Cynic. The legend has it that he walked through the night with a lit lamp, looking for an honest man."

"Did he ever find one?"

"No."

"So," I say, knowing it's just going to piss him off, "aren't we kind of wasting our time?"

He scowls into the mirror, subjugating it. Traffic stops moving altogether. "You're missing the point."

"What point? Are we Diogenes, or are we the guy he's looking for?" I'm losing patience. I'm turning into a short-timer in this war. "And what happened to that whole thing about Ulysses? Wasn't that who you were, right outside the city limits? Coming home after twenty years, to find what you'd lost? Where did that get to?"

His hands are flexing around the steering wheel, pulling it into an unknown shape. It's therapeutic for him to do this, or isometric, or something. I can't keep track. "That's still...it's like that. But it's also like Diogenes." He rolls his eyes up; I can see him do it even though I'm looking in the mirror now too. This means he's thinking. And every time he thinks, he changes his mind. "No, you're right. The Odyssey is better. Let's go back to that one."

"But we're already married. Which makes me Penelope. So who does this make the guy you're looking for? Telemachus? Or is he Penelope?"

"He's Diogenes!"

"I thought we were Diogenes. Wait, which is Diogenes? Is he the honest man or the guy looking for the honest man?"

"I...hold on a minute." He starts to suck on his lower lip. This means he's confused. And every time he gets confused, he starts talking even more. I wish I hadn't brought it up. "Have you ever read Jack Kerouac?"

"No." My left shoe is too tight. I decide to blame him for that too.

"Okay, that one works even better. Listen..."