The Place He Was Always Heading

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My grandfather got stuck heading somewhere. It’s hard to explain, but you ever drive home and realize when you got there that you can’t remember any of the ride at all? It was like that, only he wouldn’t go home.

Instead he’d wind up hours, states, even days away.

We were always worried when he would vanish for more than a few hours. Cell phones helped, my family invested in one of those bag cell phones as soon as they were available.

Grampa explained it to me like this: he had to be thoughtful about where he was going at all times. He could drive, shop, hike, but he had to put his mind into it, really pay attention to his surroundings and what he was doing. If not, he’d realize at some point he was somewhere else, kind of in a daze, heading for some unknown vacation.

As a family, we adapted. His safety net was complex. Someone knew where he was going every time he left the house. He would check in before and after leaving. He still wanted to be active, so it was hard. No one wants to be a captive.

We got him a large metal bracelet that could not be removed and said “this man is not allowed to fly” after he vanished one day and wound up at the airport with a plane ticket to Phoenix he didn’t remember buying. He happened to pass an old friend, who tapped him on the shoulder and broke the trance. Otherwise he wouldn’t have stopped.

But it got harder as he aged. The mind slips, and he found it more difficult to keep up his routines. He started going outside less and less by himself. He also started cataloging what he knew about the problem.

First, it was something that came upon him later in life, he hadn’t had that issue his whole life. Second, it was pushing him somewhere in particular, he guessed Arizona or New Mexico. When he was in our east coast home, he would move basically southwest (not in a straight line, he normally along roadways, which made divining the true location hard). Once on vacation in southern California he went into a daze on a hike and he was walking basically straight east. The, disorder, or whatever it was, also didn’t have him try things that wouldn’t work. Once we told the bus station in town not to let him buy a ticket he never showed up there. With the giant metal bracelet that couldn’t be removed he never tried the airport again either.

Doctors were stumped. They assumed it was psychosomatic, or worse, dementia, some even tried medicines that made the problem worse. We just doubled down, and decided to do our best to keep him safe.

That was before Grandma’s accident.

She fell at the grocery store, breaking her hip. Grandpa beat us all to the hospital, and stayed by her side for two days. We finally made him go home to sleep and grew worried when we found his truck still in the parking lot. He was found by police two days later, 100 miles away, walking through pain and weather towards some unknown destination.

After that, he started testing the problem, trying to follow the pull without losing control. He told me that he could always feel this pull, and he wanted to figure out where it was leading him. He felt desperate, looking for answers, trying to spot patterns in where he went. He kept a notebook where he would agonize over routes and things he would pass: the house where a man would always stare at him through the upstairs window, the dirty rest stop with graffiti talking about “a dark eye watching from the darkness.” The whisper he heard through an open window one night about the “dread lord” stalking him. Honestly he seemed to be getting more and more paranoid, we made more appointments for him, tried to convince him to stop trying to figure it all out.

I stopped going by as often. It was hard to see him like that, struggling and growing weaker seemingly by the day. I started talking to my parents about a locked facility that could keep him safe.

And then one day he vanished.

We looked hard for months before we gave up. It was devastating to not find him, to wonder how far he could have gone. I questioned whether he found his way to the end of his journey safely and wondered what waited for him at the end of his trek: whether he found the answers he sought or whether he was faced with some nightmare at the end of the voyage, a final understanding that he had finally wandered into a trap set for him years before.

It took years to get over the sadness I felt, but slowly I got my life back together. Got married, had a kid, started acting like an adult and doing better at work.

Yesterday I left work, went to the grocery store, and was heading home. The next thing I know I’m getting knocked into the side of my car by a boisterous kid whose father is apologizing to me.

I’m three states away, gassing my car, no idea where I’m heading. I’ve been driving for 18 hours, my wife is worried sick, my boss wants to know where I am.

I feel it now, the constant pull from the horizon. I need to figure out how to stop it before it takes me too.

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