Off the Map

William Gibbs:
You know, I really admire you, Mr. Grodin. More than any man I've ever met. You don't have a penny in the bank, no life insurance, no credit. But your house is all paid for, you got four years worth of food stored away, three years worth of firewood, stockpiles of clothes, beautiful wife, great kid. Your life is yours. I think you're a genius.

Charley:
I'm going crazy, George, crazy. It's these damn drugs. I feel like strangling something. I feel like going out in the yard and strangling that damn goat! I'm dangerous.

George:
Sit down.

Charley:
Sit down? Look at me! Can I sit down? I just walked twenty miles! I mean look at my legs, they're still moving, Look at 'em!

George:
Have a beer.

Charley:
Beer? I can't have a beer. I'm not supposed to drink alcohol with these damn drugs. I'm gonna have to murder someone! Ok, I'll have a beer.

Charley:
Excuse the cryin'. I am a damn cryin' machine. That's why I drink so much water, won't have any fluids left in me. Have you ever been depressed?

William Gibbs:
I've never not been depressed.

George:
[about his psychiatrist] I might ask her to marry me.

Arlene:
Marry you? George, really?

George:
She's a gentle person. She's very thoughtful. She cares.

Arlene:
You pay her to care. George, you ought not to confuse romance with business.

Young Bo:
You know what's really weird? When they send you a credit card and it's just in a plain envelope. You could so easily throw it away and not know it was in there.

George:
Who?

Young Bo:
I feel so bad for Mr. Gibbs. They completely stripped his car.

George:
Who got a credit card?

Young Bo:
It's just sitting out there in the desert like a corpse, like the vultures came and pecked out the eyeballs and everything! The radio, the seats...

George:
ARLENE got a credit card?

Young Bo:
Any news on that psychiatrist front?

Arlene:
God damn it, Charley, not again! Come out. Come out, Charley, now! Come out now, enough. Look, Charley, you can lock yourself in the chicken house, you can lock yourself in the root cellar, you can lock yourself in the shed and the truck... no, not the truck, and not the outhouse! Come out of the outhouse right now! You're being selfish, Charley. You're just sitting there listening to me, being selfish and self-indulgent, self-pitying! [hits the outhouse door] Sweetheart, I can't take this much more. Humility, Charley, it's what keeps you from being humiliated. That's where the word comes from. Everybody gets depressed, why should you be above it, huh? Well I'll say one thing for you, when you take on a project you give it your all. God. You've never done anything half-assed in your life and you're not doing it now.

Arlene:
You're up. You look much better. You got some color.

William Gibbs:
Mrs. Grodin...

Arlene:
Would you like to wash yourself? Would you? There's a pool in the stream above the goat pen.

William Gibbs:
Mrs. Grodin, I...

Arlene:
There's a junked Mercury out at the dump, same model as yours. I'm sure we can get a lot of parts.

William Gibbs:
I love you.

Arlene:
Oh. Well, that's nice.

William Gibbs:
The moment I saw you, Mrs. Grodin, the very first instant, I knew my life as I had understood it was... I'd been up since sunrise. My second night in the car, I was completely lost. I must have walked ten miles to a clearing, to your garden. To you, standing there in all those vines, those vegetables. I saw you and pignon trees behind, and the hill, and everything completely still. So beautiful. It was almost unbearable, it still is. Then later, holding your hand, I remembered being at a birthday party, this children's birthday party, and my older brother was acting out. Me, discovering my mother dead. My mother committed suicide. But maybe she didn't. He was telling this story, how I'd come home from school carrying a pyramid I'd made out of foam core, and opened the front door, and walked in backwards and bumped into her, in the hall. She hung herself. Now I don't think it's true! I don't think it's a real memory, my memory. I think it's just the description that I heard from my brother. I don't even think foam core EXISTED back then, Mrs. Grodin. I always felt partly responsible, involved, being the one to find her, but now I don't think I did. I don't think I did! It was like the cornerstone of my childhood, the event upon which I built everything else, and now it's pulled out and everything is toppled. The only thing I can hold on to right now, Mrs. Grodin, the only thing I know to be true, is my love for you.

[first lines]

Adult Bo:
[narrating] The summer my father was depressed the face of our Lord Jesus Christ appeared on a tortilla at the Taos Junction Cafe. It hung on a nail by the door, and pilgrims came to bear witness. Maria, who saw the face emerge and fainted dead away, wanted to shellac it to preserve it for all eternity. It was a wish of vanity, for she'd hoped only to extend her new-found notoriety. But time had its way, and within the years the face was gone, though something of its anguish lingered.

Adult Bo:
[narrating] It was inescapable, my father's depression. Like some fumigator's mist filing our lungs. It came to be the focal point of our lives that summer. The geological formation around which everything was defined.

Young Bo:
So, how was the psychiatrist?

George:
He was a woman.

Young Bo:
Did you get the prescription?

George:
No.

Young Bo:
You didn't act depressed enough.

George:
She wants to see me again next week.

Young Bo:
Really? Why? Why, George?

George:
[clearing his throat] I think she likes me.

Charley:
Nice shirt.

William Gibbs:
Thanks, it's yours.

William Gibbs:
I don't know who I am.

Charley:
I don't either.

William Gibbs:
Know who I am?

Charley:
You?

William Gibbs:
You don't know who I am, or who you are?

Charley:
No.

Adult Bo:
[narrating] Through my window, the cool night air carried the sound of my father dropping the complimentary box of tissues from the Kleenex company, as he passed them over to William Gibbs. Passing as it were between athletes on a relay team, a baton. There was a valve opened in William Gibbs releasing a torrent of tears. It seemed that same valve continued turning in my father all the to the off position, shutting off that steady leak that had streaked his face and, our lives, for more than half a year.

Arlene:
I don't think we should be feeding those drugs to the chickens. It's unkind.

Charley:
You fed them to *me*.

Young Bo:
[viewing Gibbs' painting] It has struck me to view the ocean as the past, and the sky as the future, and the present as that thin, precarious line where both meet. Precarious because as we stand there, it curves underfoot, ever-changing.

[last lines]

Arlene:
[on sail boat reading from "Two Years Before the Mast"] In one week after leaving Cape Horn, the long, topgallant masts were got up, topgallant and royal yards crossed, and the ship restored to her fair proportions. The Southern Cross and Magellan Clouds settled lower and lower in the horizon...

Arlene, Young Bo:
[overlapping narration]... And so great was our change in latitude, that each succeeding night we sank some constellation in the south, and raised another in the northern horizon.

Young Bo:
My dad's philosophy is: having a job is expensive. If you spend all your time working for someone else, you don't have any time to learn to do things.