The Travelling Salesman's Problem

By Jeremy Birch

Jed Halter is a globetrotting software salesman, but then his mother dies. While he is clearing her house he discovers a large box of audio tapes, with a note attached to one from his mother "Jed, start here, sorry, Mom". He listens to the first one and hears an unknown voice, that seems to be of another travelling salesman. He becomes intrigued by this voice, what it has to say and how it links to his mother and himself. Soon after, Jed loses his job and decides to drive right across America, from one ocean to the other, in hope of inspiration. As he travels along Interstate 10, he listens to more of the tapes and finds a growing parallel between his life and that of the other salesman. Along the way he learns about loneliness, hallucinations, fame and the sad story of how the other salesman found and lost love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeremy Birch
• Release date: Apr 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782802686

Jeremy Birch

Jeremy Birch has been electronic engineer and environmental campaigner for a very long time. Having been involved in quite a lot of successful enterprises (and some glorious failures) without making either an name for himself or very much money, he has decided to turn his hand to writing fiction. This makes a change from only writing stuff that ends every statement with a semi-colon and which is only readable by machines.

Book preview

The Travelling Salesman’s Problem

Jeremy Birch

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Copyright Jeremy Birch 2014

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication                 

To Jud, Peter and Helen for their love and patience

To Ste and Hellie, for their encouragement

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Chapter 1

The Travelling Salesman’s Problem

The real problem, of course, is trying not to die of boredom. I could mean that in a metaphorical sense, every boring, monotonous, tedious hour saps away the will to live - but I actually mean it in a very real and concrete way. When you are driving for hours along a rod straight road, with dry yellow grass on either side, and no hills for a thousand miles, no town for a hundred miles, you can easily drift first off to sleep and then off the road. In the more temperate months, the long wait by the road for rescue is just an alternate tedium to driving, but in the winter, it can easily mean death.

Occasionally as I drive along, I spot cars that have left the road never to return. Some look as if they have just pulled over to contemplate the view, though there isn’t one, or to sleep, or to urinate behind a tree, though there aren’t any of those either. However, some are clearly the scene of a tragic ending of life, or at least a certain ending - rusting crumpled shells hugging some concealed rock or wall that was drawn to the driver’s attention as they drew their own last breath.

So to keep from having my own ‘accidental death of a salesman’ I have tried many things. I have tried listening to the radio, but this is easily as maddening as the empty road itself. As you sweep along you can hear a hundred repeats of the same awful adverts everyday. You hear how product X will cure haemorrhoids or wind or bad breath or odorous feet, or possibly all four simultaneously, or hear hundreds of appeals from evangelists for money and salvation - a choice between clean soles or clean souls, you might think, as you start to twitch from this Chinese water torture of inanity.

If you find a chat show, it either digs up sexual or social deviancies of which you had no prior clue, or desire to have one, or tries to instil such radically conservative views in such reasonable tones that you want only to hole up in the hills with a gun until there is no one else left with whom to experience social or sexual deviancies. If you find music, it will either be a rota of the five hot songs of the day, or a diet of Hotel California, California Girls or shit-kicking bluegrass, depending on where you are driving through.

So I still listen to the radio for twenty minutes a day, but no more - just long enough to hear the weather and traffic and the opening bars from the Eagles, before finding some other diversion from three hundred miles of black top and yellow lines. I have tried math games and list games, but either these make me sleepy, or really need a pencil and paper (I tried it and almost ended hugging a bridge pillar for eternity). Or the games are just no fun without someone to spar against - where is the challenge in the suitcase game if you need to remember seven slimy slithering snakes in a sack and a hippopotamus with hiccups if there is no one else to get it wrong or to propose an even more Dali-esque item for your portmanteau?

I tried audio books, and still on occasion listen to them, but there is something so closed about another person portraying the voices of characters that excludes the imagination of the listener. I never listen to a book I have read before, or want to read in future, it would kill the one thing left to me when not driving this damn car. However, I will listen to pulp fiction - is that pulp diction then? It covers up the endless hiss and rumbles of the road and does not require my mind or soul to be involved.

One day, when I was listening to a particularly awful pulp novel by the sister of an ageing starlet, I came up with a plan. At the time I was selling cassette recorders and tapes so I had quite a few in the trunk, so I decided to try recording my thoughts as I drove along. Those first tapes were dreadful, you can hear more of the turn indicator than you can of me, and these were long straight roads. Why could I not hold a sensible conversation, thread of thought, or monologue? Perhaps I was relying too much on external stimuli, and as I have already said there were precious little of them, hardly enough to know which way was up when the fields merged with the grey clouds at the horizon. I puzzled why this should be; was I just too stupid and boring to have anything to say? So I started picking up books whenever I could, cutting short my evening at whatever truck stop or Denny’s or bar I managed to find for food, and went back to the motel (or often my car) to read and read until all light and consciousness were gone. As the books I picked up were just those I could find on the road, in thrift stores and library sales, on swap shelves and fluttering on walls, I read widely and haphazardly. But I loved it - reading thoughts I never knew could exist, things that made me angry, or worried me, happy or miserable, randy or serene, always in some way larger on the inside of the head, seeing further than those infinite rolling grey horizons of my everyday life.

And what I would do each night before falling asleep was to tape questions for myself on one tape recorder. Questions derived from the book I was reading or inspired by it: Is Mr Darcy a boring bastard or a shy hero?, What on earth is the scene with Jesus and the Grand Inquisitor about?, Is Moby Dick a whale or some expression of crisis in America? The sort of questions you hear on those late night Opinion shows just before you turn off the TV or radio, as you brush you teeth, or have to answer in high school essays, although I cannot recall the use of the word bastard in my days at school.

Anyway, I would record six or seven such questions each night, and then as I drove along and found the tedium getting to me I would play the first question, then stop the tape amid much fumbling and clunking of switches - I never did understand why you had to press both play and record together - to start another tape recording my thoughts on that tricky poser. Sometimes I could ramble on, reasoning in a vacuum, for thirty minutes or so, only disturbed from this reverie by the clunk of the tape hitting its stops. Sometimes I would go dry very quickly; if I did then I flicked out the tape, put in a fresh one and tried the next question, and later I would read more of the book and return next day to that partial tape to correct whatever naive opinion I had expounded and grow and even larger fiction for myself.

So over a period of months, then years, I had a conversation, or debate, with myself on all the major literary conundrums of the day, although few college lecturers would have even bothered to uncap their red pens for most of it. However, it kept me sane on the road, in more ways than one, and was quite an education. You might wonder how a person who spends all day driving to a ten-minute meeting gets to be well informed and erudite, the answer is by avoiding death.

As I say, I did toy with math games and one day I found a copy of Euclid’s Principles and slowly but avidly read it. What a joy it was to see a world where all problems were solvable just by using the might of the mind, where seemingly intractable things could be sorted out by opening the Euclidean toolbox and choosing the right wrench to unscrew it with: these lines are parallel, so those angles are equal or this angle on the edge of the circle must be half this angle at the centre or whatever. So then I spent some time each day proving geometrical theorems in my head, again posed from another tape, with the occasional scribbling in the steam on the window or dust on the dashboard. However, there is only so much of this geometrical thinking you can do behind the wheel whilst trying to describe your own straight line across a flat plane.

After many months of this, I started to wonder why I felt the need to talk, to ask questions and to answer them. Was I passing the time or was I substituting for something I missed in my life? Would I rather be conversing with someone else and if so who would that be?

The tape recordings were a clue - by answering questions I had recorded myself, I was challenging my younger self to justify things - or was it my past querying the present? Was the cathartic element the asking of the question or the answering? Was I asking questions on my behalf or for someone else? As you can imagine, these questions themselves were recorded and discussed during endless hours of driving from one small sale to another, across the vast and very slowly changing spaces of America. The question which caused me most often to eject the tape before forming a coherent or truthful answer was not a tricky Euclidean theorem nor an imponderable of nineteenth century literature, but the simplest of all: how did I get here?

There are many answers to that, some stupidly pedantic such as Along I15 from Barstow or the tangential by not getting a better job or the irreverently truthful by evolving from simpler creatures who had no interest in selling tape recorders or electric razors, despite being considerably hairier. It was undoubtedly a question rooted in my own personal history and not in the mythic or ancient past, but for some reason I could not grasp it without it sliding away like an eel in a creek.

….hiss…squeal…creak…clunk

The tape stopped playing and all was quiet in the garage apart from the distant sound of a leaf blower. I did not know what to make of this voice from the past, found almost by chance. I might well have never heard this message, and only by a chain of events had it ever happened. I can set down the end of the chain here; I have no idea where the start of it is attached.

In late summer, Mom fell ill back in New Hampshire, and by the time neighbours had found her and then tracked me down on my travels, all that remained of her was a frail shadow on a ventilator. She knew me, that I could tell from her eyes and a brief squeeze of my hand by her own very cold one, but the pain and the drugs had taken her too far away from me for us to talk or even to pass notes. I trust that what I said to he gave her comfort and ease, but no amount of I love you and everything will be fine, Mom can close a gap opened up by cancer run rife, and opiates.

  After a couple of days, the medical staff drew me aside and said that there was no hope of recovery, that the bills for keeping her suffering were mounting up, and that it would be kindest and best for them to let her go peacefully. Whether there was a subtext that they would prefer to fill the bed with someone who might recover, I could never tell. My own perceptions were too skewed by lack of sleep, jet-lag and shock to tell. I had been in Japan on a sales trip at the time I was hesitantly called by her neighbour Mrs Fritz to be told about Mom; the strain of seeing the person I visit two or three times per year for festive meals shrunken to a pale and tortured shell left me reeling.

Another day of watching and waiting, of returning exhausted to the Motel and eating at Denny’s, I realised that no matter what the motivations, the result was the same. Not only would I have to watch my mother die today, but I would have to ask the doctors to kill her - dress it up as much as you like, that was what was being discussed, and what I was to agree to happening.

So that day, I got dressed as smartly as I could, went in to the hospital not knowing what to hope for - an alert and awake mother I could make a fond farewell to (how do you do that? It is not like she was off on a cruise, soon to return) or for her to have already died and so have spared me the responsibility of decision. Neither was the case - she was not aware of me as far as I could tell, no flicker of the eyelids, no squeeze of the hand, no response to the kiss on her forehead. So I decided, quietly approached the nurse and said I was ready (not that I could be). Gently and slowly they turned down the ventilator and increased the morphine, to ease her distress; her breathing slowed, becoming shallower and more erratic, stopped, started again in one gasp, stopped, and then the remaining sound of the heart monitor came loud and then itself slowed, stuttered and ceased, to be replaced by an alarm that was swiftly silenced by the nurse.

Feeling tearful and wrung-out, but also oddly detached as if I dared not allow myself to admit Mom was dead and I had caused her to die, I rushed out of the ward. The next week is a blur to me, a vibrant loving life replaced by paperwork, invoices and pain. Ten days later she was buried,