Song Read No. 3 — Holy Grail, a short story inspired by the Hunters and Collectors song

Ray Doolan woke from the strangest dream at 4:47 in the morning in a motel room outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, with the air conditioning grinding away in the wall and the absolute certainty that he had been, moments ago, part of the largest army the world had ever seen.

He lay still, trying to hold onto it. They had been marching — all of them, thousands upon thousands, a river of men moving through cold that had no bottom — toward something just over the next ridge. Something that was always just over the next ridge. He could feel the specific weight of it in his legs even now: the exhaustion of going a very long way toward something you haven’t reached yet and cannot stop moving toward regardless.

He sat up. Outside, a truck passed on the interstate and its lights crossed the ceiling and were gone. He was fifty-three years old. He had been on the road for eleven days. On the passenger seat of his Corolla, held shut with a rubber band, was the business plan he had driven two thousand miles to pitch to people who kept telling him no.

He sat with that for a moment in the dark. Then he got up and made the bad motel coffee and watched the sky begin, very slowly, to change.

It had started, as these things always did with Ray, with a very good idea and a complete disregard for the evidence against it.

The idea was a restaurant. Not just any restaurant — a small chain, eventually, built around a concept so straightforward he had never understood why nobody had done it properly. Simple food. Honest food. The kind of thing people cooked at home on a Wednesday, made well, sold at a price that didn’t require a special occasion to justify. He had run the numbers. He had tested the menu on everyone who would sit still long enough. He had, at considerable cost to his marriage and his savings and his relationship with his daughter — who had used the phrase mid-life crisis in a tone that suggested she had been waiting some time to deploy it — quit his job at forty-nine to chase it.

The first restaurant had worked beautifully for two years before the landlord tripled the rent. The second had worked until his business partner decided Bali was more interesting than margins. The third was the one he didn’t lead with.

And yet here he was. Rubber band. Albuquerque. Eight rejections and one meeting left.

What he was after, he had come to understand, was not money or even success in the way that word was commonly meant. He was after the proof. The confirmation that the thing in his head — a room full of people eating something true, something that didn’t dress itself up as more than it was — could exist in the actual world. That the vision was real. That he was not simply a man who had sacrificed a great deal to pursue something that only ever lived in his own stubbornly lit imagination.

He had driven the whole route of this latest crusade across country he had never seen. Through the flat immensity of West Texas where the sky pressed down like a judgement. Into New Mexico in November, the cold coming off the mountains with a seriousness he hadn’t packed for, the locals in their sensible coats watching his California plates with expressions he had learned, by day four, not to interpret too closely.

Eight investors. Seven cities. He had been full of beans at every one — his slides sharp, his story polished, his conviction so thoroughly genuine that he occasionally caught investors leaning forward before they remembered they were supposed to be evaluating him. And then the lean would stop and the professional language would begin: market timing, margin compression, a saturated space. Nobody said the thing they meant. They were too careful for that. But he heard it beneath the careful words, the way you hear traffic through a wall — constant, going somewhere, impossible to fully block out.

By the sixth meeting he had taken to driving after dark rather than before, stopping only when he had to, eating whatever was open. Somewhere in the stretch between El Paso and Albuquerque he had pulled over on a wide gravel shoulder and stood outside the car in the cold and looked up at more stars than he had seen since childhood and thought about turning around. Just letting it be the thing it had become: a good idea that the world had declined, three times and counting, to make room for.

He had stood there for perhaps ten minutes. Then he got back in the car. He was not sure why. He was not sure he needed to know why.

His daughter Susie called every morning at seven, as she had every day since he’d left. She was twenty-six and had inherited her mother’s practicality and Ray’s stubbornness in a combination that made her, he thought, the most formidably useful person he knew.

How’d it go?

He passed.

A pause. That’s eight, Dad.

I know how many it is.

Dad. Just his name, in the particular way she had of saying it that meant: I love you, I am watching you do this, I don’t know whether to tell you to stop or tell you to keep going and I’m not sure you’d listen either way.

There’s one more, he said. Santa Fe. Tomorrow afternoon.

He could hear her deciding. It was a sound he knew — the brief silence of someone choosing between honesty and kindness and trying, as she always tried, to find the version of honesty that was also kind. And if she passes?

Then I drive home.

And?

He looked out at the desert, which was doing something in the early light that had no name in the vocabulary of people who grew up near the coast. And I think about what’s next, he said.

The silence that followed was its own kind of answer. Then she laughed — sudden, real, the laugh that arrived before she could stop it, the one that was her mother’s laugh, the one he had not heard nearly enough since her mother had stopped returning his calls. You’re impossible, she said.

Probably, he said. I’ll ring you tomorrow.

The meeting in Santa Fe was in a restaurant that charged more per main course than Ray’s whole concept was built around undercutting. The investor’s name was Carla Reyes. She had backed eleven food businesses, she told him, and watched six of them fail, and she had a way of listening — very still, very present, without the performance of listening that he’d grown used to — that made him feel, for the first time on this trip, that he was being actually heard rather than assessed.

So he told her everything. Not the pitch version — the real one. The first restaurant, the landlord. The partner who chose Bali. The third one, which he had not mentioned to anyone in seven cities, the one where he had followed every piece of advice he’d been given and done everything correctly and still come out the other side of it alone and quieter than he’d ever been, his savings mostly gone, his confidence in everything except the idea itself reduced to almost nothing.

Carla Reyes listened to all of it without moving. Then she said: The idea has always been good. You know that. The problem is you keep pitching it like a man who’s already expecting to be told no.

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

You walked in here tonight carrying every rejection you’ve had, she said. I could see it before you sat down. You’re not selling me the restaurant. You’re daring me to be different from the last eight people. She looked at him evenly. I’ll tell you in two weeks. Either way.

He drove out of Santa Fe as the sun went down behind the Jemez Mountains, the sky turning the impossible colour again, the road ahead straight and empty and long. He did not know what she would say. He did not know if it would work this time, or whether the thing he was chasing could ever be made to exist outside his own conviction that it should.

But he was still here. He had followed every order, lost almost everything, woken alone in a dozen bad rooms — and here he still was, on the road, wounded and clean and moving.

He turned the radio up. He drove on into the dark, which was enormous and indifferent and, for reasons he couldn’t have explained to anyone, completely fine.