There did seem to be an awful lot of silver cars on the road, Alex thought as he drove out of the city. Odd. Perhaps there was a factory nearby.
Then he was back into his thoughts. Those thoughts. They seemed less pernicious, less circular, less – if he was honest about it – thinky than the thoughts he had been having beforehand. Always nearer by not keeping still. Now he was moving and his thoughts were calm to the point of being almost contentless.
He was even able to avoid thinking about some of the things he usually found himself thinking about. He had decided not to think about the effect on his credit card of hiring a car for two weeks, and lo and behold, here he was, not thinking about it. He had decided not to think about the likelihood that he’d fail to finish his PhD, lose his funding and have to move back in with his mum, and lo and behold, here he was not thinking about it. He had decided not to – well, he was really not thinking about that. He ran through a whole list of the things he wasn’t thinking about – some more quickly than others, and none of them bit him.
‘I might take up not thinking for good,’ he said aloud to himself – something he realised he had started to do over the last couple of days. Not thinking was working splendidly. He knew from the atlas on the passenger seat that he was headed for the west, and that it would take him a few days to get there. All he knew was that the next big town was Birmingham. That was fine.
He weaved past another of those silver cars. They seemed to be thinning out. This was much better, he decided, than driving in the UK. Once you got the hang of driving on the right, obviously. No roundabouts. No changing gear. As a teenager, Alex had driven into the back of a stationary Volvo as a consequence of a misunderstanding that had involved both roundabouts and changing gear.
Now, here, this was very satisfactory. No roundabouts, no gearstick – no corners, practically. The highway was dead straight, and cool air from the air con blew onto his arms.
The car had a docking station for his iPod. Letting his eyes leave the road in brief guilty bursts, he put on the Talking Heads. ‘Things fall apart,’ David Byrne announced to the car. ‘It’s scientific!’
Alex sang along with ‘Road to Nowhere’, and then ‘Psycho Killer’, and just as his own jollity started to sound forced to him, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ came on and his mood turned.
It was a song about a man waking up to find himself in and out of time… Then a rushing chorus, something about water rushing over and under and everywhere. Was it a song about drowning? If so, it was a very exultant one. Alex felt uplifted and estranged. Nobody was with him. He realised he didn’t know, again, whether he was happy or sad. The music decided for him.
When he’d been a child, sitting in the back of the car, the music on the radio had been the soundtrack to his life. He’d watched fence posts, pylons, stanchions tick past – slowly up ahead, then too fast to see when you looked at them right at the side of the car, then slowlier behind. He had sat, entirely absorbed in himself – or, rather, himself entirely absorbed in what was around him. Watching the English countryside roll by. On the long journeys from Cambridge down to their Cornish holidays in summer: red clay churned in fields to each side. This was where his mother was from. Eurythmics. His father taking him to boarding school. Springsteen. Coming back late at night, sleepy, from the airport when they’d taken their first holiday to Corsica. He must have been ten, then. Tom Waits singing about an ‘old ’55’.
Alex started experimenting with the cruise control button. If you pressed it, the car kept to its speed. You could put your feet on the floor – even dare yourself, just momentarily, to take your hands off the wheel until the car, very gently, started to slide towards the lane markers at the edge of the road and you grabbed the wheel again, just between finger and thumb.
He remembered hearing about ‘cruise control’ as a child, and imagining it at first to be something they had in America where the car drives itself. Someone later had told him a story of how someone had put on cruise control on a long desert highway and fallen asleep. A very slight bias on the steering – no more than a fraction of a degree – had caused the car to wander off the road and out into the flat scrub desert. The man had woken up maybe half an hour after the the car had coughed its last of petrol and rolled to a halt. There had been no sign of a road or a river or another human being in any direction: just level low scrub, and dry dirt, and behind his car a long and imperceptibly curved pair of tyre tracks in the dust, slowly being erased by the evening wind. Nobody had come to get him. He had died there.
This story had stayed with Alex. What looks like a straight line turns out to be a curve. A tiny fraction of error could scale; a trivial multiplier could propagate into a cascade. A fragment of a degree in the angle of approach was the difference between a stable orbit and slingshotting into deep space; a fraction of a second’s lag in a clock could make a GPS system put an aeroplane into a mountain. The curvature of a miniscus could scatter light, or focus it to a point.
When Alex had been travelling in his gap year, he’d gone to Tibet. He’d left Lhasa on a local bus bound across the Himalayas for Kathmandu, him and his big brother – then on his summer holidays from university. It had taken a couple of days, rattling over the passes where the air was thin and the sky was blue-white. The high points in the passes were marked with cairns of stones, and bleached prayer flags, muddy snow in pockets of the ground.
When they stopped to get out at one place to take photographs, Alex remembered thinking how you could plot lines radiating out from his position there by the bus. At any moment, to move along one of those lines in one of those directions would be to die. He was entirely safe in the bus – but walk thirty feet to the left and you’d tumble down a steep bank of scree. Set off to the right, let the bus leave you behind, you’d be dead of exposure in forty-eight hours, maybe.
You could do that at any time, anywhere. You were almost never more than a strange decision or an accident, or a movement of a few feet, from extinction. Alex had started to imagine himself as the centre of a spiderweb of lines, constantly adjusting, on the map. At the end of each one a black X. As you walked beside a busy road, on the road side of you the lines would be compressed to no more than a couple of metres – to the other side they’d extend hundreds of metres, maybe. Stand on the edge of a cliff and the lines would fan out from your feet all along the clifftop – and the same would be true of every other human being. Everyone would carry their own invisible, unmonitored, 360-degree asterisk of harm.
If you credited the alternative universe idea, in every one of those universes there would be a you who had taken a different one of those decisions, suffered a different one of those accidents. There were versions of you who would have jumped or stumbled across every micrometre of that cliff face. And every moment spawned a new position of you in the world, a new 360-degree signpost to catastrophe, a new sheaf of alternative yous in alternative worlds around each of whom radiated another set of fresh positions, divergences, threats.
That idea had struck Alex most vividly when he was eighteen, but it had stayed with him. He became aware of it re-entering his thoughts: not threatening, but a source of wonderment. At any moment at all he was one sharp twist of the steering wheel away from the universe not existing. How on earth, with all that risk, had it survived so long?
A game he started to play with himself was to see how long he could keep cruise control on. He fixed it for the speed limit, and everyone was overtaking him. He dabbed the brake to override it, then tried to keep a steady distance behind the car in front and thumbed the button.
Over a few minutes, he found, his car was up towards the back bumper of the car in front. The trick then was to signal and move out without touching either brake or accelerator. You had to be lucky – if a big truck was passing you at the wrong time and you were boxed in, you’d have to brake… but you could cut it pretty fine.
It was absorbing. As the sun got lower and redder, and the mile markers told him Atlanta was further and further behind him, he felt settled again.
He’d never done anything like this before. He felt in and out of himself, lost and in charge. Nobody now knew where he was. Not his mum, not anybody. He was starring in a film that nobody was watching. He was unobserved.
It reminded him of his friend Rob’s joke when they’d been undergraduates together.
‘Erwin Schràdinger’s bombing down the M4 in his Porsche.’ He remembered Rob saying this, and just how he’d said it – Rob in his horrible velvet jacket and his black corduroy trousers, lolling on Alex’s green beanbag. Rob’s voice cracked and dry from weed.
‘You’ve got it wrong, Rob. It’s not Schràdinger.’
Rob, pink-eyed, thinking.
‘No. Crap. Heisenberg, right. Sorry. Heisenberg is bombing along the road…’
Now Alex laughing very hard, helium-pitched giggles. Carey, then, who they were both trying to impress, simply looked perplexed, smiling her oval smile. The joke – Heisenberg is pulled over by the police, and when asked if he knew how fast he had been going retorts: ‘No, but I can tell you exactly where I am’ – had taken Rob hours to tell, and even longer to explain afterwards.
‘It’s – you know about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, right?’
‘I heard of it,’ she said. Carey was doing English and American Studies on a two-year exchange scheme. She was a year older than either of them. Her hair was brown and curly, and she was better at smoking weed and holding it together than either of her suitors. She’d done it all through high school.
As Rob had lumbered through the contrived explanation of the contrived joke, she had smiled at Alex with a studied bashfulness he thought might, just, be coquettish. Then Rob, still on the edge of hysteria, had moved onto a joke whose punchline was ‘Zorn’s Lemon’ – he remembered that, and Carey, not understanding the joke at all and finding it even funnier because of that, burst with laughter. She fell back on the scratchy old carpet and lay there with her knees up and her chest shaking with laughter. Her mouth was pink and her teeth were very white, and she snorted a little when she breathed in. Alex could have died with love, then, just looking at her.
Three days later, to Alex’s astonishment, she kissed him after the college dance. He was drinking vodka and lemonade out of a plastic cup, and the room was very dark and very, very noisy. The lights were maybe ten minutes away from coming up. In the middle of the low-ceilinged common room drunken undergraduates were staggering and stamping in a big hairy many-legged alcohol-smelling tangle. Alex was looking into the middle of it, a little glassily, when Carey appeared beside him. She had taken the plastic cup out of his hand and put it on the floor, and then she leaned in decisively and kissed him on the mouth.
That had been – nice. And afterwards they had staggered out of the room like a three-legged race and into the midnight air smelling of grass from the lawns. Without the darkness and the thumping noise, Alex had felt drunkenness wearing off and self-consciousness intruding. But then, quite briskly, she had taken him to her girl-smelling single bed in her room across the quad and had taken charge of getting the sex out of the way, as if her soft belly and miraculous breasts and unexpected tattoo had been no more to her than the facts of her own body.
Then she’d gone to sleep on her back, snoring very softly, and Alex had lain awake not minding that her neck was cutting off the circulation to his arm. Her breath smelled slightly sweet from Coca-Cola and slightly alcoholic from rum. The duvet was askew, and one of her breasts was exposed, spilling down towards her armpit, where he could see a patch of sore skin and a bit of stubble. She had a mole on the soft skin just where her neck met the hinge of her jaw.
On Sunday morning, when he woke up, Alex had shyly and, as he thought, politely made an excuse about having to be in the library, kissed her awkwardly and said something non-committal and gone.
That was how their relationship had started. When Carey arrived in the college she was sexually confident, easily flirtatious, at home in her skin. Now, having quietly worshipped Carey for months, domesticating the relationship by making a friend of her, he’d actually gone to bed with her.
But the relationship between Carey and Alex had not, as he had expected, fizzled out in embarrassment and apology. At the cost of a certain showy huffiness from Rob, who felt excluded and maybe liked Carey more than he had let on, they had gone from friendship to established coupledom almost without passing through the in-between stage of tugging and scrabbling and kissing in public.
They were at ease, and that seemed to suit them both well enough. Alex found passion, or the expectation of passion, unsettling. Why make something private so public? And the courtship thing – he knew he had to do it but the self-exposure it involved and the risk and the game-playing and the humiliation… If you liked someone and you fancied them, why did you have to go through all that?
Carey had taken that out of his hands. They knew each other. Alex knew that she liked peanut butter on the cheapest white bread she could find, that they had the same Veruca Salt album, that she got on well enough with her foster-father, argued with her foster-mother, had no sisters and was liked better by boys than she was by girls. He put this down to jealousy; she was pretty, and neither worked it nor apologised for it. It was a fact about her.
Alex didn’t know what attracted her to him, though. Men fancied Carey; women did not fancy Alex. Alex’s place, ordinarily, was as the nerdy but unthreatening best friend of girls whom he chastely worshipped but who didn’t think of him that way. Carey, on the other hand, had befriended Alex – and yet she also wanted to sleep with him. She did think of him that way. It was almost unprecedented, this state of affairs, and he intended to reward her with his loyalty. But it made him understand her less.
He wondered for a long time whether she was attracted to him by something she imagined he had that he didn’t; or whether later, that illusion having vanished, the relationship was sustained by her affection for something else about him, such as his family, with the dull and affectionate stability that hers lacked; or whether there was something lacking in her – a simple failure of nerve or imagination that led her to idle in his shallows when with her looks and confidence she could have been with anyone else she wanted.
He studied his face in the mirror, sometimes, wondering what she saw there, and not liking what he did. Alex, when he looked at himself, saw a weak chin and watery features. He had eyes that flinched away from the camera. In the family photograph, blown up big and behind glass on the half landing of the old house, the two brothers stood in front of their parents: Saul already as tall as their mother, wearing his four-square smile; Alex’s head minutely blurred with motion, eyes down and to one side, hooding his lids. The old wallpaper from that same room in the background, gold striping the green.
But it went on, nevertheless. Alex never asked Carey whether he had been a factor in her choosing to do her postgraduate work in Cambridge. And – at her request – they still hadn’t moved in together. She said she was ‘funny about sharing space’. But the fact that he loved her, after they had been going out for three years, was something he took for granted. It was another fact about her, like her beauty and the fact that he didn’t understand her.
She wasn’t delving, introspective, exhausting in that way some girls he’d known had been – even though, as he knew, she’d had it tougher than most of the thoroughgoing neurotics he’d been out with previously. She didn’t talk endlessly about her emotions, or expect him to. Good.
Alex, there and here, had made some miles without even thinking about it. He’d noticed the state line going past about an hour back. The afternoon was mellowing, and he was in Alabama. He turned off the air con, wound down the window. Warm air came in, the smell of gasoline. He thought of singing Lynyrd Skynyrd to himself but the urge to sing had left him.
What Alex didn’t know, as he was moving west, was that things were happening all around him.
Ahead of him, in Birmingham, a man stopped dead on the steps of the 16th Street Baptist church, in slanting sunlight, startled by the sound of birdsong. He shook his head. In the chattering of half a dozen birds on a telephone wire he could have sworn he had heard the first few bars of ‘Amazing Grace’.
In the time it took Alex to pass through the Talladega National Forest, every shop in the state of Alabama sold out of Chicken & Broccoli Flavor Rice-A-Roni. In one shop in Gadsden, a fight broke out over the last packet on the shelf. A pregnant woman, overcome by her craving, pulled a gun on the teenage boy who had beaten her to it. She did not shoot.
In two small towns, equidistant to north and south of the I-40, the highway down which Alex was travelling, two men fell back in love with their wives for the first time in forty years. The names of both men were ‘Herb’, and both of them had woken up that morning and rubbed their stubble sleepily while looking in the mirror and thought about shaving but decided not to bother. One of them was to live happily ever after. The other one was to fall down a well on his next birthday.
All over the state, brothers and sisters bumped into each other by chance as one was leaving the dry-cleaner’s, and the other was running in to try to pick up her laundry.
In Las Vegas, still many miles away, the odds tilted for the first time very slightly against the house in low-stakes blackjack. Red Queen would be told about this in due course – as soon as it became detectable.
Unknown to anyone but you, in the Gulf of Mexico a sailfish of prodigious size, aided by a freakish current off the coast, spent thirty minutes keeping pace exactly with Alex’s car. Then a shark took it.
Other things were happening. Things unknown to you, but known to me.
And other things, I suspect, were happening that are unknown even to me.