THE ROAD, THE road: it came at him and spun out behind, varying without changing. Ellis knew – Boggs had taught him – that only four patches of rubber, each the size of the palm of a hand, touched the minivan to the road. They bore up its two tons of metal, glass, plastics and fluids, which in turn bore up himself and contained him and moved him in great comfort: climate-controlled, cushioned, radio and CD player at ready, cellphone charging, cup holders awaiting cups to cradle, visors set to block harsh sun glare, windows and mirrors powered at the touch of a button, cruise control to mind the accelerator.
His headlamps ghosted an interstate with a narrow median; a flavour of metal gathered in his mouth; cars came down the opposite lanes like fists. He drove until late, then slept in the minivan off a side road in a rutted open space. During the night he woke only once, with a raccoon crouched on the hood, staring with bandit eyes. Ellis pressed the horn, and the creature reared, smirked, loped away. Ellis watched a hanging half-moon and slept again until the sky was bluing. He woke cold but sweating. He turned the ignition for heat, but shut it off again and stood out to jog up the road a half-mile or so and back again. Swinging his legs and pushing himself forward without a gas pedal felt strange, and he returned to the minivan trembling and heaving, and rushed onward.
Like anyone, he could drive, he could hate it, and he could do it forever.
Sunflowers glowed in the window, endless bright heads peering upward. Black-and-white cows trundled over rolling terrain, drank at the foot of a madly spinning windmill. A haze filled the sky with the colour of weathered aluminum, and a monstrous Wal-Mart swam up out of the distance and flashed into the rear-view. Anything could be put rapidly behind; nothing could.
He felt very tired.
He spent much of the day at the place where a woman driving her daughter home from choir practice had stopped as a goose and four goslings crossed the road. While she waited on the geese, a pickup hit her from behind, and her daughter in the back seat died. Ellis spent more than two hours scrutinising the ground, moving up and down the road, but he could find nothing, so went on. Boggs wouldn’t answer his phone, and Ellis put off calling Heather. He despised himself a little for this, but he was angry with her, too. She owed an explanation for what had passed between her and Boggs on the golf course.
He drove amid squat glass ten- and twelve-storey office towers. A movie complex the size of a stadium. A row of car dealers, Nissans, Volkswagens, Audis, Fords, Chryslers, Suzukis, Saturns, Saabs, Hummers, closely parked, colourful and shining as jelly beans on a plate. Supermarkets and Starbucks and cheque cashing in little strip malls with names like Silver Water Square, Walden Center, Maple Grove Plaza. His stomach felt walnut-hard. His hands moved restlessly on the steering wheel. He examined the place amid alfalfa fields where two SUVs had met head-on, at a combined speed of 115 mph, and burned. One of the drivers died with his head – per the police photos – resting on the windowsill, his eyes rolled and exposed like a pair of eggs. Ellis stood on the road shoulder and scrutinised its gravel. After a time he moved forward a half-step. He tried to give attention to each individual stone. Moved forward another half-step. For this accident he and Boggs had developed an elaborate analysis involving Conservation of Momentum, Conservation of Energy and Taylor Series expansions, but he could remember none of it, only the photos of the dead. Limbs burned to stumps.
That night clouds on the south horizon shone auburn with the reflected light of a city. Boggs did not answer his phone. He tried Heather, but she didn’t answer. He felt sent away from her. Was that true? Was that why he went on? No. He was Boggs’s friend, so he went on. Was that why he went on? Yes. Yes? Exhaustion came abruptly, like a blow to the head, and sleeping in the minivan now felt habitual and natural, so it seemed foolish to push to look for motels. He stopped in an abandoned construction site – holes had been dug, dirt lay in heaps, but the earth movers had departed and the weeds had grown tall. He was obscured from the road by sections of six-foot-diameter concrete pipe.
Despite his exhaustion he could not sleep, and he listened with eyes closed to the nearby hysterical repetitive call of a cricket until he felt ready to try to find the creature and kill it.
Instead he moved the minivan and turned on the radio and listened to how the love and blessings of the Lord might make one wealthy.
He woke in the dawn light and silence, and when he turned the key the silence remained. He flagged a Chevy Silverado with a bearded young man and jumper cables. The bearded man gave him a look when the minivan came to life with the booming of a preacher’s preaching on St John. Ellis turned it off. He’d had no idea that he’d turned it to such a volume.
The morning grew hot. Heat lightning glinted in the distance, and the road ahead shivered. He traversed rivers and skirted lakes, cut straight through low hills between walls of blasted rock, then stopped outside a Howard Johnson’s, at the site of another Wright job, where a police officer in a trench for laying sewer lines had been killed when a Lexus landed atop him, studied the place for hours, then went on.
He sensed the danger of wafting away on a kind of easier, emptier slant life. When he was out of the minivan and he didn’t have the flow of the road before him, his thoughts seemed especially disorganised. He stood too long staring. He handed the gas station attendant his keys instead of his credit card. He took a bag of mini-pretzels and a bottle of water, and the pretzels became a day’s meal. While he was driving he had little sensation of hunger. He thought of James Dell in the hospital bed, his stomach empty, eating only the fluids dripped into his veins.
When he phoned the hospital Mrs Dell’s voice was hoarse with emotion. ‘He’s worse,’ she said. ‘A lot of – worse. I believe he’s going to die. They won’t say it, won’t tell me, but I can see it. His heart stopped this morning. They used the paddles. He looks bad.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Ellis said. ‘I can’t even begin to say.’
‘Can I tell you something? His heart stopped -’ She clucked her tongue. ‘And something had finally happened. A part of me was glad for the excitement. They had to pay attention again. And it’s been so dull, and I get bored. I don’t know what to do. Sit, wait. Patience. Look at him, don’t look at him. Think about him, then don’t think about him. Talk to him, or don’t talk to him. I don’t know if he can hear me. They say it’s possible he can hear, so I feel that I should talk. But it’s hard. It’s not like talking to him.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘He’s not well.’
‘I mean, tell me how he was when he was -’ Ellis stuttered; he’d nearly said alive. ‘- he was well. What did he like to do? What kind of person was he?’
‘He loves dogs,’ she said, ‘but he never allowed himself a dog. He isn’t allergic. He just didn’t allow it. He’s that kind of person. He denies himself things. He can be difficult. He never is who he wants to be, I don’t think. None of us are, I guess, but it bothers him especially. He loves sweets and never eats sweets. He hates the theatre, but he went. Maybe I sound bitter.’
‘He loves you, though.’
‘Oh, yes, yes. But, well, we fought terribly.’ She laughed. ‘We’ve never really had the life we should have. He denies that, too. He always thinks things should be finer, or rougher, colder or warmer. More difficult, unless they should be easier.’ She coughed. ‘I don’t mean to talk about this. I don’t want to.’
‘It’s all right,’ Ellis said.
He stopped for lunch in a Subway decorated with a yellow that worked in his eyes like needles and paid for a sandwich served up by smiling young people. He felt like wreckage before them, unshaven and unwashed. He sat at a corner table obscured from sight and only swallowed two bites of sandwich before he left.
For two more days he drove between sites where they had done work for Wright. A Lamborghini that broke in half. A woman run down by a trash truck. A shuttle bus with faulty brakes. At each Ellis examined the ground minutely. If there were houses or businesses nearby, he went to ask questions.
The time in the motel with Heather already seemed a vague dream, one that he suspected he would never recover. When Heather finally called back, he didn’t ask about what passed between herself and Boggs by the side of the highway, and she didn’t raise it. They talked about other things, passionlessly. Maybe, Ellis thought, with the force of need, phone conversations always, by their nature, contain a cold, disembodied feeling.
He could see no sign of Boggs, could not get him on the phone. But he kept driving, even as he feared that he was getting further from Boggs, not closer, and he might be indulging a fantasy or an insanity. He couldn’t think of a thing to do except to continue onward and hope for a stroke of luck, although the course of recent events made him appear to himself entirely luckless.
He was watching for an Outback Steakhouse, but he saw no Outbacks for miles, only T.G.I. Friday’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Lone Star, Black-eyed Pea, Chili’s. Years had passed since he and Boggs were here, nothing on the roadside synced with the images in his mind, and he began to mistrust his memory. He had nearly decided to turn back when he saw the Outback’s red neon.
He pulled up the exit ramp. A few drops of rain marked the windshield, but the wipers chased them off, and no more fell. The interstate beside him cut a trough in the earth, and he drove beside it on a two-lane access road, passing a hot-tub store with a blue hot tub mounted on end on the roof, an upholstery shop with barred windows, an office-furniture supplier in a converted warehouse. Unmarked buildings with rust stains down the walls. Deteriorating parking lots. All of it seemed like he might have seen it before, and he could remember none of it specifically.
In front of the upholstery shop he parked the minivan and crossed the access road to gaze down. The embankment’s slope looked steeper from here than it had seemed from below. At his feet grew dandelions and weeds. A Camel pack. A crushed water bottle. In the south-west stood a swathe of near-black clouds while the traffic below ran bellowing. He took a breath and went down clutching the weeds.
The passing vehicles moved in long streams and flows, sucking a wind that fluttered against him. He studied the shape of the embankment, the location of the acceleration and deceleration lanes, the proximity of the overpasses at the exits ahead and behind. Here, on an early morning in winter, after a night-time snowfall, a Dodge Durango had parked on the shoulder, occupied by a family of five Pakistani immigrants who had abandoned a rental apartment two days earlier and begun driving west. Ten minutes before the accident a police officer drove by and did not note any stopped vehicles – implying that the Dodge had not been here long.
The driver of the semi that destroyed the Dodge and killed everyone inside began to lose control after passing the previous exit. Perhaps he encountered a patch of ice. Perhaps his attention wandered. A standard black box in the semi recorded speeds of a few miles an hour over the speed limit, and conditions were poor – heavy snow and ice on the roadway, more snow sifting down. For a distance of several hundred feet the semi swerved back and forth – a little, then more and more as the driver struggled to regain control of the trailer swinging out behind him. Ellis had modelled the dynamics. When the driver got on the brakes, it caused the trailer to fully jackknife. The entire semi slid broadside. It was travelling at – Ellis had calculated – 46 mph when the rear corner ripped open the Dodge and hurled it down the shoulder, spinning in a complicated trajectory that Ellis laboriously reconstructed by an analysis of a stack of police photos of tyre marks in the snow.
When the Dodge came to a stop it stood empty, and the five occupants lay in little heaps here and there on the road. Scattered around them were suitcases, duffels, Fritos, a pair of flip-flops and a small charcoal grill.
No one alive knew why the family had left their apartment and started west, and the available evidence also didn’t indicate why they had stopped on the shoulder – the same shoulder Ellis now trudged along. The Dodge still had gas in the tank. Maybe it had some mechanical problem. Maybe the driver wanted to look at a map. Maybe there was an argument. Ellis and Boggs had identified the accident location by walking the shoulder with a book of police photos, watching for the shape of the embankment and a bit of fencing that showed at the top. Or had it been a guard rail? Irritated, Ellis returned to the place where he had come down the embankment and continued on in the other direction. Maybe he had the wrong Outback, the wrong exit, the wrong interstate, the wrong city.
When he noticed a sudden quiet he ran across the lanes, to the centre median.
Cars roared into the lanes behind him. The median, about thirty feet wide, shallowed in a grassy ditch. At the bottom a seagull stabbed at a candy bar wrapper.
After throwing the Dodge aside the semi had continued to slide and swing around until its wheels scooped into the earth of the median. Ellis looked for furrows in the grass. He remembered photographing the tracks of still raw earth with Boggs, and it didn’t seem likely that the highway department would have made any attempt to fill them. But he didn’t see them.
He walked with the flow of traffic, then against it. A drop of water struck his face, then another. Soon a drizzle sketched visible lines in the air. The noise of the wheels on the road began to shift tone. He stood watching the moving columns of vehicles while his hair plastered down, his shirt grew soaked, his pants. A plume thrown by a semi landed against his ankles. Eventually the traffic must break. It passed through his mind that if he waited here long enough, inevitably he would see an accident occur.
When next he looked down the median, a figure was coming.
It wobbled a little side to side, stopping now and again to peer at the ground, and eventually emerged from the rain in a baggy yellow-and-black Steelers jacket with the hood up, a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Under one arm she held an object – a headlamp assembly, wires springing from it. She stopped about ten feet away and regarded him with a frown, as if he were a post in the ground in the wrong place. When he said hello, she nodded slightly and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’
He looked at the traffic. His hands trembled in his armpits. The rain ran off the girl’s jacket, the sleeves hung past her hands, the hood shadowed her eyes.
‘I’m trying to get back across,’ Ellis said.
The girl didn’t answer. She turned to face the roadway as if she were at a bus stop and examined the headlamp in her hands. Ellis, confounded, wandered up the median a short distance, then returned and waited. Eventually he bowed his head. Eventually he shut his eyes.
Then the sound of the traffic changed. A course of rear lights brightened, cars slowed. Ellis had lost his expectation that the traffic would ever stop; to see it now seemed a flouting of nature.
They crossed the lanes between stopped cars and climbed the embankment and when he reached the minivan the girl was still with him. The rain had become extraordinary, a collapsing wave. ‘Well, get in,’ he yelled.
They watched the water move on the windshield. Except for the rattling on the roof, the minivan seemed a calm and hushed place. He started the engine to run the heater. ‘That came out of a Ford Probe,’ he said, gesturing at her headlamp.
She glanced at him. ‘I know.’
‘I can drive you home,’ he said. ‘But you have to tell me how to get there. I don’t know this place.’
‘You don’t have to do anything for me,’ she said. But she didn’t move either, just sat in his minivan. She had some pimples around her lips and watched the rain with peculiar intensity.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. You hungry?’
He eased down the access road to a Wendy’s. Inside he ordered hamburgers, fries, sodas. They sat in a booth with red seats, and she ate with a slow and precise method, one fry at a time until they were gone, the burger in small bites.
He picked the headlamp off the table and put his eye to the glass. ‘You find this along the road somewhere?’
She said nothing.
‘This was in a collision,’ he said. ‘At night.’
He set it aside, and he watched her look at it, then up at him, then at the headlamp again, her jaw flexing. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Bulb filaments are hot and soft when they’re lit. When a crash suddenly accelerates or decelerates the car, if the filament is on, it’s so soft that it gets thrown out of shape. It’s like cracking a whip.’
She lifted the headlamp and peered at the bulb filament. Then she looked at him, with one eye a little squinted.
‘Are you homeless?’ he asked.
‘No.’
His phone rang. He saw that it was the office and let it ring.
‘Do you spend much time down there along the interstate?’ he asked. ‘Did you happen to see an accident that happened there, a semi hit a Durango, about a year, year and a half ago, in the winter, in the snow?’
She stared at him.
‘I’m looking for a friend of mine,’ Ellis said. ‘He might have been down there recently, looking around. Did you see him?’
‘Did you know people in that accident?’ she asked.
‘I think the people who knew the people in the accident all live in Pakistan.’
She nodded. ‘I think the unknown dead are important.’
‘What?’
‘The unknown dead.’
He watched her. He didn’t know what to do with her. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go home?’
She folded a napkin edge against edge. ‘OK.’
Under her guidance they crossed the city by side streets. ‘My mom might know that accident,’ she said. ‘She might know about your friend.’
‘Really?’
‘I think so.’ The rain faded. They entered an industrial district. A cement plant fronted by barrel-backed trucks. A rail yard. Rows of grey warehouses. They drove beside a junkyard where piled broken vehicles rose over a fence of corrugated metal. The girl pointed down a run of gravel and said, ‘Here.’ A double-wide trailer stood surrounded by several vehicles in various levels of dismantlement.
The girl started out of the minivan, stopped, waved. ‘Come on. Mom’s here.’
A fibreglass storm door on a spring clapped loudly behind him. The mother, a lank and weathered woman in a denim shirt, said to the girl, ‘There you are,’ and ignoring Ellis she rattled through a speech of reprimand – How can you wander off without telling me? Don’t you know I worry? – in a tone of saying a thing that had been said before and would be said again without expectation of effect. Then she looked at the headlamp assembly. ‘Four bucks. Maybe.’ She turned to Ellis. ‘Thanks for bringing her back. You want coffee?‘
Ellis refused. The accident that he described, between the semi and the Dodge, sounded familiar, she said, but there were a lot of accidents, they ran together. He asked about Boggs, but she only shrugged and smiled, the headlamp still in her hands. ‘I don’t know where she finds these things,’ she said.
She had unnaturally white teeth, hollow cheeks. She smiled and smiled, and when Ellis looked around, the girl had vanished. He thought of Boggs out there alone, and he wrenched around on one heel, toward the door, calling out apologies and goodbye.
No rain. The puddles showed fragments of sky in the gravel. As he crossed to the minivan, the girl wandered out from behind a Subaru Brat rusting along the door sills. A boy who appeared to be a couple of years younger trailed her, wearing a bandanna around his neck like a cowboy.
‘I bet I know how you can find your friend,’ the girl said.
‘Your mom didn’t know anything.’
‘I have a technique,’ she said.
‘Really.’ He looked for her to smirk, but she only nodded. He felt tired and drained of resistance and ideas. He shrugged.
They passed between rough rows of vehicles lying side by side, spaced just far enough apart to allow the doors to swing a few inches, cars and trucks caved, twisted, pierced, burned, or freed of doors, hood, wheels, trunk lid, roof or fenders. Like bodies gathered after battle. Like a sorting of things before the rendering of final judgement. Drops of rainwater clung to the sheet metal, puddled in the dents. The girl and the boy walked ahead, and the boy’s steps clicked oddly – he was wearing tap shoes. And Ellis heard occasional shrill voices calling in other parts of the junkyard, words he could not make out.
A pile of rusting wheels. A pile of drive shafts. Somewhere a train moved, pushing vibrations that caused the entire field of vehicles to shimmer. Ellis lagged behind. It was easy to imagine that in any slightly different life he would never have come here.
The girl slowed and spoke without looking: the back of her head speaking to him. ‘The thing is, dead people don’t just go away. Things don’t just disappear. Things leave an effect. Souls leave an effect. And here we have a bunch of things that have the traces of souls. They’re not obvious. Maybe they’re only the effects of effects or the traces of traces, you know? But it’s not that hard to bring them out.’
Ellis hardly knew where to begin with this.
‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘it can’t hurt.’
Ellis asked, ‘Are you talking about ghosts?’
She glanced back. ‘Boo!’ Then she turned into a cul-de-sac and stopped before a Monte Carlo – crimson paint, gold trim, the interior upholstered in beige. The paint gleamed, the tyres held air. But the passenger door had been forced deep into the vehicle, as if staved in by a battering ram. The girl opened the driver’s door. She looked at Ellis.
‘What?’ Ellis said.
‘You’ll have to sit here.’
Ellis looked at his watch. The day had advanced into mid-afternoon. Overhead, clouds still dominated. ‘Are you sure you haven’t seen a big guy with a beard?’ Ellis asked. ‘Whatever he paid you, I’ll pay double.’
‘Don’t you want to find your friend?’
He peered inside. Colourful paraphernalia covered the dashboard and the pale seat fabric was spattered with stains. He tried to remember – he seemed to have no instinctive sense of himself any more – if in the past this was the sort of situation he would have extracted himself from. The stains appeared to be blood. An enormous blotching covered the passenger seat, which was distorted by the impacted door. He waited for the girl to say something ridiculous that would spur him away. But she said nothing.
The driver’s seat held him as softly as a plush sofa. Gold braid and tassels ran around the windshield glass; cards printed with the images of saints hung from the ceiling; figurines of crudely painted plastic stood on the dash holding swords, sceptres or birds; faux leopard skin wrapped the steering wheel; a bust of a weeping Virgin dangled from the rear-view mirror. The sun had faded the colours of the cards and figurines. The leopard skin was soiled at three and nine o’clock. A small stain of, again, blood marked the chin of the Virgin.
‘What now?’ he asked.
She closed the door. ‘Put your hands on the wheel.’ She circled to the front and she looked at him down the length of the hood. ‘Ask your question.’
‘What?’
‘The one you want answered.’
‘Who’s going to answer it?’
‘That’s a stupid question. That’s not the question you want answered.’
He looked around the car once more.
‘Ask your question,’ she said.
‘Where is Boggs?’ he said. ‘How do I find him?’
‘One question. Repeat it one hundred and eleven times.’
He laughed. But she waited with a dark gaze. ‘How do I find Boggs?’ he said. He began to repeat it.
The boy with the bandanna had disappeared. The girl bent and came up with a rubber mallet. She swung it at the hood, and it bounced away with a crash that sent the entire steel body of the car into a short, resonating shriek. ‘Keep going!’ she yelled and lifted and swung, lifted and swung, in rhythm with the repeated question. Then, with a bang, an answering percussion began – in the mirror Ellis saw a boy, not the boy with the bandanna but a sleepy-eyed blond boy, swinging a pair of croquet mallets at the trunk. The noise was painfully loud. Then the boy with the bandanna reappeared, running up the hood, scrambling onto the roof, and the tap shoes began striking there like falling ball bearings. Ellis cringed. But the noise had begun to generate a rhythm of patterns within patterns, and the hanging cards jiggled and turned, the tinsel and the gold braid shimmered and sparked, the Virgin bobbled and the noise beat a rhythm in Ellis’s core. He could no longer hear himself chanting the question – How do I find Boggs? – so that it seemed to sound only in his mind. The boy on the roof began to rock the car on its springs – saints swayed, the fur-wrapped steering wheel shook in Ellis’s hands.
He had no idea how many times he had repeated his question when the girl yelled, ‘Shut your eyes!’ He did. Effects echoed and buzzed, waves of pressure moved in him. At some point he had stopped mumbling his question. The terrible splitting havoc went on and on. He had to admit, if anything could shift the substance of the world off its rational foundation, this might be it.
Then it stopped.
Silence.
‘Listen for it!’ the girl shouted.
He wondered, For?
For the voice of the person or persons who had been in this car? The voices from all the accidents he had studied and reconstructed? The voices from all the accidents everywhere, ever, from Bridget Driscoll at the Crystal Palace and onward? The accidents in this way became a mathematical progression past counting. Meanwhile a noise skimmed the edge of his awareness, a modulating of frequencies and a havoc of tempo, imagined, a fire in the ears. Before him hung shining pinwheels, depthless drifting auroras. He trembled. If time could fall away, if he could look in all directions, where would he look? But he could not even keep his thoughts focused on Boggs. Instead, he thought of Heather, with an aching.
Then he realised, with a dull internal settling, that he could not believe in this business of the traces of spirits and souls. Even after allowing himself to be brought this far, his mind shaken and emotional, some crucial part of him knew that this was nonsense. He experienced this knowledge as a flaw in himself. He seemed empty, lacking belief in a soul and therefore almost certainly without the possession of one.
A breeze hissed on the sharp edges of the car. There seemed a rhythm in it, too. Whisperings. A warble of metal ripping in the faint distance.
‘Human factors analysis.’
‘What?’
‘People don’t assess speed, it’s hard to assess speed. We assess the gap. The gap between vehicles, the gap available to cross or turn.’
Darkness. ‘Boggs?’
‘Are you happy?’
‘No. No, I’m not happy.’
‘Are you depressed, Ellis?’
‘I’m not happy.’
‘Are you sad?’
‘What is this?’
‘Do you have feelings of guilt?’
Just before, the pallid, wrecked face of James Dell had been declaiming on the perversity of fortune with respect to the allocation of individual appearances, and as he spoke his left eye swivelled strangely with a cheerful ringing noise, then popped from the socket and hung on its nerve bundle. Behind James Dell, guffawing, stood Christopher, freshly burned. But that had been a dream. ‘Boggs,’ Ellis said.
‘Are you proud?’
‘Boggs. Stop.’
‘Are you self-conscious? Self-doubting?’
Ellis said yes. He had fumbled and answered the phone still half asleep, confused as to place and time, responding automatically to the noise of the ring. He began to register how complete the darkness around him was. He put a hand forward and felt a fur-wrapped steering wheel.
‘Self-loathing? Have you had thoughts of killing yourself?’
Ellis waited.
‘It’s been interesting to drive and think.’
Ellis waited, but Boggs said nothing more, and Ellis finally said, ‘All right. What are you thinking?’
‘The road is a place where you know you might die at any instant. Right? It’s a part of the nature of driving. On some level we’re always aware of death as we drive. It’s actually a part of why we like to be on the road. The possibility of an accident, of drama, of death, which is absent from our lives otherwise. Modern life is deathless, we expect that we will grow old and shuffle away to an assisted living facility where we can expire in obscurity. Is that really what we want, deep in our brains? Maybe something will happen on the road, now, or now, or now. You see? It provides an element of ultimate risk, and we desire risk. How many thousands die each year? I’ll tell you: more than forty thousand, just in America. How many of them might be saved if only the speed limit were reduced ten miles an hour? It’s less interesting that we slow to rubberneck the car crash on the side of the road than that we speed up again as soon as we’re past it. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.’ He hummed a few notes of the theme from CHiPs. ‘Seventy-two in a sixty-five zone,’ he said.
‘That’s what you’re doing now?’
‘Let’s allow a perception-reaction time of, say, two point five seconds, to get on the brake. And then braking. I’ll be a full foot-ball field and more down the road before I can stop this thing. Where are you?’
‘In a junkyard. What time is it?’ Ellis asked.
‘It’s almost four.’
‘A.m.?’
‘No -’
‘In the afternoon?’ Ellis pulled the door handle, pushed the door. It swung partly open. A heavy tarpaulin lay over the car. He allowed the door to click shut.
‘Is something wrong?’
Ellis let the question float. Then he said again, ‘Boggs.’
‘Witnesses are unreliable. The car flipped six times, went fifty feet in the air, did a triple lutz! Always prefer the physical evidence over testimony, Ellis.’
‘Right. Right. Sure. Why are we talking about this?’
‘You’re wondering, does a suicide actually talk about death? Wouldn’t someone intent on taking his life talk around death, the way we talk around whatever is nearest to heart? I wonder, too. It’s refreshing. I’m used to knowing what I’ll do. Does this sound insincere? Is it getting under your skin. God, I hope so. You’re still on the road? Still following me?’
‘I’m trying to,’ Ellis said, staring at the darkness.
‘You do love your subtle distinctions.’
‘Tell me where you are. Wright? Wright twenty-nine eighty-two? Wright thirty thirty-five? The one with the hood ornament in the eye?’
‘Give up.’
‘I’m going to find you.’
‘This isn’t about you,’ Boggs said. ‘I’ve known about you and Heather for a long while. She always had the sheets from that RV in the laundry. It isn’t about that. What I’m doing is about me.’
‘How long have you known?’
Boggs said nothing. Ellis knew he was unlikely to get from Boggs anything that Boggs didn’t want to give. He tried to listen for background noise, but he heard only a faint high whine that seemed a lingering effect of the hammering on the car. Ellis said, ‘If this isn’t about me and Heather, what is it?’
‘Well, maybe that was a lie. Maybe I was just trying to puncture your self-importance.’
‘You really knew?’
‘Come on, any asshole would have known. I should have known the minute you sat for your interview and you didn’t dare mention my wife’s name, even though she was the only reason you were there. But I thought you were too shy to try anything.’
‘You let it go on, after you knew?’ Ellis said.
Then Boggs hung up.
When he stood out of the car he was alone in long aisles of devastated vehicles. The grey sky lay close. The gate had been locked. He moved along the fence until he came to a Ford Excursion, climbed onto the roof, dropped over the fence. He would not have been surprised to find his minivan gutted, its parts spreading across the city. But it stood as he had left it. He eased slowly along the driveway to the road, then pushed fast, as if he were stealing it.
He returned to the access road beside the interstate where he had parked before, and he parked again and listened for some minutes to the bluster of the traffic. Then he went from business to business, enquiring if anyone had seen a man of Boggs’s description. None had. He walked the top of the embankment, looking again for the accident’s specific location, without success. It came to him that the girl was wrong: all things did not necessarily leave a trace, and even traces were not immortal; eventually the dead were absolutely forgotten, eventually the places where they died became merely places.
Sliding in the mud he went down and searched along the shoulder once more. The clouds had cleared and as he walked with the traffic he squinted into the sun. He recalled that the driver of the semi that had struck the Dodge had talked to the police about the sun in his face before he jackknifed.
But the accident had occurred in the a.m.
And therefore he was on the wrong side of the interstate.
He scrambled up the embankment, drove to the access road on the interstate’s opposite side, parked in front of a Shell station. He remembered this Shell – when he and Boggs were here, they had parked in the same place. Boggs had gone inside and bought a hot dog from the rotating rack. Ellis had laughed at it, and Boggs had said gravely as he ate, ‘Sweet porcine flesh.’
He crossed the access road and studied the ground. A pen cap. A black plastic garbage bag. A dirt-crusted wine bottle. Items cleansed of histories. And, here, the same tyre mark from the VFW parking lot.
He examined it a minute, then ground his heel into it and went back to the minivan.
On a map he put down Xs on Wright jobs. He was stunned to see how many there had been, and he feared he was forgetting more. Minutes passed, his mind wandered, another memory appeared, and he marked an X. Xs lay in all directions from here, and where to go next was unclear. He couldn’t think of anything to do but pick one.
He stopped for the night in an empty corner of a Wal-Mart parking lot. He phoned Heather. ‘Love,’ he said.
‘Stop saying that,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I don’t think you know if you love me.’
‘Why are you saying this?’
She was crying. He was glad that at least she was crying.
‘You’re cold,’ he said.
Somehow, it sounded like a joke, and she laughed. ‘Then I wonder, what do I want?’ she said. ‘Is it that I can’t even have love without questioning it until it becomes something else?’
‘Questioning,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
‘You know.’
He said, ‘Are you sure you can’t talk about Christopher?’
‘I’m going to hang up now,’ she said, ‘but you understand that you deserve it, right?’
‘Please, I don’t -’
‘Let’s talk later. I can’t now.’ She hung up.
He called her again, but she did not answer, and he smashed the cellphone against the steering wheel, repeatedly, until it had broken into several pieces. Then he looked at the pieces and regretted it. He gathered the pieces and put them in a cup holder.
When he closed his eyes his thoughts clawed at one another in a kind of terrible dreaming. A tap on the window woke him. A security guard told him to go on. Ellis asked about the RVs parked nearby, and the guard said, ‘RVs allowed, cars not allowed.’ Ellis stared at the young man, but the absurdity did not seem to penetrate.
‘This is a minivan,’ Ellis said.
‘Minivans not allowed.’
He drove on, down an unknown road, into darkness, trees flickering at the periphery. He saw no good prospect for stopping. His eyelids trembled.
The asphalt ended and he continued into the darkness on gravel and jarring washboard ruts. A glow appeared in the distance. A hand-painted sign, illuminated with floodlights, said ‘The Cricket Bar’. A bar seemed like a good place to rest – if he were questioned he could claim to be sleeping off his drinks. The bar itself appeared to be little more than a hut of weathered wood. He stopped in a far corner of the rutted parking lot, nosed into some brush, away from the handful of cars and trucks clustered around the building, where a couple of windows showed small, dim light. He could faintly hear voices. Cicadas screaming. No music. No one came or went from the building.
Sleep was a swift fall through perfect darkness. He woke remembering nothing, under clouds like a flight of giant apricots. The parking lot lay empty.
As he began manoeuvring the minivan it felt and sounded strange, but he gassed it out of the parking lot and into the road before he understood what was wrong. He stopped. The left rear tyre was flat. The right rear tyre was also flat. He studied them and found that both had small punctures in the sidewall. Perhaps from a pocketknife. The entire vehicle slouched back on the flat tyres, and he wondered how he had failed to notice the flats sooner. He stood looking at the tyres as if with sufficient attention he might discern that they were not flat after all. The minivan had a spare tyre, but it was not helpful because he needed two tyres.
He walked over to the Cricket Bar, knocked, and when no one answered, tried to open the door. Locked. He circled to the back and found another door, which gave the same result.
He returned to the minivan, locked it and began walking.
In the night all that he had been able to see from the road were the trees along either side, but now he saw that the trees on his left fronted a vast field of goldenrod, the flowers dim at first but soon blazing as the sun elevated. Then the goldenrod ended at a wood of birch, and the boles made stripes of vertical white that crowded behind one another into an obscure distance while ferns spread underneath. Dust rose from the road as he walked and powdered his pant legs and clung to the sweat on his neck. He’d been walking for perhaps twenty minutes when he heard a vehicle approaching from behind, and he walked on the grassy edge of the road to let it pass, but it slowed and idled at his back. A red Jeep Cherokee. Ellis did not glance at it again. He moved faster, and it stayed with him. He looked over toward the birch wood, and behind him gravel spurted. The Jeep roared up and drew even. A young man in the passenger window – pale hair shaved to stubble, face long and freckled under the eyes, eyes wrinkled with smiling – said, ‘Your minivan back there?’
‘Two flats.’
‘That’s some bad luck. Need a ride?’
‘No, thanks.’
The young man grinned with big white teeth, straight as bricks. ‘It sure looks as if you could use some assistance.’
‘I figure it’s a nice morning.’
‘Just trying to be helpful.’
‘Thanks anyway.’
‘We’re just trying to help a guy out. You don’t have to be an asshole.’
Ellis said nothing.
The Jeep accelerated ahead, then skidded to a stop. The passenger stepped out, then the driver – a heavier young man with a ball cap down almost over his eyes. Ellis looked again at the birch woods, but he felt tired and slow and it seemed likely that they could run him down easily, and then it would only be worse. The young man with the white brick teeth kept smiling – an earnest, likeable smile, a smile difficult to doubt. But the driver scowled with fat arms hanging, and the two arrayed themselves so that Ellis could only face one of them at a time. The licence plate on the Jeep was mudded over. ‘Two flats. That is some bad luck. How does that happen?’ the smiling one asked.
‘A statistical fluke.’ Ellis felt adrenalin and a fearfulness that annoyed him. ‘It could happen to anyone.’ He expected a blow from behind, but expecting it did not help when it came: an exquisite pain at the upper rear of the head. The world chunked with black. He fell to his knees. His vision slowly cleared, and he watched the smiling man shape his lips around incomprehensible syllables. Beside him, the fat one held a short length of pipe. Then a flashing movement, and nothing remained but a monumental pain and darkness and the impossibility of movement.
Shades of white. These gradually tinted blue, then green.
Rough objects pressed – the gravelled earth. Dry, toothy weeds.
A faint shallow rasping noise intruded. He understood this to be his own breath. For minutes he focused on it.
Then, sitting up, he gasped and the black returned, but he strained and kept himself up. He felt a long soft welt near the top of his head and alongside it an open shallow wound, with blood clotting in his hair. His wallet, his watch and his keys were gone. His cellphone was gone. No, he remembered, he had broken that. When he shifted his gaze to the birch woods, the white trees trailed rainbow images. He looked at the road’s narrowing empty distance, and he felt like sitting down and abandoning the difficulties of the world and waiting, waiting a long time, until his body merged into the rough earth, until he was consumed into something larger, something without self-awareness or memory.
Instead he walked, stumbling with confused balance, back toward the Cricket Bar. The minivan stood at the side of the road, doors open. The keys lay on the driver’s seat. A hole gaped in the dash where the radio had been. But in the armrest console between the seats, under a clutter of receipts, he found his credit card where he had left it. He locked the doors, took up the keys and began walking again. He was paced by phantoms at the edge of vision, white things and red things and black things. They scrambled forward only to retreat as he turned to see them better. The sun stood high and felt hot on the wound in his scalp. Its heat there grew as he walked, until it pressed like a blade.
A vehicle approached from behind, and he held himself from turning to look at it. A pickup, it went by scattering gravel from the tyres, not slowing.
He did not see another vehicle until miles later when he staggered into an intersection. More cars went by without stopping, and he kept on beside buzzing high-voltage lines held aloft by enormous steel armatures. He came to a gas station with a garage attached. A mechanic, sitting at a large accounts ledger on a grease-blacked tabletop, looked at him for some seconds before asking, ‘What happened?’
Ellis looked at himself, his clothes soiled and bloody. He said, ‘I’m not sure.’
The mechanic laughed.