The next morning I took my first stint of driving.
I drove south, mainly on impulse.
It was a hot day and there was sweat under my armpits and in the crook of my elbows and all around the seams of my shorts which were digging into my thighs and making them sore. I kept shifting positions. We stopped for a bathroom break at a gas station and there was a red line on the top of each of my legs.
Cal went into the bathroom and I waited outside. To my right there was a doughnut and coffee place with orange plastic tables and there was a sticker on the window which made up one wall and in the corner there were tall wheeled racks with slats to put your used trays into, and the trays were covered with red paper cups and plastic straws and paper napkins and odds and ends of food packaging.
There was a long line of people at the doughnut counter. They were slack-faced with the early morning.
Two little kids ran about between the tables and after a moment one of them fell and began to cry and the mother came over and picked it up and said something which was maybe comforting or maybe admonishing.
Beside me was a newsstand with newspapers and magazines and I wandered over to look at it. Toward the bottom of the front page of the newspaper, underneath the headlines, were the words:
BODY FOUND IN SAN PADUA KILLING
The body of a man was discovered in the early hours of Tuesday morning in Tana Beach, a notorious neighborhood of San Padua. The area, well known for its nightclubs, bars and brothels, has seen a spike in violent crime over the past year. The victim was identified as Sandro Martin, a man in his late twenties. The police have so far declined to comment. An investigation is ongoing.
Cal came up behind me and stopped.
I murmured, “Cal.”
He said, “Yeah. I know. Come on. Don’t read it.”
He moved me away toward the doors.
Before he did I saw the photo below the article and it was the face of Sandro Martin, the man in the alley.
He had dark hair and his face was pale.
His eyes were dark blots of ink and they bored into me.
In the car Cal said, “Don’t think about it. You can’t go there.”
I stared ahead of me.
Those two dark eyes, those two blots of ink.
In front of the gas station a woman was dragging a child by the hand and I watched them without really seeing them.
After a moment I said, “I can’t not think about that, Cal.”
Then I said, “The police are looking.”
“Let them look.”
“How can you say that?”
He said, “We’ll face bad things when they happen. If they happen. They won’t.”
“You can’t just assume.”
“They won’t.”
That was the first time I had really seen the man’s face. I thought, Jesus Christ, I didn’t even know what he looked like.
Jesus.
He had been an ugly man. An ugly heavy man and his face could have been any other heavy face.
I tried to get them out of my head, those two dark eyes which were two lumped clumps of ink from a printing press, all pixelated, and I couldn’t, and they were there and they bored into my mind’s eye, and that heavy ugly face warped and became a strange botched version of itself in my memory.
Back on the road we rolled both windows down in the front of the car but I could still smell sweat, my own sweat and his, the warm tang of it, it was on my clothes and my hair.
I thought, I need a shower.
I felt dirty. I felt filthy, running deeper than skin.
Early that morning I had tried to clean off the animal smell at a roadside service station where there had been a sort of foot wash, I think it was, and it was outside at the corner of the building and I had crouched down and stuck my head under it and then my arms and legs. There had been a car hovering about behind me. It was waiting to go to the car wash. There was a family inside it and they had watched me, dull, incurious, faces sagging.
I felt my own filth sitting on me.
On the dashboard there was an empty orange juice bottle and a paper coffee mug and a folded chicken sandwich wrapper that was spotted a little with mayonnaise and all these things were heating in the sun and the smell was making my head ache.
I wondered if people had smelled this way before we wore clothes. Surely they hadn’t with bodies open to the air and bodies open to rainwater with nothing to trap all your own dirt to you.
“I feel unclean,” I said.
He snorted. “Better get used to it. Anyway. We are unclean.”
“I smell.”
“I like your smell.”
Despite myself I laughed a little. “No you don’t. Not like this.”
“I love your dirt.”
I said, “Don’t.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
After a moment he said, “I like what you really are.”
I looked sharply over to him and tried to read his face, to see whether he was just saying what he thought I wanted to hear, and it was impossible to tell because he always looked like he meant what he was saying. He caught my eyes and smiled.
I don’t know if there’s anyone in the world who can say I like what you really are to another person and mean it.
We stopped at a gas station. On the roof was a giant plastic chicken and coming out of its mouth was a giant plastic speech bubble. Inside the speech bubble were the words:
SEE YOU NEXT TIME, FOLKS
Behind the building there was a small lawn with a couple of picnic tables on dead grass.
I climbed up and sat on top of one and Cal sat beside me and took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and took one out and lit it and put it in his mouth and then lit another and passed it to me.
I said, “Thanks.”
I looked across at him. He was leaning back, slouching back, and his face was tipped up slightly to the sky. And his shirt was stained and hanging open and the sleeves were rolled up and I could see the tops of his arms where they were a little burned and starting to peel. And I could smell him and he smelled of cigarettes and joints and bad aftershave and chewing gum and old breath and fried takeout food.
He looked sideways at me and our eyes caught and he smiled a half-twist smile and I looked away but I was smiling too despite myself.
He nodded up at the back of the plastic chicken and he said, “It’s someone somewhere’s job to make those.”
“Someone somewhere.”
“Poor bastard.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Scares me out of my mind.”
“What does?”
“That. Day in, day out, standing in some production line pressing a button or whatever. Like my father did.”
“I know. I remember.”
“Worked in a car factory every day of his life more or less, right up till he could barely walk through the door. Then they let him have a couple of years sitting in some chair in front of a TV screen. With his loving wife.” For a moment he stared straight ahead and his eyes were sealed off, glazed. Then he spat on the ground and stubbed out the cigarette under his shoe and said, “Anyway. Long time since we had anything to do with each other, me and him.” He turned to me. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
Driving down onto the highway, I could see the shape of his body out of the corner of my eye, slumped against the car door in the passenger seat.
Just for a moment he looked somehow smaller and shrunk in on himself.
In front of me the long length of the road wound out, wound out and wound on under hot sky.
And I drove and the road became hypnosis, a horizon and an end point in perpetual retreat, one long reel of flashing gray and cat’s-eyes.
And low in front of me the old wavering sun.
We turned off the main highway into swampy land with plane trees plate-like on a late yellowish sky and grasses and shining brown water broken by the snarls of great fallen branches all bleached out and covered in egrets, and occasionally the heads of alligators, snout and yellow eyes, and here and there were traces of people, some mining holes filled with water, a luminous chemical blue, and heavy heaps of mulch beside them, and the length of road empty in front of me cutting through and cutting on.
We drove through miles of swampland stretching bright with water in the late sun and we came to a new road as the sun went down somewhere to the right of us, flooding yellow onto the bottom of a deep blue sky, a few stars winking low on the horizon.
We were silent and tired.
I looked over at Cal.
His head was slumping forward on his chest. Every now and again there would be a movement as he jerked awake.
I put on the radio. There was some old song playing, blues, a male singer. His voice was sad.
It sat on the hot air.
It made me feel old.
I used to have dreams when I was very young of being a huge bodiless expanse of consciousness without end and I would wake up scared and wanting to go back into my body and at the same time exhilarated. It was something like vertigo, and every so often as an adult I’ve had vague hints, intimations of the same feeling, a sort of brush of a memory of it at the edge of my mind. I try to hold on to it and magnify it, but I can never quite get at it or draw it out enough to fill me up.
But I feel myself at the edges of it sometimes.
That night driving on that highway with the blotched sunset on deep dark and the few faint stars, I felt it then, the memory of vertigo.