HE PRESSED THE BUTTON TWICE TO LOWER ALL FOUR WINDOWS simultaneously. Clay appreciated this feature, the brainstorm of one particularly insightful engineer who understood that on a hot day the first thing you wanted was air. There was, though, a kind of pleasure in the close dry heat inside the car, flecks of dust, the way you could almost smell the sunlight. The wheels made a particular noise on the gravel, then cleared that and moved smoothly over the asphalt. He drove slowly, nonchalant, to make himself feel the more brave. Also, he figured, the longer those people stayed, the more right he had to their thousand dollars.
There was a field of something being cultivated, but Clay had no idea what it was. Were soybeans the same thing as edamame, or were they something else, and what could they be used for? He drove slowly past the little shack selling eggs. The road was an intermediate thing, still narrow, not quite real; he waited for the GPS to register, but hadn’t he found the way to the shore only yesterday morning? Clay knew what he was doing.
Someone had once told him that people found smoking calming because it was essentially deep breathing. There was no shoulder, so he simply stopped in the road, turned the machine off, depressed the button to bring the windows back up in beautiful unison. He stood ten feet away because he didn’t want the smell of smoke to permeate the car.
There was that familiar, pure rush of satiety. There was an almost swoon. He had nothing to lean on, so he simply drew himself up taller and looked around at the world, which was quiet. He had a fleeting desire for the clarity of a cold Coke, to shake off the vague hangover. That’s what he would do. He’d drive down this road, turn onto the main road, wind around the curves and end up at that four-way intersection and instead of bearing right, toward the sea, he’d go left, toward the town. There was a gas station, there was a public library, there was a junk shop and an ice cream parlor and a motel, and farther down the road one of those depressing low-lying complexes with a grocery, drugstore, dry cleaner, and chain sandwich shop tidily arrayed before a parking lot so large it would never fill up. That’s where he’d go in search of knowledge, not to the library but to the place where things were sold. You could get a Coke almost anywhere.
Clay looked at his phone. Habit was powerful. It showed him nothing. He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, then got back into the car. The brain was a marvel. You could drive without wholly thinking about driving. Sure, familiar routes, the everyday commute—start the car, find the highway, maneuver through lanes, take the usual exit, glide to stops at red lights, move forward at green ones—while not exactly hearing the top stories being reiterated on NPR, or thinking about some slight at the office, or remembering a production of The Pirates of Penzance you saw the summer between sixth and seventh grades. Driving was rote. It was something you just did.
He wasn’t actually thinking about the production of The Pirates of Penzance he’d seen the summer between sixth and seventh grades, though he remembered that as the golden, temporary season in which he’d still been his mother’s favorite child, but he must have been thinking about something because Clay turned, at some point, and drove for some distance—he found estimating distance and measures of volume impossible—and realized that though he was definitely on a road, a more serious, two-lane road, the sort of road the GPS would know and name, he could not be certain, not really, that it was the road he’d wanted. There were directions written down in Amanda’s notebook, of course, but Amanda’s notebook was back at the house, in Amanda’s Vuitton bag. Anyway, the ability to take written directions to one destination and simply invert them to move in reverse was an obsolete art. It was like winding the car windows down with a crank. Human progress. Clay was lost.
Everything was very green. There was nothing to hold on to. There were some trees. There was a field. A glimpse of a roof and the promise of a building, but he couldn’t say whether it was a barn or a house. The road curved, and then he emerged somewhere else where there was another field and some more trees and another slice of roof of barn or house and Clay thought of those old cartoons that recycled their backgrounds to create the illusion of movement. It was impossible to say what was more sensible—to stop the car and backtrack or to forge ahead as though he knew where he was going. He didn’t even know how long he’d been driving, or whether he’d know the turn back onto the road that led to the gravel driveway up to the house where his family waited. He didn’t know whether that road was marked by a sign or what the sign would say. Maybe he ought to have paid closer attention; maybe he ought to have taken this errand more seriously.
The sound of the wind and the sensation of it on his face was distracting. Clay slowed the car a little and sent the windows back up, then jabbed at the center panel until the air-conditioning came to life. He continued straight, but that wasn’t exactly correct, since the road undulated and twisted and maybe he’d gone in a complete circuit and that was why the trees and occasional buildings looked so familiar: because they were. He found a piece of gum and put it in his mouth. Fine.
There were no other cars, and he didn’t know if that seemed odd or not. Anyway, it was not the kind of road for stop signs. The local planners trusted the local people. He pulled onto the dusty shoulder and turned the car around and drove in the direction from which he’d come. Now nothing looked familiar, though he’d just driven through it. It was all inverted, and he noticed things on the left side of the road that he’d missed when they had been on his right: an amateurish painted sign reading “McKinnon Farms,” a lone horse standing in a field, the remains of a building that had burned down. He drove and then slowed, because he felt he must be close to the turn back to the house. But he wouldn’t take that, he would drive on in the other direction, where he knew the town waited.
There was a road on his right, and he turned to look up it as he passed, but it was not the road that led to the house, because that road had that little painted shack where you could get a dozen eggs for five dollars. He sped up and drove on. There was another turnoff, but again, no painted shack. Then he wondered whether he’d turned twice to get to the road where he now found himself, and was looking for a landmark that did not exist. Clay took out his phone, though he knew you weren’t supposed to look at your phone as you drove, and was surprised that it did not seem to be working. Then he remembered that of course it had not been working, that was the real purpose of this errand, not an ice-cold Coke. He had driven out to show everyone that he was a man, in control, and now he was lost and felt ridiculous.
He tossed the phone into the seat beside him. Of course there were no other cars. These were rural roads, for the convenience of a handful of people. The day only seemed strange because the night had been strange. He was a little turned around, but he would find his way; he hadn’t gone so far that he’d need rescue. He thought of how the government sent helicopters for the antisocial weirdos who insisted on living atop wildfire-prone mountains. People thought fire a disaster, failing to understand it was an important part of the life cycle of the forest. The old burned. The new grew. Clay kept driving. What else was he supposed to do?