That night, Jack lay in bed unable to sleep. Laura had moved off the couch and now slept beside him. Though the bed was small, she only occupied a small sliver of space, a mile away from him. Periodically he could hear Boots move about the cabin, small shuffling sounds in the dark. It seemed like the guy never slept, but crept around in the night from room to porch and back again.
He wondered about this man living by himself out on the edges. Only a crazy man would. Isolated, alone. No stimulation for the mind. Either that or a man hiding from something. Some dark secret that he wished no one to see. Perhaps he kept that cemetery out back as a memento of all things evil. His past buried beneath the rock. Jack thought about it, but assumed that if he was a homicidal maniac, there would be slim pickings out here in the boondocks to fulfill his desire to kill. No, he was not of that sort, he thought. He was just a misfit. An outcast. Someone who could not hack it in normal life.
Jack thought about how he had gotten there, how he found himself lying in a stranger’s bed, with his wife curled up next to him. Four days had passed since the highway, or so his wife had told him. They were due back home now. He should be walking into his office tomorrow morning and getting back to work. But instead he was out here. Wherever out here was.
The highway. He would close his eyes and he could see the stretch of road in his mind. The dotted center line unfurling in the distance. Total hopelessness. The waiting. He wasn’t sure if he would ever lose that feeling whenever he would get back behind the wheel.
Do we get to the places in life by one choice? One grand stroke of decision that points us on our way? Or is it a series of small, inconsequential steps that go unnoticed until we look up and see that we are far away from anything we ever wanted? Jack thought back to renting the car, to buying the airline ticket, back to scheduling the vacation on his calendar. So many small steps to end up here.
Laura sighed and turned in her sleep. Jack looked over at his wife. Her slow steady breaths causing her rib cage to rise and fall under her folded arms. So close to him and yet a universe away.
They had been close once. Their marriage had started that way, but now they were distant. Two separate beings occupying the same small spaces. In his mind, he could picture snapshots of happiness, but he couldn’t see the slow steps of detachment. Each little thing that accumulated through the years that now forced a wedge between them. He wished at times that there had been one sweeping moment of change. One moment that they could look at, isolate, define, work away. But there wasn’t. There were a hundred small glances, short words, curt comments. Too many to recall and sift through.
Jack heard Boots’s footsteps walk back across the floor, up to the door of the bedroom, and then back again. Maybe the old man would come crashing through the door with an axe in his hand. Maybe Jack would leap up and beat the life out of the old man, saving his wife from dismemberment, and saving the day. They would ride off on horseback, she with her arms around his waist, in love again with her brave hero.
Either that or he would be chopped to bits while Laura cowered in the corner waiting her turn, a look of shame on her face as she realized she had cast her lot with such a horrible protector.
He thought of her sleeping in the passenger seat of the rental car, slowly wasting away.
Jack rubbed this throat with his hand. It was still raw as he sat up and took a drink of water. The water had warmed up to room temperature, but he didn’t feel like walking to the hand pump to get a fresh glass. The idea of meeting Boots in the dark didn’t fill him so much with dread as abhorrence. Better to sit back and be content with warm water.
He fought for sleep and won no prize. The back of his eyelids danced with the image of the highway. The heat rising.
The foreboding.
The blackness.
The shadows taking shape and racing toward him. It makes no sense, he said to himself as he thought about this last memory. The evil wind, racing down the highway toward the car, wrapping around him like a blanket and constricting his bones. No, better to rationalize it out of existence as the last throws of an overheated brain.
Hallucination.
Heat exhaustion.
The firing off of synaptic nerves before they went silent.
But it was the feeling he could not escape. The feeling that sat in his soul, accompanying the dark shades of psychosis. The feeling in the pit of his stomach of absolute loneliness. Absolute isolation from all things.
Soon, sleep did overtake Jack, and as an unknown blessing to him, he dreamt of nothing.