My hands are on the steering wheel of a large pickup truck that is sucking gas like a great diseased lung, and I think just for a moment, “Jesus, take the wheel!” My grip on the wheel, on life, loosens a little. A frightening prospect by every stretch of the imagination, feeling the little white exclamation points that signify danger, heart pounding in the moment. Wake up! You’ve gone too far, you ignorant bastard. Line dividers shout at me in the warm silence of my truck quad cab. Bump Bump Bump Bump. They are punctuations of calamity. I yawn heavily and feel my jaw pop from the strain. It’s worthless to think about anything this way, it solves nothing, and my grip tightens again. I can smell the last couple meals I ate in the car. It’s a stale smell and there isn’t an air freshener that I’d rather have. White knuckling down the highway one O one, collections of useless battered trash clutter all my blind spots. There is a strange pressure behind my eyes, like hot blood, that forces me to glance around and try and see the world for how it is and not how I want it to be.
The one responsible for all that pressure, my passenger, he asks, “What if I just took a hard left?”
This question startles me and pricks all the hairs up on my neck. This is frightening. Not only would I cross the three lanes of southbound traffic, but should I clear the center divider, I would cross another three or four lanes of northbound freeway. A course packed with high revving insanity and anger trapped in four wheeled steel and glass cages moving at their own pseudo-terminal velocities. It would mean certain almost death. Perhaps a lifetime as a quadriplegic or permanently attached to a machine that does all my breathing for me, begetting all sorts of discussions about my right to die… The safety rating on my truck is high enough that it isn’t as risky of a maneuver as it might have been thirty or forty years ago.
There is no reason for this question. None whatsoever. Is there? Who would ask such a ridiculous thing? I’m sure for the moment there isn’t a good reason and that would make action on my part all the more disastrous and utterly incomprehensible to those who watch the wreckage from the lenticular eye of a news chopper at six. No reason for it? You can’t tell me he had no reason for it! That’s not within my epistemological understanding of the world in which I am forced to cope!
The answer to the question is easy. The answer is death, destruction and chaos. But the action is also easy. Absent mindedly, without aim or malice, I could achieve ends of total carnage, striping the black asphalt with tire skids and gore. How could it be so easy to cause so much harm? There isn’t anything stopping me.
I yawn again as I look at my speed-o, a disappointing fifty-five stares back at me, hovering like a drunk butterfly. My passenger points out the sign for South San Francisco as it appears around a bend on the right. He says, “What’s it gonna be? You gonna keep going like this?” I think he’s concerned that my mind is wandering, flirting with the Ruinous Edge. He wants me to focus. There isn’t anything stopping me. Freeways have guardrails, minds do not.
He is with me always. A question in the back of my mind. A passenger when I’m alone. My passenger is silent, not even his breathing is noticeable above the hum of the engine, tires and road all purring along simultaneously. His silence is what bothers me, he doesn’t even have to speak to disarm me and brim me with dread. At least he doesn’t critique my driving. The helpless knave can only blink his big dumb blue eyes at me in the rearview.
There is a gap in the traffic and I take it. I accelerate a little bit and feel the overwhelmingly useless power of the vee eight’s internal combustion harnessed to take me from a to b, here to there. I wonder for a moment, “What is a true measurement of horsepower… who came up with that?” The information waits for me a short web search away. I could just look down and ask my phone to get it for me. Only a few seconds. Well… that will have to wait. Reading and driving is unsafe at any speed.
A sunbeam, striking out on its own, glints off the edge of my hood and directly into my eyes for a moment, temporarily blinding me. Is this the disaster, the call, the answer, I have been driving towards? And then it passes and everything is as it was, buzzing movement down the black asphalt.
Mid morning has brought it’s self to bear, all it’s weight, paused directly above me, the rest of the day still to go. I root around in the center console for some sunglasses. My passenger isn’t helping. I have to do it without looking, well, almost. I steal a glance or two. If someone were to suddenly stop in front of me… well you get the idea… I get my claw game just right and put a pair of dark aviator style sunglasses down on my nose.
The fog cleared sooner than I thought it would. South of Mission it can do that sometimes. The sun does as the sun chooses, shines down when you least expect it or want it. Seeing clearly can be a burden as often as it can be a blessing. “Is this all there is?” I asked my passenger and myself. We talked at great length about the whole thing last night, too. We talked and talked about lots in life, reasonless anguish, and shortened straws. We talked about the great sewing scissors that sweep down from the sky and cut the ends off frayed threads. Is that what it means to be mortal? To fly, and then swim or drown?
The passenger asks about the ‘hard left’ again, “What if…?” Since we’re here I entertain the thought for a moment… At this speed things are little different. I’ve reached about seventy miles per hour as the road opened up just a little bit near the airport. I am a law-abiding citizen but five over the limit isn’t going to kill anyone. Now the left turn could be taken as an act of terrorism, so close to the airport. It would ruin so many people’s days. Beyond the immediate wreckage would be a whole mess of delayed flights and security responses. That would be unconscionable. Also, at seventy, my truck would morph to a flaming pile of bent metal and draw me much closer to the permanent result that requires no further action on our part. I could even help the whole process along, I suppose, and unbuckle my safety belt. But this is risky territory. My thumb rests lightly on the buckle. There is the freak accident possibility of being thrown through the windscreen, clear of my destruction and miraculously surviving the ordeal, leading to some very awkward conversations about WHY? and WHAT ON EARTH? and so on. Of course my passenger would have died in the crash, his question answered. There is also the fact that wearing a seatbelt is the law and as I mentioned earlier, I’m a law-abiding citizen.
Another yawn steals my breath for a moment and my eyes tear up. I can’t really reach my eyes behind my sunglasses so I just push the saline out of the corners and streak it across my face. The worst war paint you could imagine, it’s transparent and made of sadness. Another tear squeezes its way out as the green exit sign for Milbrae passes on the right. Population: Cars. A vast parking lot of possibilities just south of SFO. You can park here, or here, or over here, or waaaaay over there. Lots of parking. This is too many tears for yawning, I think I am actually crying. My vision is blurry and suspect. Am I crying over fatigue? Boredom? Milbrae? Maybe there are reasons for the left turns people make, for the wanton destruction they cause…
A cloud passes over the sun and the world is plunged into grey. I can’t see my eyes behind the aviators but I’m sure they are red with anger. I can feel them itching. I grip the wheel tighter just to make sure its there.
My passenger and I took a long useless walk last night to clear the air and we ended up asleep on the floor, questions from the previous day unresolved. I didn’t even have the energy to push the mental garbage off the bed. And now all this bat-shit craziness is appearing in my truck with all the fast food I’ve eaten. I’ve been hoarding every last question, thought, and reverie and they make it impossible to check my blind spots. These tears are too much. I might have to take off my sunglasses and properly wipe my eyes. I’ll use my shoulder, leaving my hands at nine and three. Safety first.
I see a red flash in the blur and grey. Some ignoramus, more than likely certified by science to be among the stupidest people on Earth taps his brakes in front of me for no apparent reason other than to see if his brakes are indeed working. Yes! They are! How about that!? Maybe this asshole truly enjoys the feeling of an ill-maintained half penny carnival ride, whipping his neck back and forth. I hope his brake check injured his brain and caused him to suffer from some hilarious and permanent neurotic condition, like constantly asking for cheese or burping at the least opportune times and failing to be embarrassed about them. It’s all his fault anyway, that small bit of gray matter sloshing around in that comparatively massive cavity he calls a skull can’t be healthy. I change lanes to avoid hitting him and my speed drops down to a coasting fifty-five again as I pace him on the right. My passenger shrugs as I stare the other driver down for a second. It’s useless to shout but I do it anyway. He doesn’t hear me. I’m a big insect, bug eyed and screaming, “What’s the deal?”
I have to get these glasses off. The cheap shitty nosepiece is bent, making my whole face appear to droop to the left in a badly painted kind of way where perspective hasn’t been mastered. I look like art that you’d expect to see in an elementary student exhibition. Badly drawn and poorly painted, I don’t look like that. I know who I am.
Just then the clouds break again and wash the road, the bay, the gulls, the hills, the myriad other cars, and me in the golden smog filtered light. It’s a special California scene. On top of all this I have to yawn again, I can’t help it. It’s a real fit of these air sucking muscle reflexes. As I open my eyes from the yawn, and push another wet glob from the corner of my eye, my other passenger speaks up from the back seat. She leans over and pushes her bright angelic face into the front of the cab.
She says, “We should go get ice cream.” She rolls down the back window and hurls some of the garbage out on to the freeway.
She always says that. Well, not specifically that. Whenever I’m about to answer the question about left turns, she pipes up from somewhere in the back with a brilliant and/or idiotic suggestion. I never know what is going come out of her mouth. Seems like a daily occurrence that she comes by and cleans house. She is always reminding me about nine and three and seat belts, and not eating while I drive and well everything…a real lifesaver. Last night she said I should call my mother. I didn’t. But she was right. I should have.
The exit for Burlingame is to my right. “Home of the It’s-It factory store, since 1928.” I put my sunglasses on the passenger seat for a moment and look in the rearview. She has a point; ice cream is always a good idea. She claps her hands excitedly. I slow down, let the truck ride it’s inertia down the ramp and head to a stop at the light, carefully signaling my turn. The sun has finally started to support some of the weight of the day, instead of leaving it all to me. I pull into the It’s-It parking lot and park the truck. She hops out from the back seat, and shuts the door with a swing of her hips.
My passenger, he doesn’t want anything. He says he’ll wait in the cab.
# # #
Andrew Kehoe is a Sacramento native raised by an artist and a journalist and is a public service enthusiast. After graduating with a degree in political science and working for eight years for a large corporation he decided to teach English in Japan for a couple years where he rekindled the fire of writing speculative fiction, playwriting and honing his photography skills. He is working on his second first novel The Intersection and working to get his first play Memetic Response produced.
