How to Disappear Completely (ii)

part two

ii.

You’re driving your German car down an American road, drinking Canadian whisky out of a Japanese thermos. The desert, smooth as glass, stretches out around you on all sides. You’re a long way from home; that is, you’re a long way from the place you used to call home. You’re a long way from anything or anyone that matters.

The people who still love you have been so depleted, so shell-shocked by the unyielding barrage of your disappointments, your mistakes and self-sabotage, that though they worry, though some pray, each in being accustomed to a state of affairs in which any news concerning you is bad news is reluctantly accepting no news to thus be good news. Some twisted-up part of you vows to never be news of any sort to anyone again, not until you’re somehow able to liberate them from perpetual disappointment, or someone calls your next-of-kin asking for dental records.

You drink, swallow, wince, fight down the nausea. You pop the clutch, shift into sixth gear, and let the wide open nothing lull you into unconsciousness. You close your heavy eyes, feel the pull of the car drifting over the double yellow line, playing a game of narcoleptic chicken—until the front left tire drops off the asphalt at a hundred and ten miles per hour, and the quicksilver tang of adrenaline brings your consciousness back to the fore.

Mountains rise up out of the horizon like a waking colossus. You’re not familiar with the geography of this region–you’re not even sure what state you are in at present–but you are possessed by the sensation that they should not be there. You watch them grow in stature, in detail, blossoming in hues you thought impossible in geography. You remember her telling you that the human eye looks out upon an inverted world, that our brain automatically mirrors the images we see across their horizontal axis. You imagine the rusted reds, the sulfurous yellows, the panchromatic shades of dirt in mortal bloom, the Mandelbrot-fracted mountains descending from the sky like stalagmites, the dripping fangs of God, as a hundred million years of geological labor trudge impossibly westward and your sun-blistered road pulls you south and forward in the unstoppable march of time towards oblivion, the heat death of everything.

Night falls, and a swollen red moon heralds your return to civilization. You had envisioned a sleepy motel, perhaps with the word “rose” somewhere in the name, across the street from a dust-ravaged all-night diner housed in one of those shiny Space Age trailers. But the first building to come into view is a Burger King. It’s closed. Down the street there is a strip mall dotted with insurance offices and hair salons amongst a cancer of vacancies. Only as you pass a smattering of lonely, prefabricated houses do you find something close to what your soul was looking for: an inn with a statue of a horse impaled upon a streetlight and no trace of a name.

You swing the car into the parking lot. There’s activity here, the glow of little orange coals dancing trails in your road-weary vision, reminding you of the fireflies, Lampyridae something-or-another, you would harvest as a boy by the jarful. You drift as the night air caresses your face, thinking of how those glimmering mason jars would illuminate those pine straw forts of yesteryear with thrumming fluorescent magic, under which your council of lost boys would hold court, pupils dilated, beholden to whatever furtive ritual of youth would, in a matter of mere months, be supplanted by furtive combustion of plant matter, stifled coughs and talk of strange new yearnings.

Now, as you light your own little orange lamp, combustion of plant matter still very much a ritual (and a vice), do you see the silhouettes of haggard men holding a not altogether different sort of court as the sort you recall: smoking, swigging openly from long-necked botties, speaking of wars and rumors of wars, and the women against whom they are to be waged.

The men watch you with idle interest. You’re not from here, but you belong in some primeval sort of way, the stink of desolation wafting off of you. You smell like them. You give a sort of half-nod in the general direction of their ostensible chief, a thick-necked man leaning against the tailgate of his late-model Ford F-250, around whom the rest are gathered. He’s doing alright, his body language seems to say, not that it’s any of your business. He sizes you up, returns the almost imperceptible greeting, and resumes his rambling, profane monologuing.

Inside there’s a check-in counter, a hallway that seems longer than the structure as seen from outside, and a one-horse bar of the sort endemic to desert towns along the highway. You resist the urge to cross over the threshold to the crowded bar area, raucous with country songs as old as you are, and brassy feminine laughter; first, you must secure shelter, satisfy at least one of old Maslow’s fundamental needs before Chutes’n’Ladders-ing your way up the hierarchy. The woman at the front desk tells you the price of a room before any other words pass between the two of you. It is a perfectly average sum. She is a perfectly average woman of average weight, average build, and average complexion. Later, she will coax you out of yourself, smiling and asking you about your past-nothing recent, nothing painful, so naturally endowed with tact is she–about boyhood, about the pageant queen you couldn’t believe would even so much as look at you, about what you did on prom night, about what she did on prom night, how bashful and inexperienced she was, about how that is most certainly no longer the case.

Ah.

It will really take you that long, but she’ll have you hastening to throw your money on the table and stumble out the door, left wrist clasped tightly in her perfectly average grip. She will squeal in mock horror as your lit cigarette singes her mousy brown hair when you lean in for a kiss under the sodium orange streetlight in the shadow of the Horse With No Name—which, in a quintessentially American twist, turns out to be the name of the joint.

She will nibble on your ear there in the parking lot, whispering plain dealings, asking if you are horny. You will reply that you are “sort of horny,” which, while accurate, is really a rather clumsy, inane thing to tell a lady in the heat of the moment. She will find your awkwardness endearing, say “you’re funny,” which in the language of her tribe means: “I do not pretend to understand you, though you may use me as you will.” She will open her mouth too wide when she kisses you in turn, her probing tongue rich with the taste of oak and ash, of alcohol and just plain spit. You will have time for only fleeting second thoughts before she takes you by the arm with such force as to damn near rip it out of its socket, and drags you past your bemused parking lot brethren to the room just past the ice machine. You will fumble with the lock for what feels like an eternity, and finally at long last spill forth into the dark room in a diluvian union.

In the morning she will be gone. You will remember nothing of the night before, only little slashes of sunlight filtering through the dancing blinds, tickling a nameless patch of pale skin quickly covered with khaki cloth and gone forever from your sight. You will awaken in earnest to the earth-splitting trill of the courtesy telephone. Someone will bang on your door as you kneel retching into the porcelain on the filthy bathroom tile; the miserable sound you make in response buys you enough of a reprieve to complete your necessary expulsions, brush your teeth, and dress in yesterday’s clothes. Burning with shame, you leave the key in the door and ferry your worldly possessions to the car in a single trip. You sit in the driver’s seat with the air conditioning on, listening to the struggling compressor and watching to see who comes to discover the room key. No one does. Aware that you have come a very long way and gotten absolutely nowhere, you pull out of the space,

out of the lot and onto the desolate thoroughfare,

heading southbound

to nowhere

at all.