“You can see it. Look how paranoid I am.”
I break a smile. That tension, once again subsides. “Sure thing. Can you drive? We’re going to Utah.”
“Mormons?”
“You know Ben.”
She smiles. Blushes. I’m jealous of Ben.
After some initial traffic, the small Kia we’ve chosen is soon on the more open freeways of Pennsylvania. After an hour of sparse talk, I’m regretting having Dalcia along on this ride. After all, she doesn’t really know what Ben and I are up to, that we’re at a point where money by any means necessary is now the way forward. Surely she has no love lost on those who would deal drugs? Seen too much of it tearing apart the neighborhoods where she’s lived. Or am I applying a loose stereotype to something that’s much more complicated than that?
Not wanting to dive into it, I focus on the road. That twin arterial that is every freeway I’ve ever driven in the States. I can’t think of another system—not even the autobahn—that quite mimics this. I’m not sure if the effect is positive, but it is unique. And so, I drive. Doing my best to set social convention, using my blinker, giving space, only using the left lane for passing. Hardly anyone else does. On the highway, more so than on the streets of New York, alone I can sense something of a hatred amongst the cars. Something more antagonistic than I last remember. Of course, being more or less a New Yorker, I haven’t spent much time driving. None at all. But I do remember driving such freeways and seeing them as a route to freedom, as amazing inventions, as a place of congregation for America. Americana. Or was that some silly youth’s idealization of an activity—that in a small town was in fact the only route to freedom—that was simply new?
It must be the only explanation. I see hatred in the way the cars move now. Everyone racing. Old people clogging up the road going too slow. Semi-trucks swerving into the lane, cutting off the flow for their one hour take over of another semi-truck. And when this is mixed in with the crumbling state of the roads, melancholy—dammit, not again! And I had just thought that I would neat it—drifts into my mind, tightens it. How I ever saw something to like in this asphalt stream, these striped yellow lines, the opposing cars growing in size, always going, never stopping, the overpasses, never different. All so damn communist (can’t one intrepid tagger, can’t the person’s work I see in the City color them up some?), the people all seem so dull. And when I take a break. Move to see the gas stations, or go for a bite to grab, the conformity of the strip streets, gas station on one side, maybe a Starbucks if I’m lucky, all so Spartan, all so mind-numbing, I wonder what it is that keeps these parts of the country together.
And in the air here, too, of people at the breaking point. Of having enough of just barely making it. Of knowing that just about anything in the break of convention would send them over: another black president, a bad storm season, and hunting and gathering would happen. And the freeways would then stop becoming so damn boring. They would start being populated with highway bandits—surprised they aren’t now though maybe it’s the drones that keep them at bay—small ambushes, roadside bombs. Not hard to think it. If these people have nothing, why wouldn’t they?
When night comes, and we switch seats—her driving now and me sleeping—and she gets over her initial shock at the fact that we’re not stopping, just driving, that there might have been a purely non-emotional reason for her being on this trip. She rebels after a few hours and pulls us over to a motel. National chain, because Dalcia, having never seen anything outside of New York, is scared of the crazy white boys, and is sure that we are close to being shot. Better the devil you know, I suppose, and in the Bronx you’re more or less assured of being left alone if you’re not getting mixed up in turf wars or honor issues. Here I admit that I sense that lawlessness in the air, that the random shootings I know aren’t a part of the everyday fabric are still there. That road rage is something that, since I’ve been feeling it towards cars that don’t follow basic car-protocol or care for the person next to them, will consume someone, sometime. I don’t want that to be me. If only we had trains in this country. I would be crossing the nation. Reading a book.
I pretend to be asleep as Dalcia walks to the lobby, haggles with the clerk, then comes back out.
“I need to sleep.”
I open one eye, though I can tell she’s not buying it.
“I’m paying.”
I don’t reply. I don’t want her to pay. Don’t want her to do anything of the sort since I still see her as a child. But what else can I do. Any cent I go over the budget is less I can give to the movement and is less that I even have.
In our room, a small moldy smelling place with a twin bed, I volunteer to sleep on the bed.
Now she doesn’t answer, as if she expected it no other way. I go to the bathroom, my back aching, my joints not so fluid anymore, turning into points of fusion, sealing when still too long. Even here, in the bathroom, it smells of urine.
I come to the bedroom, about to tell her that we should complain, that no room is worth paying for if you’re uncomfortable. But she’s in bed with a Gideon’s bible in hand. Annoyed, though understanding, I grab a pillow and one of the sheets.
“You’ll be cold,” she says.
A semi truck downshifts outside our window. Why did we get the ground floor?
“Oh?” She’s right, of course. I’m freezing just standing here. I go to the heater. It’s on max. And it seems to be getting colder.
With a smirk, she reads the Bible. “You don’t read this, do you?”
I sit up on the bed next to her, making certain that I don’t go under the covers. I switch on the TV. What’s her deal? On the local news, an accident. Then a case of road rage. Two men shot each other. Also seems to work out in a case like that—no innocents. I focus on the screen. I hear Dalcia slide out the drawer and slam the bible in there. I can smell her. I try not to think on it, but my blood heats up nonetheless.
“Sad, right?” I say, my voice much too low to sound unaffected.
“White people. What can you do?”
I’m not sure why, but staring at the TV, something I haven’t done in ages, it seems like a portal to a different world. And here, with this local news team taking a low camera angle to the police tape striped across an otherwise inconspicuous road, there’s a sense that the world, the America I once knew, isn’t the same. That in fact it’s been damaged and won’t come back. Of course, when the news switches to the news about more drones being deployed above the ground overseas, I grow angry at how simplistically they’re presenting everything—even though they bite their lower lips, these very telegenic types, and they say how tough of a decision this is. I switch off the TV.
“You really hate the news, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
She shrugs and switches off the light on her side. I sit frozen, thinking about whether I should switch off my lamp and lie under the covers with her, or to go to the floor. The latter is, even if she doesn’t mind, the more honorable thing to do, but what does that even mean these days? Am I holding on to values that have long passed? It has been the problem so far, hasn’t it?
“You going to sleep?” she says as she kicks at the bottom of the blanket until it’s untucked.
“You don’t care about what goes on in the world?”
She lets out a sigh like we’re going over an old argument again. “What?” she hisses.
“The news—“
“I know,” she says and this time sounds every bit the teen that she is. “You think others don’t think about this shit?”
“It’s—“
“We know what’s going on. There’s nothing we can do about it, is there?”
A sting on my ego, I switch off the light and get in bed with her. For a second I can feel her heat reaching from across the bed. But I eventually turn around and am soon asleep.
It’s another semi-truck downshifting that awakes me. The dream is an opaque one of me running from... I’v
e lost it. Dalcia sleeps dangerously close to me. But she’s sound asleep with the blanket wrapped tight around her. I realize now that it might not have been the semi-truck that awoke me. I’m freezing and sneeze immediately creeps up to my nose. Pushing my face into my pillow I sneeze. Dalcia slowly turns over. I think about ripping the blanket from her grip, smiling because I remember doing the same with my wife. But my mind’s whirring, thinking about the trip still ahead of us. Of how we need money to help all aspects of our operation.
There’s no way to tell what will happen, and that is, unlike when I was young, a troubling thought. A thought that stirs up my guts, my heart, making certain that nothing is left the same as it was before, as if the aging process has now speeded up and only those in exotic locales, islands, will make it through at all. And then I think on Khalid. That email. His last message in the world, ostensibly. Did he really just blow himself up? And why have I tried not to think about it for this long?
I find all my clothes to wrap myself into and find a motel paper and pen and start to write. It’s nothing much really, having not written for so long I thought I would be out of it, but I’m not. Well, I’m not sure, the first draft is never the best, it’s all emotion usually, but I write nonetheless. Random prose. Random thoughts. It’s been a while and it’s freeing. The pen, the cheap ball point that one can find anywhere in a cheap motel with stains the owners didn’t bother to remove, is the click open kind. And soon, between the thoughts, I’ve already measured the strength of the spring and the jump of the pen when pressed close and the bottom’s held against the table. I catch it, press again and write.
“Mmm?”
It’s Dalcia, now without any blanket and in her lingerie I look away as fast as I can, just barely stopping myself from clicking the pen again.
“What time is it?”
I turn. She’s covered, a sleepy eye on me. She seems proud.
“Four. You should sleep.”
“Why. You’re driving.”
I laugh. She smiles.
“I’m not kidding.”
“I’m sure you’re not.”
“You’re writing?”
“Not really.”
“You were.”
I nod.
“That’s good. I thought you said you had given it up?”
“I did. This is nothing. Just thoughts. Not writing. Turing—“
“Oh, I know, I know. Your boyfriend. He’s better at everything.”
Before I can retort she rolls back over and is slightly snoring to sleep. Not wanting to disturb her I head to the lobby, where I think they keep a brewer full of coffee. But it’s half full, and it’s old. I douse it in cream and sugar, and it still tastes burnt, tastes like it’s been run through metal pipes a hundred years old. I drink it anyways. Now, down here, the two receptionists whispering away to each other, I find that I have nothing to write. It was the presence of Dalcia that started the flow of thoughts.
For a few minutes I listen to the receptionists talk about their crumbling families. The woman’s son is in jail. Dealing Meth. The other is losing his wife. His kids don’t even talk to him. He’s sure that the wife, the crazy bitch, is whispering all sorts of things into their ears. Something he would never do. The woman seems to agree wholeheartedly. I think there’s potential for a relationship for each of them. I silently pray that there will be nothing to hinder either of them from taking their obvious connection further.
I wake up Dalcia and soon we’re on our way. As we come into the firs range of mountains, a freak cold front hits us. We stop when the cheap car starts slipping in the ice. Dalcia finds us another motel. I don’t think twice as she pays. In the bed, me a little less embarrassed, her in the robe—didn’t know they gave robes here, not with the smell emanating from the carpet—and with her Bible. I don’t switch on the TV, because I don’t want to see anything that will annoy me.
After a few moments, me massaging my neck—the road has not improved, and if anything can be said about the west, about venturing out here on the interstate, is that one can see—with the gates and the signs that if a light is flashing, the road is closed—with the wind pushing the snow unto the road, with the gusts playing with the car, that out here nature is very much a factor that will ostensibly kill you. That without a city to cocoon you, without the City to cocoon you, you are left out here with nothing, that humanity seems (and I’m being entirely solipsistic here, but who doesn’t do that? Who doesn’t let their own fears extend to others?) so fragile. I’m not sure what that does. I’m not sure if this is the basis of some frontier-spirit that is fine with the things I’m fighting against. That doesn’t see human tyranny as anything all that amazing, because there is also, in this world view, the tyranny of nature. And nature does not care. And if we come from nature, should we care? Should we not slaughter, or raze from our path all that stands in its way?
I look over at Dalcia reading the Bible. Perhaps that book itself, the result of a cruel nature as well, is cruel for just those reasons. I’m sure weather and the idea of death takes the softness off people. But does it make them crueler?
Dalcia slams the book shut, looks for the remote, finds it, her robe flapping dangerously close to opening, me staring away, and switches it on, flopping back on the bed. She’s huffy. Annoyed. Am I suppose to help her out? Am I supposed to figure this out? We’re not a couple.
“What?”
“You are the most judgmental person I know.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the TV. It’s the news. It’s a national channel and it’s talking about the specific battles of technology, of course our side will crush any and all comers, especially cave dwellers with at best stolen technology, and it is only a matter of time before we overcome everyone. I see a general talking. And suddenly, my stomach clenches. Behemoth, with that cat’s grin, is standing behind him.
“What do you mean?” I say, my voice cracking; I take my eyes off the TV, my stomach calms down.
“The way you’re looking at me when I’m reading the Bible. You’re, what, Muslim?”
“No.” There, I’m removed from her. From her assumption that because of a few actions on my part that I’m some other. Rednecks, when I was in the South made the same statement, they were a little more adamant, but to hear it from someone in the Bronx, someone I cared for and who should know better, is a bitter pill to swallow. My mind drifts. I’m sure now that with Turing lies the way. Humans are too...
Dalcia shakes her head and rolls her eyes. A teen again.
“I’m not a Muslim,” I say. Though I could very well become one, if this is always the action. “I’m an atheist.”
“Oh.” It seems that she’s much less impressed with this.
I bite my tongue. Hold back a retort that the white men that converted her ancestors by the gun would not have expected her to take that conversion so seriously. I stare back at the TV. They’re talking about swarm technology being used. The picture: black and white, shows a drone videoing them. The swarm, made up of small missiles, flies into the air and swoops down on a village. It’s beautiful. Like birds, really. Using AI, the swarms, much more intelligent that the birds they mimic, swoop down on a village and, using face recognition, chases down the bad guys. They are able to run too, and can chase men down tunnels. Using infrared, they are more or less invincible, and more or less are able to shoot only the guilty. They show a man running across the field. His gait is hidden by the distance, but it’s there, one can sense his fear, can see him glancing over his shoulder, and the swarm moves in. Much too fast. They swoop by and the man falls on the dirt. Red spreads. Something about that, not so much the actions—war is war—but the fact that throughout the entire action there wasn’t a single soldier on the ground, from our side that is, tickles something deep inside. I push it back.
“Christ,” I say. I remember what Turing says. Is he aware of what this is doing?
“What?”
Oh, the Bible. “I wasn’t judging you reading the Bible.”
/>
“I can sense it.”
I shake my head excessively.
“You must. If you don’t believe in it, you must have something to say to me.”
“I think that everyone of us must find our way through life. Who am I to interfere with that?” That’s not really what I think, I think it abhorrent, but then again, lately I’m not sure what it is I need to think; and I also think that religion is still the least of our worries.
“I’m more concerned with that,” I say and point to the TV, though now all that’s over and someone’s talking to a pundit who claims that there will be nothing to save the people there because they had crossed a line and no one crosses a line with the American people. There is no discussion as to why that, a deadly swarm—I hear them nickname them Satan’s locusts—is the penalty.
“They’d do the same to us, wouldn’t they?”
I really did not expect her conversion to be so complete. “You think that?”
She eyes me. She’s a full convert. Christ. And she still has some suspicions about Khalid.
“You know I fought for this country. I was a soldier too.”
She looks me over. There’s no sympathy.
“The news said you were a broken soldier.”
It still stings, those words, the idea that all that I did to serve was for naught. The words settle in my throat, heavy, constricting. “Is that what they say?” There’s no helping my lower voice. “And you believe them?”
“Why take the other side?”
“Because it’s right?” There’s more to it, for certain, but what else can I say about my own conversion, because that’s what it was: from hard charging, to what I am now: a man working with Turing with some idea to help the world. The weak.
She scoffs.
“You’re saying you don’t agree with that?”
“I’m just saying doing that will cause more heartache for everyone.”
Anger bubbles up. “What?”
She rolls her eyes, somewhat throwing up her hands. “I mean look at Khalid. If he has a reason. Maybe he does. I’m sure you think that. But does that mean it’s right?”
The Labyrinth of Souls Page 36