* * *
Gil turned for a moment and he would have looked out towards the bridge as he always did, but he was on autopilot set for out of town. He told his body to get in the car and go and he didn’t want to think about anything, not even the leaving. He was aware that he was in the car and that he was driving…that he was leaving. But he didn’t want to think about anything else right now. Years before, when he had been travelling, he learned this trick of entering a kind of meditative state where there was just the physical act of driving and the noise of the road and nothing more, nothing in his head to contemplate because if he thought too hard about everything that was going on, he might lose that perfect focus on the driving that he allowed his body to have. He thought of it as becoming one with the machine, that he was just the thing that helped it to go and he would play his part and he and the machine would get to where he needed to be and when he got there he could find some job that allowed him to become a part of some other machine and not think about anything while his body did that. It was only when he stopped doing something that his brain would come alive and he would think. Right now he couldn’t afford to think because then he wouldn’t be able to do anything else.
He wondered if his father needed the speed to set his mind in motion and he thought of his father and his mind drifted from driving to death and he knew his father was going to die and he was waiting for his father to die and there was no good reason for that because his father was healthy and took care of himself and removed himself from the stress of the Job and of the expectations of the town and no one but Gil knew what he was doing and so he could do it without anyone butting in or asking how he was doing or wondering why it was taking him so long to do it and then he would feel all that stress all over again and he would start to drink or eat too much or drink too much coffee and that would have killed him just as quickly because his father couldn’t stand to not be doing the right thing because it was what he was born to do and Gil knew that he died doing something important and something noble which was something that Gil could never quite do or never quite be because no matter what he did it always came out badly and even though he liked people and he was a good person it didn’t matter because he was cursed and his curse hit people like a ton of bricks and even though they might survive his presence they could never really be successful in what they were doing around him and maybe if he had always stayed away from Stansbury his dad wouldn’t have crashed into the tree because his dad had been so close to the store and to him and it must have been his curse that killed his dad and anyone else that died in the town while he was there was probably his victim too and he should probably just find a mountain somewhere and build a cabin and live there and not see people anymore and that way no one would ever die because of him again but he loved to be around people too much and he loved to hear their stories because there was life in them and not everyone he met was hurt or killed or suffered he hoped because there were so many people he had met along the way who were really wonderful and didn’t deserve to be a victim of this thing that followed him and he could never get rid of and maybe it was because of the town and the bridge and maybe it was something worse but he never knew except to know that it was a real thing and it was a part of him and he wished he could make it go away…
Gil barely noticed as his car rammed into the phone tower.
Lakebridge: Spring (Supernatural Horror Literary Fiction) Page 43