But that was all gone. That sun had set, and here he was. Alone. Healing.
‘Happy to be here,’ he said again, before stopping the tape.
He reached an intersection. A line of automobiles had stretched behind him; he realized he’d been doing ten or twenty under the limit. Dwelling on all that baggage. Journeying to the centre of something. Sporadic cars and trucks thundered by on the I80, most heading northwest. McConaughey waited for an opening and merged, throwing Cosmo onto the road and following the main flow of traffic, instantly disappointed that he’d taken the more popular route. He wasn’t about the popular route; he wasn’t about going slow. He was all about trailblazing, speeding along the road less travelled. He’d turn off on the first desolate stretch that presented itself, he decided, as long as it meant plowing south, toward the heat and naked expanse that sat between him and the vigilant border: a place that would reward his loneliness, and in its absence both absorb and forgive. He drained the last drops of his water and threw the plastic bottle over his shoulder, where it came to rest amid the camp and detritus of his life.
II
Boy, you done it now, McConaughey thought. Got yourself good and lost. He stuck his neck out the window and sent a long Texan whoop! toward the dry horizon.
He couldn’t explain the sense of elation he’d been feeling since he yanked the wheel left, splitting to the south and roaring down a nameless road. The Dukes were cooking and jamming up some toe-tapping, extended psychedelia, Nugent labouring a pentatonic riff into ecstasy. McConaughey slammed Cosmo’s roof with his palm, another squeal of pleasure leaving his lips as the riff collapsed back into a bass-heavy, pickup rhythm. This was what he’d been waiting for: no destination in sight, no crowding presence, no phone, no email, no connection to anything but the groove of the music and the awful skyline.
There was a passage he’d read somewhere, a long time ago, that came rushing back to mind. Something about the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist. Could have been from way back in high school, maybe, or while researching a part (or was it an Aerosmith lyric?). Basically, it said that a tourist’s travels were mostly physical in nature, that the roving tourist was seeing, experiencing, absorbing, but always as an outsider with home in mind. The itinerary was set in advance, and the journey gained momentum as a return, rather than a departure. McConaughey was terrified of being the tourist, fanny-packed and Tilley-hatted, visiting the brochure attractions and never once stepping outside the comfortable routes predetermined by tradition or by some expensive agency. No, when he travelled he was pure pilgrim, embarking upon a quest more spiritual than fleshy, where each step along the road was just as important as the last and no firm destination materialized to kill a sense of spontaneity. The road was metaphorical, he thought – a process of becoming rather than visiting.
He had a breakthrough. He thumbed his recorder.
‘Okay. Here we go. The pilgrim travels along a spiritual path; to him the journey requires that he become a different dude by the end. On the other hand, the tourist walks a purely physical road, picking up bits and pieces of other cultures and peoples … but keeping his mind set on home, on a version of himself that won’t change … And this … this is exactly like acting. An actor plays all these parts, but keeps his heart safe and sound, just like a tourist remembering his home. Being on a pilgrimage is dangerous, but acting … acting is easy … acting’s about the head … and real change requires … the heart.’
Hitting STOP, he felt a clarity of mind he hadn’t had for months. It was rare that a trip like this would pan out exactly as he envisioned it. He imagined the stack of tapes he’d fill with philosophy before the end. He tapped his fingers at ten and two, jiggling his thighs in time with the music, letting his thoughts levitate into orbit as miles began to thread out behind him and the rocky sediment to his left began turning to a chalky, bone-like white, swirling higher now in elevation like an inverted crater, and along the empty field were scattered bleak and purposeless stones, ragged hardness, this tanned and prostrate body –
What?
Matthew whipped his head to the left and brought his foot down hard on the brakes. His tires squealed to a dusty stop on the right shoulder. No way. He looked again, and there it was, his eyes refusing to play tricks. Aw, shit, he thought, fumbling for his sunglasses. There, about thirty feet from the road: a body, somebody, a human being, lying on his chest in the dirt, a tanned, bare ass mooning him, the buzzards, the empty sky.
‘No way, no way,’ he said aloud, more excited than scared. He was about to immediately rush onto the road to help the poor bastard, but then remembered his nudity. He pulled on a pair of board shorts crumpled under a pile of occult books and magazines. Wiping the sweat from his eyes and raking a few errant locks from his forehead, he slipped into a pair of flip-flops and unlatched Cosmo’s back door, the sunlight making him dizzy.
He still wasn’t convinced, even though he’d gotten a solid look from behind the wheel. You just didn’t find a naked body out in the middle of nowhere, thirty feet from a nameless desert road. Or … or did you? Still, it was probably a rock, or an animal, a trick of that intense and ancient star beating down from the radioactive sky. Nugent and the Dukes chugged along a minor-chord progression while Matthew flip-flopped across the road, slowing his pace as he approached the heap in the sand.
He dropped to a crouch, hands clasped in the shape of a prayer over his lips. Yep, no mistaking it from this close. It was a body. Naked. And by the looks of it, recently deposited, as there were no signs of decomposition, dehydration or the telltale rips of scavengers. What in the name of high holy fuck, he thought, staring at the man’s muscular back, his well-toned calves, his sun-kissed skin, as a drift of dust sprayed over the form.
He squinted north, feeling a hot point of heat fingering the back of his skull. No signs of life, simply the shimmer of the horizon. It was probably best to go back to the van and race toward the I80, hail down any passing car and get somebody to use a phone. Call in the authorities and let himself off the hook. But then again, he didn’t want the road trip to end. His escape would be over. This day, this day of happiness and freedom, would end, and he couldn’t stomach a break in his aimless itinerary.
Hell, he thought. A vague sense of fear quickly shifted into exhilaration.
He stood over the body, hands at his sides, breathing through his mouth. Then he bent his knees and pulled the guy over by the shoulder, grimacing, struggling against the dead weight, surprised by his willingness and knowing that somehow this was terribly wrong – that there was an odd feeling in his stomach, some strange timbre in the air, and that he should really just be moving on. And every hair on his body reached toward the sky; and all at once he was cold, deathly cold, leaping back from the body, hands flailing as a low gurgle came bubbling up his throat, the voice in his head screaming from some unaccountable canyon that the body wasn’t just a body: the body was him.
As in: Matthew McConaughey. A perfect clone.
Then he was sick, neat and heaving in the dirt, the scrambled eggs and toast he’d had for breakfast and all the lukewarm water he’d sipped on the road. He spat bile, perching on all fours, staring east and straining to breathe. He couldn’t think. He waited a minute, two, three, four, let his spinning head clear, let those twisting stomach knots unravel.
I am hallucinating, he thought. As he caught his breath, he reviewed the most likely of explanations. Sunstroke. Maybe one of the granola bars or eggs he’d eaten had gone fusty. Food poisoning. Something in the water. Radiation in the air. An acid flashback from ’96. He coughed a few more times, blowing his nose in his hands. Get ready, he thought. And then he looked again, expecting normalcy to return.
But there was no mistaking a perfect reflection. It was him, plain and simple. He tipped back onto his ass, body trembling, staring at some version of himself, face ground into the dirt. I’ve lost my shit, he repeated to himself. Or – or – this is just some dude who really, really loo
ks like me. Like it’s my long-lost brother or something. Has to be.
There were stranger things in the world, after all. The wind picked up force, sending grains of rock and dust into his mouth and eyes, as if the desert were agreeing with the thought: that this had all the markings of a vision quest or major spiritual battle in the works. He didn’t want to think just yet of ghosts or spirits (or demons, or devils, met along some forbidding crossroads), freezing his blood and turning him to mush. It was time to use his head, be rational and get the job done, like all his old acting heroes, the John Waynes and Humphrey Bogarts, the Marlon Brandos and James Deans. He had, for a small but surreally out-of-body moment, the queer impression that he was on a set – that lights and boom mics and cameras were trained on his reaction, and that sooner or later the director would yell cut! and this man, this other Matthew, would stand, peel off a mask and walk back to wardrobe. Oh yeah, he’d realize, rising to his feet. I forgot I was making that cameo on The X-Files.
It was just a moment. He was back to his radiant outdoor reality, collecting himself, trying not to be afraid, banking reasonably on the assumption that this was just a massive coincidence, that the guy was just a fantastic look-alike. Not quite as handsome, on closer inspection. Just a stupendous sort of luck to find such a convincing body double, he thought. Cosmic alignments, et cetera. And what a goddamned story! He’d be on Entertainment Tonight by tomorrow, smiling across from Bob Goen and Mary Hart, relating how he found a missing person and helped solve a mystery.
There were things to do, though, before he’d be on TV. To get full credit, he couldn’t let anyone else find the body; he should transport it to a hospital himself. Besides, that way no one but the doctors would get a look at his twin’s genitals, caked in coppery soil. He hadn’t even checked the man’s pulse. He leaned over the body and pressed his fingers against its neck, searching for a beat. Nothing. So it’s done, he thought. Time to get it out of the dirt before the elements took it.
He sucked in a deep breath. Then he thrust his hands under the corpse’s armpits and began dragging the body toward the van, trying to elevate the torso as much as possible so that only the heels and calves were touching the ground. He puffed and clenched his teeth but it wasn’t difficult; he was fit, an iron man, used to running and swimming and struggling with weights. There was the threat of being spotted, of passing traffic spoiling his chance to be the sole transporter, but of course the nameless road was still vacant by the time he reached the vehicle. It (he?) was cumbersome, and scraped up from the drag, but in a few flexing seconds he had the body into the van and stretched prone on the mattress. Matthew pushed through the beads and seated himself behind the wheel, the Dukes still wailing away.
He cranked Cosmo into DRIVE, looking over his right shoulder before swerving onto the road. He had to part the curtain to get a glimpse of his double: lying feet-first toward the rear of the van, arms splayed, one leg slightly bent, penis curled demurely and sand caked beneath finger- and toenails. The body’s face was his face, only sleeping: something he’d seen before in a few photographs, or whenever he watched himself close his eyes onscreen. He let the beads fall and turned back to the dash, applying pressure to the pedal.
About ten seconds later he was mashing REC.
‘Okay … bizarre thing happened to me … found me … found me a body on the side of the road … just lying there, naked … but turns out … it’s … he’s like my identical twin, or like some clone or something … craziest … Continuing to head south … closest town is Silver Creek, I think … should be there soon.
‘Ha!’ he cackled, fingers wrapped tight around the wheel. He felt electric, crackling. He wondered how much time had passed: ten minutes? twenty? He couldn’t remember when he’d pulled over. It was like he was blurring along some speed tunnel, unable to tell what the appropriate response should be, the colour of experience smearing into his field of vision. It was funny, it was actually funny (which he’d love to tell Sandra, if talking wasn’t something that still might open a wound).
And he wasn’t another mile, the landscape just as vacant, remorseless as stone, a white and shell-like spiral of rock approaching on his left, when he saw another one. This time there was no comic double take or neck-wrenching screech. He saw it well in advance, his jaw falling slack, his hands resuming their tremble, the squashed muscle in his throat releasing a trebly ohhh. And without really knowing what he was doing, he crossed to the left side of the road and parked. Then he left the van and shuffled over the windy sand, kicking through scrub over the thirty feet off the asphalt to where the naked body lay crumpled almost exactly like the one he’d just picked up.
He nudged it with a single flip-flopped toe, and a silvery filament of sanity quivered in his imagination, so fine that a strong gust of wind seemed liable to snap it. He shook his head. It was another Matthew, probably dead, naked, with his cheek pressed against the ground, one peaceful, closed lid exposed to the sun.
He crossed his arms and rolled back on his heels. Well, this was certainly something. Cinematic, even. He was the protagonist in some back-roads drama, something existential, inevitably called ‘quirky’ and ‘fun’ and ‘darkly comic’ by the reviewers. Was his acting adequate? Was he conveying the appropriate levels of disbelief, desperation, horror? Or would his dramatic flailing be seen as too dude-ish? Would Ebert be ‘much moved’ by his performance?
He felt calmer than he thought he ought to be. It was the acting experience, he knew: the method-acting disassociation, the ability to role-play, to project. He picked up and dragged his double across the asphalt, clutching it around the chest from behind. Once inside the van, he sat it down, limbs floppy, next to the first corpse, which he managed to roll over onto its side while he leaned the second against its back, Siamese bedfellows. He climbed back into the captain’s chair with a new, frigid smile stamped on his sweat-drenched face.
After a good swig of water and a stiff slap to the cheeks, he drove on, the terrain unfolding like a gaudy postcard. The sky was a vision of some pagan heaven, he felt, its worship causing a dissociative kind of vertigo: a feeling that deepened, now, to nausea-rekindling degrees, with the spotting of another body. He pulled the van over. And the feeling of sitting there, about to leap from his vehicle and collect another duplicate, somehow held the foreshadowing of routine. There was work to be done, dreadful work, but he had to act, had to attend to each mess of limbs with equal care and comportment, hefting the new body off the soil and rock, lugging it into the van and lying it down gingerly with its brothers. ‘Now there are three,’ Matthew said, after it was safely in and with its duplicates. He sucked air, nearly hyperventilating, feeling like some lost terrestrial janitor skipping along the highway of his splintered psyche, tidying up its errant shards. Then breaking into emotion, feeling fatherly, motherly, in the same space of breath, staring down at his three sleeping children, whose faces he covered with one of Cosmo’s thin white sheets (though he felt an energy stored and patient beneath the cotton, a lonesome desire from the clones, willing more and more siblings to sprout like pods from the earth – or had he fertilized it? Had his droplets of hot urine leeched into the soil to produce these cabbage-patch corpses?). The sun felt too hot, too real. What was real? Was the sand on his toes real? Were Academy Awards, or was regret, real? Were buzzards? Were the three sleeping Matthew McConaugheys in the rear of his van real things, flesh and blood, or were they something else? He thrust his arm through the bead curtain, feeling the hair and scalp of one of his copies. ‘Something is going to happen,’ he said aloud, though now he was certain: that his prophecy was correct, and that something was going to break his heart.
Still in PARK, he stared at the shell-like uprising from the ground, unable to force the van farther down the road. He’d sit and wait. Wait until things made sense again, until he could think properly, use the recorder. It would all make sense. But what if the brothers kept coming? What if they kept sprouting from the ground, one after another,
as if to punish him? What if I’m in hell, he thought.
‘I’ll have to leave some behind,’ he whispered. And with a sudden cough, he wept.
III
McConaughey wrenched Cosmo toward a trail marked by repeat tire tracks and a worn and beaten feeling. He abandoned the main road because a white puff of cloud had formed what looked like a curved arrowhead, seemingly gesturing to a spot on the horizon. (He was indeed following shapes in clouds; he figured he was past the point of measured responses.) The path ran to the east, around pathetic dunes and ridges. He urged Cosmo on delicately, with only the softest pressure on the gas. He wanted to be tender, as if too much commotion might rouse the three Matthews in the back.
Relief began to bubble and blossom as he followed the trail for another mile, tires dipping in and out of gouges, crunching over the broken earth. He whined in delight with each passing rock, whispering oh thank you oh thank you tas the path yielded only more mounds of sand and blunt nature, inch by nerve-wracking inch. After the second mile, he began to shout in happiness, punching Cosmo’s roof, as if he’d just been spared some deathly sentence. He was free, maybe; there were no more Matthews along the trail.
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