“What?” he shouted.
“You’re beyond the laws of nature, time, gravity, friction, all of it,” said a voice that was a combination of Lauren’s soft Southern lilt and the child’s tiny whisper. It sounded almost computerized. “Picture two people standing apart from one another on a frozen lake. They’re tossing a basketball back and forth between them. Each time one person receives the basketball, the force of the other’s throw pushes them farther away along the ice. The two players are the matter particles which are being interacted with, and the basketball is the force-carrier particle which affects them. One important thing to know about force-carriers is that a particular force-carrier particle can only be absorbed or produced by a matter particle which is affected by that particular force. For instance, electrons and protons have an electric charge, so they can produce and absorb the electromagnetic force-carrier, the photon. Neutrinos, on the other hand, have no electric charge, so they cannot absorb or produce photons. Isn’t that interesting? I wish I’d gotten to teach some of this to my students…not that they would have paid much attention.”
“Why are you doing this, baby?” said Matt into the phone, bursting into tears once again and feeling diminished, inept, and so goddamned weak he just wanted to die.
“Shhh, honey, don’t get upset,” said the voice of his dead wife and child. “All matter, be it the car in which you’re sitting or a meteor in space, is composed of quarks and leptons. Both quarks and leptons exist in three distinct sets. Each set of quark and lepton charge-types is called a “generation” of matter—charges +2/3, -1/3, 0, and -1 as you go down each generation. All visible matter in the universe is made from the first generation of matter particles—up quarks, down quarks, and electrons. This is because all second and third generation particles are unstable and quickly decay into stable first generation particles.
“Now, think about something, honey. Imagine that we’re—little Cynthia and I—imagine that we’re a first-generation quark and you’re a first-generation lepton, and that your guilt, your grief—whatever you want to call it—imagine that it has become so powerful that it’s engineered a specific first generation force-carrier which, upon interaction with the first generation quarks and leptons, scrambles them into an instantaneous decay pattern and reduces the object to a harmless spray of subparticles. Do you see?”
“Oh, God, no, no, I don’t! What’re you talking about, baby? Where are you?”
“Right beside you, honey. A bunch of particles in a jar. The Universe is no longer a great mystery, Matt. In fact”—and here she/they laughed—”it’s kind of a bore. Everything was always a bore without you by my side to share it with. Even dying.”
Click!
He had to get out. He suddenly didn’t give a damn if he got to Niagara Falls or not, or whether or not he found some help for that other car stranded way back there, or if he ever saw another sunrise; all he cared about right now was getting away from the car and the urn and the phone and the guilt in his gut, all of it.
The headlights were almost here, so Matt tossed down the still-active phone, flipped up the hood of his coat, threw open the door, and stepped outside—
—and no sooner was his first leg out of the car with the rest of his body instinctually following that he immediately felt himself drop with such suddenness and force that he barely had to time to think The ground’s disappeared before his arms were flailing out, hands seeking purchase, and he somehow managed to grab hold of the seat belt that pulled out to its farthest length and then locked in place as he hung there, his head at the level of the running board, gripping the seat belt, swinging back and forth, the rest of his body hanging over an endless, seemingly bottomless, black, black, black chasm. He pulled up his free arm and threw it over the running board, trying to grab onto the gearshift, but the first time he missed and almost lost his grip on the seat belt but managed to grab the brake pedal in time, and that was good, yes, definitely, but it wasn’t enough because the cold, the goddamned arctic cold turned the pedal to fire against his skin, so he took a deep breath, feeling his throat turn to iron, pressed his chest against the running board, and made a second, frenzied grab for the gearshift, and this time he nailed it, got a solid grip around the thing, and began pulling himself up and forward, his legs kicking out and back as if he were swimming, trying to balance his torso evenly between the seat belt and the gearshift because he wasn’t sure how much of his weight either one of them could handle and that’s all he’d need, for one of them to snap off or tear away, he’d be royally screwed then, no way could he get another grip in time, and for a moment he pictured himself freefalling away from the car, screaming as he watched the bottom of the car rise higher and higher as he plunged down into whatever in the hell waited below—if anything waited below—and forced himself not to think about it, just kept concentrating on keeping his weight balanced and his grips firm as he put his shoulders into it, rolling them slowly forward, then back, forward, then back, and soon he felt his hand slide up the seat belt, felt his elbow touch the edge of the running board, and as soon as the first elbow was inside and locked in place the rest was easy, he twisted sideways and lay his left shoulder on the floor, shifting the majority of his weight onto the gearshift and praying that it would hold, and it did, and soon there was his knee coming over the edge of the running board, his hand sliding a little farther up the seat belt, and with a last, painful effort, he got the rest of himself back into the car and onto the seat, still clutching the seatbelt that he at once pulled across his chest and locked into place, throwing his head back against the headrest and pulling in strained breaths, trying to stop his heart from triphammering right out of his chest.
It took a small eternity for him to stop shuddering, and by the time he was able to move again, he realized that the door was still standing open. He pulled his head forward and reached out for the door, gripping the inside handle, and he started to close it, he knew this without looking because he could feel the force he was putting into it, but then he made a big mistake: he looked out.
And what he saw was nothing. Nothingness. Only a wide, deep, endless blackness with no varying degrees, not like a normal night possessed, some shadows darker than others, giving it discernable boundaries, recognizable limits, something he could distinguish as being part of the world he knew. No, not this. This was the end of everything, where it all came crashing down, where it all scrambled into an instantaneous decay pattern and reduced everything to a harmless spray of subparticles that were scattered about only to be absorbed by whatever had existed here before the universe had been born.
He knew all of this with that odd certainty that every human being experiences at least once in their lifetime, an unbreakable conviction that they and they alone have just realized something that they can never hope to express to others with a tool so pitiful as mere language.
He looked out the windshield and saw the snow-covered highway before him; he looked to his right and saw the abandoned SUV still idling in the emergency lane, its wipers still singing their song of thunka-thunka-thunk!, the exhaust from its pipes swirling into the winter air, creating small misty whirlpools that seemed to be trying to resolve themselves into definite shapes.
Matt closed the door, lowered his head, and silently uttered a prayer for safety and deliverance to a God he’d never really believed in nor disbelieved was there to hear such pathetic requests, but pray he did.
And then he did something that he suspected wasn’t a very good idea, but he had to know, had to be sure. He pressed the button on the door handle and began lowering his window.
It took only a few seconds for the window to drop halfway down, and that was all Matt needed: through the lower half of the window he could see the highway on which his car was for the moment stopped; but above, in that space where the rest of the window had been, he saw only the blackness of space illimitable, pressing toward him, a few tendrils whispering against the door, curling upward like the darkest smoke, a
nd beginning to spill into the car.
He raised the window a few moments before the first tendril of nothingness could make it inside. From the floor, the voice from the cell phone was still repeating, “…never to stop. The best way to get there is never to stop. The best way…”
The headlights he’d seen earlier were no closer now than they had been before. Matt wondered if the vehicle was moving at all, or if it was only occupying the same space, over and endlessly, while the road below it moved, giving the driver the sense that he was in control.
He looked at the SUV once more as he put the car in gear, and then remembered—
—jesusgodhowcouldyouforget?—
—how he and Lauren had looked at an SUV just like this one during the third month of her pregnancy, how she’d convinced him that, with a new baby and all the tons of new-baby-caring-for paraphernalia they’d have to haul around every day, they were going to need a vehicle like this. There was going to be a lot of stuff, you know. And if the weather was bad and they needed to take the baby to the hospital, didn’t they want a vehicle they knew they could depend on to get them there? And think of all the groceries they’d have to buy every week. Don’t you think this would be just so perfect?
He drove away, mind and body numbed beyond anything he’d ever experienced. He kept driving until he saw the EXIT sign up ahead, then the exit, and he took it, and no sooner had he gotten back onto the road than a Merge Right sign appeared, the another abandoned vehicle in the emergency lane, taillights flickering, a Ford Escort this time, just like the one he’d been driving when he and Lauren had first been dating, and he kept driving, kept following the directions every time a Merge Right sign told him to do so, kept passing other vehicles abandoned in the emergency lane; Merge Right—the Honda he’d driven during his last year of high school; Merge Right—the Toyota that Lauren’s parents had given her for her college graduation; Merge Right–and the rusty, damn-near dilapidated Chevy station wagon he and Lauren had once taken for a test drive from a used car lot, just for shits and giggles, and in which, on a crisp autumn afternoon, he had proposed to her, and she had said yes.
Merge Right. Decay patterns. Particles scattering.
He stared at the snow that came spraying forward from the darkness to throw itself on his windshield only to be scattered by the wipers, and he thought about decay, and loneliness, and grief, and responsibility.
He slowed the car and looked into the rear-view mirror, watching as the exhaust danced into the night, combined with the swirling snow, and danced a ballet of form, becoming the faces of every person he’d ever hurt, ever disappointed, ever let down, lied to, betrayed, mocked, ignored, or—worst of all—forgotten about. They danced around his car with a cold grace, and continued to dance around as he inched forward, never touching any of them, until, at last, he came to a stop and put the car in Park.
“I knew after about fifteen minutes,” he said to Lauren, looking at her, there, scattered particles trapped in her jar. “I knew what you were going to do, and I did nothing to stop it. I couldn’t move, baby. I was too scared. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to handle it, having to deal with the baby and taking care of you, trying to nurse you back to health, spending the rest of my life worrying that you were going to try it again the minute you were out of my sight, never knowing if you’d ever get over it, the two of us always looking at each other and seeing only the third person in our family who wasn’t there.” He turned to face her. “Do you understand?”
I know, honey. I just needed to hear you say it.
“And I still feel like you abandoned me, and sometimes…ohgod, baby… sometimes I really, really hate you for it.”
Now it’s part of the world, that thought of yours. You have spoken it aloud. You have given it form.
“So what am I supposed to do now, baby? How am I supposed to keep my promise to you?”
Leave me here.
“I can’t…can’t do that.”
“It’s okay, Daddy,” said the voice from the cell phone, once again that of the child, of Cynthia, his little girl who almost was.
Matt leaned over and unstrapped the urn, bringing it to his chest and cradling it with all the tenderness he could muster.
Just open the door and step outside, honey. The ground will be there this time.
“I don’t want to leave you.”
You’re not. You’re just scattering some useless particles, that’s all.
Matt unbuckled his seat belt and opened the door. True to Lauren’s word, the ground was still there. He climbed out into the icy night and stood upon the skirling snow that wound around his ankles, holding him in place as the others, the figures of mist and snow and exhaust, continued dancing around his car. He spotted the faces of his own parents among them and whispered, “You two would’ve made terrific grandparents.”
He removed the lid from the urn and tossed it into the car, and then, slowly, with great deliberation, raised the urn over his head, turned into the wind, and emptied its contents into the winter night. He did not notice that a good portion of the ashes had fallen into a small pile near his feet.
He climbed back into the car, replaced the urn’s lid, strapped it into place once again, and began driving away, closing the door only after the car started moving; he wanted one last breath of the night wind; perhaps some of her still lingered near and he could breathe her in, have her with him forever and always, a part of him, absorbed into his tissue, never to be taken away again.
“Matt?” came her voice from the cell phone.
He leaned over and picked it up. “Yeah, baby?”
“Where are you going?”
“Home, I guess. If I can find the way.”
“Honey?”
“Yeah…?”
“You have to forgive yourself first.”
“For not saving you?”
“For all of it. For everything. You’ll never find your way home if you don’t.”
He stared out into the snow and darkness, and thought of all the sins, mortal and those of omission, that he had ever committed, all the people he’d hurt, turned away from, alienated, or ridiculed. He realized, with a smile, that he’d been a pretty selfish man for most of his life, and not a particularly good man, either. All the goodness, it seemed, he’d been saving for Lauren, and for their child, and what good was it now?
“I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, baby.”
“Then it’s going to be a long drive back.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Remember, Daddy,” said Cynthia. “The best way to get home is to keep driving and never to stop. Never to stop. Never….”
And as Matt’s car was swallowed by the snow and darkness, a wind came up from the south, softly, with almost no sound, and took hold of the remaining ashes, swirling them around in a final dance before scattering them, one by one, into the night air where they drifted for only a moment before surrendering to the decay pattern and vanishing into nothingness, leaving only the drifting snow, the sighing of the wind, and the figures of the mist dancers; soon they, too, began to break apart and scatter, until, at last, there was no sign any of them had ever been there or that any of it had even happened.
A Preview of PRODIGAL BLUES
1. The Biggest Part of the Mess
I was in a bar called The Blue Danube on the OSU campus that was filled with too many, too-loud, too-pretty trust-fund college snots, all of them pulling hernias as they sucked on their clove cigarettes and tried to impress each other with how terribly individual and iconoclastic they were; one prick in particular, his mesmerized harem of prickettes in tow, was holding court near the end of the bar where I was seated. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the words I SWEAR I DIDN’T KNOW SHE WAS 3! printed in big white letters across the chest. To emphasize the depth of this wit, a pair of baby booties dangled from the exclamation point. One of the harem whispered, “He’s so controversial!” to the prickette beside her, then both w
ent back to staring at him, slack-jawed and wide-eyed; viewed from the right angle, when the light hit their eyes, I could actually see the backs of their skulls.
Until the guy noticed me, he’d been spouting opinions about everything from Skinner to Faulkner to Kierkergaard and Hayo Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Then he happened to glance over his shoulder, recognize me, and grin.
“Hey, I’ve seen you around campus, haven’t I?”
“Probably.”
He stared at me for a moment, then tilted his head to the side the same way a dog will when it happens upon a virgin fire hydrant. “You’re one of the maintenance dudes, right?”
“That’s right.” Actually, I’m the supervisor of the entire maintenance department, but I didn’t think he’d find that little tidbit of much interest.
He looked at his harem, gave a quick wink, then turned back to me and said: “I got a great joke for you, the other guys on your crew are gonna love this:
“A pederast is walking through the woods one night with a six-year-old. The kid looks around, then whispers: ‘These woods sure are dark. I’m scared.’
“The pederast looks at the kid and says: ‘You’re scared? I gotta walk out of here alone!’“
The assault charges were thrown out after the judge (an ultra-Conservative—first time in my life I’d ever been glad of that) listened to the guy repeat the joke through what was left of his mouth, but I still have to pay the emergency room bill, plus all follow-up medical expenses (within reason) for the next six months.
Money well-spent.
When she came to post my bail that night, Tanya, my wife, wouldn’t even look at me. It wasn’t until we were driving back to the house that she gave any indication I even existed: her right hand flew out like a stone from a slingshot and hit between my nose and mouth.
Destinations Unknown Page 20