Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  “What’re you gonna do for money here? How’re you gonna live?”

  “It’ll work out,” he said quietly, knowing that she would let him stay. “I just need a little time to get things straight. I’ll be clean by the time I get there—”

  “In three days or whatever.”

  “—and I’ll tackle the money thing as soon as I roll into town. Promise. I’ll get us set up. I’m a wine man from here on out. Wine and espressos, swear to Christ.”

  Dani growled in frustration, and Sandoval leaned his forehead against the ridge of the phone box and smiled, felt the scabs pull again. “I gotta go, baby. I’ll call you when I make it into town. Three days.”

  He felt something like a slow, unfolding explosion inside the bomb shelter of his ribcage: who else would do this for him? Who else would love him like this? Who else, really, had yet to be run through by the sword of his selfishness? She was all he had left. His last island.

  “Three days,” she said, and hung up. Sandoval ran for the bus, his feet clapping against the pavement.

  •

  He was studying English at UW Seattle, Nathaniel was. Heading home to DC for the holidays, and they rode through that deathly time of day on the Dog, that endless, loveless stretch between 3 and 6 p.m., where time stumbled and dragged and then stopped entirely. Sandoval was crestfallen to feel the sitches start to sink their fangs in him again after his earlier reprieve: the cramps, the feeling his joints were comprised of molten glass chunks. A film of sweat that felt oily and yellow on the skin. He felt like something plastic being melted under a magnifying glass. They were in Montana by then, and it should have been beautiful, but all Sandoval saw was sagging barns and barren fields, sun-bleached billboards, homes with leaning stands of trash piled against their side walls. Roadkill beyond count. The back-of-the-bussers had been loudly discussing breast sizes for some time—which sorts were ideal, the varying pros and cons of “little bitty ones” versus “tig ol’ bitties”—to the point where Sandoval was gripping his knees with his hands and preparing mentally and spiritually to go back there and clock the first dipshit he laid eyes on.

  Nathaniel took his headphones off and turned to him. He leaned over and said quietly, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” said Sandoval, grateful for the distraction. He palmed sweat from his face, felt the pastiche of Band-Aids under his palm as he did.

  “Are you kicking right now?”

  He looked at Nathaniel and saw the kid—and he was a kid, truly—was free of judgment. Sandoval opened his mouth to deny it and then blurted, “Christ, is it that obvious?”

  “You’re just looking a little peaked, man.”

  Sandoval looked at the seats around them and then nodded. “A little bit, yeah.”

  Nathaniel nodded. “Dope? Or booze? Probably dope, right?”

  Sandoval’s eyes cut across the aisle. “Shhh. Come on.”

  “Shit, nobody cares, man. On the bus? You just gotta relax.”

  “Relax? With the fucking idiot brigade back there? I wish.”

  Nathaniel smiled, adjusted his tam. “Get you some earplugs, Mark.”

  “Get a cattle prod. Stun gun.”

  Nathaniel cracked the lid on his half-empty Coke cup and poured in a generous dollop of vodka from a pint of Smirnoff that he’d tucked into his jacket. “Shit, I coulda given you this before, man. Sorry. Hold out your juice bottle there.”

  And so, yes, he was feeling much better when they wheeled into a rest stop outside Bozeman an hour or so later. Night had fallen, and it looked like every rest stop ever built on any stretch of sad and desolate and windblown highway—a pair of squat cement outbuildings flanking a small visitors center full of vending machines, a thin scrub of trees beyond.

  It was bitterly cold out, the grass gritty with frost, a hard skin of old snow riming the pavement in thin gray washes. The few riders that got off the bus to smoke and hit the restrooms cinched their coats tight against their throats and hustled. “This one’s a pee and flee,” the bus driver barked before closing the bus door against the chill, earning him a few guffaws. “Five minutes.” Overhead hung a gleaming scythe of a moon, the night flung with nickel stars.

  They pissed with the other passengers and then hurried behind the back of the men’s bathrooms to huff one more cigarette out of the knifing wind. Sandoval patted the pockets of Marnie’s windbreaker and remembered the joint he’d found in the inside pocket. He pulled it out with the zeal of a magician pulling a rabbit from his hat. Nathaniel laughed silently, cigarette smoke curling from his mouth; they were drunk.

  “You wanna?”

  “Hell yeah, I wanna,” Nathaniel said. “Make it quick though, driver’s not waiting long, man.”

  “We’re fine.” Sandoval mouthed the words around the joint. His lighter kept sparking and dying. Nathaniel cupped his hands around the flame. Success! Sandoval took a few quick puffs, got the cherry going.

  Both the taste and scent hit him immediately: chemical, acrid, manufactured. He licked his lips, frowning.

  “Ah, goddamn,” Nathaniel said, his nose curling in distaste. “It’s wet.”

  “Wet?” Sandoval said. He held the joint between his fingers, stared down at it.

  “Shit, yeah. Weed with PCP or some shit mixed in. Embalming fluid. You smell that?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and then, lamely: “This is my wife’s.”

  “Your wife’s?”

  “My wife’s coat. I found it in her coat.” Marnie was, what—smoking PCP now? Was it just a thing she had been given and forgotten about? Had someone given it to both of them, at some party?

  “You don’t want that shit, Mark.” Nathaniel said softly. He cupped his hands, blew into them. “For real.”

  Sandoval sagged against the wall, rolled the back of his skull against the brick. Thought of Marnie and the maelstrom of emotions that came with her, the bomb-blast realization of this new facet of her. His wife smoked PCP! He felt destructive, ruinous.

  “I’m gonna smoke it,” he said. “Why not?”

  “That shit drives people crazy, dude. You’ll be jumping off an overpass, thinking you can grow wings and buttfuck a car or something. My brother’s friend tried to do that. Dude from Woodridge, he tried to fuck a car. Not even kidding.”

  “I’ll just have a bit,” said Sandoval, squinting and holding up the joint.

  “Dumb,” Nathaniel said. “Real fucking dumb, man.” And then he pushed off from wall and said something about getting back on the bus. The wind was so strong Sandoval could hear the snapping fabric of Nathaniel’s jacket as he rounded the corner. Then he was gone. God, it really was acrid. Like smoking the inside of a wall, or if you ground up a calculator and smoked that. Sandoval being Sandoval, he marveled for a moment, there against the cement wall of a men’s bathroom in a rest stop somewhere in eastern Montana, at just how bad it really did taste, as he gazed down at it in his hand. And then came the thought of Marnie again and his self-pity flared and he huffed more, sparks from the cherry whipping through the dark.

  He walked back into the cavernous echo chamber of the men’s bathroom some indecipherable amount of time later. He may have heard the bus’s horn toot once, though it could have been an air horn from a truck on the freeway. He ran the cherry against the wall, put the rest of the joint in his pocket.

  Inside the bathroom: a dented mirror above a pair of sinks. Drawings of crude and woefully improbable biology. Two tissue-clotted urinals, a drain in the floor. A pair of empty stalls.

  He shuffled into the stall of the less brutalized toilet and latched the door behind him. Perching on the back of the tank, his feet on the lid, he lit the joint again, and was soon ensconced in a bitter cloud of smoke that marijuana was only the faintest participant in. Sandoval sat folded on the toilet tank like a troll, occasionally coughing. He realized that somewhere in the past
few minutes he’d resigned himself to not getting on the bus. That the bus was probably gone. Hadn’t he heard it leave? The passage of time was taking on a malleable, taffy-like quality. His limbs felt as if they were belted to the floor with invisible anchors. His breathing had grown tinny in his ears, bright and crackling like a blown speaker. He gazed at the hand cupping the tiny remnant of the joint as it hung over the toilet bowl, and he felt his entire body being pulled toward the floor.

  Overhead, the lights flickered with a sizzle and snap, then suddenly glowed brighter. Hospital lighting, he thought, spit gone electric in his mouth. Kill-floor lighting.

  He rose, the rasp of his boots on the cement nearly infinite in their sonic variants. Dropping the joint in the bowl, his hand seemed miles away, an appendage spied through a tunnel, a convex distortion, and when he laughed, it sounded distant, mud-clotted, horrible. “I haven’t smoked pot in a long time,” he said through the invisible netting wrapped around his head. The words reverberated, like physical things that roved and bounced within the stall.

  He leaned over with his hands on his knees and retched. Two, three gut-heaving yowls. A bowling ball full of warmed blood, that was what his skull had become. He spat and missed the toilet. The saliva fell to the cement with a sound like someone clapping their hands in an empty gymnasium. Maybe the bus is still waiting for me, he thought. Maybe I didn’t miss it. Maybe I should go out there.

  Fear’s dirty fingernails wormed their way inside him, lifting and testing. I just want to sit on the bus now, he thought, leaning his head against the filthy stall wall.

  I shouldn’t have done this, he thought. I should have listened.

  It was the last thought of any real cohesion for some time.

  •

  And what happened next?

  What happened next really was the ten-million-dollar question, wasn’t it? And ten million was being conservative, when you considered the advance he’d gotten for The Long Way Home, the years of significant royalties, the translations, the options and profit points on the movie, the advances for the other books he would later write, the generous fees for speaking engagements, the write-offs, even the emasculating acts of his later years in which he’d slump hungover in his little booth, signing books and promo glossies at sci-fi and comic conventions, diminished as his star would later become. But yeah, ten million was on the slim side, and all of it—the whole thing, his whole blessed, magical, fucked up life after that point—hinged on what had really happened in that dark cement box of a bathroom in Bumfuck Nowhere, Montana, after he smoked that joint. What had happened there, and what happened in the scraggly snow-dusted copses of scrub pines and blackberry bramble out behind the rest stop, and in the mostly empty parking lot, and later in the deep, dark woods.

  He remembered staggering around the bathroom for a while, just feeling the kettle drum of his nerves jangling, alternating between outright panic and a feverish euphoria that quickly sputtered out and was very different from a heroin high. He walked to the sinks and gazed slack-jawed at his face in the dented mirror covered in half-peeled stickers and marker scrawls. He spent some time examining the whitened vistas of his eyeballs, trying to discern patterns in the red silken threads of veins buried there.

  His heartbeat sang in his sour mouth. He gripped the counter and sneered.

  Marnie, he decided, was wrong for leaving him. Don Whitmer had lost a valuable employee. He would eat stew from the bowls of Dieter and Julian’s skulls. He tapped a fingernail against his canine and marveled at the sound of it. He spent a lifetime spitting in the sink, trying to get rid of the chemicals abrading his gums, his tongue.

  And honestly, maybe he was the one that broke the light above the mirror. Maybe he did. But at some point—days, minutes later—he noticed that the only light in the room was the single bulb on the ceiling, flickering in its steel cage. His limbs continued to weigh him down and he slowly began to sink toward the floor, an ice sculpture melting. He grinned and watched himself in the mirror.

  And then something skittered behind him and he stood up, his hands slapping at the wet countertop.

  But there was nothing there.

  Just the entrance door, the dented garbage can with its a grim tide of paper towels ringing its base. His breath was ragged, his blood so loud he thought he might be able to hear it moving inside him; he gazed down at his hands again and became lost within the parchment-fine skin, the blued veins.

  When he looked back up, he saw a little man standing behind him in the mirror.

  Sandoval screamed, childlike and breathy. The man—for lack of another word—was maybe four feet tall, as khaki-colored as a pair of pants, mouthless and nude. As smooth as a thing culled from wax. Thin-limbed and bald, it tilted its head almost inquisitively. While the eyes themselves were as black and lightless as any sea-bottom, the flesh ringing the eyes writhed with movement. These circles of roiling, putty-colored flesh. Sandoval breathlessly screamed and hoisted himself up on the counter, his ass soaked in sink water, and the little man ran away on hind legs suddenly grown multi-jointed, its legs hooking backward like an insect. Fast, so fast, but somewhat hobbling, too. Watching the thing move made his eyes itch. He screamed again.

  The little man ran into the far stall, the one Sandoval had just smoked in. The door clapped shut and slowly drifted halfway open.

  Sandoval crouched on top of the counter, piss now warming his thighs.

  A hand with too many knuckles reached out over the top of the stall door and slammed it closed. Bang. Then opened it and slammed it closed again. Bang. The bright sound of metal against metal. Bang.

  Oh, long, knuckled fingers.

  Too many knuckles.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Then the hand pushed the door open and the little man’s waxen head peered at him around the edge of the doorway.

  The flesh where a mouth would be began to grow thin. Translucent, the skin of bubblegum. The coils of flesh around its eyes squirmed. The skin of its mouth finally tore open to expose the black cave of its mouth and the light bulb on the ceiling exploded with a febrile pop! The room was flung into darkness.

  Sandoval screamed and hopped to the floor. He slammed against the door, found the door handle and flung it open and staggered outside.

  The world was frozen and blue.

  The parking lot was scoured in a watery cobalt illumination, as if God had put a scrim over the moon. A pair of big rigs sat hulking in the gloom at the far end of the lot. He heard a bang inside the bathroom, something metallic buckling and scraping across the cement floor, and hot piss again sluiced its way through his jeans and then turned icy. He stumbled toward the parking lot because his lizard brain told him that beyond the parking lot was the inevitable human river of the highway. Cars and their headlights and their drivers. People. He stumbled toward the ineffable tide of life out there beyond the parking lot, there on the highway, he could hear it, hear it like his own blood in his head, like his own heart, the highway, of course, that’s what he wanted, he wanted to be among them, people, he didn’t understand how he could’ve ever not wanted to be among them—

  His foot hooked over his other ankle and he fell.

  He shredded his palms, the back of his hands a cold blue, and when he looked up at the sky, it was not pinpricked with stars or scudded with a veil of clouds but was instead lit now with a disc of light. That disc of dark blue light. A light so large that it seemed to block all else out, to span from treetop to treetop on each side of the lot, and where had it been only seconds ago? And then the blue became white, white as chalk, as fresh paper, a light so bright that as he put his hand up to cover his eyes—and he was truly screaming now, yes, definitely, something integral cracking inside his throat—he could see the delicate framework of his bones beneath the skin, the black latticework of his own bones laddered below the pale flesh.

  •

  In the bla
ckness, something feathered his cheeks. He scrabbled up, hands slapping at his face, but with the terror came familiar scents—pine, dead leaves, earth—and a bitter, numbing, ferocious cold.

  He’d been covered, or covered himself, in a mounded layer of pine branches, the needles brushing his face. Dawn was the thinnest wash of color among the trees. His hands and feet were frozen, disconnected things. Sandoval’s eyes were mostly gummed shut, and he wiped at them and saw that he lay among a thick stand of scrub pine and was flanked all around by a dark wall of brambles. He curled over into himself again, seized up with cold, shoved his hands between his thighs. Wind sloughed through the treetops and he pulled more branches over his body like some kind of burial mound, his teeth chattering.

  Eventually, a cold morning light purled through the filigree of trees, and he rose and started walking. With little thought as to direction or solution, he put one foot in front of the other, a kind of chemical sludge coating the back of his throat. His bones ached with exhaustion. He staggered through the underbrush, hands jammed in his armpits, careening off trees and hardly flinching when branches scraped across his face, jabbed him in the ribs. He barely put his hands out in time to break his fall when he hooked a shoe over a dead tree limb. He stared at his scraped palms—they were bleeding freely—and stood up with a grunt and half-furious sob and continued on. Woods and woods and woods.

  Once he walked into the remains of a rotted fence still hung with sagging barbwire and simply pushed the fencepost over. Some of the trees were dusted with old snow that tumbled like sugar when he caromed into them. It was hard to separate what sound was the wind and what was the highway; he considered the possibility he was walking in a large circle. Or perhaps he’d simply gone mad. Maybe he was still in the bathroom, the little waxen man terrifying enough that Sandoval’s mind had simply gone somewhere else. Perhaps the withdrawal and booze and PCP had driven him over some irrevocable edge. It seemed impossible that a day and a half had passed since Seattle and Julian and Dieter.