Several cars had stalled.
Victor wanted just to stop the car in the middle of the road. Maybe the other vehicles would steer clear and once the traffic died down he could escape. Or a tow truck might tow them to safety. But there would be an accident if he stopped. They were only a half-mile or so from the mall when Victor swung rapidly on to an access road.
“Victor! What the hell are you doing?”
“Traffic’s too tough, Rachel. This road will take us home safely.”
“The hell it will! We’ve got shopping to do! Are you crazy?”
“I’m just taking the best care of you and the kids. I don’t want anybody killed or crippled in this family. Now … now you listen to me …”
“Stop the fucking car!” Rachel jammed her left leg over the top of the transmission hump, forcing it far enough for her shoe to catch the top of the brake. The car jerked suddenly and began to fishtail.
“Rachel!” The car seemed to be rocking. His children’s screams filled Victor’s ears. It’s happening! It’s finally happening!
But then the car stopped dead. The motor stalled and died.
“You could have killed us! You could have destroyed our babies! Torn ’em apart! Is that what you wanted?”
Rachel flung open the door and was sliding the kids out before Victor quite knew what was going on.
“You’re crazy, Victor. We’re not going to be riding with you anymore.”
“Rachel!”
But she’d already slammed the door. In a few minutes they were just dark shapes in the road behind him.
Rachel and the kids didn’t come back that night. Or any other night. Two days later she called from her mother’s to tell him she was filing for divorce. She’d seen a lawyer.
“But I love you and the kids. Rachel?”
There was a long pause on the other end. Then a soft voice. “I used to love you, too. But you need help, Victor. Honestly, I think you do. You scare me and you scare the kids! Not one more day of it.”
Victor didn’t like driving the turnpike at any time, but especially at night. It was poorly lit and poorly maintained, and he’d always suspected that some of the cars out there late at night drove without their lights on. He wasn’t sure why they would do that, unless they didn’t want to be seen until the very last second. Predators driven by predators. He imagined dark vehicles passing him in the night, their only sound the wind rushing by and rocking his car.
But he couldn’t go home; Rachel would have called the police by now. There were several towns to the north where he might find an out-of-the-way motel room.
So he pressed the gas pedal harder than he could remember ever doing before, the fear of being stopped momentarily more pressing than the terror of mindless automotive speed. The station wagon took the curves naturally; Victor was too tense to turn the wheel very much. The Plymouth seemed to be practically driving itself.
Occasionally his headlights would pick out an unidentifiable bit of crumpled metal, or a stray hubcap, a licorice-like piece of tire. He’d move the wheel ever so slightly, just enough to avoid it, and wonder how they cleaned this stretch of road. Did they close it down for sweeping? The logistics of this simple operation seemed almost mystical to him.
Sometimes another pair of headlights would appear suddenly in his rear-view mirror, twin flames in the darkness. He’d slow a little and switch lanes. Sometimes the other car switched lanes also, and then Victor’s anxiety seemed uncontainable. After a while they would be forced to pass him and he’d be reassured it wasn’t the police or someone else following him.
As it grew later Victor became worried, and afraid. He really didn’t like to be on the road this long. And it was so difficult to gauge his speed. It was easy to drive too fast on the turnpike, especially in the dark. He’d heard other people say this and it was true. You could not believe the speedometer. You could not believe you were going that fast.
He’d waited a long time to get his first driver’s license, until he was almost twenty-two. But then it was time to move, to find a job. He couldn’t put it off any longer. He passed the written test easily—it was just a matter of study, of automotive rules and techniques. But just thinking about the driving test brought out the cold sweats. He did pass it, but driving like a robot, wishing the other vehicles out of existence. He was lucky there hadn’t been a serious accident. There were some advantages to the daze. It kept him from thinking about the other automobiles—the Buicks, the Nash Ramblers, the ugly Packard/Studebaker wagon—approaching him, following him, coming after him in his thin metal shell of a car. His car was all that stood between him and a bone-grinding, body-rupturing death under their wheels.
Each morning when Victor strapped himself into the family station wagon, he saw how he was going to die. Because of his own inattention the wagon would creep off the roadway, as if in slow motion. It would slide, then roll down the embankment. It would roll over once, twice, and come to rest on its smashed-in roof. Victor would be dead inside, still hanging from his seatbelt, his neck swollen from the break.
It seemed ridiculous to be driving at this speed on the darkened turnpike, against all the cautions he’d always believed in. But he had to get to another town, to a motel, to some place safe. The faster he went, the less time he would have to drive. That made perfect sense.
The wind roared in his ears. He looked around frantically, trying to see if any of the windows were down. Everything was sealed tight. But the wind continued to roar in his ears.
Victor twisted in his seat. He was going to change lanes; it would be a little safer in the center lane. But he had to check the traffic first, see if anyone was coming up behind him, and he knew he couldn’t trust the mirror completely. There were blind spots. Driving was full of little traps.
Timmy was sitting straight up in the seat. Victor stared into the boy’s pale face, transfixed. “I had a dream, Daddy!”
“Timmy, you’re blocking the window!”
“The car was coming apart …”
“Timmy, I can’t see!”
“There were all these … things coming in after us.”
“Timmy!” Victor jerked around and wrestled with the wheel. A low, brown shape seemed to dive from the side of the road into his left front tire. The car rocked and Victor felt the two thumps on the car’s underside, as if whatever it was knocked to be let in. He glanced into the rear-view mirror and had a momentary glimpse of the large brown dog spinning on its side like a top on the road behind him.
“Daddy?”
“It was nothing, Ann. Go back to sleep.” Probably belonged to some child his own kids’ age. I’m sorry, but Fluffy won’t be coming home tonight. It looked as if the dog might have committed suicide, just dived under his wheels. He wondered if humans did it that way. A high dive into flying metal.
The pavement had got rougher; the kids were complaining as they were knocked around on the back seat. It was incredibly bad driving for a major highway. The car was hard to control at this speed. Victor leaned forward against the windshield trying to make out what had happened to the road, but the headlights seemed to have loosened and were jiggling too much for an accurate line of sight. Victor made out numerous low, dark shapes. Nothing more.
The station wagon felt like an antique, much older than the miles on the odometer indicated. Maybe that dealer had rolled it back on him. He’d read about it—they used a bent piece of wire. The car seemed to be falling apart, in a Hodgkin’s dance. He thought he felt pieces dropping off, and suddenly one of the jiggling headlights failed.
The car squealed, more metal flew past. There was a clatter and a sudden roaring behind him, as if all the beasts had been loosed from their cages. In the shaky illumination of the one headlight Victor could see the dark shapes that covered the highway. They were writhing in pain. Or pleasure.
He hoped his children were seeing all of it, however awful. He hoped their eyes and ears would be filled with it. Rachel would never understand; Rachel
didn’t drive. But it wouldn’t be that long until his children did, and maybe his children had a chance. He was making this trip for them. And thinking that, he realized again how very important they were to him. More important than anything else. Particularly more than his own worn out and neglected life. A car wasn’t a toy, it was a death machine. Always had been. It destroyed the incautious.
The car leaped forward as if to pounce on the dark shapes, leaped violently, and it was as if the back of his head had blown out, trailing bloody hair and exhaust, his face roaring, his eyes blazing.
And then he knew. He knew. It’s happening now, right now! And he turned to check on those sweet children, but the car doors were gone, they’d been ripped off the car like wings from a tortured fly, and his beautiful children were gone, pulled back into the endless miles of black asphalt night behind him.
He twisted back over the wheel with the scream pushing out of him, roaring in unison with the engine as it pulled itself apart. The dark shapes edged closer, and he saw in the rough yellow light that they were of many different sizes and shapes. But all of them dark as the night, highlighted in red. So many dark shapes in the road, waiting to take him at last.
Decodings
During one of our occasional visits my father once told me that the key to life was figuring out the codes. Everything that happened, he said, had its own code, whether it was something as simple and everyday as the first day of school, or as complex, as cosmic, as the ultimate destiny of a people. Nothing, he said, was even remotely what it seemed to be.
My father talked like that all the time. Maybe that was why my mother left him; I don’t know—she’d never talk to me much about it. She said he didn’t know the right things to say to a daughter. She said he didn’t have much common sense. She didn’t want me to see him, even for those occasional visits. I could understand her concern—those conversations left me anxious and shaken. My father never appeared crazy; even when I reached my teen years I tended to believe almost everything he had to tell me. When he told me that secrets were everywhere, that appearances not only deceived but poisoned as well, I embraced these perceptions wholeheartedly.
“Now and then there is a lapse,” he said, his eyes large and frighteningly well-focused, “and we forget that we are civilized, and some other code of behavior makes itself available to us, and we must choose whether to remain civilized or to follow this new way of being.” I, who had made so many poor choices during my life—of jobs, men, friends, places to call home —understood this very well.
But the more I embraced his ideas, the more I resented him personally. He shouldn’t have said such things to me—surely he would know what kind of harm they might do to an impressionable young girl. He taught me nothing of compromise, or the making of friends. If his conviction about secrets and plots wasn’t bad enough, there were the apprehensions he had concerning the female sex. “I’ve never felt comfortable with women,” he told me one time when I pressed him about the breakup of my parents’ marriage. “They think so differently from men, it’s like they’re part of another race. A far darker, more ancient race, I think.” And then he looked around, as if afraid of being overheard, and leaned closer to me, whispering hoarsely. “You just have to examine their bodies, if you dare.” I stared into his eyes—didn’t he see me? Didn’t he know I was becoming a woman, too? “They’re not constructed in a way that is compatible with men—the fact that intercourse between us is possible at all is surely some sort of evolutionary accident! Their genitalia are … quite unusual.”
All this happened before my father got sick, of course. After that the harangues fell off, and for the past ten years he’d spent most of his time staring at the wall, tracing the edges of things, trying to look behind things, lifting up pieces of peeling wallpaper or paint to find out what lay underneath. He deteriorated slowly, but steadily. By the time he was sixty he had been in a nursing home for almost eight years. I checked on him periodically, even though all those sick and elderly people made me profoundly uncomfortable and half the time he didn’t want to see me. The nurses and social worker kept me posted on his progress, or more often its opposite. They said he would have bouts of the old paranoia, finding conspiracies in the most innocuous of events, and then would stiffen into a strained observation of everything around him, as if desperate not to have some significant detail escape his attention.
When the social worker called to say that my father wanted me to drive him down to Innsmouth, his home town, to see a doctor there, I made excuses at first. I pretended to have plans, although I never have plans. I said that my mother was quite ill now, which was true, but she hadn’t figured into my concerns for years. I could not bring myself to tell her that I simply did not want to see him, that when I was with him I was constantly looking over my shoulder, that talking to him made my skin hurt. He had talked about making that return trip to Innsmouth for decades, and I had come to see it as just another of his endless, irrational monologues.
But the social worker said it might do him good to get out. She thought maybe returning to the town of his youth might soften the effect of some of his harsher fantasies.
I was forty years old then, and because of plainness or attitude or circumstance I’d never married, never had children. I lived alone in a third floor walk-up. I could see no legitimate reason to refuse him, and I was too embarrassed to relay to the social worker my illegitimate ones. Besides, what was the worst that could happen?
Innsmouth itself is like a house which has been remodeled too many times. No two parts of the place reside comfortably together. We drove in from the north on a relatively new superhighway that swerved sharply before reaching the city. Despite its age and sprawl, Innsmouth was served by only two exits from this highway. The exit ramp was long and winding, elevated so that for several miles we seemed to be driving through a forest of dilapidated Georgian and Queen Anne rooftops. The ramp let us off on a downtown thoroughfare whose buildings were far more modern, but in terrible disrepair. Most of these were of the poured-concrete variety, distinguished only by their obsessive sameness, and by the layers which had flaked off their fronts, leaving numerous irregular patches discolored by the rusting away of the exposed iron cables and bars. More often than not, windows were broken or boarded. Mounds and pillars of trash crowded the entranceways, and three out of every four storefronts were empty. Fissures criss-crossed and tangled the sidewalks. Large potholes along the edges of the street were barricaded, making our progress hesitant and slow. Here and there pale figures in tattered clothing shambled about. The place smelled of fish.
“The concrete here is in pretty bad shape, Dad,” I said, making a poor attempt at conversation. He’d spoken little during the long drive, except to point out all the “For Sale” signs on the outskirts of the town, and regions where the land appeared to have sunk some since his youth, the ground gone marshy and smelling of stagnant sea water. “Do you suppose it’s the sea air?”
My father grunted and shifted his gaze, staring out the front of the car as if his eyes had suddenly gone lidless. Since the beginning of our journey I’d had the distinct impression that he was seeing things I was not, finding clues in the landscape I had no idea how to look for. “Some people keep trying,” he began, rubbing nervously at the huge liver spots which now covered a sizeable portion of his face. “They keep putting up things that are bound to come down. They try to put a mask on Innsmouth, but its true face just keeps pressing through. It wears away at the inside of the mask until one day it just tears it to shreds.”
As we drove past the ranks of broken and diseased buildings in our search for the turnoff to the clinic, I would catch brief glimpses of the views provided by the connecting streets and alleyways. Washington, Church, Federal yawned open their mouths to me so that I might see the garbage they contained. Deeper into the city, behind the concrete façades of these failed attempts at urban renewal, I saw a ragged skyline of centuries-old structures of wood, brick, and stone, with
torn roofs and faded fronts. Broad, Lafayette, Adams offered up similar samples of urban decay. Occasionally there were newer looking buildings, but always with some blemish in the structure where decay had eaten through to the surface. Those eastern streets which led to the waterfront offered the most dismal of the views: houses which had collapsed into their foundations, houses which had been burned but their remains left standing like blasted heads propped up in display, houses which appeared clawed, chewed, half-consumed by the thick sea air.
These views tended to make me drive faster, and more than once I asked my father with some irritation if he was sure about the directions he gave me. I nicked a barricade or two, and once the right front wheel dipped into a pothole full of a dark, thick scum covered by thin green scabbing.
But I could not stop myself from peeking down those distorted lanes even as I raced past them, so that the smooth concrete was perpetually dissolving into crumbling stone and rotting planks, prefabricated warehouses evaporating into peeling Victorian turrets which in turn gave way to crumbling Federal columns then great Georgian structures with their hollow insides open to the sky. The haphazard movement of irregular shadows drew my eye, but I could not focus. My father seemed increasingly agitated and vague: scratching at his great spots, rubbing at his dried-out, torn lips, licking at oddly translucent skin with a ragged edge of tongue too long for his mouth.
Frequently he would dip his narrow fingers into his coat pocket for the jar of ointment the nurse had given him. He’d smear it onto his face until his nose and chin dripped with the heavy, milky goop. But then he couldn’t keep himself out of it, and his tongue would scrape it off his skin as quickly as he applied it.
I had not realized how sick he truly was. Beneath the yellowed skin that covered his cheeks, the bones were warped, distorting even as I watched him. They appeared to be pushing towards the back of his head as if to form supports for gills.
Absent Company Page 24