The Glow

by Dan Bryan

Chapter 4

  The road did not open up, really open up that is, until they were halfway to Rockford. Getting out of the city was an interminable mess of traffic lights, clogged freeways, and exhaust fumes. Carson was driving and he started to rant about a theory he had that the ideal population for the world was about 150,000 people.

  "And brilliant ones too."

  "That rules you out." Olivia said.

  "That's right. I'm only one of the ten million smartest people in the world. But there's no sense in getting worked up about that."

  Carson's mood improved immensely as the pace of their car increased. He eventually smiled enough that it was safe to suppose that he loved all people again, and not just the fortunate 150,000.

  Alessandro sat in the middle of the back seat, wedged between Quentin to the left, and Olivia to the right. Within ten minutes of their leaving Alessandro had passed out in that spot and he had not stirred for the entire first two hours of the trip.

  Olivia gazed serenely at the fields and the sycamore trees. Her elbow rested on the open window and her face rested delicately on her palm. But for his utter lack of talent at the artistic game, Quentin would have tried to sketch her face as her eyes wandered to the far edge of the unplanted fields. She seemed to be striking out somewhere for not the first time ever.

  "How are the space cakes working?" she said, turning to Quentin.

  "They're just fine. Have you ever driven between Washington and the east before?"

  "No."

  "It's so far. It's like we're a band of medieval knights, you know? And here we've made it barely to the edge of our own shire, and we're about to plunge into the dark unknown."

  "I can see that. And people can jump out of the woods and disembowel us at any moment for being the wrong kind of people."

  "They'll try to slit out throats for being Vikings, but rest assured they'll be annihilated!" Kjell wailed.

  "It's totally exciting." Olivia said.

  "My dream in life is to produce and direct a movie about the First Crusade. America has forgotten." Kjell continued.

  "Yes but the political implications. You could never walk down the street again without fear of assassination." Carson said.

  "Oh I'd have bodyguards and body doubles. My goal in the movie would be to show the deaths of as many Muslims as humanly possible on a cinema screen. I would be a billionaire!"

  "Kjell Karlsen, don't be naive. You'd have to hide for your life in a cave on Tristan da Cunha if you made that movie."

  Alessandro continued to sleep in the middle of the back seat, oblivious to the rest of them.

  "Sometimes, I think I just want a normal life." Olivia sighed, asking Quentin. "How do you listen to this all day?"

  "I don't listen to this." Quentin said. "Kjell and Carson trigger each other I think. Their insanity is mutually reinforcing. Usually in the evening Kjell just sits around in his underwear and types around on gay chat rooms and stuff like that."

  "Whatever. Look, we have the next ten hours to sit in the backseat here, and you're so fucking quiet that we should just find something to talk about. I want to you to eat this space cake, smoke a Newport if you want, then lean back and tell me your entire life story. I want to hear what the hell happened in your life, and then later on when you finish I'll tell you my sad tale of normality."

  "Ok." Quentin said.

  "Like what the hell was Kjell talking about when he said that you jumped off of a cliff?"

  "That was on a dare. So there's this place in Virginia with a lake and an eighty foot cliff, and it's a straight drop. On our football team it was kind of a rite of passage to jump into it. It hurts so fucking bad when you hit the water from that high. Apparently there was this kid who landed on his back once because he was an idiot."

  That was how it started. The white lines of the pavement hurtled beneath their car, the flat fields gave way to rocky hills and the lakes of Wisconsin, they passed from one side of Madison to the other, and Quentin reminisced on the substance of his twenty-one year old life.

  When he was a little kid, before he even went to school, his family lived in a one-story house in the woods. His first memories were of them playing with sparklers on the Fourth of July and going to the swimming pool. When he was in second grade they moved to a bigger house in a "nicer" neighborhood. They told him his father had won a big trial. Quentin secretly liked the house with the woods better.

  He had a little sister. Abigail was her name. They weren't sworn enemies, but they never really got along. Quentin would try to play with her sometimes when she was a kid and she would invariably get mad at him for something trivial. Nothing much changed as she got older. She was what their grandma called persnickety (she only used the term when Quentin's sister was out of the room).

  The most disgusting moment of his entire childhood came when a kid named Dalton threw up down his back in first grade. Both of them went home that day. The next time their seating assignments were rearranged, Dalton was placed in the front row.

  Every summer when he was a teenager there was football practice. When two-a-days came around he would have to show up at the field by seven in the morning. Then in the afternoon it would be ninety-five degrees and humid. So it went, day after day, their coach forever apoplectic.

  The last year of high school, after their great playoff defeat, he decided not to play again. This made him a great enigma around his school, and even around town to some extent. But that summer, during the afternoons when it was burning hot and he knew that his friends were getting screamed at by a disjointed lunatic, he was driving his jeep to the beach or through the mountains, often with his girlfriend at the time, and he had no regrets.

  He'd always gotten good grades and had his mind on many things. His father told him to go to the best school he could get into. To seize the American dream. To be a lawyer or an engineer or a scientist and to live the good life. That was how he'd left Virginia.

  Over Christmas break in 2003, just a few months in the past, he found out that his high school girlfriend was both married and pregnant. She was barely twenty-one. There was shock that came with hearing it. How serious some people got so much earlier than other people, he ruminated.

  "Tell me about it. I'm twenty-four years old and I just graduated from college two months ago. And I've never been in a serious relationship." Olivia said.

  "I thought you had a boyfriend in high school. You said so the other night."

  "That wasn't serious."

  "In that case, you've basically heard my entire life story. Did I miss anything?"

  "I don't fucking know. It's your life." Olivia laughed.

  "This is true."

  "I want to get some fucking cheese and get drunk, you know? That was awesome and beautiful though. Thanks a lot for sharing Quentin."

  "Sure thing."

  "Carson, when the fuck are we stopping? We've been driving for like six fucking hours and I'm about to piss all over the place."

  "... and that is why Mercer Island will always be the most boring island that an island can possibly be. Nothing like Bainbridge and certainly nothing like Ibiza. And as to Olivia's question, I think we should pull off immediately, at the next exit, and get organized for the next leg of our journey. Are there any objections?"

  No one said anything. Within a couple of minutes there was a place to leave the freeway and Carson took advantage. The sun was just beginning to touch the top of the trees on the horizon.

  "So when do I hear about your life?" Quentin asked Olivia.

  "Tomorrow I'll tell you all about it. I might take hours."

  "We've got time." Quentin said. Olivia nodded and at just that moment the car stopped in the parking lot of a gas station.

  "Sir Quentin, do you have your act together?"

  "How long do I have to drive?"

  "I would say until around three in the morning. This will help you." Carson said, pulling out a plastic bag from the glove compartment.

  "Is that wh
at you've been having?"

  "All the time, my friend. For best results, wash them down with a venti-sized cup of coffee."

  The plastic bag was full of tiny white pills. Quentin grabbed one of them and chugged it down in the parking lot with a Red Bull. At the same time, Olivia emerged from the travel center with an armful of cheese and a bottle of cheap red wine.

  "Keep your eye out for deer. I like Volvos as much as the next guy, but Escalades are far superior for hitting things on the freeway. The hood on this particular vehicle will crumple up and squash you like a rat if you hit a big animal at full speed. Also, this is a once in a lifetime trip. Relax and enjoy yourself."

  With those words Carson stepped into the car and collapsed in a heap against the backseat window. Kjell remained in the front seat through his own adamant insistence, and Alessandro was roused for a brief time to roll the rest of them a joint.

  Quentin started driving down the dark freeway. Every stripe in the center of the road was an individual entity. He could almost see the separate pebbles mixed into the asphalt. In front of him in the distance there were sets of tiny red lights -- spread out widely but still present. And wherever they passed groves and woods his eyes darted to the side of the highway in search of the reflective doe eyes that would anticipate a potential collision. He looked very carefully for these things, but the act of looking for these things was not strenuous. In fact, Quentin's focus was at such a high level that he could lean back in his seat, relax, and still concentrate in a way that felt purely foreign to his actual nature.

  "We've listened to Death Cab, we've listened to Modest Mouse. We should listen to the Microphones. It's like the whole Washington thing." Olivia said.

  "I thought that Jimi Hendrix came from Seattle." Alessandro said.

  "Yes, but Quentin is trying to expand his horizons. I'm sure he's listened to Mr. Hendrix before, is that right?"

  "He can't even hear you right now. He's in the zone." Alessandro replied.

  It wasn't so much that Quentin couldn't hear what was being said. It was just that he was so intently focused on the world at large that he couldn't split the inner world apart to muster a response to the conversation within the car. The music sprawled and swirled through the contours of the car with jagged abrasiveness. It had a near hypnotic essence to its instrumental overlays. Just like every grain of dirt gleamed on the freeway, so too did every track seem like a discordant universe.

  "It so dark now. Can you imagine wandering across that field?" Olivia asked.

  "This promises to be a most interesting view of America for myself. I should be taking notes on everything like your modern Marco Polo." Alessandro began. "What mystical customs do the farmers and preachers of Minnesota practice? How regal do a thousand bison look on the rolling plains at dawn?"

  "Yes but haven't you been to the Alps? Is that not the height of beauty? " Olivia asked him.

  "I've skied in Switzerland. I've seen Shevchenko at San Siro with my own two eyes. I've ambled down the Riviera in every feasible direction. The utmost concern at present is the open prairie and the buffalo."

  "Well, if that's your utmost concern, we have a long way to go. Quentin, how far is it to Minneapolis?"

  Quentin still did not answer anything.

  "Jesus fucking Christ. The point is, we're not even to Minneapolis, so you don't have to worry yet."

  "I wanna see buffalo! Can't you understand?"

  "I know baby. We all do."

  With this, Alessandro moaned and wailed in theatrically overwrought fashion. Five minutes later he seemed to be asleep again.

  "Holy fuck. How much does this guy sleep?" Olivia asked.

  Quentin drove on.

  "Quentin Ross. If you don't answer me in ten seconds I'm gonna choke you."

  "Alessandro? I think he sleeps all the time." Quentin said.

  "I mean, like he's been awake for like two out of the last ten hours, right? And that's after sleeping last night."

  "It's hard when you're a celebrity."

  "What does that even mean?"

  "I have no idea. Must look at road."

  An hour later the lights, the bridge, and the wide expanse of the Mississippi pitch black beneath them. Olivia was silent. One CD was replaced with another. Always she whispered the name of the album, and always Quentin forgot within the first song. Everyone was asleep. Saturday night at the bustling edge of nothingness. They had barely started and the next big city to the west was Seattle itself, which they might never get to.

  It was a decent while before anyone else spoke. Quentin was forcing himself to keep his eyes open. It was the middle of the night. The road was empty but for the long-haul truckers, spread out widely and lumbering at their own slow pace.

  Carson sat up in the back and immediately asked, "Where are we now?"

  "Almost into South Dakota I think."

  "No shit. Hey, I can drive again. You should get some sleep. Are you wired?"

  "I was pretty fucking wired about two hours ago. It's getting normal."

  "Do you take Ambien? There should be some in Olivia's purse."

  "No thanks." Quentin said.

  They got out of the car to change places at a desolate gas station, stretching quickly under blaring flood lights. When they drove again, Quentin was in the back, between the window and Olivia. She slumped over into Quentin's shoulder, her feet stretched out and intertwined with Alessandro's. Her chest rose and fell at soothing intervals. Quentin didn't have the heart to push her off of him.

  He could barely sleep at all that night. The whole arrangement was very uncomfortable and his thoughts were racing too much to begin with. He would almost fall asleep, for what maybe felt like twenty minutes, and then he would jerk back into lucidity. Carson and Kjell were up front talking like old brothers. He caught fragments of stories about the times they had to go to Sunday school, about the trouble Carson got into when he was in high school, and so on. Then he'd drift away again, but not for long.

  Eventually he got so sleepy that he started seeing things. Maybe the monks who'd felt nirvana saw their future of eternality, and the knowledge of its harmless, peaceful nature made them lack for nothing in the world again, knowing all of it would soon be over. At the same time, images from dreams would flash across his eyes while they were still cracked open, wakefulness and sleep combining in a hazy, terrible mishmash. It was very, very late into the night before he found a pure, dark restfulness.