by Roy Scranton
This light, words careening inside a car. False. Holding two opposed notions, but how? Do I think them differently? What if they’re not thoughts at all, but only afterimages of things that already happened? Rationalization of biorhythm.
She remembered his aggressive, fearful eyes. The twitch in his lip. She pictured him by the side of the road, standing on the shoulder, thumb out, going where? Gone and where? Why? Some kind of ploy? Is he gonna call them up and tell them come get him?
Remy seemed to think it was four-dimensional chess; he refused to believe Jim had gone plumb loco and lit out for the hills, the dark in-between, the tarp under the bridge. But that, Suzie held, was exactly what Jim wanted.
No, in fact, this was not the time for facts. Things happen and they flash across your brain, leaving images that form as words. Words happen, leaving images that flash across your brain, more words.
She was dreaming all of it: A little story about Jack and Jane and Jesse. An epic nightmare fantasy of the Donald and Taylor Swift and Call Me Caitlyn. Where did MS-13 fit in? And Kim Jong-Un? She was dreaming Kokopelli and Bonnie and Clyde. She was dreaming Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate and how they drove all the way out until the cops got them, and why did she do that? How? Gone and where? Dreaming different people, her old agent Anna, her horse-riding friend from Oklahoma named Grace, her mother, America, the children she might have had, the children she’d aborted, Jack and Jane, puppets dancing, playing out scenarios on the inner wall of her mind in shadows cast by the false light of consciousness, because that’s what Suzie does, has always done. She doesn’t take reality as it comes, but pumps it through a machine in her head that spits it out as stories she can control. Stories that make some kind of sense. Stories that hold at a distance the horror of being trapped in a box made of words, nightmare mind—look ma, no hands.
She wishes she could break the machine, stop it from making stories, stop it from always starting over. She wishes she could lie on the floor of the world and stare up at the stars, a word comes in, goes out, gone and where. Nowhere. They, he. When. Float. Stone. Words come in and out, but nothing ties them together, like stars unconstellated, each one shimmering distant, isolate, bright.
Jack and Jane had been driving all night when the bricks fell, cascading, the bricks didn’t fall. Go back and read it again. Skip the next sentence. We are caught in nets of envy. The back seat full of crumpled wax too lazy to throw a gray pill of cigarette ash arcing under the windshield like a ballerina. Wait for it.
Something happens it always does. They watch hotel TV all night. They watch paintings of wildlife: caribou, acrylic. They watch one another, blue light glowed skin, blood seething in static horizontals, eyeball tire tracks. They met the man who wrote the algorithm for the French & Indian War. They met a man who played dead.
They arranged figures on a table reenacting the death of John Henry, still but for the machine. Blades whispering. Gravel crunches underfoot.
Read gravel crunch foot. Underfoot? Read shadows. The ice clatters in the ice machine. The whole system lurches and pixels grind. It’s nice there’s an ice machine. Also a Coke machine and a snack machine with Honey Buns, Twizzlers, and chili cheese Fritos. Everywhere the comforts of home.
How he remembers the gravel underfoot, old Jack, and it brings back the taste of dust and the crisp, smoky dusks of autumn. Fields burning. It brings back and blows down. Water in all its forms, rising. Breathe. Breathe in. I can’t breathe.
Jack and Jane fold like matches struck over the back of the cover and Mom puts the kettle on, Dad plays “Imagine” in loafers, cars everywhere drip light down blackening walls. More water/nets. Nets like highways, like water. They met a man who taught them to code.
The highways are red like we know and. No and. Start over.
Cars everywhere drip light down gray walls, ashen walls, monochrome walls, mercurochrome walls, walls the color of holocaust pictures, faded walls, deliberately distressed walls clawhammered to look older than they are, the light sliding again and again and one more time in schiz, blob, and reel, pooling in a slick on the floor leaking down the street, filling our kitchens with water. The highways are red, are blazing. No. There are no highways only the sea the map.
He erases his name and writes it again. I can’t breathe.
Jane stands over Jack and lays a cold brick on his chest. He looks at her, her fingers still. She pushes down and he breathes in, his ribs lifting, filling his cage with air, and she pushes harder. His heart beats, she can feel it in her fingertips rough with red grit dust. She straddles him and leans, both palms against the stone, until he can’t inhale any farther. He holds his breath, looking into her eyes, as his sight goes dim. He exhales. His chest sinks and with it the brick, in through the skin, blood folding bone around rock.
Outside a horn sounds, inside breathing. The highways are black like a line across the sky. The sea. No zero.
You ask, at a certain point, what it’s all about.
La Iglesia de la Virgen de los Remedios: the white cross in the mountain clearing between pines green and dark.
The crashed car down the road: they ran on the flat as long as they could, till the rim gave out and they ditched. Jane pulled herself from the car, bleeding in the side from where they got her, and started limping, gun heavy in her hand, looking back over her shoulder, sunglasses glinting in the high mountain blaze. They’d stopped the last one, but it was only a matter of time.
Jesse dead in the back. Plugged in the chest and gut, ze didn’t last long. Jack, meanwhile, shirt wrapped around his head to stanch the blood, is mumbling “Jane, Jane” as he pushes open the door and falls, legs collapsing. It’s getting dark now for Jack. The sun doesn’t seem to work like it used to.
“Jane,” he gasps, face in the needles, trying to push himself up with his knees. Gotta give him credit for trying.
Jane legs it up the road, each step a jab in her side. Liver? Uterus? Stomach? Or maybe she’s lucky and the bullet went right through. Either way it’s tearing her insides up and she needs help, she knows that much. Fuck pain.
Up ahead she sees the church and the huge white cross behind it in the clearing, the smaller cross in the gravel. Read gravel crunch foot.
Had to end somewhere. There’s no way this crazy spree could have lasted forever—and did we even really want to make it to Canada? Did we even think we could do that?
She thought back on the ride, the first bold revolt, the thrill when she crossed the threshold and shouted: “This is the resistance.” The excitement she felt the first time she pointed her gun at someone, the shudder of sexual pleasure when it went off, the grace of falling bodies. The beauty of a dead cop.
But everything comes to an end, and that was the point anyway. A new beginning needed an end to start over, burn, burn, never fade away.
She can hear the sirens, cruisers on their way up the dusty track. Only a matter of time.
Her tank top soaked with blood and sweat now, she’d never realized what hard work it was to die. She felt her back pocket for extra mags—three, at nine rounds each, meant twenty-seven plus the five or six in the gun. Against however many cops, pistols, shotguns, Homeland, SWAT, ATF, DEA, and the FBI. You think maybe they brought the National Guard? For little ol’ me?
A puff of dust down the mountain at the turn. She can see only the black MRAP in front, with the water-cannon cupola. Maybe they’ll stop at the car and think that’s it. Except there’s an APB for one man and two women (patriarchal sexist cis-het fucks), armed and dangerous. This was it. This was really it.
She threw herself against the door of the church and slammed it open. Up near the altar a young priest looked at her, his face calm even as she raised her pistol. Sitting before him, her back to the door, a huddled pile of bones and white hair draped in a Yavapai poncho, a woman so old she might have seen Cortez burning his ships.
“Padre,�
�� Jane rasped. “I need a little remedios.”
He looked at her silhouetted against the brightness outside, hearing the sirens down the mountain, eyes on the glint of pistol weaving in the doorway.
“Come in,” he said, patting Quintana Juanita Alonzo Varga y Lopez Pretty-on-Top’s shoulder and leaving her sitting in the pew. “I’ll return, tía,” he whispered to the old woman as he moved toward the door.
Jane stepped in and closed the door behind her and leaned against it. She stood slack for a moment, her gun hand falling to her side and her head drooping, eyes losing focus. She started to slide down the door, then with a grunt and gritted teeth stood and stumbled toward the priest. She growled, pulling herself together, breathing hard through her nose.
He showed her the palms of his hands, trying to calm her. “You’re hurt very bad.” The sirens louder now, nearly on them. “I can help you. Just put down the gun.”
“There any other way out of this place?”
“No, m’hija. You go out the same way you come in. Mira, hija, I can help. Just put down the—”
“Only way you can help me now, Padre, is over my dead body. You and the old woman better find some cover. This is bound to get messy.” Sirens blaring now, scatter of gravel, the sky turned to blood.
“This is a place of God, m’hija,” he said, almost begging.
“It oughta do, then.” She pushed past him and up to the altar, with the Jesus of the Mount on one side and Mary of the Immaculate Heart on the other, and the suffering Christ himself hanging emaciated from his fierce crucifix between. It was a nice stone altar, very old school, almost heathen, and she could bend on one knee behind it and plug away all day as safe as if she was sitting in a bunker. She let herself down slow, her bloody right hand smearing the stone, then took up a supported stance on one knee, eyeing the doorway.
“M’hija, please,” the priest said, “let me help.”
“Might wanna help yourself the fuck outta the way, Padre,” she said, sighting down the barrel.
Just then the door swung open and one cop came in low, another high, armored and helmeted, with carbines. The one going low had enough time to say “There—” before Jane put two in the crotch of the big beefy fucker standing up, just under his vest plate. Then, exhaling slow, she blew out the knee of the crouching one. The door erupted in splinters and fire, and the priest jerked and spun, caught in a swarm of lead.
“You’re surrounded,” came the voice over the bullhorn. “There’s only two ways you come out of there, Suzie, in handcuffs or in a bag. It’s up to you. You come out now with your hands up, we might even get you to a hospital.”
“My name’s not fucking Suzie!” she screamed, then winced at the pain in her side.
“This is your last chance,” the bullhorn barked.
Maybe that’s it, then, a bad end to a bad ride. If there’s no fucking point to anything anyway, you might as well go down blazing.
“Come get some, you Trump-lovin’ bitches,” she shouted, the screen going dark.
Jack stood against the rear fender in the sun staring into the trees going up the hill across the highway, the road still rumbling in his ears despite or maybe because of the silence, this wide spot, this flytrap log cabin advertising home maid lemonaid and fresh appel pie’s.
Hey, she said. Why don’t we call it a day?
Jack made a face.
Serious, Jane said from the back seat, looking at her phone. There’s a creek and a lake and a park. Let’s get a tacky room in a dirty motel where there’s an oil painting of a deer on the wall, buy a couple six-packs, and take the rest of the day off. We’ll go down to the creek and chill.
Two rooms.
You still upset about that?
What do you think?
I think we’re all friends here.
We can make it to the border. Why stop now?
It’s like six hundred miles.
We could be there by midnight. One, two at the latest.
You wanna drive for the next twelve hours? Through these mountains, in the dark? We’re not gonna make it.
Jesse came out of the cabin carrying something small.
Hey kids, ze said, they got a stuffed bear in there. It’s appalling. We should take pictures.
You wanna take the afternoon off? Jane asked.
Jesse opened the packet in hir hand and poured spicy peanuts in hir mouth.
Yeah, sure.
There you go, Gene. Two to one. You are vetoed.
Jack stared at her reflection in the rearview mirror, her bug-eye sunglasses staring back, blank slabs of shade, her phone in her hand, smooth lips slack and unyielding, then twisting and grinning, halfway malicious and halfway entreating, c’mon, don’t be such a Krampus, ain’t no thang. Or that’s what he thought she thought. That’s what he wanted to think she thought, but in fact she is to him a cipher, pure form, her words never connecting to reality the way other people’s did, the way his or Jesse’s did, for example, her actions occurring for motivations impenetrable from this dimension, her whole being shifting as if her mind were controlled by an alien intelligence who learned to be human from reading the backs of cereal boxes. What was she at? How long could this last? What did it really matter, in the end, whether or not they made it to Canada?
Or at least that’s what he thought he thought. Jesse got it all on film. And nothing mattered anyway, not out here in Deadwood, out where it was happening.
Why don’t we just do it in the road?
What?
Trucker sex, Jesse said. I like it.
Although, Jane said ruefully, they’d probably call the sheriff on us.
Let’s go see that bear, said Jack.
Jane unfolded from the car, taking pictures with her phone. Is it a boy bear or a girl bear? she asked.
Your heteronormative gender binaries only serve to substantiate the political ontology of neoliberal patriarchy, Jesse said.
But does it have a dingus? Jane asked.
That’s all you care about, isn’t it?
Real talk, lover, Jane said, taking pictures of Jesse.
It’s a mama bear.
You check?
No dingus.
Not the kind of motel where you get a robe; just pray the towels are clean. Jesse slid Jane’s arm off hir, got up, pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and washed hir face in the sink.
Jesse? Jack said.
Mhmhm?
You all right?
I’m just going for my “Continental breakfast.”
What time is it?
Seven.
Fuck.
Jesse came back and looked sweetly at the two of them lying in bed.
You and Jane want anything?
She’s still sleeping.
Shh, Jane hissed. I’m still sleeping.
That’s all right, Jack said. I’ll be out in a minute. Queen Mab needs her beauty sleep.
Shhhhh, Jane hissed. I’m sleeping.
Jesse nodded and left. Jack watched the door shut behind hir, then stared at the TV’s blank screen, a gray square with white squares reflecting the morning light in through the curtains. He looked over at Jane sleeping beside him, her naked body sprawled under the bunched sheet.
He remembered it was September 11. He remembered it was the Fourth of July. He remembered it was Victory Day in Moscow, and Cinco de Mayo too. He remembered it was his birthday.
Would they have complimentary copies of USA Today in the lobby? He doubted it. Likely only a TV, if that. He imagined the sensual pleasure—if it was pleasure—of a bowl of Sugar Smacks poured from a single-serve box, a cup of whatever it was they’d call coffee, a multicolored pie chart showing the results of a Gallup poll.
Maybe they’d drive through Gallup today. Maybe they’d settle in Gallup.
He ran his hand along the sheet over Jane’s hip and down her thigh, then back along and down the valley. Jane hissed and turned.
I’m sleeping, she said.
Jesse sat in back, aiming the camera at Jane’s head, wisps of hair come unstuck over the auricle’s helix and the vulnerable skin at the nape of her neck.
I hear they’re using napalm in Sinaloa, Jack said.
Jesse watched Jane’s head cock slightly toward Jack, then swing back past its original position to the right, so now the shot’s the whole back of her head.
In the age of the Anthropocene, she read, history and biology seem to converge.
Just like in Vietnam, Jack said.
Jane shook her head, then went on reading. The consequences of rapid—in brackets—microbial—close brackets—reproduction coupled with differences in evolutionary strategy is that the microbial part of us evolves more rapidly than the non-microbial part of us and can respond more quickly to environmental changes. That a part of us might be capable of coping with more acidic water, wilder weather, and higher temperatures than other parts of us produces a strikingly different version of what might be endangered. Understood in this way, quote—the body multiple—close quotes—is not an italicized entity to be protected but an italicized system, an interactive process of life and death combined.
Jane read on: The soup of synthetic chemicals in which we now live puts human masculinity—I like that, she interjected, quote human masculinity unquote—at risk and affects reproduction in wildlife worldwide. Just to take a few of the most startling examples provided by Nancy Langston, quote Male alligators exposed to DDT in Florida’s Lake Apopka developed penises that were one-half to one-third the typical size, too small to function, ellipses. Prothonotary warblers in Alabama, sea turtles in Georgia, and mink and otters from around the Great Lakes all showed reproductive changes. Male porpoises did not have enough testosterone to reproduce, while polar bears on the Arctic island of Svalbard developed intersex characteristics. End quote. Surveys of many British streams discovered that quote more than thirty percent of the fish ellipses are now intersex. End quote.