by Peter Straub
He held both hands palm-out in a placating gesture. “I’m not saying a word, if that makes you happy.”
Inside the backpack they found two malt-flavored energy bars, two pint bottles of water, two tins of Vienna sausage, and two bags of salty chips, and everything was nearly too hot to touch.
“That’s just plain scary,” said Vira, examining the rucksack. “It is like mine.”
“Oh, shit,” said Donny. “Maybe we’ve done this already.”
Vira caught herself short of showing Donny a little mercy. “Here we go,” she said in a vast sigh, hotly expelling air she couldn’t afford to lose.
“We’re trapped inside of some kind of Möbius strip, endlessly repeating our previous actions. Has to be. Look at the backpack. It doesn’t look like Vira’s—it is Vira’s. From the last time we were here. And we don’t remember because whatever purpose is behind all this hasn’t been achieved. Whatever happened, last time, we blew it. And if we blow it again, we’ll find another backpack just like this one.”
“Do you want a third of this or do you want to continue the lecture?” Zach had drawn his Swiss Army knife to divide one of the energy bars, but the protein goo was already so warm it practically poured apart.
“No, look at it.” Donny was flushed with fear and anger now. “Two of everything. Only two. Why only two? Who’s the odd guy out, here? Me. What the fuck happens to me?!”
“Shut up, Donny!” said Vira. “Look at the damned thing—it doesn’t have my wallet, my I.D., my hairbrush, tampons, or any of the other stuff in my backpack. It’s a fucking coincidence!”
“No. Something happens. Something changes. One of us gets gone.”
“Donny, you’re gonna pop a blood vessel, man.” Zach cracked one of the tins and took a ginger sip of the water packing the mini-wieners.
“And I’m not hungry,” Donny continued. “I see that stuff, food, and I should be starving, but I’m not. We walked all day yesterday and all today and we should be ready to hog a whole buffet…but all I feel is that edge of hunger, of thirst. Just enough to keep me crazy.”
“I wholeheartedly agree about the ‘crazy’ part,” said Vira.
“Eat anyway,” said Zach. “Save your energy for your next explanation of what the hell has happened to us.”
“Yeah, we’ll be laughing about this tomorrow,” said Vira, methodically swallowing capfuls from the sports bottle of water, knowing enough not to chug, not to waste, to take it extraordinarily slow and easy.
“Anybody care for an alternate point of view?” said Zach, relishing the salt in the chips even though they made him thirsty. “The backpack is a marker. Someone else has made this trip. And they left this stuff behind because they got out, got rescued, or didn’t need it anymore.”
“Yeah, maybe because they died.” Donny was still sour, and not meeting their eyes. Privately he thought Zach’s proposal was too upbeat to be real, and was full of holes besides. Maybe he was just playing optimist to cheer Vira up. In a book or a TV show or a movie, it just would not track because it begged too much backstory.
“If somebody just dropped this and died, we’d’ve seen a body,” said Vira. She was always on Zach’s side.
“Not if the sand blew over it,” said Donny.
“Jesus fuck, there’s just no winning with you,” she said. “You just have to be right all the time.”
That caused more long minutes to elapse in silence as they picked through their paltry booty. Donny looked out, away…anywhere but at his two increasingly annoying friends. Vira and Zach huddled, murmuring things he could not overhear, and neither of them acknowledged his presence until he jerked them back to the real world.
“Look at that,” he said.
“What?” Zach rose to squint downroad.
Donny pointed. “I think I see something. That way.”
“Then it’s time to burn a little energy, I guess. We get lucky, we can leave the backpack in the sand for the next sucker. Sweetie?”
Vira dusted her jeans and stood up. “Yeah. Ten-hut, let’s march.” She tried to think of a sarcasm about the Yellow Brick Road and Dorothy, or the Wild Bunch, minus one, but it was just too goddamned hot.
Donny led them, appearing to scent-track. Normally he liked to walk two paces behind Zach and Vira, because he enjoyed watching Vira’s ass move. Perhaps if he walked with his partners to the rear, they would just disappear at some point. Plucked away. It could happen. It happened in stories, in movies.
They walked toward it, but it turned out to be nothing.
They had wasted most of the second day waiting around the car under the arc of the sun. Waiting for rescue. Waiting for answers, for trespassers, for anything outside themselves. That was when Donny had begun ticking off his handy theories.
“Okay, we’re all drunk,” he said, knowing they weren’t. “We’re stoned. This is really a dream. See the car? We actually crashed it and we’re all dead, and this is Hell or something. Purgatory. Limbo.”
“I love that concept,” said Zach. “Hell-or-something.”
“Water jug’s empty,” said Vira. They’d stashed a gallon container in the backseat prior to departing on their road trip. One day of busy hydration had killed it. Her careful makeup had smudged, melted, run down her face, and evaporated.
Zach tied a T-shirt around his head to save his scalp from getting fried. “We just sit tight and try not to perspire,” he joked. “Someone’ll come along. We came along.”
“Las Vegas used to be the greatest psychological temptation in the country,” said Donny. “Going there to gamble was an act of will, requiring a pilgrim to penetrate a sterile cordon of desert. You can’t go to Vegas accidentally; you have to make the decision and then travel across a wasteland to get there. It’s not like you’re at a mall and think, oh, I’ll do a little gambling while I’m here, too. And once you do the forced march, you’re there and there’s only one thing to do, really—what you came for. That’s more strategically subtle than most ordinary people can handle. Nobody thinks about that.”
“And your point,” said Vira, “is…what?”
“Just that it’s interesting, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s fucking hot and I wish I wasn’t here.” She fanned herself and Donny won an unexpected flash of sweat-beaded nipple, perfect as a liquor ad.
“We can’t drink the water out of the radiator,” said Zach, returning from beneath the hood and wiping oil from his hands.
“Why are you even thinking like that?” said Vira. “We’re not stranded. We’re on a main highway, even if it is in the middle of buttfuck-nowhere. Some hillbilly in a pickup truck will come along. What about all the other people driving to Vegas? We didn’t just wander off the map, or get lost on some country switchback. We’re not going to have to wait here long enough to think about drinking the water from the radiator, or eating the goddamn car.”
“Guy did that in New Hampshire,” said Donny. “Cut a Chevy up into little cubes and ate it. Ingested it, passed it. Guy ate a car.”
“Shut up, Donny!” Vira had been making a point, and resented derailment at the mercy of Donny’s internal almanac. Donny was chock-full of trivia like this. He thought he was urbane. He was passably-interesting at parties and good for scut errands since he always volunteered. Now Vira guessed that Donny’s canine openness and availability was just a cruel trick, a dodge intended to keep him around people who could at least pretend to be interested in all the useless shit that spilled from his mouth.
Ever the mediator, Zach tried to defuse her. “What are you getting at, Vira?”
“You guys talk as if we just drove off the edge of the Earth or something. The car just stopped, period. We’re not going to have to dig a goddamn well to find drinking water because the car just stopped, and it just stopped a couple of hours ago, and other people will come along, and we’ll be inconvenienced and probably have to rent another car, or stay overnight in some shithole like Barstow, but it’s an inconvenienc
e, and Donny is running his face-hole like we’ve been abducted to another planet.”
“I’m not saying anything,” said Donny. “But have you seen any more cars, for, what, five-six hours we’ve been here?”
“Children, children,” said Zach. “Stop fighting or I’ll turn this car right around.” That made Vira laugh. If only. Then Zach ambled toward the sprawl of flat-paddle cactus they’d pressed into service as a restroom privacy shield.
“Maybe you should piss in the empty water jug,” said Donny. “We might have to boil our own urine and drink it.”
“I’d rather die,” said Vira. “Hey, there’s an idea—we can kill you and eat you for the moisture in your body, if you don’t shut up.”
When Zach had buttoned up and returned, he had resumed his air of command and decision. “So I guess it’s down to this: Do we stay, or do we start walking?”
“Stay,” said Vira. “At least we’ve got the car for shade. Who knows how cold it gets at night? This is the desert, after all, and we didn’t bring a lot of blankets.”
“We march,” said Donny. “Vegas could be just over the next rise and we’ve been sitting here all day like the victims of some cosmic joke.”
“Sun’s going down,” said Zach. “I’m inclined to spend the night walking. We’ve got two flashlights, matches, a melted candy bar, and half a bottle of flat soda I found under the passenger seat. We take extra clothes to cover our skin in case we get stuck another day. And we stay on the road, in case somebody comes along—that’ll do us as much good as sticking by the car, hoping someone spots it.”
“It also wears us out faster,” said Vira. “I’m not built for this nature shit. Nature is what you go through to get from the limo to the hotel lobby.”
“Come on, Vira,” Donny said. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“The only adventure I want to have right now is in a Jacuzzi, with room service.”
“Ahh,” said Donny. “Cable porn and pizza and cold, cold beer.”
“Three A.M. blackjack action and free cocktails,” said Zach. “Hot showers and cool sheets. Jesus, I have to stop; I’m getting a hard-on.”
“Yeah, Donny, you start walking and Zach and I will stay here and try to conserve moisture.” Vira smiled wickedly. At least they were bantering now, grabbing back toward something normal. But she collected her backpack from the seat, as though resigned to a hike, hoping it would turn out to be brief but worthwhile.
They walked away the hours absorbed by dusk, until the sun was gone. The road stayed flat and straight except for regular hummocks that kept the distance maddeningly out of view, diffused in heat shimmer. At the crest of each rise waited another long stretch of road, and another rise in the distance.
“Human walking speed is four to six miles per hour at a brisk and steady pace,” said Donny. His voice tended to lapse into a statistical drone. “Figure half that, the way we’re clumping along.”
“Conserving moisture,” Vira reminded him.
“The arc of the sun says we’ve been doing this for about four hours. That would put us between twelve and fifteen miles from the car. And I still don’t see anything.”
“That’s because it’s dark,” said Zach. He knew what Donny was intimating. At night you could see the glow of Vegas against the sky from a hundred miles out. There was no glow.
“Yeah, and if it’s dark for eight hours, say, and the sun comes up over there, we’ve got another twenty-odd miles.”
“I am not walking twenty miles,” said Vira. “I’ve got to sit down and cool off.”
“Good idea,” said Zach. “When it gets cold, we can walk to stay warm.”
Vira flumped heavily down in the sand, trying to kink out her legs. “You guys notice something else?”
They both looked at her, wrestling off her athletic shoes.
“All the time we’ve been walking and walking? Since we started there hasn’t been a single highway sign.”
The trip had been Vira’s idea, another of her just-jump-in-the-car-and-go notions. Spontaneity permitted her the pretense of no encumbrances or responsibilities, which in turn allowed her the fantasy that she was still under thirty, still abrim with potential with no room for regret.
Zach grumpily acceded, mostly because he liked to gamble. A two-day pass to Vegas would allow him to flush his brain and sort out his life, which was in danger of becoming stale from too much easy despair, the snake of self-deconstruction gobbling its own tail.
Taking off on an adventure gave them the illusion of control over their lives. They weren’t dead yet, nor off the map. Most of their friends, however, begged off with the usual smorgasbord of excuses—jobs, babies, commitments, obligations, all couched in placating language that broadcast its intention not to offend. It was a good method of sifting one’s so-called allies: Hit them with a wild-card proposition and see who bites.
“What about Donny?” said Vira.
“He’ll be farting around his apartment, waiting for his phone to ring,” said Zach. “He can spell the driving, and you know he’ll volunteer half the gas, just to get out and see different scenery.”
“Remind me why he’s our friend?” Vira was nude, mistrusting her vanity mirror, working search-and-destroy on perceived flaws. No tan lines. They had a variety of acquaintances, each good for one isolated conversational topic, to be accessed as needed. Donny’s status held at mid-list.
Zach shook his head, feeling superior to the shortcomings of his friends. None of them were about to get laid right now. “Because we both know that Donny doesn’t really have anybody else. He’s our holiday orphan, our warm body. Spear carrier. Cannon fodder. Come on, he’s not so bad. We get stranded in the desert, we can stand back-to-back and defend your honor.”
She had turned sidesaddle in the chair before the vanity, and gathered his tumescing cock into her grasp to speak to it. “Are you suggesting the Sandwich of Love? Hm? One below and one above? You’re the buns and I’m the meat?”
“No,” he said between clenched teeth, sucking a breath, coming up rock-hard.
“Good.” She stroked the beast in her hand. “Donny’s not my type, anyway.”
He showed up so fast that Zach and Vira barely had time to jump out of the shower, the aura of sex still clinging to them. Vira just made it into abbreviated cutoffs and a knotted top while Zach struggled wet legs into unyielding jeans. Vira felt Donny’s eyes take inventory, up-down, from her still-damp cascade of black hair, the full length of both slender legs, to her big feet. Her breasts were nicely scooped, with hard nubs declaring themselves too prominently as they blotted through the sheer material of her top. She caught Donny cutting his gaze away when she looked up. Not her type.
Donny was well-groomed but brittle, as though his look had been not so much preserved as shellacked. He had always lived moment-to-moment, hand to mouth, check to check; not so charming, when one began to add on years without progress. He had duly logged his time as a depressed philosopher, overstaying college, scooping up handy opportunities, staying slightly out of step but thereby remaining available for any lark or diversion.
Zach emerged from the bedroom, toweling his hair and pretending like he hadn’t just had sex. He was at least ten years older than Vira; what the hell was that about, wondered Donny. What really worried him was that he might be no further along than Zach, given another decade. A better apartment, a cleaner car, steady sex, and…what else? Zach had two degrees and worked for an airline company doing god knew what. He had Vira. He seemed to understand how the world worked, as though he could perceive things just out of reach by Donny’s sensory apparatus. But was that progress? Donny always teased himself with the possibilities, should he finally catch up to his paternal pal; pass him, maybe. All Donny needed was the right opportunity. He had spent his entire life training to be ready when it knocked.
Their friendship was convenient, if nothing else.
“Okay, now we’re far enough gone that you have to catch me up on
the important stuff,” bellowed Zach from the pilot bucket of his muscle car. Air, industrial-dryer hot, blasted through the open cabin and tried to sterilize them. “No chitchat. The good stuff. Like, are you seeing anybody?”
“Nope.” Donny tried to make it sound offhand, like not today, but it came out like not ever, and you know it.
Vira craned around, one arm over the seat, mischief in her eyes. “Don’t even try to convince me that nobody’s looking.”
“I’m just not in a big hurry, that’s all,” Donny said from the backseat.
He watched the knowing glance flicker between his two amigos. Zach had laid out the argument many times before, convinced that Donny set girlfriend standards so high that any candidate was already sabotaged. Donny would counter that his last serious relationship had wrecked him. Then Vira would swoop in a flanking maneuver, accusing him of inventing the former mystery girlfriend (whom Zach and Vira had neither seen nor met) in order to simplify his existence by virtue of a romantic catastrophe. Donny’s perfect love was so perfect she could not be real, Vira would say. Or: so perfect that she would never have had anything to do with him in the first place. It was nothing aberrant; lots of people lived their lives exactly this way.
Zach and Vira would claim they just wanted to see their friend happy. Happier.
Donny deflected the whole topic, thinking himself humble and respectful, a gentleman. In his mind, he dared them to feel sorry for him.
They chugged supercaffeinated soda and ate up miles and listened to music. They were alone on the road when Zach smelled the gaskets burning.
None of them knew how much they would miss the car, how much they would long for it, days later.
“We have to do something unpredictable,” said Donny.
“Is this another theory?” Vira was in no mood.
The day was shading into night. They had been walking at least a week, by rough estimate and a sunrise-sunset count.