#19: Back through Darkness
"The wind moved on, and the dust died again. It was always dust, no matter how much it danced."
(Last time, the guys found Allegria ruined. They decided to head home.)
We drove. The hours—long, flat, blank—uncoiled around us. We had grasped the fine glass globe of hope and desire too firmly. Shattering at the touch, it brought forth blossoms of blood as it sliced open the hand with surgical precision. A sting remained as the reminder of promised joy.
Time or care or use or whatever had exhausted the air conditioner, so no more soothing breezes poured from the vents—just warm sighs. The heat weighed like an anvil on every pore. When the windows came down, air thundered in and rendered any attempt to talk a nuisance; when they were up, the stagnant swamp-heat made talking an impossible exertion. No more mixtapes, now. That music was exhausted. The radio spun through various stations, from rock to rap to oldies to pop to country to talk to static. Sometimes, we just rode completely quiet, sweltering in our seats.
As the heat bored into my brain, I gazed again out the window. This time, no smiling face appeared. Nothing alleviated the tedium of the rolling road. It was a chain of signs and rest stops, cars and clouds.
And we drove.
No wonders hid on the roadside. No surprises or wrong turns greeted us with seeming delights. Songless, the road wound on—a black band of gray across the nation.
The wind raised the dust. Having the appearance of life, it whisked down the road in cataracts. But the wind moved on, and the dust died again. It was always dust, no matter how much it danced.
Passing
Days stretch into days, the sun rising, the sun falling, the numbing exchange of sameness. Hours pass—sometimes slipping through the fingers, sometimes with the tedious sadism of geological progress. And we sit, and our minds drift within vacant shells, our spirits soured by the siren song of the almost. Everything passes. Even our better moments. Maybe even our hopes. Maybe we’re only left with that image of a passing girl in a car, a smile we can’t quite see, as we suck on dust’s grainy sustenance.
We descended from the cut heights. My ears burst with a swallow at the changing pressure. A cotton-tipped vise tightened on my jaw and ears.
We drove the highway teeming with cars and sixteen-wheelers and motorcycles. The rush of traffic crashed like waves of static. The Road Warrior’s motor hummed like a swarm of drones. The heat rose through the engine. Ralph squirmed. Danny had closed his eyes and leaned his neck over the back of his seat. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple seemed to struggle with the weight of the heavy air.
A few times, for something to do, we’d pull over somewhere. My friends would get out and walk numbly around the wagon—a few rotations of the glum-go-round. I’d sit slumped in my seat.
Once, I did leave the car. The manacles of my stiff muscles caused me to hobble. Ralph pointed at me and said, “Look, a scarecrow.” My chest stuffed with brittle shreds, I smirked at him.
When we started driving again, the scarecrow was behind the wheel. The sun fell. The blue darkness swept down, and the car lights grew blaring. The night brought a teasing hint of respite from the day’s heat, a few degrees of relief—like licking the bottom of a rock for some Saran-wrap skim of water.
I drove as the darkness deepened. There was no thrill in the miles, which were mere ticks of the odometer. The numbers rolled around in the dim neon light of the dashboard’s instruments, the zero sweeping around at every mile.
I drove past cities. The lit windows looked like faded stars. A few black towers rose, bound with ropes of yellowed novas. I drove, and the novas tumbled down like jacks on the ground.
That string of ticks drained the car. I pulled into a gas station. I slouched over to the attendant’s hutch, slapped down some cash, and went to fill the car. Bugs swarmed over the lights above the gas pump. I watched their frantic circulations, their vain endeavors against the indifferent plastic. I swallowed. The pump clicked in my hand—dead. My fingers closed with a lurch.
The traffic thinned with the thickening night. Every mile seemed one closer to loneliness. Soon, we drove alone for miles, two headlights against the black road, with the occasional big rig or other lonely rider gliding by in the night. The great trucks’ rumbles could be felt in the still air, and the lights grew blinding in the dark solitude. They filled the rear-view mirror and drowned my eye in a flood of photons. Against the warped glass of the windshield, the white lights blurred and splintered; the lines of light stretched out like fractures in the eye.
I drove alone and heard the slumber-soaked breaths of the three around me. Pat’s crumpled snores sounded like choking gurgles. A funnel of tension pressed down from the sides of my skull to my eyes. Weariness yanked at the optic nerve behind my eye.
Perching my foot on the pedal, my ankle tingled. The tendons by my knee stood out in a dull ache in the darkness. I felt the steering wheel in my hands. Its curves were hard; they were something to hold. The wheels spun black through the black miles. The top of my skull clamped down on my brain, which, sluggish, seemed to rise.
By two in the morning, I decided to get some rest for the next day. I pulled off at an exit and drove down the dark road to the empty parking lot of a strip mall, finding a space near some bushes and away from the few streetlights.
It was a hot, sticky night. I didn’t want to choke on a swarm of bugs, so I kept the windows closed. Every breath made the already close air a little tighter. I couldn’t lean my seat back. Danny’s legs were already jumbled up behind me, and leaning back even a few degrees would have bumped into his knees. I couldn’t move my legs much without banging the unyielding edge of the steering wheel. The heavy air pushed my face, my whole body, back into the seat.
I drifted in and out of sleep. My dreams were like a boat skimming the water; impressions of the waking world and those of dreams mixed together with little cognitive bounces. A shadowy hand seemed to push the back of my head down—deeper into the darkness, kneading at the back of my neck—but the flesh, the sinews, the wasted joints, resisted. I couldn’t keep straight where I was sitting or where in my dreams I waited to fall asleep. I didn’t know what box I was locked in or why, when I turned, something kept me back and bound me across the chest. My face drifted forward and landed against the rim of the steering wheel. I leaned against the locked door and waited for the dawn.
Travel Journal Entry #8
Things never work out quite the way you expect. It’s our last night on the road before L, S, and I have to get back to MA. (You like that—on the road, like I’m a real pro…) We played in Kristy’s hometown. There must be NOTHING to do out here, because we got a good turnout. Who would have ever thought that we’d need to set up more metal folding chairs in a rec center in upstate New York?
Even though we’re going to play a lot more together, it was kinda sad for this tour to end. No, I’m not going to get all weepy and sentimental—leave that to Lana!
But so much has happened on this trip. And all the ups and downs made it something important.
“It’s about moving on.” That’s what Clara told me when I was struggling with a movement from this Bartok sonata. The “Melodia” was just killing my fingers. She said I needed to move on to other parts of the sonata—to not let myself be stuck in one place.
And here’s the weirdest thing: I did move on, but, when I got back to that movement, suddenly it all made sense. I could keep up with it now.
Like I said, things never work out how you expect. Just like I never expected that journaling could become a habit again.