by Mykle Hansen
We get back in the car. Bob says nothing for a moment, then puts it in Reverse, then checks his left-side mirror and sees that it’s maladjusted. He tries to aim it with the servo joystick mirror aimer thing but it’s not responding. He curses. He rests his lower lip on the steering wheel and squints.
Bob switches out of Reverse and into Low, leans on the horn and rages full-ahead. We gain speed quickly and cross the first row of spikes doing almost forty. The car bounces, and we cross the second row, still gaining speed, and the car jumps, there’s a double-popping sound and it kneels, and then the third and fourth bumps we almost feel through the positraction independent suspension and self-compensating hydraulic shocks. The fifth row is softer, the hiss of air escaping from little holes grows louder and the rumble of the air compressor shifts up in pitch as it struggles to reinflate the tires. But it’s not working so well, and when we cross the sixth row the car kneels again, and on the seventh row it kneels some more, we’re no longer accelerating, reflected in the passenger-side mirror I see shredded pieces of former tire flying out behind us, looking limp and defeated and German, we’re losing our momentum, rolling on the rims, and the rims are scraping on the rocks and knives as we cross the eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh rows on pure momentum, slowing down, unable to get any purchase, sparks and rocks spitting from below us, and Bob stops and starts, stops and starts, rocking the car forward like you would rock some cheap two-wheel drive car stuck in a mudhole, we scramble over the twelfth barrier this way, ride up against the thirteenth ... scrape against it with the front wheels, which Bob twists to the left and right (effortlessly, due to the power-assisted steering) ... and just when all seems lost, something hooks to one of the wheels and we are launched powerfully forward, across the last row of tire-eating blades, and up along the flattening incline we scramble, and around the last corner, and there, at the other side of a clearing, is the edge of the volcano.
Bob gets out. I get out. It’s silent, the sky is now a dingy red, there’s no sensation of heat or cold, only space and silence. The volcano makes a low quiet sound like an immense old lung slowly inhaling. Bob pulls his HandiCam out of the trunk, points it at me and says “All right, we made it! Let’s say Hi to the folks back home!”
Trans-Continental Fiber Tunnel
Installation Notification Notice
US West Communications Customer:
Martha Q. Customer
1887 Solemn Upswing Grade
Portland, OR 97221
September 9, 1999
Dear Customer Customer:
In order to serve you better, US West is undertaking an exciting new expansion of our service offerings. One important aspect of this expansion is the new Trans-Continental Fiber Tunnel (TCFT). The TCFT Project, funded in part by your federal tax dollars, promises to dramatically enhance the sustained livability of Americans like you throughout the entire US West Extended Customer Service Area. Now that FCC approval of the implementation phase of this joint project has been granted, technicians from US West will soon be visiting your home to install the portion of the TCFT that passes through your children. Please read over the included Q&A text at the end of this letter to find out more. This is an exciting opportunity for all of us, and we at US West want to keep you well-informed.
Sincerely,
All Of Us At US West.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE TRANS-CONTINENTAL FIBER TUNNEL (TCFT):
Q: Through which of my children will the TCFT pass?
A: Yolanda, Matthew and Aimee. Jack will not be affected by this installation procedure.
Q: What steps are being taken to assure the safety and health of my family during this procedure?
A: US West’s trained staff of network engineers, ditch implementors and customer support representatives will be available 24-hours during and after the installation, via our toll-free customer support hotline: 1-800-WE-CARE-0 (zero).
Q: What will the installation look like?
A: Upon completion, the TCFT will resemble a four-inch (10.3-centimeter) diameter aluminum pipe, fixtured to the north-east side breakfast nook wall, passing in a straight horizontal line through your kitchenette area, dining room, and TV room, before exiting your home just to the left of your sofa. The pipe will traverse at an altitude of 38 inches (97 centimeters) from your floor. The pipe will also pass through the upper shoulder area of Aimee (13), the face and rear-cranial area of Yolanda (9) and will graze the ear of Matthew (7.5).
Q: Why is it crucial that the TCFT intersect my home and family in this fashion?
A: Strict design and budgetary constraints dictated by our federally mandated business plan prohibit the complexity of design that would be required to re-implement the TCFT conduit around your domicile. Instead a shortest-path algorithm has been approved by the Federal Communications Oversight Authority and members of your community. If you would like to discuss these impacts of excessive telecommunications regulation with your senator or representative, call our toll-free congressional hotline: 1-800-SMRT-VTR.
Q: Will my regular telephone service be interrupted during the installation procedure?
A: No.
Q: Will the health of my family be negatively impacted by the TCFT installation?
A: This is not directly foreseen. US West recognizes that the health of your loved ones is an important family concern. We offer a toll-free informational service you may use to learn more about family nutrition, troubleshooting basic illness, and how to shop for the best deal in health insurance. Simply dial: 1-800-DOC-TALK.
Q: What is US West doing to compensate families for the inconvenience brought about by the TCFT?
A: US West is always striving to better serve the community. The TCFT project benefits all of us, through increased access to on-demand digital television programming, new interactive shopping opportunities, and an expanded intra-community citizen data system shared by firemen, health officials, and community safety officials. This network, known as NARCNET, promises to dramatically upspeed the processing of 911 emergency calls, and may save lives.
US West understands that the TCFT installation process will be inconvenient for you, and we have chosen to offer a free gift to you and other affected customers in the service area. To claim your free gift, dial our toll-free giftline: 1-800-PAY-OFFS.
Magic Pill
This is the one time in my life that I feel able to lift ten times my own weight in sagging plastic bags of old clothing. This is the one time in my life that birds swooping down from nearby trees to pick at my hair do not bother me so much. This is the dawn of a bright, fantastic new day. This is the first time that I’ve ever had the courage to drive my car without first attaching the lap and shoulder belts. I have never felt electricity actually buzzing up and down my back and along my shoulders and the backs of my arms and down my legs and into my hands and feet and fingers and toes before. Today time is composed of moments, and each moment is palpable and exists as a heartbeat, a tick in a perfect clock, orderly, one after the other, and my movements and my thoughts are listening to the beat of movements, and synchronized, and dancing with it, and everything that happens is graceful, orderly and correct. It’s like I am a bell that has been struck, and is ringing a pure tone. I can fly. I can breathe underwater. I can leave my body. I can have sex with supermodels. I can live forever. I can radiate energy, laserlike, from my eyes. I can win at video poker. I can fix my own car. I can withstand extremes of heat and cold. I can climb up trees. I can do anything.
The Fun We Tried To Have
We got some beers and put them in the trunk. We scored some drugs. We filled the tires and the tank and the windshield washer fluid reservoir and we picked everybody up and headed for the ocean. It was a beautiful day when we left. Rebecca was on the rag and made a big deal of explaining to all of us beforehand about how awful it was going to be to be around her, not really apologizing or anything, just warning us in advance that she was unlikely to have or be or create much fun. She had this s
cruntchy tension in her face, knotted up and squinting through her thick glasses. Kevin was quiet. He brought his guitar but there wasn’t enough space in the back seat for his guitar with everybody else coming, so he put it in the trunk. James was there, and Scott and Sparrow, who together managed to overturn any suggestion of what music to play on the tape deck, so instead we listened to the radio. Keith hates commercials, so he kept flipping channels, reaching over Angie’s knees to hit the scan button, so all we heard was halves of songs, halves of conversations, and little fragments of really annoying commercials. I drove.
Rebecca explained how because she was on the rag she would need to stop frequently to use unsanitary service station bathrooms in order to change her tampons, enough of which she was pretty sure she hadn’t brought, and that using said restrooms was the sort of experience that you would find depressing and humiliating even if you weren’t on the rag, nevertheless, it was very urgent that we pull over at a service station, and not just any unclean-looking one but either an Arco or a Chevron or a BP. So we found a BP and she hopped out, and everybody hopped out and Keith went inside to buy a candy bar, and pretty soon everybody was inside having a candy bar except for me and Scott who grabbed beers from the case in the trunk and went in search of a private place to pound them.
It turned out that this BP had only outdoor plastic chemical porta-toilets, but Rebecca informed us that she didn’t want to create problems or seem ungrateful or bring everybody down, so she would just hold it until we got to the beach. We all got back into the car, and everybody had a soda and Keith spilled his soda on Angie’s lap, and so they got out again and Keith got Angie some paper towels that sopped up some of it, but Angie was cool about it, incredibly cool considering I knew she didn’t really want to go on this trip at all, but came along to be with me, and being there was determined to enjoy herself, which is one of those things about her that I love her for. So she laughed it off, and everybody started joking around a little bit, except for Rebecca, and we all got back on the road and got underway.
Then we hit some traffic, some sort of road construction, and slowed to an occasional creep. It got hot. We rolled up the windows and turned on the A/C but the A/C had a bad smell of mildew and people got nauseous so we turned it off and rolled the windows back down. Traffic continued to almost not move for another half-hour. We drank all of the water — there was only a gallon for all seven of us, and all of our sodas were also gone, and all of the ice in them, and the paper cups and plastic lids and straws were crunching up on the freshly cleaned carped below.
We were thirsty and hot. We all knew there was a case of beer in the trunk, cooling in a cooler full of ice, and I knew it was going to come to that, but as the driver and the one whose license was at stake I didn’t like the idea too much. Also the car behind us had a cell-phone, and there were “Report Drunken Drivers 1-800-SAV-A-LIF” signs every twenty miles or so.
As we crept closer and began to round a corner, I saw three lanes of traffic trying to merge together into one lane in a very tight space, and beyond that I saw a long row of cop cars and two ambulances, and just beyond that I started to see some wreckage.
Keith pointed out that if we were going to get the beers out of the trunk we ought to do it soon before we were any closer to all those cops. And he yanked the keys out of the ignition and jumped out and went around and pulled the big blue box that reads Pabst Blue Ribbon Par-T-Pak legibly from 100 feet away out of the trunk and slammed the trunk lid harder than it needs to be slammed and hopped back in the car and slammed that door, also unnecessarily hard, and gave everybody a beer, and I had one too. They were cold and good. Then he tried to hide the rest of the case of beer under his feet with limited success.
We continued to creep slowly forward. We had been there nearly an hour. Rebecca said nothing and the look on her face told me I would need to stop at the next available service station featuring sanitary indoor toilet facilities, and it better be soon. She had no beer. The three-lane merge was horrible. Everybody honked at everybody, people just leaned on their horns non-stop, as two gigantic Winnebagos together blocked off the mergers from the left so that a long row of other Winnebagos could cut in front of the rest of traffic. The cops didn’t seem to notice or care. They were everywhere, chattering into the radios on their shoulders, looking very serious and kind of agitated. Eventually we got around the corner some more and the one wrecked car I had seen became two, three, five wrecked cars, and a motorcycle, and further on there was a rescue team surrounding another smaller car.
We crept on, heads craned out the window. I just wanted to go away, but even after we got merged together into one lane the traffic continued to crawl. Keith saw something, and then Kevin and Sparrow saw it, and then I saw it: underneath a red hatchback that had rolled on its driver’s side, an arm stuck out at an angle that couldn’t have left it attached to anything. And tucked behind the hatchback, kind of hidden, an opaque brown plastic bag covered something dead and person-shaped on the ground, and there was a large fluorescent orange sticker affixed to it that said REMAINS. We all got very quiet and drank more beer and tried to stop looking. We crawled on past four more smashed cars. You could see by the scrapes and scratches on the road that they had all been dragged aside by trucks. One old Volvo had a head-impact shatter on the windshield, bloody brown, and the entire front end was smashed into a wedge like it had tried to fit under some other car. And the Volvo had a bag on the ground behind it too.
Rebecca screamed Let me out! Open the Door and we tried to calm her down but she bolted over Sparrow and out the door and began to run around in a circle, looking for something that wasn’t there that she desperately needed, and then as she twisted she threw up all over the roadside next to us in a long ugly arc of vomit. And then Scott got out of the car nonchalantly on the right rear side, and I watched him in the right-side mirror as he threw up neatly in the roadside on top of part of where Rebecca threw up, and then the car behind us stopped and a fat lady opened her door and didn’t even get out, just puked right there next to her car and shut the door again. I got very queasy myself. Then suddenly the cars in front of us got some speed and started taking off, and the lady in the car behind us leaned on her horn, and some of the police started looking towards us, so we all got back in the car and drove on.
We finally got back to three lanes and traffic was thinner than ever, and we all felt kind of awful. I stopped at the next BP, but Rebecca said she didn’t need anything and just wanted to go, and everybody got pissed off at me for stopping without any need to stop. So we got back on the road. We were about thirty miles from the beach, and the sky was getting cloudy. The car reeked of beer and the cans were littered all over the floor. I asked everybody to pick up the trash and put it in the beer box, and a couple of people halfheartedly picked up a few things.
Kevin then said Does anybody want some pot? And Sparrow said Oh got I NEED some pot! and everybody concurred. I didn’t say anything. I felt a little bit light-headed but I was just not wanting to worry anybody, or bum anybody out, or bring anybody down, or further threaten the enjoyability of our Sunday at the beach, which we had planned for a week and which was perhaps our last chance where all seven of us would be free on the same Sunday, our last fun-trip of that summer. I just wanted everybody to stop feeling bad and start having a good time. Kevin loaded his big glass pipe and passed it around the car. I wasn’t going to smoke any myself, but then I did.
And then it was like we all finally started to relax and enjoy each other’s company. Finally. Keith invented a new game, called “Pileup”, in which the back-seat inhabitants would attempt to form a pile of mangled human bodies as in a car wreck. They would have ten seconds to arrange themselves, and then they had to Freeze while Keith took polaroids for insurance purposes. Everybody had the best dead-mangled faces. Then Kevin started singing Two Dozen Beers Six Sodas And Four Buds On The Wall, Two Dozen Beers Six Sodas And Four Buds ... and we sang that for a while, and then we broke into
several simultaneous conversations about various fascinating topics. I just got into driving, and meditated on each driving maneuver, and kept my speed at exactly the legal limit and practiced staying perfectly and unwaveringly in-lane. The sky became dark grey but nobody really noticed. You could begin to smell the sea. We’d be there soon.
And when we got there, the fun we would have. Real American summertime Fun, the kind we used to have all the time, the kind we are always complaining that we never have any more. It makes life bearable, this Fun, the elaborate and time-consuming and crowded and dangerous and intoxicated pursuit of it. I began to realize that for all my efforts at calmness and concentration, I couldn’t tell if I was staying inside my lane or not. My eyes were jerked around by details on the roadside as we drove. Signs for smoked fish outlets, and garage sales, and explanations of local parking policy. We passed a dying shed with a dying Japanese pickup truck next to it. And then up ahead, on the right side, next to a large gravelly turn-out I saw a hippie with his thumb out, and I always pick up hippies. So I automatically flipped the turn signal and started pulling to the side of the road, and slowing down, or so I thought. Keith said Woah there when I got the right side onto the gravel. Rebecca made a squeak noise. The hippie was looking right at me. He was skinny and had a little mustache and long black hair with beads or something in it. He was stepping back from the roadside. I realized I was still moving kind of fast.
So I applied a bit more brake, and then I had the strangest sensation of the entire globe beneath us being spun in circles while we remained in the car, completely still. I had my seat belt on. Someone started screaming about three seconds into the spin, I think it was Angie. Everybody else was transfixed. I gripped the wheel and sort of spun it left and right in a futile effort as the road that used to be behind us came around from our left, crossed our right, and then the bank of trees, and then right dead ahead of us, the hippie again, who leapt up off the ground quite amazingly, rose above us and landed in some condition on the roof. Then our spin ended with a metallic shock to the rear right side, and we were again attached to the earth. Angie stopped screaming.
