But all of that ended. She left. One night when she couldn’t sleep. One night when I couldn’t speak. A night like a terrible earthquake. The order of our lives breaking down. And I stayed there until morning, like a bronze statue among the ruins, jaw and fists welded tight, eyes wide, and my heart on the tip of my tongue, watching her pack. She’d put a scarf around her neck to hide her injuries and looked me over, the outline of a bleak, sorry smile on her mouth. It was over. A few moments later her car was turning the corner, raising a cloud of dust. That was nine months ago, more or less. I didn’t keep count of the days.
Just as I was about to fall asleep curled up on the front steps, the phone’s blare roused me. I walked inside, letting myself be guided by its ringing. In the darkness, I bumped against the corner of the table, tripped and fell right next to the cat. As I got up trying to find the receiver, the cat bounded out the half-open door.
Hello?
KILOMETRE 0
It was my father. Yelling on the other end of the line. Again. I told him to calm down. To speak slower. That I couldn’t understand a thing. That it would pass.
His voice had been the same for a while now. Withered with age. Sometimes the silences that punctuated his sentences made me think of black holes, expanding. He hesitated as he approached each word. Other days, his speech became an uninterrupted flood, a great landslide towards panic.
This time he told me that people had come into his house. That they had wanted the keys to his car, food, money. He hadn’t moved from his rocking chair. They came in and yelled, loudly, not giving him a chance to answer. There were four of them. They rifled through his house, overturning everything. They took the keys to his car, food, and his hunting rifles. They hadn’t found his money though, hidden in the potato bin. Then they left, joining up with a group waiting outside, before going into the house across the street. I tried in vain to reassure him. He insisted. They’ll be back, them or others like them. I asked him the time, calmly, to bring him back to reality. He stopped talking. Mumbled a little. I don’t know, he said, there’s no power. He went on to say he should hide and wait. I told him he could wait if he wanted, but he shouldn’t hide. And don’t forget to sleep and eat. And don’t drink. And rest up a little, will you?
This couldn’t continue much longer. He needed help. He couldn’t live alone in the middle of nowhere, in an abandoned mining town, nearly deserted. My father was sinking with the town, and both he and it were turning into ghosts.
I knew he wasn’t doing well. For years now he’d been saying his life seemed to be shrinking, that he felt he was forgetting simple things. That he still drove though his licence had been revoked. That the dark that sometimes filled him had nothing to do with the usual confusion of alcohol and solitude. That trying to find the names of things infuriated him. That he distrusted everyone without knowing why.
And that night, once again, he seemed demented. I tried to reason with him, but he continued, not listening to me at all. A house had burned. People in the streets. His neighbours fleeing their own homes. Then people had come into his house, they wanted the keys to his car, food, money, and he hadn’t budged an inch from his rocking chair, they came in, and then they told him … And I hung up.
KILOMETRE 0
To do something, anything.
My father had cancer of the memory. His hands had been resting on the arms of the same rocking chair for far too long. Wearing the same boots and old checkered shirt like a straitjacket. His cigarettes slipping between his fingers and rolling on the floor. Hunching over while trying to sit straight. Barely able to read and write. I thought this might have been it. He’d crossed the threshold. His memories were tangled. He had hallucinations. Led long, imaginary conversations with my mother. Though he could still yell and scream, I knew that soon I’d have to start guessing words that rested, suspended on his lips. Soon, if it wasn’t the case already, he would forget to wash himself and barely eat anymore. He wouldn’t know how to hold his fork. His legs wouldn’t support him, and he would need to concentrate to put one foot ahead of the other up the staircase. Soon, he would fall asleep still dressed, next to the unlit stove. He would only get up to make sure the blinds were closed. He’d no longer know how to make a decision. His eyes would shine with fancy and vainly search for a place to settle. And he’d no longer recognize me.
I needed to do something. To call him back.
I picked up the phone, called the number, and waited. It rang. It rang for a long time. No answer. I waited anyway. But he wouldn’t answer.
As I hung up, the receiver fell from my hand, dangling from the end of its cord. I knew he had no one. Knew nobody wanted him anymore. I needed to do something. It had been years, long years, since I’d been back. So far away. My vertigo a mirror image of the receiver’s, gently rocking back and forth, dangling from the end of its cord.
I leaned into the refrigerator again. It was sweating. There was no light inside. No beer, either. Glanced at the alarm clock. It offered no sign of life. Reached out towards the light switch. Nothing. They were probably rebooting the power grid for the whole region. I walked out. Darkness surrounded me. Houses, streets, the entire city plunged into darkness. I could hear voices from the end of the street but saw no one. Then silence.
Everything was black. Everything was calm. Not a light illuminated the small city, except for a cold and blue-tinged glow at the horizon, announcing the day ahead.
KILOMETRE 0
If the power returned and the refinery’s flare stack started spitting flames once again, I would need to be at the garage in less than four hours. It would be coffee and work boots. The garage, the humidity of the concrete floor and greasy tools. A truck’s innards, a small light bulb overhead. Then, around noon, it would be the hangar with the others, the sandwich, the smell of mustard, the insipid taste of a few old radishes and a can of beer in a Dixie cup. Half an hour later work would begin again, stomach full this time. A cigarette break in the afternoon, the four o’clock blues. At six in the evening, I would head home. A grimy house, warm water in the shower, then a fifteen-minute walk to that bar, full of faces.
If the power was still out tomorrow, then I wouldn’t need to work. And perhaps not the next day either. In front of my house, in the fading night, I knew my car was waiting. To leave. Without a word. Without my next paycheque. Nothing held me to this life here. Everything I owned could fit in five or six duffel bags and two large toolboxes. That was it. I also had some money stashed in the potato bin. The road. Kilometres. The heavy hours of early afternoon. The fresh hours of the night. Towards my village. Towards my home. My father. To walk in that door hoping that he might still recognize me despite the years that had etched lines on our faces. To just grab my things without saying a word to anyone and leave without saying goodbye. To drive through the country. To stand before my father, in three days, like a surprise emerging from forgetfulness, defying logic. To tell him everything would be okay, that I was there now. To take care of him.
To forgive a few mistakes, as well. And face my past.
KILOMETRE 28
Beyond the dash lights’ glow, the road was wide and straight. Like a landing strip ahead, as my car’s old headlights faded in the shimmer of dawn. The wind blew insistently against the body of the car, a noise joining the repeated knocking of pistons in the engine, like someone banging on an emergency exit door. Too late to change my mind now. Too late to pretend. To forget. Too late to change the narrative.
I was driving fast. At this hour, no one was on the road. But I couldn’t resist snatching glimpses in the rear-view mirror. There was nothing behind me, of course. No orange halo over the town. No flame fed by the refinery’s flare stack. No beacon to mark the road behind.
The cat meowed in his cardboard box. I should have left him back there. Especially since he savagely scratched my cheeks when I tried to put him in the box. At least that would teach him to not atta
ck me. And vice versa.
I turned the radio on, looking for a station. Nothing but dead air. No matter. I had a road to drive. I wanted to see my father.
Morning was on the cusp of the horizon. Far away, at the edge of my rear-view mirror, I sensed movement. Slowly taking my foot off the gas pedal and looked back. A thick column of smoke rising up towards the sky still filled with night. It wasn’t the refinery. Nor the town. It was farther away than that. A forest fire, probably.
I started off again, shifting gears. The sun finally dragged itself over unimaginatively flat prairies, its first rays striking a landscape where only a few bushes, my car, and strange black smoke seemed untethered from the dusty ground.
KILOMETRE 85
Under the noise of the motor and the silence of the radio, I could hear the landscape go by. The barren plains continued, naked in the light of day. Behind, the smoke still wouldn’t disappear and clung to my rear-view mirror with its long fingers. I kept thinking of the blaze I had left behind.
I had met my ex-girlfriend three years before in a roadside bar. On the edge of some endless highway that lost itself in the north country. I counted the kilometres. My beer as well. She had come near while I was searching through my wallet. What are you drinking? Let me buy you one. I couldn’t refuse.
In that grimy place where women danced naked after midnight, we leaned against the bar as if against a ship’s railing. Everything around us was nothing more than faraway horizon. We spoke in flightless sentences, in small hidden looks. Her pink lips. Her soft hands. And her laugh like a waterfall. We were no longer strangers.
That night, in the labyrinth of my car, we eagerly undressed. She was on top, then I was. We were together like on a ship in a stormy sea. And in the parking lot that night, a few honks of a horn somewhere close by, followed by harsh laughter.
I stayed at her place for a little while. A small house next to the highway, hidden by a row of spruce. Three weeks later, the car filled with luggage, we left for the coast, then headed south, careful not to know what lay ahead of us.
The sun was over the road now, highlighting the crack across the windshield. Without looking in the rear-view, I examined the crack until a voice interrupted and asked what I was thinking. Shaking my head, I aimed the car at the white line. Nothing, nothing.
I had left a lot behind, but my past followed me anyway. A beast with a frightful head, horns, a gaping maw.
KILOMETRE 135
Travel was a foreign language I knew intimately, but paid no attention to. Instead, I concentrated on the swaying of my car filled with tools. I felt like I was at the helm of a rickety boat on a sea that sought to turn it over.
I followed the same path I had taken so long ago, but in reverse, like you might ascend a long river without tributaries. In the time since, there had been so many detours, so many meaningless encounters, so many dreams weighed down by alcohol, hangovers, money whittled away on the counters of boisterous people, of barmen aching for a few more coins, so many ruses and thefts, so many lies, that I had stopped believing life stories. Be they mine or someone else’s.
I drove and I looked at the scars on my hands, on my forearms. Marks left by so many work accidents. That screwdriver I stuck in my left hand, barely three weeks ago. The hood that fell on my arm when I first arrived at the refinery. And these cuts I named my daily bleedings, in the shape of a thousand small lines on my knuckles, in the palms of my hand. Every day, a car’s sharp metal or gnawing mechanical part shed my blood, mixing it with the engine’s dark oil.
I thought of the tools I dragged with me everywhere I went. My toolboxes, heavy, dirty, but oh so useful. My life made of bolts, soldered joints, dust, and grease. Of coffee and cigarettes. Of noise and swearing. Of sighs at the end of the day when I washed my hands clean, slowly, painfully.
Good. Good that it was over.
The last months at the refinery had been especially hard. Under the company’s cars and trucks. Again. Just as it had been when I used to work in my father’s garage. I who’d promised myself: never again. And the last, fading days with my girlfriend. Who came home later and later. Speaking to me less and less. Who inched away from me, smiling at others. And that mobile home where I’d been sinking, my only company a car, a hole in my heart, a hole in the wall and a bandaged hand, painful, that prevented me from working for several days.
I hadn’t been at the wheel of a car for more than a few hours for quite some time. I hadn’t been out in a while, really. I felt like I wasn’t used to movement anymore. I opened my eyes wide, but my surroundings had become nothing more than a long line of invariable streaks of drab colours. I could distinguish nothing but poorly built fencing that held in a narrow corridor of asphalt.
KILOMETRE 532
In the fields on each side of the road, herds of cows grazed. They watched my car with somnolent insolence and the colourless gaze of those who are thinking of something else.
It would soon be noon. The cat was mewling insistently. He desperately pushed at the sides of the box. Three days and three nights of driving awaited me, if I didn’t stop too often. It would have been nice to while away a few hours gazing at the scenery. But everything around me was dry and, on this continent, you would have had to drive thousands of kilometres to see anything new. It was easy to believe that I wasn’t moving at all, and that nothing existed beyond my windshield.
It reminded me of my father’s glassy eyes. His empty gaze, one night at the table, while we ate in silence. I wasn’t very old at the time. The only noise was the scratch of utensils on ceramic and the gurgle of a wine bottle being emptied into his glass. It was winter, the days were short in our treeless valley. The town was calm. Boring. People were worried. The mine had closed a little over two months before. Almost everyone had lost their jobs. The few who still kept theirs had fingers crossed, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It was easy to see the scars that up until then we’d learned to hide. Some accused those who’d pushed for the strike of having run the company out of town. Others pointed their fingers at those who, despite a call for solidarity, had replaced the strikers in the mine. But the winners would have no victory. Despite the fact the company had left everything behind. Buildings, machinery, and kilometres of flooded subterranean galleries. That winter, some were still on unemployment insurance, but everyone knew it would only last for a while. Then there’d be nothing. It was the beginning of the end. Those were the only words my father had spoken that night, pushing his plate away after only a few bites.
These days, I recalled my hometown as a place of waiting, of anger, and empty bottles. A village I never wanted to see again. A depopulated place, where house after house was clothed in plywood windows. Houses at whose feet accumulated seasons of dead leaves. Houses with twisted trees in the yard, like those you might see in children’s books, when it’s time to be afraid. Street corners where kids invented games that could be played alone. Front steps where, each spring, old men and women counted their dead, using the fingers of both hands, and then not having enough. A church and a school with no life left in them, except for shadows of the past. A town where at the grocery store, at the hardware store, at the gas station, only ghosts were named by the few who broke the silence.
A town in which my father was slowly running off the rails, having done nothing for too long. I could understand how a banal and predictable reality could become unbearable with time. And, as I grew older, I began to sense the threshold between lassitude and insanity.
I drove. I drove and my eyes moved to the dashboard. The odometer turned and turned as if it hungered for more. At each pothole, the cat mewled and my tools sang against each other, itching to be out of their boxes. Meanwhile, I shared the dotted line with vehicles I’d never see again.
KILOMETRE 559
The prairies dragged along on either side of the road. On the left, only a railroad filled the empty space, waiting for the next
train. Hours frittered away punctuated by tiny villages. I drove through them in slow motion, as if brushing past a ghost.
Just outside one of these villages, I turned my engine off in front of the pumps at a gas station. In the garage door’s entrance, a man was seated, eyes towards the sun. Getting out of the car, I walked into his workshop, lost between two horizons. I recognized the disorder. It had nothing to do with the industrial garage where I’d been working for the past few years. It was more like my father’s trash heap. A place made of metal, gasoline, and grease where, one day at a time, my father taught me how to put my hands into a car’s ribcage.
The man pushed himself up, hands on knees. Fill her up, I said. He made his way to the side of the garage. I heard the sound of an engine starting up and stabilizing. He walked back to me and said there hadn’t been any power since the night before. He’d been working his pumps with a generator. Leaning against my car, he noticed my tools on the backseat. He asked whether I worked in a garage. I corrected him by telling him I used to work as a mechanic. He asked me where I was going. I told him due east, east for a while yet. Recradling the nozzle, he said I was lucky, since there weren’t many people on the roads today. And supposedly cats are good luck, he continued, pointing at the cardboard box. I paid the man and returned to the quicksand of my seat. When I started my car, he waved in my direction. I nodded, and accelerated. He stayed there a long time, watching me disappear. From a distance, he seemed like a single tree, alone on the plains.
Running on Fumes Page 2
