Two dozen people busied themselves around the rail cars. They looked like scavengers feeding on a fresh carcass. The sliding doors of some freight cars had been opened. A group was transporting boxes towards a truck parked nearby. Others were stacking bags. All this was happening a few hundred metres from the road where, like so many other cars, I made sure not to stop.
KILOMETRE 1136
The light of day haloed the asphalt, plunging its deep fingers in the surrounding yellow earth where only shattered hopes flowered. Nothing moved, except for my car, a straight trajectory through unchanging scenery. Far away, under the heavy sky, even the wind turbines dared not turn. Unmoving, as if the heart of the world had stopped beating.
My own heart had stopped beating nine months ago. Or something like it. I’d stayed late at the garage to finish up some repairs. Surprisingly, back then, I enjoyed working a few extra hours. The huge mechanical lair would finally be calm. Without the clinking of tools on the concrete floor. Without useless shouts and raucous laughter.
She walked into the garage. I wasn’t expecting her and it had startled me. How had she managed to get in? She told me she knew the guy at the gatehouse.
Everything happened very quickly. I closed the hood of the truck. I washed my hands, my forearms, while she was there, behind me, not saying a word. I was going through my pockets to find my cigarettes. She threw herself on me and, with surprising economy of movement, undid my belt and raised her skirt. We fucked there on the ground, in the dust and the soot, under harsh neon lights. We fucked with urgency, hard and fast. She told me to stay with her, to continue, not to stop, that she wanted to hear me too, that my body was hers, that she wanted to feel the best of what I was, harder. I watched her bend and move, not being able to distinguish pain from pleasure. Her nails. My hands on her breasts. Biting. Our accelerated movements. Her moans. The heat between our thighs. Her staccato movements, as if she no longer had control over anything. Her face contorting. Then a powerful cry, as if she was out of breath. And I fell next to her, sweating, on the cold and dirty concrete, without knowing whether I’d come or not.
I slipped my pants back on, feeling the weight of my cock between my legs. I wanted to smoke. My cigarettes were in the car. Before stepping out, I turned around. She was there. Lost in her thoughts. Her shirt still off. Her skirt around her waist. And she seemed to float in the heights of the hangar, gazing at the softly swinging hook tied to the hoist.
Night had fallen already. The orange halo of the refinery enveloped me. Walking towards the parking lot I told myself, once again, that I liked her. That time spent with her lost its weight. But when I returned to the garage, the room collapsed around me. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Her feet were beating in the air. Her fists were tight. Her eyes strained towards the ceiling.
My heart was beating in my temples.
I ran towards her, trying to lift her up, but I couldn’t unhook her. She kicked me, groaning between muted gasps. I ran towards the hoist’s control pad. I brought the chain down and, following the rhythm of clicking chain links, she slowly collapsed to the ground. I threw myself on her, undoing the chain that was tight around her throat. The marks they’d left seemed like the bites of a wild animal. She coughed a long time, shaking. Then she vomited. I could say nothing so I took her in my arms, thinking of going to the hospital. Once outside, as I hurried to the car, she moaned to me to leave her alone. To slow down. To stop. So I did, for a moment. I held her in my arms. Without ever looking away from the illuminated bouquet of the refinery’s smokestacks, she told me it was over. That she didn’t want to die but she just wanted nothing to do with anything anymore. This city. This life. And especially me.
I began walking towards the car. I gently lifted her into the back seat and we drove back to my place. The refinery could have exploded then, and it would have taken me days to realize anything had happened.
She left as soon as she recovered. Didn’t leave much behind. Except a heavy silence and her goddamn cat.
Trying to concentrate on the road, I realized it had been hundreds of kilometres since I’d checked the oil level. Suddenly, I reeled with the impression that the engine could choke at any moment and that everything might end here, now.
KILOMETRE 1361
I turned off the engine and got out of the car. My bones cracked as I finally unfolded myself. The air was warm and dry. The sun heavy. The asphalt seemed as soft as roof tar. The metal of the engine crackled. The service station was deserted. Like an island floating in the middle of a drought. I’d been riding so long that when I finally stopped, I suddenly had the sensation that everything kept moving. I understood sailors who suffer from land sickness.
The gas nozzle in one hand, I tried to get the pump to work, but it remained inanimate.
The small shop seemed closed, but the door opened when I pushed against it. It was dark. Anyone there? No answer. I waited. I moved behind the counter in order to activate the pumps. There was no power, though. I looked around me. No cash register, either. I took a few pints of motor oil. Before going out, I shouted out once, to make sure I was alone. Then I took two cartons of cigarettes, three bags of chips, and a jerry can, just in case.
Outside, no sign of life. I pulled up the car’s hood and leaned over its entrails like a bored doctor examining a patient. Everything seemed normal. Just not enough oil, that was all. I added some, thinking about all the small drops left behind, like droplets of blood. I told myself a wild animal could follow them like tracks in snow. A part of me hoped some wild thing, an animal or a monster come out of the too-great empty spaces, would attack me suddenly, jump on my back, its mouth watering with a hunger for bloody flesh.
I slammed the hood shut and stretched my legs in the vacant lot of the gas station. My feet were heavy and raised dust that stuck to my sweat like the sea’s salty air to the skin of a sailor. I kicked a pebble and heard the metallic clang of my steel-toed boots. There wasn’t even a car parked near the building. Only a phone booth drying up in the back. I went in. Lifted the device and put a coin in the slot. No tone. Nothing. As I left the phone booth and looked around me, the place seemed even more vacant under the sun’s glare. Around me, everything was so flat that I was convinced I was the tallest landmark between the horizons. I had the impression that something, hidden in a ditch, somewhere, watched me with one eye, like a beast feigning not being ready to pounce.
Walking back towards my car, I came to realize the situation I was in. I was in the middle of nowhere, not a soul nearby, and I had enough gas for two hundred kilometres, at most.
KILOMETRE 1452
I passed a colony of birds squawking on the turned earth of a field where their only company was an abandoned tractor. As if the driver had run away, upset by a ghost.
Night was approaching. I could feel distance and time melding together, one kilometre, one hour after the other. But couldn’t shake the feeling that each minute would never end. If only I could grab them, physically, and dip every minute in a cup of coffee before swallowing it. Black coffee, no sugar. Bitterness in a Styrofoam cup. To keep me awake.
I was driving fast. I love the solitude of motion. Cars I passed were the only presences that populated my journey, but they didn’t really matter. Around the road, there was nothing, and that nothing folded itself out before me as I burned through what little gas I had left.
Behind the purring of the motor, the silence was becoming cumbersome. With one hand, I risked opening the cat’s box. I couldn’t well leave him in the box until I reached my destination. In the rear-view mirror, I saw him stretch a little before venturing out of his nest. But I remained on guard; they’re sneaky little animals.
I would have been happy to listen to the radio. Even if I’d never really cared about what went on in the world around me, I would have liked to listen to the evening news. But I couldn’t get a single station. The only thing I heard beyond the rum
ble of metal was the timed beating of my heart. I’d been driving for a while now, and I wanted to smile at someone. But no matter where I turned, I was all alone, except for my lassitude, my toolboxes, and the goddamn cat cleaning himself.
I recalled the last few years of my life like vague stories told by a stranger in a bus depot restaurant. As if my memories weren’t my own. As if the time that I’d spent, here and there, hadn’t really existed. Today, all of it bored me. When I yawned, my jaw cracked and my eyes filled with tears.
In the rear-view mirror, nothing remained of the day except for a thin white line between the obscurity of earth and the blackish hue of the sky. It was easy to lose myself in contemplation of this vista that lacked a hill or a silhouette while my car continued on its way. But suddenly, the sound of a honking horn like a tear in the fabric of the air startled me. When I looked at the road again, I was blinded by two large yellow headlights. I pulled on the wheel and avoided a head-on collision by inches. The wheels cried out, strident, stiff, but the car remained unflappable. It knew all about exhaustion at the wheel that flirts with death.
Nothing but accidents to look me in the eye.
If the cat had ignored my weariness entirely, the sudden jolt of the car surprised him, and he jumped between my legs to find refuge beneath the pedals. I gave him a kick. He bristled and tore at me. I tried to keep my eyes on the road while avoiding his wrath. I was forced to stop to confine him to his box.
A laborious operation. As soon as I managed to put him back in his cardboard prison, he began fighting and pushing against the box’s weak points, meowing like a maniac.
I tried to calm him down, telling him that it would be all right. Like that voice in the distance, far away in the depths of my mind, narrating my life.
Shut up! Just shut it, will you!
It was hot. The air was heavy. I licked at the saliva that pearled on the side of my mouth and pressed my foot to the accelerator. The cat could complain all he wanted to; as for me, the only thing I wanted was to claim independence before the theatre of passing days turned me into another marionette. I also needed to see my father before forgetfulness held him too tightly in its long, broken fingers. I didn’t care about the power outage. Or the rumours. Stories, really. And even if exhaustion had undercut my understanding of things, I knew all I wanted was gasoline.
In a field, a dead tree dressed in black. Migratory birds landed there to spend the night. While I travelled alone. I didn’t stop at night, I continued on.
The road lay before me under the wheels of my car and I met only gusts of wind. The cat had fallen silent, exhausted. Finally. I watched the red spiral of the car’s cigarette lighter. My hand trembled on the rhythm of the road as I brought the lighter to my cigarette, furiously breathing in. The next moment, when I threw my butt out the window I knew that, behind me, the wake left by my passing was already closing, as if I’d never been there at all.
And once again I let my eyes lose themselves in the rear-view mirror, watching the landscape become softly cloaked by the fabric of night, like a woman putting on a long black dress.
VI. THE MINOTAUR
The star-studded sky dissolves into a flowering blue. Already, daylight pierces the labyrinth like the disembowelled guts of a dying beast. The young mercenary hasn’t closed his eyes for the night, and yet he again begins to walk among the countless twists and turns.
Soon, the sun is at its zenith. It crashes into the sand-coated walls of the corridors. The armed young man must squint to keep moving in this shadowless place. He sees bright spots of light each time he closes his eyelids. And when he opens them again, walls are like mirrors. He startles when he thinks he’s seen, here and there, a face just like his, wandering among the galleries, lost.
It’s hot. Thirst like daggers in his throat. But he refuses to bend. He walks through the bowels of this sleeping volcano, telling himself his sword has yet to find blood. At each intersection, he hopes to glimpse a large open space at the centre of which death, the beast, and he, will have their foretold meeting.
VII. THE MINOTAUR
The centre of the labyrinth seems to grow farther from him as he makes his way towards it. In fact, he wonders whether this beast he’s heard so much of is as hungry as the legends say. And if the place he is to be found exists at all. All the young mercenary knows for certain now is that his spool of red thread is running out and, soon, he won’t be able to keep going without risk of losing himself.
He purposefully ignores the passage of time. And while he stands there, trying to fathom his instincts, twilight spreads its large hand over the walls. He listens carefully. This is the hour of hungry beasts. But in this place where his promises to regret nothing weigh him down more and more, he hears nothing but his own weariness lurking. And yet, he knows he cannot leave this place without having done what must be done. The night thickens. He tells himself perhaps the beast will show itself only if he pretends to be in the world of dreams.
VIII. THE MINOTAUR
Hours pass. The young mercenary feels time breathing down his neck. Huddled in a corner, he can’t sleep but pretends to. He wonders if the beast is tracking him. And has been for a long time. A very long time. Like a patient carrion-eater waiting for his prey to topple with exhaustion.
He hears a noise. Behind him, not far away. Someone, something is coming closer. The beast. He knows it. He can feel it. Close by. A few sword slashes away, crouched in the night.
The young mercenary slowly grips his weapon. And in one movement jumps up and throws himself in pursuit of the monster through the interminable galleries of the labyrinth. He howls like a madman and the beast flees on its hind legs. He distinctly hears the sound of its hooves hammering the labyrinth’s earth, pulling away ahead of him. In the thick obscurity of night, the young mercenary calls on the gods to give him the strength and courage to track his enemy and slay it.
He moves ahead like a hunter, ready for a fight, ready to throw himself at the throat of anything that might stand in his way. Each dark corner is a potential threat. Each intersection, a danger. Suddenly he feels a warm breath on the nape of his neck. He turns, slashing his sword. But his blade cuts only air, knocks on the ground and vibrates through his bones. Shaking himself he runs off down the corridors, certain that he’s about to finish the vile beast once and for all.
Night ends and, deep in the galleries, one can still hear the echo of his laboured breathing and the metal of his sword repeatedly striking walls of stone.
PART TWO
KILOMETRE 2053
I needed to fill my tank. The needle was about to fall off the dial and I was beginning to imagine the worst. On the side of the road, I saw a cardboard sign. gas. With an arrow. I followed the sign to an old warehouse, a bit off the road. In a parking lot, a dozen cars had gathered around a parked tanker. I waited. Without my headlights, you couldn’t have a seen a thing. A man came towards my car. He turned on a flashlight. Good evening. Good evening. We’re only taking cash. Okay. You’ll need to wait half an hour, there are people ahead of you and it’s a slow process. Fine. He half-waved in my general direction and headed back to the tanker truck. I put my head out of the window. How much is it, exactly? There hasn’t been power in a week, so it’s five dollars a litre. I nodded non-committally and turned off the engine.
The scene was a strange one. Headlights. Shadows around the truck. The purring of motors. An empty lot. And, in the distance, the landscape sometimes lit up by cars travelling in the night.
I was waved over. Fill her up? Yes, and the jerry can as well. I took the bag carefully nestled under my seat. Around me, faces drawn, and furtive, cautious looks. When they told me the tank was full, I paid and left. Back on the road, I counted my reserves a few times over. Even if I now knew that my savings would melt away faster than expected, I was still relieved.
But the gas tank’s needle had begun to fall again. On the side of t
he road, streetlights like meaningless, functionless totems. The farther eastward I went, the clearer the effects of the power outage became. Like a curtain pulled over the land. A puddle of oil spreading over the ground. Or maybe as if everything had been orchestrated, following a precise plan I’d been unaware of. Anyway, it was summer, at least. A few days without power wasn’t the end of the world.
Little by little, stars winked out and the pink fingers of dawn scratched at the horizon, announcing another clear day. A hard blue day. Without any wild animals in the shapes of clouds. Without a place to let a fertile imagination roam.
I remembered the slap I’d gotten when I told my father that my mother visited every night to sit at the foot of my bed and speak with me. He told me to shut up and not go around inventing stories. I’d been serious though. And he had been too.
Each additional kilometre per hour increased the vibration of my car, but the land moved too slowly for my taste, as if held in place by gravity. I wanted to see my father, no matter the cost. To see him before his memory collapsed completely. While it might still be possible to hear him before the curtain of insanity irrevocably fell. And, especially, to see him after the distance of years that had held us from each other. On the fingers of one hand, I counted the thousands of kilometres that I still had to drive, and on the other, the sleepless nights to suffer through. Meanwhile, sleep had become a waking dream between two rotations of the odometer. A small town driven through, unnoticed.
The cat started mewling again. But this time without energy. He must have been thirsty, hungry. I’d take care of him next time I stopped.
Pastureland extended into the morning’s half-light, and my headlights diluted the sky. The landscape flat and unchanging. As if I’d simply circled back to my starting point overnight. Despite the growing familiarity of the featureless landscape, I convinced myself that everything disappeared behind me as I drove forward. As the bags under my eyes deepened.
Running on Fumes Page 4
