"Fine," I lied.
"Bullshit, Joseph. But it doesn’t matter. Just remember to concentrate."
"Frank, you—"
He looked away.
"—you should be the driver. Let me—"
"Shut up, son." The car was suddenly there, bearing down on us. For a moment I thought it was going to run us down. At the last moment the car braked hard, went into a skid, and sprayed gravel at me and Frank. The car slid to a stop with the driver’s side door facing us.
The engine wound down from a howl to a rumbling growl, and then was silenced. An ugly knot of fear tightened in my stomach. "Father, Son, Spirit, Lord ... " I heard myself saying, and then shut my mouth. It was too late for prayers now, and I was certainly in no position to ask.
The door cracked open.
The overpowering smell of shit and blood nearly made me puke.
The door swung wide, and I saw first one booted leg, then another touch the ground. The thing stood up to full height and stretched its arms toward us. It cocked its head sideways and leered at us with a mouth of rotted teeth. "Joey! Poppa! Good ... to see you!"
The thing had Zeke’s voice, Zeke’s wild red hair, and Zeke’s broad shoulders and height.
But the shell was empty. The body was starved, the clothes ripped and soiled, the skin a sickly white.
Only the eyes—Zeke’s narrow eyes—seemed animate. They flashed in the sunlight, like coals left burning during the day for the night fires.
The thing laughed.
"Aren’t you ... glad to see me?" It stepped forward and Frank picked up a rock.
"Stay the hell away from me."
"Poppa!" The thing shut the car door, leaned against the hood. I almost gasped, the gesture was so like Zeke. The creature’s gaze swung toward me. "So, Joey. What do you and this ... piece of shit ... want?"
I fought down my anger. "I want a race."
It laughed again, a dry chuckle. "A race. Joey wants to race. We haven’t ... raced together ... in a long time."
"From here to Busted Bridge. Two miles. One shot."
The thing grinned, shambled forward. "But what are the ... stakes. What are the stakes?"
"Pink slips," I said.
"Pink slips?" It cocked his head. "But I have no ... need for a car." Then the thing smiled. "No. Not ... a car." It touched its chest in mock depreciation. "I need another ... vehicle." It pointed one long finger at me. Zeke’s finger. "This one wears thin. You are pink ... and fresh."
A thrill of terror ran down my spine. "Exactly," I said. "I want him back."
It laughed. "You want my faithful Engine?"
For the first time its gaze fell on our car, parked behind us. It moved forward, its smell rushing before it. I felt bile burning at the back of my throat as it stepped past me. It looked cautiously at the blue circle painted around the car, then stepped over it. It held out one pale hand.
"Get away from it," Frank growled.
Its hand hovered over the car. The thing stared intently at the patterns from hood to trunk. Then it hissed: "Who is it?"
Frank and me said nothing.
"Who ... is it?"
Frank shrugged elaborately. "Maybe nobody you know."
"I know ... everyone." It slowly touched one finger to the silver pattern painted on the hood. The grotesque face curled into an expression of surprise when the lines did not burn. "It’s empty!"
"So? Do we have a deal?"
It nodded, laughing again. "It is just ... a car!" It walked back to its car, shaking its head.
I felt Frank’s hand on my shoulder. "I want you to thank your folks, Joe, for all the help they’ve done me."
He held out his hand. We shook, his scars feeling rough against my palm.
"Now remember. Let me do the work. It’s between me and Zeke now." He smiled. Like Zeke. End of argument.
I walked to our car. A silver ox was painted on the driver’s side door. Symbol of the farmer, Frank had said. On the other door, where the creature could see it clearly, was a silver lion.
I sat down in the Pontiac, pulled the door shut, and placed my hands over the channels. A part of me wanted to cut my hands and shed some of my own blood in this race. I stared ahead through the windshield so as not to see the thing that wasn’t Zeke in the Chevy next to me.
The Pontiac was surrounded by a pattern of blue paint drawn on white cement. Diagonal lines shot off from that pattern on the side opposite the Chevy and joined to another, smaller circle. Frank sat in that circle, holding a knife. He looked at me and nodded.
I slowly turned my head to face the Chevy. I yelled, "Ready?" The thing grinned and the Chevy Engine screamed to life.
"Start your ... Engine!" it rasped, then threw back its head and howled.
I nodded to Frank. For a moment he looked at me. There was hope and fear in his eyes. He stared at the knife in his hand. With a quick movement he plunged it into his chest.
The Pontiac engine roared. A wave of heat rolled up my arms.
On the pavement where Frank had been sitting there was only an empty corpse.
I looked over at the Chevy. "Now, you fucker!"
The Pontiac bucked and flew forward. I did not scream. I could feel a steady heat, like a murderous calm, flowing up my arms from the channels.
The white highways stretched like a snake before us. There were two miles between us and Busted Bridge, and I had never really driven before. My Engine was untested, untamed.
But it was effortless. The wheel would jerk in my hands and suddenly we’d be skirting a pothole that I hadn’t even seen. Frank’s spirit gave itself up willingly, threw its entire being in the Pontiac’s engine. There was not even any need to conserve anything for a second race.
The highway made a slow curve, and then the columns of Dead City were rising before us like a mountain range. After a mile and a half the Pontiac and the Chevy were still even.
Then a searing pain in my arms nearly made me jerk my hands from the wheel. I held on. I heard the creature scream as we passed it.
We were almost to the edge of the City when the Chevy’s pattern blew. In my rear view mirror I could see blue flames explode from the pattern on the hood. The Chevy skewed sideways across the road. The car ground against the railing, spewing sparks, and then swerved back onto the lane.
But it was not under control. The car began to spin, almost gracefully, creating bright red ovals on the white cement. The car crashed through the opposite railing.
I yelled and slammed on the Pontiac’s brakes. I nearly lost control myself before I could turn the car around. As we approached the split railing of Busted Bridge I felt my arms go cold, and the Pontiac choked to a halt. I jumped out.
Zeke was on fire. He fled from the Chevy in a stumbling half-run, and then dropped to his knees. He looked up with pain-filled eyes and saw me.
Behind him, the car exploded with a light that was no color at all.
Zeke smiled.
Father died a year later. Firstmother crumpled up with grief and followed him into the grave in six months. Sara’s still a young woman, and she makes a good wife. My brothers and sisters that were her children have become my sons and daughters. Sara’s pregnant with the first of mine, and it looks like I won’t need a secondmother for many years.
Unless Lydia Mitchum ever shows up here again. She ran off about six months back from the Preacher and the rumors have been coming by about her and some woman driver. I think of her—and her green shirt and her breasts—sometimes. But not too much.
Father’s land is mine now. You can make a good living off it if you’re not afraid to work, and I know there will always be food on the table for the kids. I don’t race anymore. The farthest I want to travel is to the edge of my acres, and only as fast as the horse pulling the plow ahead of me.
The other night I couldn’t sleep, so I eased out of bed quiet enough to not wake Sara. I walked over to the Landers’ place in the cool night air, and I stood on the porch of the dilapidated
house. I could see the two gravestones on the hill, spaced just a few feet apart.
I went around to the shed behind the house and unchained the doors. Moonlight spilled across the silver and black car. I rummaged around in the shed a while, looking at wrenches and brushes and rusted car parts. At one point I climbed behind the wheel and looked out through the windshield. I lightly touched the channels. The car was empty, completely empty.
When I was all done remembering, I unscrewed the caps from the kerosene lamps and sloshed liquid up and down the walls and across the car.
I stood near the back of the house. The shed burned for a long while. There must have been a big can of kerosene somewhere inside, because suddenly a whole side of the shed exploded out and the roof tumbled down.
It was dawn before I got home. My house looked solid and clean in the growing light. Sara stepped out onto the porch as I walked up. She had a worried look on her face.
"What is it?" she asked.
I shook my head and touched her rounded belly beneath her gown. Sara said we would name him Joseph. "Nothing." It was time for the morning chores, and from inside the house one of the children started crying.
It was a happy sound.
As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side ...
—Ezekiel 1:10
Petit Mal #3: Persistence
I see your face in every flower,
Your eyes in stars above.
It’s just the thought of you.
— Billie Holiday, "The Very Thought of You"
I wake up to see my daughter’s face. Her lips are pulled back in disgust, an expression of furious condescension that is one of the primary weapons of the American fourteen-year-old. Her skin is pale in this winter light, washed in the glow of frost-hazed glass, her brown eyes almost black. Dark hair, the same shade as her father’s when I first met him, falls over one cheek. Oh, Franny is so angry. Yet even outraged, worn out from too little sleep, she is beautiful.
Her face, frozen in this moment, is the first thing I see when I awake, the last thing I see before I fall asleep, and at every moment in between.
The tumor had been growing for some time. The warning signs, the physiological notices advertising the tumor’s acquisition of new territory, were apparent only in retrospect: a few more headaches than usual, an occasional flutter in the right corner of my vision that I chalked up to too many hours at the computer screen. There was no reason why this was the moment that my vision froze. It just so happened that on that day, in that second, one more cell divided, one more neuron fired in agitation or failed to fire, and the mental movie (but not a movie, it’s more complicated than that) stopped on that final frame.
Franny: dark eyed, shouting.
My brain didn’t know what to make of this cessation of activity. The retina continued to blast pixels into the visual cortex, but somewhere in the thalamus, that trillion-rail switchyard that routes sensation to the conscious mind, a track had been shut down. And so the thalamus delivered the only freight it had, the identical pattern of impulses it passed along a moment before. But the mind demanded more: What next? What next? The thalamus, empty handed, pushed the pattern again, and kept pushing, an infinite string of boxcars bearing the same image: Her angry, beautiful face.
What I see is not like a photograph, or a blurred still from a movie. The world has depth, as shimmering and fully three-dimensional as the world on the other side of anyone’s eye. It seems to me not as if the world has stopped, but that I’ve become stuck in time. I’m staring at Franny, waiting to rejoin her.
I can’t remember the exact words she yelled at me before that moment, or what new syllable was forming on her lips. Something like, It’s my fucking phone! That morning, she’d lost her cell again, and for the second time that week we were running late because she’d spent ten minutes calling her own number, tossing bed clothes and checking pockets, to no avail. We got into the car without it, and I made my usual threat to cancel the phone if she couldn’t keep track of it. A trivial, silly argument. In that moment, I wanted to strangle her, and I’m sure she wanted to do the same to me. But that moment only. These shouting matches weren’t matches at all, merely flare-ups, as dangerous as a single firecracker. My husband never understood how we could be screaming at each other one moment and in the next deciding on lunch, signing a permission slip, kissing goodbye. I told him that Franny could yell at me because she knew she couldn’t hurt me. I was her mother, and I could weather her blows. She knew, bone deep, that I wasn’t going anywhere.
When I awoke in the hospital Franny was there, scowling, in mid-shout. Behind her, the voices of doctors described my condition. The neurologist—my first neurologist, like a first boyfriend, destined to be remembered only vaguely by a set of brief, awkward interactions—explained that when they brought me in, they ordered the MRI because of the threat of concussion, and were surprised to see the tumor there. So in a way, he said, the accident was lucky. (Lucky. Lucky for him I was too doped on painkillers to respond to the insult, too weak to slap him.)
The surgery to remove the tumor was a success, or rather, not a total failure. There were depths they feared to excavate, but with radiation and chemotherapy I had a very good chance of living through the year. As for the persistence of vision, it certainly was ... persistent. (He chuckled at his own joke, but of course I couldn’t see his face.) Unprecedented, really.
I didn’t care about that. Tell me about my daughter, I said. Tell me about Franny.
More doctors arrived. They feared too much emotion would slow my recovery. They proceeded to itemize my other injuries, as if my body had not already delivered the news. I could feel the subsonic ache of deep bruises and fractured bones; every move of my limbs moaned the damage. My constant hallucination was a welcome distraction. I was not only in the hospital; I could look out at the bright winter day, the sun coming through the windshield, shining on the face of my daughter. Each morning I woke to her angry face, yelling silently at me: It’s my fucking phone!
A psychologist suggested, in oblique terms, that perhaps guilt was preventing me from letting go of that moment. But he had his facts wrong. The tumor froze me before the accident. When I turned to look back at the road, my hands on the wheel, I could see nothing but Franny from a few seconds before. I blinked and shouted, not understanding what was happening. It was as if I had fallen asleep, and could not shake the dream from my head, or open my eyes. I mashed the brake in panic. As it turns out, this was the wrong thing to do. The road was icy, the traffic too thick around me.
I told the psychologist, in non-oblique terms, to fuck off.
My condition was neurological, and I became a student of how the tumor had sabotaged my vision. What we see, when we say that we are seeing, is not a snapshot of transmitted light, not a slideshow projected on the inside of the skull. The fovea, the most sensitive area of the eye, is only a millimeter in diameter, capable of capturing a cone of light only a few degrees wide. But the eye makes due. It flicks this tiny lens about a dozen times a second, jittery as a robin, snatching photons. The image is a composite, a patchwork of these snapshots, with the gaps (and there are many gaps) filled in with expectation, embroidered with biases, colored and shaped by experience. Edges and depth and motion are illusions manufactured by specialty neurons. The scene we picture in our heads, this model, is an act of imagination, like summoning a word from a string of letters. Franny, in the moment that I keep with me, is not just jumble of light in a Franny-like shape. She is everything I know about my daughter, everything I expect to see, complete in herself. Not a letter, or even a word. She is a poem.
There are many old people in this facility. You cannot live very long on this planet without experiencing tragedy. Most have lost spouses. Many have lost children. My own story is nothing notable. But I wonder how many of them can still picture the faces of their loved ones? So many
of my fellow residents have minds hollowed by Alzheimer’s or rewired by dementia. Or perhaps they’ve merely forgotten. Age is a sneak thief, an untrustworthy orderly who pockets your spare change and takes only what won’t be missed until you go looking for it. The thefts happen every day, day after day.
I am lucky. I have lived much longer than the year they gave me. And no matter how old I get, my condition has made it impossible to forget what my daughter looked like at fourteen, eyes rimmed by too much eye liner, pale and furious and vibrant.
I am also famous, in certain white-coated circles. Neurologists, some of them quite young, come to see me. Very rarely, someone proposes a new treatment. I tried many of these in years past, but I’m done with that now. I will not submit to surgery again. I don’t want to lose what little I have left.
The doctors ask me how I cope. I tell them that there was a time (lasting for years, but I do not say that), that I wished the tumor had struck me truly blind. Or failing that, frozen my vision on something banal. Why couldn’t my final sight have been of some boring landscape, or beige ceiling, or the red-black of the inside of my eyelid? Why not something I could ignore?
But now I am content. Every day is a sunny day, I tell them. Every moment it is morning. And I have my daughter.
She is a middle-aged woman now. Her wheelchair—the latest in a succession of wheelchairs, each more sophisticated than the last, this new one capable of climbing stairs—has been no impediment to her visits, or to her life. She has two grown children. A grandchild, my first great-grandchild, is on the way. Franny comes twice a week, without fail, to sit beside me, her warm hand on mine. I can tell her anything. I can tell her when I am afraid, or missing her father, or frustrated with the limitations of life in this place. And when I have nothing to say, she says, Tell me about when I was young.
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