The Glow

by Dan Bryan

Chapter 5

  When Quentin finally was awake for good, sitting straight and seeing things in lucid consciousness, their world had changed. It was barely after dawn and the land around them was a desolate wasteland of rocks and thick, brown grass. Kjell was driving fast and whistling to himself with Alessandro in the front. Their voices were the first thing that he heard.

  "Quentin, look back and see if anybody's coming up on the left." Kjell said to him when he opened his eyes. There was a slow truck in front that was impeding the progress of their car.

  "There's nobody for a quarter of a mile." Quentin said. He yawned and stretched his legs but his knees were stiff.

  "Alessandro was just asking about the buffalo around here. I told him we should start seeing them any minute." Kjell said. That seemed like an extremely unlikely statement based on what was then in Quentin's field of vision. Regardless, Alessandro had a camera clasped within the grip of his right hand.

  Cultivation of anything was very limited. The traffic was very light and the speedometer was touching ninety. Alessandro noted approvingly that they were driving like true Americans.

  Soon they stopped for breakfast. The parking lot was narrow and ran parallel to the main road. The building itself was brown with red trim and cheap siding. A big electric sign shot up into the air, with bright lights that would have flashed the name of the place if it was dark out. It was a Dakota colossus with the words "FAMILY RESTAURANT" on it.

  When they made it to the front door though, they found out that the restaurant wasn't open yet at all. A manager opened the door and told them, "Not until seven."

  They went back and stood by the car. Kjell rifled through Olivia's purse, which was sitting on the floor, and he a pulled out a cigarette and lit it. This he did sitting in the passenger seat, swigging the last few gulps from a wine bottle from the previous night. Then he exited the car again and walked behind a tree to take a piss. The town they were in had far more vegetation than the rest of the Dakota landscape.

  "I wonder what river is around here. Is it the Platte or the Missouri?" Alessandro asked.

  "Can't you look it up in the road atlas?"

  "Kjell, it still boggles my mind that we set off on a two thousand mile drive and we don't even have a map!"

  "Just look at the road signs. America tells you everything."

  The three of them sat at a booth by the window, facing out into the parking lot. It was very bright inside but the walls were old and faded and the floor was made of cheap white tile. Some of the prices on the menu were covered with new, higher prices, handwritten and taped over on pieces of paper. The lone waitress in the establishment was cheerful, middle-aged, and somewhat heavy.

  "You boys look like you could use some coffee." she said, filling their cups.

  "Pardon me ma'am. What river is that meandering through this town?" Alessandro asked.

  "That's the Missouri. You don't know that?" she replied, smiling.

  "You'll have to forgive my amigo here. He's from Italy, but rest assured he's fully registered with the authorities. I'll try to keep him in line from here on." Kjell said.

  "Oh honey, he's not bothering anyone."

  She walked away towards the kitchen shaking her head slightly.

  "Thanks Kjell. Do you feel like pinning an Italian flag to my t-shirt while you're at it? You didn't know what fucking river it was either."

  "I know. That's the beauty of it."

  Outside, Olivia stepped out of the car and stretched her arms up towards the sky. Kjell banged on the window with the back of his fist and she looked over and saw where the three of them were sitting. She walked in to join them with a morning cigarette in her mouth, meandering through the parking lot, through the front door, and around to where their booth was. Her stride was decidedly half-tempo.

  "I haven't been awake this early since last fall." she said, sounding still asleep. Sliding into the empty seat next to Quentin, she rested her hand on his shoulder as she sat down. The booth was narrow and again she was close to him. She ran her fingers through the top of her hair it in a hopeless attempt to undo the mess that the previous day had brought.

  "I must look like a war zone." she said.

  "You look great." Quentin answered.

  "There's an entire circle of hell reserved for liars you know. The sixth I think... or maybe the fifth?"

  "The 8th circle is for the dishonest." Alessandro said. He grinned at Olivia.

  "What did you learn that in? Mexican kindergarten?" Kjell asked.

  "I learned it sucking on my wet nurse's tits."

  "You're gonna have to keep your voices down. This is a family restaurant." Olivia said without an ounce of seriousness to her voice whatsoever.

  "That's a good point. We must consider the impression that we're making on the townsfolk. We represent not just ourselves but all the outside world."

  "So we've got a homegirl, a queer, a foreigner, and slumped in the car we've got your brother crashing on whatever speed." Olivia said.

  "... and then there's Quentin." Kjell said.

  "Yeah yeah yeah." Quentin said, content to be the butt of the joke. Olivia winked at him.

  Later their food arrived. It tasted absolutely terrible. Their bacon was burned and the toast was charcoaled. Finally the waitress brought the check and they each threw in a buck for the tip.

  "Play the Microphones again. It's perfect music for the plains." Quentin said to Olivia.

  "Wonderful!" she said, smiling. He looked at her and she was nodding, her eyes drifting like a dream. Before too long they would be climbing red and purple rocks beneath the cool March sun. When they got to the car Quentin drove and Olivia sat in the front seat.

  "I hope nobody minds." she said in a very polite way as she got into the car, and nobody minded.

  They left town on the freeway and crossed the Missouri river, and after this the landscape assumed the same flat regularity it had before and soon the only thing they saw was dead brown grass.

  A couple of hours passed. They drove into the Badlands park and the same prairie grass remained in place until they were right up by the indented pillars. The conical rocks were ringed with a hundred different shades of pink, white, and amber. They stopped their car at a certain point on the small park road, and everyone got out and walked across the soggy grass to where the towers and mesas began. The top was a flat horizon, with erosion eating the rock away into the ground in dazzling, irregular patterns -- and obverse indentation in the normal form of Earth.

  "An inverted world!" Olivia said wondrously.

  There were rings around every rock, stacked upon each other, looking like the inside of a tree. Had they really all been flat in some primordial age? Nobody there knew the answer.

  Olivia tiptoed around them taking quiet pictures, always when they weren't paying attention. She lined up shots at different angles from the sun and the rocks, and said nothing. Carson pointed to her after she photographed him from the side with Kjell, the two of them talking like brothers.

  "Olivia is actually a very adept photographer. She's taken a lot of pictures in Washington over the years. It's really fascinating because you can see places five or six years ago, or just look at different people and it's really a distinctive record of her life back then. And she also took a lot of pictures of that whole Battle of Seattle shitstorm as it was happening. Even though nothing's changed that much yet, there are always things which get lost and you almost take the smallest of them for granted. You forget that a certain store used to be something else, or that her best friend Nola had very long hair in 1999, and having good photos of those things is vital." Carson said.

  "You didn't even know Nola back in 1999." Olivia shouted.

  "That's why I utterly failed to recognize her in the old photos you have. Imagine if you wouldn't have taken them now -- I would have been robbed of a very amusing experience."

  "That's true, she's changed a lot over time."

  Olivia handed her camera off to Kjell a
nd started wandering among the rocks, making him take pictures of her at different angles, mixed with different combinations of people. She grabbed Quentin from behind, by the shoulders, and turned him around to face Kjell while she slid in next to him.

  They stood up against the underside of one of the ledges, and the light against the rocks was pale and they both stood out with their dark jackets. Quentin put his arm around Olivia while the camera was snapping and he realized the unthinkable. He almost wished right then that he'd never even seen her before in his life.

  Alessandro began rolling a new joint, back in the car, as they moved further into the Badlands. They stopped and left the car at four different places, inching their way through the park in haphazard fashion. At one of these inlets in the rocks they walked at least three hundred yards from the road until they were completely hidden and they smoked the joint. After they did this, they climbed up one of the gentle slopes until they were all sitting abreast on the top. From here a thousand peaks and trenches revealed themselves, expanding out for miles.

  "Ladies, gentlemen, everyone." Alessandro began as they sat silently, "It's hard to behold this site without thinking a little bit about the spirits that inhibit our worldly ways. Usually they're hardly in the realm of consciousness, but little things like this morning make you realize that the spirit is never gone. Sometimes you forget the world is nothing but a ride, and when you forget that, it means the spirit is receding. Today, that spirit recedes no more. I hope that made one tiny bit of sense."

  They marveled in the afterglow of that poetic statement for a moment. Alessandro even looked a tiny bit surprised by the quality of his extemporaneously worked out composition.

  "That’s beautiful." Kjell said. "Of course, Quentin is only here because he’s running from his girly-girl."

  "God damn it Kjell. You can never let a poignant moment stand, can you? You’ve always got to get irrelevant and break it all apart." Olivia replied.

  "But seriously. Marcela wanted him to spend like two thousand dollars and fly to Chile to meet her parents, and it’s like, hello, are you nuts? They’ve been dating for a little less than four months and they’re in college."

  "Well you know how I feel about that kind of intensity. Unbecoming to be sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that you can never keep your fucking mouth shut for anything."

  That put their discussion to rest, and then Olivia took her final photos of the wide expanse before they walked back to the car. It was afternoon already and they needed to move again. Who knew when any of them would see the Badlands next?

  Olivia demanded the keys to the Volvo, pounding on the driver's side door with the palm of her fist. Quentin had them now from driving through the park. He tossed them to her underhanded and she dropped them straight into the dirt.

  "You're useless!" he joked.

  She sat behind the wheel now, gripping it hard with two hands. Quentin watched her drop two adderall pills with a bottle of pepsi. She took on an intense look now, staring at the road from someplace deep within herself. Carson took more adderall as well, on some romantic impulse perhaps, and he sat in the front seat beside her.

  They had spent four hours in the Badlands, which was evidently quite enough for Alessandro, because he went back to sleeping with his head against the back right window.

  "Let's stay away from the damn interstate for just a while. I love these empty roads!" Olivia said. They had a map of South Dakota now, and there were small little lines that shot off and she traced one with her finger before she threw the unfolded map to the back for them to worry about. Montana was the goal now. Their path diverged northwesterly, and soon they would enter the mountains and see snow. For now they just saw dirt by the road.

  "Do you think a Volvo is designed to handle these speeds over long distances?" Kjell asked, but not in a manner that betrayed any real concern. Olivia drove at about ninety miles an hour once they were beyond the last of the houses of Rapid City. She didn't say a word as the pills kicked in.

  Carson, on the other hand, rifled through his bag and produced a notebook. He opened it and frantically leafed through the pages, nodding quickly as he read the part that he was looking for.

  "Ahh yes, here we go. We were going to discuss the level of spirituality in this country right now. That is precisely what was on my agenda to discuss on a Sunday morning, but of course we came upon the rocks just as this would have been the prescient topic." he said. He put his arm around Olivia but she continued her single-minded focus on the road, so he kept speaking.

  "I don't think there's any doubt that the spiritual integrity of our society is on the decline. I think we saw this very clearly with the invasion last year--"

  "Oh my God! Stop right there!" Kjell exploded.

  "Alright Kjell, I realize that you and I are in complete disagreement on the merits of the current military action--"

  "I'll say."

  "-- but I will respectfully ask you to please shut the fuck up until I am finished elucidating my brilliantly crafted theory of everything in modern society. Does that work?"

  Kjell leaned back and looked down at the floor. Carson began speaking in a rather pedantic tone.

  "So we drive here on a Sunday, and millions of people went to church today to assuage their consciences, and they have only the most vague understanding of how their life and beliefs are affecting and even killing people elsewhere. And that's what I mean when I say this war is an example of that. It's a thing that people support reflexively, usually because they are uninformed or misinformed, and I'm saying that doing so is spiritually shallow."

  "What could be more cosmic than the thrill of the kill?" Kjell said.

  "When people vote a certain way and don't research the full implications, when they execute that power or any power in a careless fashion, it ultimately derives from a lack of spiritual understanding. Furthermore, you've never even been in a fistfight." Carson said.

  "Only because those punks know better than to mess with me!"

  "Hey, we're in Wyoming now!"

  Olivia interrupted. She pointed out the sign by the side of the road, with drawings of mountains, and as far as they could see in any direction there were no buildings and no cars.

  "Perfect. Wyoming is alphabetically last among the United States." Carson said.

  "You're not changing the subject that easily! We're driving right now and burning gasoline. Do you have any idea what it takes to keep that system moving? Or do you just want to enjoy the benefits and complain about the source?"

  "There's a huge difference between buying gasoline and occupying random countries so we can be shot at. Isn't it clear at this point that every single thing our dear President has ever said on this issue was a total lie?"

  "You were taking his words too literally. What was he supposed to tell people?"

  "Ok, I'm not sure what meds you're supposed to take or if you haven't been taking them, but when you talk it sounds like nonsense." Carson said.

  "America is soft and Americans are living in a fantasy-land. That's the real spiritual death of the United States, Carson. Stop listening to what people say and look at what they do--"

  "Says the guy who's voting for George Bush this fall."