End of the Road

by Jonathan Oliver

  He scrabbles wildly into the junk in the passenger seat, his fingers catching a strap. A bag? He hauls it out, tips it up, gets another lungful of that smoky stench. The car won’t blow, will it? Doesn’t that only happen in movies? But then... why are there always burnt-out cars on the side of the highway? The fire has to be coming from the electrical system, but he can also smell petrol and he doesn’t want to be caught in an explosion. That could happen, couldn’t it? Cars aren’t his thing – he doesn’t even maintain his bike himself, gets some dude from Durbanville to pick it up every so often to service it. Another luxury he can’t afford.

  He roots through the bag, but there’s no phone, just a confetti of receipts, an old lipstick and a child’s drinking cup.

  “Something’s burning,” the woman sobs. “Please! I don’t want to die like this. I don’t want to burn to death oh God please help me.” And then, “Please,” she wails. “Please! Help me!”

  He yanks at the driver’s door again, leans in, fiddles with the inside catch. It’s jammed, and even if he could open it, she’s really trapped. The engine block has been pushed forward, pinning her hips, crushing her legs.

  He could just get back on his bike, roar away and pretend he was never here.

  “Mister,” she whispers. “Mister. Don’t go.” Has she read his mind?

  He needs a fire extinguisher, he has to somehow dampen whatever is causing the smoke that’s leaking out of the vents. But this is some old jalopy, not a Merc fresh off a showroom floor. He knows, even without looking, that there won’t be one in this car, but he snatches the keys out of the ignition anyway – the woman batting at his hand as he does so – and runs around to the boot. His gloved hands are trembling and it takes him several tries to fit the key in the rusty lock, and it opens with a creak. He blocks out the sounds coming from the car’s interior – the muffled cries of the woman, as if someone’s trapping, pushing her face down, taking out his rage on her – they hurt his ears. He surveys the junk filling the boot. He hauls out an overpacked suitcase, the sleeve of a purple silky blouse hanging from its seam. There’s also a tote bag filled with all sorts of shit. He scrabbles through the stuff, chucks it onto the tarmac – an old iron, a plastic kettle, a hairdryer, a photograph album, a half-full jar of Milo, a pair of child’s sneakers, shoelaces knotted together, a balding teddy bear. What the fuck was she running from?

  “Mister!” she screams from the front. “Mister!” she’s coughing now, sounds like she might be choking. “Burning! I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve seen people die like this on TV.”

  He makes himself walk to the front of the car. She whips her head back and forth. “Mister,” she says again, “Please!”

  “What show was it?” he says. As if that will calm her. As if it will calm him. As if he was just back at home and he was never really here.

  “Discovery,” she says. “I used to...” She starts to cry now. A regretful cry; not fear, but sadness.

  “I’ll try and flag someone down –”

  “Mister, I don’t want to die like this.”

  She’s starting to annoy him. What the fuck is he supposed to do? This isn’t his mess. Another car whooshes past. Then another. It’s as if he’s cut off from the real world – a world where everyone else just gets on with their shit, goes home – trapped behind an invisible barrier, behind their massive barbed-wire fucking fences. The light is changing. It will be morning soon, then rush hour. The highway will be teeming with people.

  “It hurts, mister! Get me out, mister!”

  She stares into his eyes and he remembers the woman from last night. She looked at him the same way: that mixture of pleading and betrayal. Then she laughed again, as if his fists were as soft as his dick. He steps back. The booze and the anger churn in his stomach. He wants to be sick.

  And then she says it, the hysteria gone from her voice. “Then kill me. I don’t want to burn to death. Kill me,” she whispers. “Make it quick.”

  He looks into her eyes, the thick wisp of smoke drifting between them. She means it. He’s never been looked at like that before. No woman has ever looked at him like that before.

  He steps away woodenly. Limbs moving of their own accord.

  “Don’t go, don’t leave me, mister! Please! Please!”

  He rounds to the back of the car and picks up the steam iron, feeling a trickle of cold water running down his wrist – she didn’t bother to empty it when she packed it up.

  He approaches her window. “Do it,” she screams, flapping her hands towards her crushed legs. “I’m burning. It hurts. It hurts so bad, mister it–”

  The angle’s all wrong, and the first swipe only glances off her forehead, and she screams again. He braces his left shoulder against the side of the car, swings his arm back and in the split second her eyes lock with his, he sees something in them – doubt? betrayal? – then lands the first real blow with a hollow thunk, and her noise stops. He shuts his eyes and keeps swinging. Thunk, thunk, thunk. He thinks he can feel something give. He keeps going until the muscles in his arm spasms.

  He drops the iron. Draws in a shuddering breath. Realises his eyes are stinging. He wipes his gloved hands across his face. They come back sticky.

  Get away. Get away from the car. But he doesn’t move.

  He doesn’t allow himself to look at the woman. He doesn’t want that imprinted in his mind. Breathes in again.

  It’s then that he realises he can no longer smell smoke. Makes himself look past the thing in the driver’s seat. Not even a wisp of smoke floats out of the vents.

  The fire has gone out of its own accord. Hasn’t it? There was a fire, wasn’t there?

  He backs away, is only aware that he’s stepped into the road when a car horn screams past him, followed by a muffled yell.

  He imagines himself getting back on the Ducati, riding away, the blood in his gloves slipping on the throttle; getting his grip, eating up the road, the sirens washing towards him, heading for the scene he’s just left behind, increasing his speed, becoming a roar and nothing else. He sees himself taking his exit, heading past the 24-hour Engen garage on the corner, the place where he usually stops for a Coke and a packet of smokes after one of his nights out. The pictures come clear and fast, so clear that his right hand clenches, as if he’s squeezing the accelerator.

  You can’t take it back. You can’t jump back to that moment and wish it away.

  Ahead, the N2 and freedom beckons, but he doesn’t make a move towards the bike. He waits. He wants to tell the police when they come what happened. That there was a fire, that she begged him, that he did what was right. That would be the respectable thing to do.

  But the sky lightens and the kids come to the fence to look at the new wreck. They’re talking loudly among themselves. They’re calling the adults who start shouting across at him, clashing their fists against the fence. Still the police don’t come.

  The kids start throwing stones: idly, he senses, not with any purpose. The traffic is thickening on the highway. The car is still; what’s inside is still.

  He takes out his cellphone, thumbs through the photos. Sees the woman from last night at the bar. She was good-looking. Then the one of her in bed, just before. She was turned on, drunk, smiling. She really liked him; it was just a minor setback. He slides through the other photos, the nearly complete card. It’s a beautiful set, and he feels pretty proud of himself. Maybe he wants to complete the card – he’s a collector, a prospector, after all. Maybe it’s not about earning the boys’ respect after all, but his own. If he just finishes what he started.

  He stands up, stretches, dusts himself down, and gets on the bike. He kicks up the stand, turns the key and hits the starter button. He thinks of the woman’s smile, blends into the encroaching rush, and is gone.

  PERIPATEIA

  VANDANA SINGH

  The roads taken and those not taken, the paths before us and the possibilities they can lead to – all these are considered in Va
ndana’s story blending scientific speculation and personal discovery. Here the road leads Sujata, a scientist trying to come to terms with loss, to a realization about the true nature of the universe.

  IT OCCURRED TO Sujata that what she was experiencing was a kind of life-after-living. Veenu’s abrupt and unexplained departure three days ago was a clean dividing line between what she had thought of as her life, and the inexplicable state of being that came after. A phase transition as fundamental as that of water boiling in the saucepan, turning to steam, she thought, stirring in the tea leaves. The brown ink spread through the water the way pain seeped through every part of her being. She’d become, in her post-life, a sponge for metaphors, a hammer to which everything was yet another nail in the coffin of that earlier existence. The other day she had found herself wandering disconsolately through the park between frolicking, screaming children, staring at Lost Cat notices on the utility poles, and she’d thought of posting a notice – Lost: The Ground Under my Feet.

  It was getting dark; she left the tea steeping in the pan and turned on the kitchen light. The brightness hurt her eyes. White walls, white counters, the potted coriander on the window-sill, a small dining table piled with sympathy cards. The fridge snored like a polar bear. On a shelf to its left was a little altar from the time Sujata’s mother had visited last year; it held a smiling Buddha and a Nataraja, a somewhat garish print of Lakshmi, and a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet showing an equally garish Christ. Sujata’s mother didn’t really have any basis for believing in God, a fact she would readily admit, but she liked to plan for contingencies. She’d put Jesus up there with the others, as she said, “just in case.” The wall across from the window bore witness to Sujata’s own probabilistic approach to the universe: it was covered almost entirely with sticky notes in yellow, green and pink, fluttering in the breeze from the window like so many prayer flags. Here, in Sujata’s tiny, neat hand, were maps of possibility, random thoughts, and notes on a variety of subjects that had caught her interest. In the middle there was a large sheet of paper with a graph showing two world-lines, hers in purple, Veenu’s in green, two lines crawling across the white space, more or less parallel, until three days ago when Veenu packed up and left. Since that time the purple line had crawled forward, tentative and alone.

  The latest series of sticky notes was an exercise in possibility. Imagine a phenomenon, and write down all possible explanations and descriptions. Then some time-dependent weighted combination of these was (maybe) an approximation to the ever-changing truth.

  Who or What is Veenu?

  An idea. A beginning and end in one, a snake chasing its tail.

  A lover, a partner, a friend.

  An offspring of the mind’s deepest sigh.

  A neural implant, an AI that enables us to network with others at a thought.

  Defined by my existence, the way Veenu’s existence defines mine.

  A traveler through the whorls and eddies of space and time, whose world-line sometimes intercepts with mine.

  An imaginary friend who didn’t go away when I grew up.

  She picked up the last one, which had fallen off the wall, and stuck it back next to the others.

  “You’re so weird,” Veenu used to say, in an indulgent tone. She approved of eccentricity as a matter of principle, but was the more practical of the two of them. “Why don’t you go back to your paper on the Higgs field?”

  The paper on the Higgs field had been sitting in Sujata’s laptop for three months. The trouble, she had said to Veenu – goodness, was that just a few days ago? – the trouble was that the paper was straightforward and eminently publishable, and therefore not very interesting. She’d rather write a paper entitled ‘The Higgs Field Considered as a Metaphor for the Entanglement of Matter in Time’, or ‘Alien Manipulations and the Unfinished Universe’.

  She was sipping the too-bitter tea when the road appeared. As always, the apparition came without warning; the only hint of its impending arrival was a dull headache and a slight visual aura. Then the wall, the one with the sticky notes and the graph, began to shimmer and crackle like an old television set between channels. After which there was no wall at all, just the white and dusty road.

  She dropped the cup. Bits of china crunched under her shoes as she walked through where the wall had been, and stood on the road. It smelled vaguely of burning insulation, with a hint of cinnamon.

  She had developed a ritual by now: look to the left, into the past first, a check for accuracy. Yes, there was the misty bulk of the university building where she worked, and the coffee shop where she and Veenu used to hang out most evenings until the impossible happened – and beyond that, a sloping green hill from her undergraduate days, and then the trees she climbed as a child, and the chai shop she frequented in high school. The order was a little muddled, and the images vague and shifting in the mist, but she could recognize each thing.

  She steeled herself to look to the right, toward the future. There was a deafening beat in her ears. Would there be any indication of Veenu’s return?

  On every previous sighting the future had appeared as a turbulent dust haze, a shifting cloud bank, through which vague images were sometimes discernible. On occasion these were visions of the road itself, flowing like a dark river through an unfamiliar green land, branching and bifurcating into the horizon. This she had interpreted as some kind of probability graph, a reassurance that the future was not determined, that she could choose her path. Sometimes other, more mysterious or terrifying silhouettes emerged from the cloud bank – a decrepit house by a river, a figure on a sloping roof, a sadness that was without shape or form, but recognizable as a sharp jab in the ribs, a sudden breathlessness. Once there had been an incongruous white tower like one of the minarets of the Taj, but she had never encountered it in real life, and it had not been there in subsequent sightings of the road. Her hypothesis was that some futures were more likely than others, and that the future with the white minaret had simply been eliminated through the games of chance.

  She closed her eyes before looking. When she opened them, she saw, to her complete astonishment, that the road ended to her right. No mist, no vague shapes, no branching paths into a semi-determined future, but just a clean line where the road abruptly stopped. There was nothing beyond it but a blank wall. She was so astounded by this that she staggered toward the demarcation before remembering that it was never any use walking on the road, left or right. It was the sort of road where the destination maintained a constant distance from the traveler, no matter how fast or far she walked. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, but nothing had changed. She thought: this means I’m going to die.

  Abruptly she was back in the kitchen. The lower part of her left trouser-leg was cold and wet with tea, and there were bits of china on the floor everywhere. The air was still. The familiarity and emptiness filled her with foreboding. She looked at the wall she had walked through – it was solid again, and a few more of the sticky notes had fallen off.

  There was no sign of impending death. Perhaps it would come tomorrow, or the day after. Or maybe there was another interpretation for that clearly demarcated finish line. Something had ended. But what, exactly?

  She stayed up half the night, sipping tea and munching on dry crackers, thinking about Veenu and waiting for death. When death refused to oblige, she went to bed.

  NEXT EVENING, AFTER a day at work in which she felt as though she was swimming upstream through a bewilderingly swift river, Sujata returned to the house, exhausted.

  There were more cards in the mailbox. She picked them up and threw them on the dining table in the kitchen. The house was silent as a tomb, except for the refrigerator’s constant purr. She stood in the dark by the window. The neighborhood was quiet, lights on behind curtained windows. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The neat lawns and fenced backyards of suburban America – every house a prison unto itself. Her reverie was disturbed by the cards falling off the table. A fury took hold of her then
– she picked up a mass of cards in her hands and threw them up into the air. They were all around her like a pack of predatory birds. She was finally going insane, or so it seemed; the cards flapped away at her, calling out what was written in them in high-pitched voices. Thinking of you, wishing you strength for this difficult time. Theater tickets. People trying to be kind, without actually getting involved, people trying to mask their shock at the unthinkable: Veenu leaving, without warning, without a word! As though what had happened to Sujata was something shameful, something that might infect their own blessedly ordinary lives or threaten the security of their relationships. She batted at the cards, tearing them from the air, tearing them into little bits. At last the cards fell silent, lying torn and tattered on the floor, and she knelt down, sobbing like a child, pleading with the universe for some kind of explanation. The universe, not being obliged to reply, remained silent.

  At last she gathered the torn cards and put them in the recycling, and washed her face. Three of her sticky notes had fallen off the white wall. She picked them up and stuck them back on.

  Alien Manipulations in an Unfinished Universe: an Anti-Occam’s Razor Hypothesis

  The neutrino was predicted by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. It took until 1956 to discover that it actually existed.

  One of the great predictions of particle physics, from considerations of symmetry, was the omega particle. Predicted in 1962, discovered in 1964.

  In an effort to distract herself, Sujata made some tea, set out a plate of cookies, and began to complete the list. Pink sticky notes on the prediction and discovery of the tau neutrino, the top and bottom quarks, dark matter, the Higgs Boson.

  When Sujata was in graduate school, she had founded the Anti-Occam’s Razor society. Membership varied between one and four. Occam’s Razor, a guiding principle of science, posited that the simplest idea that explained a phenomenon was most likely to be correct. She had always found this a dull notion, a surrendering of the imagination to the tyranny of the mundane. She liked to invent complicated explanations for straightforward phenomena, a kind of intellectual Rube-Goldbergism, just to thumb her nose at William of Occam. It was a joke, of course.