by Sean Platt
His “please” sounded like an appeal.
Piper’s feeling of assurance — of trust in Meyer — slipped a notch closer to desperation. Once behind the wheel, his control restored even in the most useless of ways, he seemed to straighten and harden. Within minutes, it was easy to forget the pleading eyes he’d had earlier — not about something as silly as driving, but about his guilt over Heather, over fears he couldn’t and wouldn’t dare articulate. He was Meyer Dempsey again. And Meyer Dempsey always got what he wanted.
They drove that way for an hour. Two hours.
As the dashboard clock approached the wee hours, traffic started to swell — some unknown Indiana city on the horizon, perhaps. With more cars on the road, Meyer seemed desperate to drive faster. The van kept beeping to warn him about his speed, and he ignored it with a steely gaze forward. The kids were asleep in the back, but they woke to his aggression.
He cut in. And out. And in again.
Horns honked. Tires screeched.
He was driving like he had something to prove.
“Dad …” said Trevor. But then he stopped, and said no more.
Piper gasped as Meyer cut between a car and an SUV that had been dutifully sticking to their lanes. Meyer grumbled as if their adherence to proper driving and safety was a hassle, or a weakness.
A horn blared behind them.
“Honey,” said Piper.
“These fucking people,” said Meyer.
“Maybe if you just ease back, and …”
“The sooner we get there, the sooner I can ease back.”
“But we’re nowhere close. We’re just in Indiana.”
“Exactly. We’re nowhere close. Which is why we have to make up time.”
“Maybe we should rest.” Then, inside her head: Maybe you should rest. Maybe we should all just step back for a bit.
A near collision with the rear of a Buick. The van swayed, then surged into a gap. From the back, Lila lost a tiny scream.
“You’re scaring us.”
“It’s not me doing the scaring, Piper. I’m trying to do the saving.”
“Then you need to slow down.”
“Slowing down doesn’t get us where we need to be. I’d rather you were scared now. Because we should all be scared of what’s coming.”
Piper was usually docile, but now she felt her eyebrows bunch, her forehead wrinkle. “Shh. You’ll frighten them.”
The van nudged the rear bumper of a silver car ahead. The car swerved, corrected, then drifted far away from the big vehicle and its crazy driver. When Piper looked over she could see the woman on the car’s right side looking over with big, vacant eyes.
“Oh, I’ll frighten them, huh?” Projecting: “Hey, kids. Guess what? Aliens are coming, and we’re hauling ass to get to our doomsday bunker.” He shook his head at Piper, lowering his voice. “They know it already, Piper. Pretending nothing is wrong will only make us stupid.”
“And do stupid things like driving like a maniac?”
Meyer laid on the horn, then cut left. A second car swerved to avoid him. Piper was reminded of her father driving years ago when she’d been little, back when all of the cars had been manual, and the true test of a man’s patience had been to put him behind the wheel in heavy traffic. Her father had consistently failed that test, and Meyer was failing it now.
“Let me handle this, Piper.”
“You’ll handle us into a collision.”
“I’m trying to get us where we need to be.”
“You’re angry.”
“I’m angry because we’re not where we need to be, and everyone here is out for a Sunday drive.”
“Slow down, Meyer.”
“Every minute we waste …”
“The bunker in Vail doesn’t do us any damn good if we’re dead in a pileup, Meyer!”
Meyer looked over, his fugue momentarily broken. His eyes hardened again, now fuming atop the rage.
“This is my van, my plan, and I’m the only one here who’s willing to …”
“Look out, Dad!”
Meyer’s eyes snapped forward as Trevor yelled, and he saw the back of an enormous RV looming ahead. It was stopped. The entire line of traffic had stopped, and Meyer hadn’t seen it coming. Nobody had.
He wrenched the wheel hard to the right, apparently deciding that rolling the van was preferable to smashing it into the RV’s back end. But they were skirting a hill that climbed to the right, and the wheels rose as momentum tipped in the same direction. The two forces seemed to cancel out, and the van remained on its spinning rubber feet. Meyer hit the brakes and jockeyed the wheel back to center, holding tight, letting up between brake pumps to prevent an imminent skid. They struck the guardrail and grated along it for maybe fifty feet, raising sparks and a grinding noise like the end of the world.
Then it was over. The van had stopped on the berm still six feet from the dead line of traffic. A man in a tan Oldsmobile was staring at Meyer as if he’d just committed a crime.
Meyer laid his hands on the wheel, his head on his hands.
The road had turned into a parking lot.
They were all going nowhere.
DAY THREE
CHAPTER 14
Meyer is standing in the middle of a plain filled with long grass so green it’s almost neon. It flows with the wind, but the motion is too perfect. It’s moving in waves, but the waves seem artificial, as if in a computer-generated effect in one of his movies. Only instead of producing this movie, he’s in it. He’s the star. He’s in this field of perfectly waving grass, and the grass is so green it’s almost lit from inside. The whole world is green, except for the sky, which is a perfect uniform blue from edge to edge, bunkering against the edges of this infinite field.
A caricature of reality rather than reality itself. A landscape drawn by a child.
There’s someone beside him. It’s Heather. Company on his journey, possibly holding his hand in the real world, beyond this vision. Meyer confronted his demons as he always does, facing his mother and father, who he watches die every time. This time he watched himself slit the throat of Sam Blackwell, Heather’s comedian friend. Not new, but never pleasant. He doesn’t always murder Blackwell, but he’s done it often enough.
The medicine is supposed to wash you clean, but first it must dredge the worst of what’s inside you to purge it. In real life, Meyer is never jealous of Blackwell or the way the media acts like he’s in dalliances with Heather when they share a stage. And he shouldn’t be, because he has a new wife, and Heather should be able to sleep with whomever she wants — not that he believes she’s sleeping with Blackwell.
But he must be jealous somewhere deep down, because more than once he’s found himself wrist deep in Blackwell’s blood, pieces of spleen and heart clinging to his shirtsleeves. More than once he’s taken Blackwell’s head entirely off, and once he saw himself reach up through the ragged neck of the severed head, somehow meeting gray matter from the brain below.
This time, merely slitting the man’s throat feels like a vacation.
“It’s so beautiful,” says Heather, her small hand in his, her voice light and more serious than it is outside of ayahuasca’s kiss.
“It’s too beautiful,” Meyer replies. “It’s not real.”
Heather smiles. “Of course it’s not real.”
“It’s not real in reality,” he says.
Heather smiles again and walks away. She’s never understood.
This isn’t even the real Heather; even deep in the medicine’s grip, he knows their minds haven’t truly connected. Heather, unlike Piper, likes to experiment. Piper won’t travel to Colorado to see Shaman Juha with him. She wasn’t interested in his soul trip to Peru, seeking the source. But Heather always has, and finds ayahuasca to be a real gas. But she’s never believed the way Meyer has. She’s never seen. His connections (and the months of clarity that follow) always seem to lift the veil for him, but never for Heather.
The scene changes.
Now he’s not in a field. He’s on a path above Machu Picchu. He’s never been to Machu Picchu, but all places are the same once you realize that no things are actually real in reality. Once you learn the trick of cinema, it’s easy to go anywhere at all. Seeing a movie of New York every day, seeing a movie of Machu Picchu the next. There’s no difference. The only reason he’s never “been to” Machu Picchu, he now suspects, is because he’s never decided, within the privacy of his own mind, to be there instead of New York, or anywhere else.
Heather is beside him again. Now she’s naked, but the thought isn’t arousing. It’s simply how things are. Heather’s skin is no more who she is than her clothes. His own skin is no more who he is than this is Machu Picchu in front of him.
“You found your axis once,” she says, her black hair swirling in a gentle wind. “Now find it again.”
The cliffside doesn’t crumble. It simply vanishes. And he’s falling, falling, falling …
His eyes snapped violently open, as if they’d been glued and he’d just won the battle to see. He felt a sense of departure — of being robbed of something that mattered. Meyer remembered something, just now, about Heather. He’d been with her. She’d been nude, as she’d been beneath him the last time he’d been in LA. Her body was different from Piper’s. Good, but not as young, as toned, as firm, as gravity defying. But their connection, even from the beginning, had always been more mental than physical. They had their fun times, but Heather often joked that if only their minds could fuck while their bodies stayed put, she’d be up for trying. It would beat the burden of guilt, as if mental cheating wasn’t a lie.
Must’ve been a sex dream. He’d woken with a cast-iron boner.
Piper was looking over at him. She was just to his side, up on one elbow on the makeshift bed in the converted berth, the partition curtains drawn. Meyer hadn’t loved the idea of closing the curtains when they’d pulled into the park last night, taking the exit at Piper’s insistence to wait out the line of stopped traffic and get some rest. He’d thought Lila and Raj might use the opportunity to get dirty, but Piper reminded him that Trevor was back there too. And nothing cockblocked quite like a little brother.
“I see you’re happy to be awake,” Piper said.
“I’ll be happy when we’re driving,” he said, rising.
“The kids are still asleep,” she said. Her fingers were walking across his chest, down his flat belly.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said.
Her walking fingers reached his erection.
“It matters a little,” she told him.
CHAPTER 15
Day Three, Morning
Rural Indiana
They were on the road a half hour later, the curtains back, the bunk reconverted. As predicted, the kids hadn’t stirred even a hair. Piper had peeked through the partition, and Meyer, a little concerned by the close quarters, had looked back too. She’d told him that no matter what, he needed to relax. She’d joked that if aliens were coming, the human species might need their help. He’d reminded her about his vasectomy, but she’d climbed atop him anyway, promising to be quiet.
They were out of the RV park and onto the two-lane road below the highway before Lila, Raj, and Trevor so much as lifted their heads. Meyer had traced the road’s course last night after they’d pulled into the park, theorizing that they might be able to get down and around the obstruction through some tricky turns and creative navigation. It would cost them distance, yes, but might save them time.
They didn’t need to test that hypothesis; the highway turned out to be entirely clear. Piper worried that it would simply fill later, and that they’d find themselves stuck between exits if it did. But Meyer, having traced the long route around, decided the risk was worth it. The sooner they made Chicago, the sooner they could get past Chicago — something that, due to the metropolis’s sheer enormity, gave him pause. But once they solved Chicago, they should be home free. There would be people who decided to cross the flat heartland bound for nowhere, sure. And once they reached the mountains, it was true that a blockage could be crippling. But chances on those roads — to Meyer at least — seemed far better. They’d be over the hump with maybe sixteen hours left to drive at highway speed. Plenty of room to spare if they ran into trouble.
They’d slept later than Meyer would have liked (he chided Piper for not waking him earlier, but it was hard to stay mad when he could still taste her), and by the time they were on the road the sun was strong behind them. Meyer let the van do its own driving, turning into the cabin to avoid the light flashes in the rearview. Then he waited, content for the first moment in what felt like forever.
It won’t last, he thought.
But nothing lasts, said a countering voice inside.
There was something else, too. Something about what he saw rather than felt — about reality rather than lasting and persistence. Maybe something from his dream. Maybe something to do with the haze of his latest ayahuasca ceremony still percolating in his blood. It was the only drug Meyer took, but it was plenty. The effects lasted, and lasted, and lasted. Months afterward, he’d feel above the fray, looking down on his life, able to see connections that were obviously true, but that had somehow remained invisible before.
This was like that. He’d been putting something together behind a curtain for years, it seemed, but he had no idea what it was. He was like an inventor working with a blindfold. He knew he was building a grand contraption (in this case, a vision of previously unknown truth), but until the blindfold came off, that contraption would remain invisible, and the truth unknown.
With the thought, he thought anew of Vail. Of the compound he’d been compelled to have built. Of the van he’d been compelled to purchase and stock — a second vehicle to his everyday ride. Of the plans he’d been compelled to make. Of the move from New York he knew they’d make once school was out. Of the paranoia he’d felt for too long.
Had he really known this was coming, or was it coincidence?
“Hey, Dad,” said Trevor, blinking awake. He yawned and stretched. A strange thought struck Meyer: For almost two entire days, Trevor had been sitting in that same chair, rising only for the bathroom. None of them had even left the van last night. They’d locked down, and someone had stayed awake at all times. Even at gas stops, Meyer had been the only one to exit the van since Jersey. Could it be bad for Trevor to sit for so long? He was a growing boy, after all.
But that was just morning reverie. Dream hangover. Nostalgia, perhaps. Meyer was forty-three, and sometimes it was hard to believe he wasn’t twenty years younger. And yet he’d somehow aged, with a daughter nearly as old now as he felt deep inside.
There was another vague flash from his dream — something to do with Heather’s nakedness, her skin, his skin. But it was gone like dandelion fluff in a breeze.
“Hey, kid,” Meyer said to Trevor. Then he looked at Lila, who’d woken in Raj’s arms. She straightened. He added, “Morning, princess.”
“Dad,” she said, smiling. “Don’t call me that.”
“I can call you anything I want.” He returned her smile.
“Dad,” said Raj.
“Don’t call me that,” said Meyer. But for some reason Raj’s joke struck him as funny, and he laughed a little. They really must be exhausted. Not spent in terms of needed sleep, but emptied by fear. When you heard an alien invasion was on the way, you freaked out. But as nothing new happened hour after hour (except for people in cities losing their shit — different issue), that freak-out state became harder and harder to maintain. A person, it seemed, could get used to anything in time.
They drove all morning. Through noon. The kids demanded to stop for food as they had the past two days, but Meyer still refused. The van was stocked, and they could add to the stores whenever they found more opportunities to stop for gas. The idea that restaurants would be doing business now was ludicrous anyway. Was he just supposed to pull their survival van up to a McDonald’s drive-thru, roll down t
he window, and order four value meals? Anywhere they stopped would be closed at best, likely raided, and possibly lousy with desperate people looking to take what they had the moment the Dempsey family gave them a chance.
They picked at the van’s provisions, complaining. Watched more movies and TV shows from the van’s juke, bored and restless.
Finally, as they began to skirt Chicago and traffic started to swell, Piper said what Meyer had already been thinking.
“Maybe it would be a good idea to check in on the news. Just a little.”
Meyer nodded. He didn’t need convincing. She was the one who kept trying to protect them from unpleasant truths.
Piper touched the screen, then tapped the news station. An announcer’s voice filled the van in a rush, and she jabbed frantically at the console to lower the volume.
“ … in scattered locations,” the announcer began midsentence, “but the National Guard reports that incidents of crime have been ‘within expectations and manageable.’ Spokespeople for the Guard have praised the population in general for their ‘restraint and level-headedness.’ Still, fires continue to burn out of control in Las Vegas and parts of Chicago. Here’s William Quincy, National Guard.”
“Chicago?” said Raj.
Meyer shushed him. He was more interested in what they had to say about Vegas, as a heavy ball of guilt returned to his gut. He wasn’t superstitious, but suddenly his dream of Heather last night felt like an omen. When was the last time he’d dreamt of Heather? Her appearance in his dream now seemed ill timed. Was she dead? Was she a ghost, returning to warn him like Jacob Marley shaking his chains?
It’s just because she’s on your mind. Don’t be stupid.
And that, at least, was true. He couldn’t go five minutes without thinking of Heather and what might have happened to her. It was a real-life cliffhanger. He found he didn’t enjoy them nearly as much in the flesh, and needed resolution more desperately. And the worst thing? If something had indeed happened to her and she didn’t show at the ranch, he’d probably never know. What news outlet would report on one woman shanghaied when the planet was crumbling?
