She wasn't home. She was somewhere else. Safe.
I started the car and pulled away up the street.
CHAPTER FIVE
1.
My fingers tightened on the steering-wheel.
The leather creaked under my grip, and my knuckles felt full of hot sand. I eased the accelerator, pushing the Jeep past 70 as it barreled down a blackened road to nowhere. I took Highway 119 across the Sawmill Bridge, leaving Prophecy Creek behind, making my way along the Schuylkill Expressway. I chased the stark headlights across the asphalt for nearly an hour, coasting across the Walt Whitman Bridge after two-thirty. As the Jeep slipped over the watery border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I glimpsed toward the black river below.
I rolled out onto land again, and the vehicle fell back into the primitive darkness of some long-forgotten epoch. Wooded hills rolled away into a deep haze. I had done this all before. I was sure of it. In another lifetime, on another plane of reality. In a terrifying nightmare in a dream. In the world-from-before. I looked out over that landscape, saw my own eternal Avalon regressing into a distance marked by varying gradients of black on black.
I entertained no concept of a destination. My only thought was to drive until the land ran out. Now, as the dashboard clock marched dejectedly toward three o'clock, a weary sort of logic reasserted itself, railing against the insanity that beat at my temples. I had stolen a car.
This was an empirical fact that I had ignored, then denied, then rationalized, until I finally accepted it right around the time that I had passed through Fernhill Park. I had stolen a car, and was now driving it across state lines. I had no plan, limited money, and half-a-tank of gas, and I was pretty sure that my rebellious impulse had just turned into a felony. If I continued down this blackened road to nowhere, I had no doubt that the story would end very badly for me. I knew only that I couldn't go back.
I waded through the bucolic night, overwhelmed by this ancient landscape that might have been the foothills of the Poconos or the Paps of Fife above the Firth of Forth or the second moon of Endor. I heard myself laughing.
I passed through this impossible topography without time or location, the absurd fiction of nations flaking away like paint peeling from the desiccated slats of a skewed fence. And when that fence finally tumbled into the weeds and decomposed back into the Earth, the border it marked would be forgotten forever. Those lines would never be redrawn, and that was just as it should be.
I laughed, and the sound of my own laughter made me dizzy. I laughed, because in that intoxicating delirium, the notion of nations was too intense and massive to be held all at once in a single brain. I laughed, because there was nothing else to do. I had looked into the unflinching soul of the universe, and it had looked back into me and seen itself. It was absolutely absurd. It was laughable.
And so I laughed. Because curiosity is the greatest gift, and knowledge is the greatest curse. It always had been. And I had no one to blame but myself. I had looked into the photosphere of a total solar eclipse, into the Ark of the Testimony, into the jar that Zeus had given to Pandora. I had looked, and I had seen what was never been meant to be seen. That indelible memory could not be unseen.
I would carry that knowledge with me forever. I would treasure it, and care for it. I would share it when I could and defend it when I must. I would be mocked for it, revered for it, vilified and deified as a mad prophet by a society so high on its own ignorance that it waged war against itself and murdered its own people for theologies, ethnicities, politics. Oil. And justice for all.
I laughed, because the alternative was to turn back and drive this Wagoneer off the Walt Whitman Bridge into the icy relief of the South River. I reached to the dashboard, snapped the radio on, twisted up the dial to drown out my racing thoughts. A graceful tumble of piano chords rained at moderate-4, and Billy Joel told me about a kid working in a grocery store, saving his pennies for someday.
It seemed such a waste of time.
So I laughed.
Half-an-hour later, the fraying ends of my sanity whipped in the bitter breeze slicing through the open window.
A litany of classic rock had carried me through New Jersey. Jimi Hendrix's operatic guitar rang out under an exchange between a joker and a thief, and I eased the radio up to full volume. I jammed the gas pedal, delirious with the fiery taste of my own immortality.
The Jeep crested a gentle rise, and a neon sprawl of steel and glass and concrete monoliths sparkled out of the darkness. I shook my head, blinked hard, tried to clear away the kaleiscopic hallucination. But the City persisted, huddled against the fringe of the Angry Sea, the tarnished gem of the East beckoning with the cries of the Sirens.
The expressway widened. I stared thunderstruck into the cyclopean eye of Atlantic City. Screaming sodium-arcs crowded the hem of the road, casting a colorless glaze over the eight-lane thoroughfare. I eased my foot off the gas, coasting down that shadowless urban tract.
Extravagant shrines towered into the troposphere, glorious tributes to the postmodern deities of decadence. Kinetic spires of commercialism flickertwinkled like shattered glass, all glitz and no substance. And of course that was the point. The City was just a glittering lure.
I stared into that corporeal mirage, and a sudden splash of red-and-blue and red-and-blue flashed in my rearview, jittering across the interior of the car. I glanced up at the mirror, saw the front-end of a white Crown Victoria and the unmistakable shape of cruiser headlights, that crimson-indigo screaming from the bar lights on its roof.
"Fuck," I spat, easing the breaks. I tried to recall where my mother hid the registration as I reached for the handle to roll the window. I even started concocting a cover-story to explain why I was driving an out-of-state car that did not belong to me at this late hour. A family vacation, and a drug-store-run to get aspirin. Mom was too tipsy.
It sounded good enough inside my head, but I never got to test it. The cruiser pulled by me and shot along the straightaway into downtown. I watched the squad car, blinked as its tail-lights flared, and tried to consider my unimaginable good fortune. I couldn't do it. That much luck was too intense and massive to be held all at once in a single brain. The distinctive tone of a police siren rang out once, and then the cruiser disappeared into traffic.
I laughed out loud, then pulled back into traffic.
I steered the Wagoneer for another fifteen minutes.
Lurid showpieces stood out against a velvet backdrop. That tawdry sideshow played on an endless loop for my infinite amusement, and I was suddenly sure that I was the only real character in someone else's nightmare. Ethan's perhaps. If I glanced into the rearview mirror right now, I might even find him sitting in the backseat, grinning up at me with that complicated, unfathomable smile.
I looked, secretly hoping he would be there. Because that would mean that I had burned away the last vestiges of my sanity. There was a measure of relief in that.
But he wasn't there. Of course he wasn't. I was not insane. I was only pretending to be. A few blocks later, I twisted the wheel right, rolling the Jeep down a forgotten side street between two brooding casinos. The garish cabaret winked impotently in the rearview before fading as I slipped out into the stark fringes of the metropolis. A half-mile farther from the arterial freeway, the broken road rose before ending against a crumbling dune.
I rolled to the end of the sandswept lane and stopped. A fistful of sandstones clattered against the undercarriage. I stared into the bruised nimbus of one last lamppost slouching in this furthest outskirt of humanity, an alien relic marking the edge of a decaying landscape.
I threw the door open without thinking too precisely on the event. Better to act than to think. Or so I've heard.
The briny bouquet of the Angry Sea flooded my lungs. I sucked in an icy breath. The crashing voice of the end of the world grumbled from the far side of that crumbling dune, beckoning me with the cries of the Sirens.
I climbed out of the Wagoneer. Followed the desic
cated slatwood fence that skewed at odd angles after a lifetime of disregard. And even then that ended, and I pressed on, scaling that flaking hardpan ridge. I climbed its crumbling face, spilled over the summit, and looked deep into the churning black waters of my own soul.
I blew out a long breath I didn't know I'd been holding. It was a breath I'd been holding for most of my life, and it dissolved back into the universe. Just as it should.
A bitter breeze sliced across the beach in fitful flicks and twitches, spitting an abrasive grit into my face. Four-foot breakers tumbled end-over-end, capped with frothing mist that curled along the coastline. I looked down at the point where the land ended in unthinking waves, and I gasped. Because at this late hour, I had finally, mercifully reached the deep and terrible End of the All.
I stumbled down that crumbling dune, staggered across the beach. Collapsed into the surf that curled along the coast. The icy sea rushed through my fingers as land and endless waters whispered breathless eroticisms to one another. The ocean stretched away beyond the borders of the world, beyond the impossible vanishing point over the curvature of the Earth. Melting into nothingness.
I closed my eyes against the darkness, and saw all of the secrets that hid in the clefts of the world. Gluons and muons and elegant accelerons. I felt the elusive texture of eternity and the impossible energy that binds a universe bent on ripping itself apart. The madness of entropy. The voice of the universe brushing itself against my mind.
That glacial surge roared through me, swallowed me whole, dashed me to psychoscopic dust. I was murdered by that crashing blue, beaten to death by ancient waters. I came unmade, and became at one with all things.
The infinite tide washed me clean, thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before, brought me back to myself and made me whole and real and human again.
I stood again, got my feet back under me. Ignored my creaking joints as they screamed from a sudden onslaught of age. I stood at the edge of the deep and terrible End of the All, bathed in the dying reflection of a bleak moon. Freezing seawater dripped from my fingertips, whipped in the bitter breeze that sliced across the beach. The soles of my shoes sank into the wet sand as the swirling surf swept up to my shins. And that was okay. I didn't mind.
Not even a little.
I stood there with all of America at my back. Prophecy Creek slept out there somewhere in the unforgiving night. I drew in a sharp breath, tasted my own fiery immortality, wondered just how far across the Angry Sea Meadowbank really was. If I could see it if I squinted hard enough.
I shuddered in the piercing cold, and smiled, standing alone on that absurd infinity of sands. I was me once more, perhaps for the first time in my young life, and entirely at peace within this flesh despite the thousand natural shocks that it is heir to. I stood on that solemn breaking point as waves crashed endlessly. Everything was right.
It was as close to perfection as I dared to dream.
So I turned once more toward land.
The world stood blank and dark and bold. All things lay before me, where they belonged, and the madness of entropy crashed at my back. Just as it should. I laughed, started deliberately up the beach. Each footprint sunk into the damp sand, and I glanced down to watch the tide ramble up the shore and brush the coast clean.
I climbed up the arid bank, shivering as arctic saltwater trickled over my goosepebbling skin. I reached the peak of that crumbling dune, looked back over my shoulder to the end of a continent. Indifferent waters rolled in, receded, repeated, bid me their brackish farewell. I scanned the coastline, and smiled. My footprints were gone.
In the opposite direction, the City flashed against the darkness of that good night. I picked my way down the descending side of the hardpan ridge, and as the sand crumbled beneath my sneakers, I felt myself step across some intangible border. Not a line drawn in the sand by people to separate here from there, but a line drawn forever across my memory separating then from now.
Separating me from him. Because I had climbed this dune eastward as one man, and I was crossing it westward as another. I felt that in my marrow as clearly as I felt the tears of the sea dripping down the back of my neck into my sodden collar. A confused, terrified, defiant boy had come to this mythic break in search of incomprehensible answers to unaskable questions. All he had found were the glittering shards of his own shattered soul.
It was the only truth that had ever mattered.
A cataclysmic confrontation had erupted in the surf as land and endless waters whispered breathless eroticisms to one another, and I had survived the battle. I had taken him in my brackish embrace, and shown him his own horrible truth, and he had rejected it. Because he was confused; because he was terrified; because he was defiant.
He had rejected his incomprehensible answer. Rejected himself. And so I had crashed against him until the fury of his own truth had been too much. I had gone blind from black wrath, and it hadn't been his fault, but it had been his destruction. He had come unmade, become at one with all things, and returned to every particle of every world.
I had murdered him there in the breakers, and cast his shattered body into the Angry Sea. I had to. Because he had rejected his truth, and it had broken him. He could not return to his world if he refused to return to himself.
Because I was his truth.
And I was the only truth that mattered.
So I had taken his place. I had been made whole and real and human again. I had ignored these creaking joints as I stood under a bleak moon while freezing seawater dripped from these fingertips. I had left him to be taken by the sea. I will mourn him, and remember him.
But I will never regret destroying him.
2.
I reached the skewed wooden slats imitating a fence along the edge of a sandswept lane, and found it too strange that the Wagoneer should be just where I'd left it.
I piled back into the vehicle, freezing and emptied and satisfied. I twisted the key in the ignition and cranked the heater, pressing my weight into the seat. Sensation crept back into my limbs. The scar under my arm and the two across my back tightened, and my breathing slowed.
I put the Jeep into gear, checked the mirrors, reversed to the nearest intersection. My heart clenched inside my chest as I watched that crumbling dune pull away from the windshield. That was where I had been born, where I had come into this desiccated world for reasons unknown. It was a place that would enthrall me and terrify me for the rest of time. It was the site of my first murder.
At the bruised nimbus of a fading streetlight, I swung the car ninety degrees and stopped. I paused, looked out the passenger's side window, memorized the darkness. I eased the car another ninety degrees onto the gravelly lane. The tinselly City loomed in front of me, beckoning me with worthless promise. Endless waters lapped at my back, a father and a mother wishing me the best.
I pushed the gas, drove back into that short and brutish fray, spilling back out into the eight-lane thoroughfare and turning back in the direction that I'd come. I sped up, out of the commercial district and several miles further into the neglected fringes populated by the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
No pretense had been painted over these crumbling bricks. No lurid diversion distracted from this forgotten existence. Only shadow, and sweet silence.
Further on I spotted a billboard over a battered diner. A floodlamp had been set out to light the wooden sign reading SNAKE EYES DINER in a stylish script. Someone with just enough talent had once exerted just enough effort to prove that they cared. And that made me care. Relate to it, or perhaps find a bit of myself in it. So I stopped at this place of all places, at this late hour, instead of heading off into the darkness to wherever it was that I was headed, to do whatever I meant to do there. Mostly, I was hungry, and I had no idea where I was going anyway.
A smaller wooden plate painted with 24HRS hung from two hooks. I pulled into the parking lot, rolled over an extension cord snaking across the crac
ked asphalt from the floodlamp to the door. I pulled into a vacant spot in front of the door, next to a Ford Bronco with faux-wood paneling. I shut the car down, grabbed my bookbag off the passenger's seat, climbed out of the Wagoneer.
I followed the extension cord through the door and stepped into the hazy diner.
The restaurant, such as it were, was nearly abandoned.
A clock with a cracked face hung on the wall, ticking its elemental cadence toward four o'clock. One patron sat on a stool at the counter, wearing immaculate wingtip shoes and a tousled grey suit, working at a plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, and hashbrowns and nursing a cup of coffee while reading a copy of The Press of Atlantic City.
On his way to work, or on his way home.
I took two steps into the room, and a woman emerged from the kitchen behind the counter with a coffee pot. She topped off her customer's cup, and spotted me. She wore her dirty blonde hair cut short, and a t-shirt with a pair of dice showing snake eyes strategically screen-printed over her breasts. She looked forty, and was probably ten years younger. She looked like a fallen angel.
The woman flashed me a mercurial smile and waved at the nearly abandoned dining room. "Take your pick."
I nodded, crossing the diner. I passed behind the other patron, and the woman asked, "what can I get for you?"
I paused, considered. I almost asked to see the menu, then saw the plate on the counter in front of the man.
So I told the woman, "I'll have what he's having." The man grunted a laugh, and I passed by, settling into the booth against the back corner. I had a view of the door, the counter, the other patron, the kitchen through a window behind the counter. I felt safe in that corner booth.
The Danger of Being Me Page 21
