Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road

by Rio Youers

  “You have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, Hanna. You don’t want to end up like Mom. In her seventies before she realized she never lived her life. You don’t even go anywhere on the weekends. It’s just you holed up in this place with the blinds closed. Sleeping or watching television. You don’t even try to get out,” Rebecca says.

  I smile instead of slapping her. She couldn’t understand the exhaustion that falls heavy as lead over me every night. How I cannot seem to shrug it off.

  “I should call it a night. I have kids coming for tutoring in the morning. Can’t be late,” I say, but I have never been late. Always too afraid, too nervous of being seen as a failure or of being watched even more carefully than I already am. Three mandatory observations a semester but usually more. Notes in my mailbox if I forget to take attendance, if I leave early, if I am not at my assigned duty station on time. Reminders that this is part of my contractual obligations, and that all infractions will be recorded on my file and considered as part of my evaluation.

  Rebecca kisses me on the cheek before she goes, so light it might not even be a kiss at all, and squeezes my shoulder. “You look gray, sweetie. Seriously. Everything about you looks like it’s dying. At least take a few days for yourself. Get outside. Go for a hike or something,” she says, and then she is gone.

  I sit at the window and wait for the moon to appear, but there are clouds, and there is still a droning in my ears that is like fever or like the sound of tires on asphalt.

  The next morning my tongue tastes of salt, and I move silently through the dark contained in my apartment and then out into the dark contained within the great dome of sky where everything that crawls beneath looks like the same scrawled shadow. I drive and imagine not stopping. Driving until the car runs out of gas or until the road falls off into gravel, and then dead leaves and pine straw, and then getting out and walking until I cough my heart into my palm.

  I can’t listen to the radio. All of that blaring noise and chatter that amounts to less than nothing. There is only me and the road winding before me and the occasional glare of headlights, but there is no sun.

  When I pull into the parking lot, the sky has just begun to lighten, and I hurry into the building. Already, there are students outside my door. Always waiting, for extra tutoring, for make up work, to ask questions I’ve already answered in class or for extra credit, or to feed me bullshit excuses about why they didn’t turn in their data-based responses yesterday or why they won’t be able to take the reading quiz today because they were at a basketball tournament all weekend and really needed three extra days to study.

  I sleepwalk through my lesson plans, pretend to watch as the students move into collaborative groups to goof off instead of finishing the assignment. They think I can’t see them on their phones, or hear them talking about their sex lives or drug habits. They think so little of me. For them, I am a ghost who sometimes makes noise.

  “When is this due again?” a girl with hair the color of dishwater asks, and I know I should remember her name, but I don’t.

  “At the end of the period. You’ve had almost an hour,” I say, and there are a chorus of groans. I bite down on my cheeks.

  “That’s bullshit,” a voice mumbles from the back.

  Half of them don’t turn in the assignment, and I spend my planning dutifully marking them and ignoring the constant pinging from my email.

  At the end of the day, it seems as if the same students are there, still lingering, still asking the same questions, and their faces blend together, a nightmare blend of open, wet mouths all bleating in identical tones. By the time the students have gone, and I’ve marked another handful of papers and responded to three parent emails asking why their children are getting Cs when they’ve always been A level students, and photocopied tomorrow’s assignment, I can feel the sun has set once more. The hallways are empty, the other classrooms dimmed, their windows dark mirrors that reflect my pale, bloated face as I make my way back to the car. I swipe at my eyes, and mascara flakes under my fingers.

  I drive, and the road is empty. I close my eyes, see how long I can keep them closed before panicking and snapping them open only to see that I haven’t drifted anywhere. I am still exactly on this road that has no sun.

  Sometimes I dream that the dark is not a portion of the external world at all, but something I carry inside. I drive and squeeze the steering wheel to keep my hands from shaking. Outside of the window, there are dim forms that seem to rise and fall. I know I am only imagining these things. I feel like I remember reading about it back in college—the Psychology class I had to take—how the brain tries to find order in chaos and will trick itself into seeing images in nothing. Inside darkness, I believe there is only chaos. Not an empty expanse at all but colliding forms constantly shifting, constantly seeking something onto which it can latch and go through a metamorphosis.

  There have been so many days without light. So many hours peering with bleary eyes at walls and faces and roads.

  There is a message from Rebecca on the answering machine, but her voice smears, breaks apart in robotic screeching, so I delete it and don’t call her back. I am not hungry, so I sit in my living room with the volume on the television muted and listen to the sounds in the building that should be there but are not. Instead, there is only a dull kind of roar you hear tucked inside of seashells. A sound meant for children and summer days with the kind of humidity that curls under your skin and lingers well past sundown. I try to follow the pattern of it, but just when I find the rise and fall, the rhythm changes like some great leviathan’s breath.

  I fall asleep on the couch, and at three a.m., I wake panting and shivering but unable to remember what I dreamed. The sound is still there. Something in the walls, like a forsaken God howling behind plaster.

  I make a pot of coffee and wait until it’s time to go. I am grateful to leave that sound behind me, to fall into another kind of roaring that I understand. The road and the sound of the tires against it. There’s some comfort in that.

  There are at least two or three kids missing from each of my classes. Some kind of flu going around. Administration emails about it—offer extra help sessions, be mindful of scheduling make up assignments—and the remaining kids are quiet, sniffling in their seats, and staring back at me with pink, glassy eyes while I force myself through a PowerPoint. Eventually, I give up and put on a movie. I try to grade, but the glare reflecting from the papers gives me a headache. Instead, I watch my students’ faces and wonder when it was that they all started to look alike—hair pulled forward, so it covers their eyes and faces, the skin sallow and seeming to droop downward. Maybe it’s whatever’s going around.

  The girl with the dishwater hair appears at my desk, and I gasp. I didn’t see her get up. “Bathroom,” she says.

  “You need to go?” I ask, prompting her to ask me, to show me the minimum respect anyone would show any other fucking person, but she blinks back at me. There is crust in the corners of her mouth.

  “I’m sick,” she says, and I write her the pass and hand it to her with the tips of my fingers. She doesn’t come back, and I don’t email the nurse to ask.

  At the end of the day, I spray all the desks with disinfectant and wipe down my pens, my markers, the keyboard on my computer. I douse my hands in sanitizer, rub it up and over my arms, and then over my mouth and chin.

  I don’t see the paper until I have finished and am packing my bag to leave. Folded into a tight square, it sits perched on the edge of my desk. It is the kind of thing that is meant to be seen, and I glance about the room even though I have been alone for hours now. It’s just something I missed. This is what I tell myself even as my heart rabbits in the cage of my chest, and I hold the paper away from my body and unfold it quickly as if whatever is contained inside could unstitch the world.

  The paper is blank. I turn it over and over, but there are no words scrawled there, and I toss it into the trash, my throat suddenly aching. I worry that maybe
I’ve caught whatever bug is going around, and swallow again and again, each time a lingering reminder that there may be something festering inside of me. I cough, and it is weak, and I tell myself I’ll take some cough syrup. There are only three more days until the weekend. Three more days. I repeat this over and over to myself until it means less than nothing. I glance once more at the paper in the trash, and then grab my bag. There is an irrational fear damp and heavy in my mouth, and I hurry out the door without looking back at that blank sheet of paper that should have words but doesn’t.

  I drive home in the dark and wonder what it would be like to have sunlight refracting back through all this glass and metal. There is a part of me that shudders, but I shrug it away. I am tired, and it is only nerves and anxiety jerking at my body like some absurd puppet.

  On my fingers, I can feel only the emptiness of that paper, and I cough, but it is dry and unsatisfactory.

  Tomorrow, Rebecca will come to the apartment, and I will cook her dinner and listen to her tell me about all the things wrong with my life, but tonight, I delete the message the moment I hear the high-pitched whine of her voice. There must be something wrong with the answering machine because at the end of the message, there is a long screeching that extends downward into a kind of howl before cutting off. This weekend, maybe I’ll venture out. Buy a new one. But I am so tired. The thought of doing anything other than this learned routine exhausts me.

  I try not to drink liquor during the week, but tonight, I dig out the bottle of gin hiding in the same cabinet where I keep the mixing bowls I don’t use and pour three fingers over ice. I do not turn on the television, and before I have finished the glass, that roaring sound from the previous night is back. I smile and lift my gin in a mock toast, but there is nothing that responds, and so I drain the glass and wait for the night to become another version of night.

  There are fewer students in class the next day. While my back is turned, I can hear them whispering to each other—that same sound as the roar in my apartment—but when I turn to face them, they are still, their faces impassive and mouths damp and slightly open as if they have forgotten who they are, and I want to slap their faces, and clamp their jaws shut, and then run from the building, but there is the paycheck and the rent and the insurance and all of those adult responsibilities you learn about without ever truly understanding how little all of those things add up to.

  I ask questions, but no one answers even though I wait and wait. There is none of the awkwardness, none of the shuffling of bottoms in seats and darting eyes until one student dares to lift a hand just to ease the tension.

  These are not children before me. I tell myself this and shiver and remember that it’s likely they are sick, likely their parents have forced them to come to school even if they have coughs that rattle deep in their chest or are more tired than usual.

  Their eyes are too bright—glittering as if with fever—and I open my mouth to keep on with the lesson but then trail off. There’s no point. Instead, I turn off the lights.

  “Put your heads down. Quiet,” I say, hoping administration would understand if they venture past my room and peek through the window. The students comply. One by one, they lean over their desks, and soon enough, the room is filled with the sound of their slow breathing, and it is somehow like being trapped in an echo chamber. When the bell finally rings, the sound is muffled, and the students peel themselves away from the desks and trundle out.

  There are no students in my last period. I wait and wait and then check the hallway, but all the other doors are closed, and I walk past a few of the classrooms and look in to see a handful of faces I don’t recognize seated calmly at desks or standing at the front, their mouths curving over silent instructions. Substitutes more than likely. Whatever’s going around is hitting the teachers now.

  I cannot see if there are students in those closed off rooms, and so I return to my own classroom and think of contacting administration, letting them know that all my students are sick, but what could they do? I check my email to see if there’s something there, some indication of what to do if we should be in a room with no students, but there’s nothing.

  There are papers to be graded, always a stack of something to do, but I know that it is daylight, and there are no students to teach, just this empty room, and so before I can tell myself I shouldn’t, I grab my bag, my keys, and lock the door behind me. I keep my eyes down so that there is no opportunity if someone sees me in the hallway to ask what I’m doing. I hurry. Suddenly, there is a desperate need to see that there is still sun, to come through the doors and know that there is still a different kind of life that exists outside of my own.

  The hallways divide and divide again, but soon enough, I am in the main corridor, and it is empty, and I am panting. There will be no one to stop me leaving, no one to keep me from the sun, and I reach for the doors, my hands trembling, and I could almost cry out with this deep need. I bite down on that animal-like noise and push through the doors.

  Outside, the sky is the color of charcoal.

  I shrink backward, the door easing shut as I go, and squeeze my eyes closed. “No,” I whisper, but I know what I’ve seen. That whatever exists behind that door is the terrible thing that has been opening itself up for all this time. I rest my fingers against the door and swallow down the bitterness flooding my mouth. I do not want to go forward. I cannot go back. I could scream, but it would not bring back the sun.

  I open the door and fling myself out into the night, my keys sweating in my palm. My car is still in faculty parking, but everything is quiet. I ease the door open, afraid to make any sound. I drive, take the turns too quickly, and I do scream then. Again, and again, but there is only the road and the dark and me moving through some awful thing, and my throat goes raw, but I cannot stop myself.

  I can hear the roar from the apartment before I’m even to my door, and I don’t want to go in, don’t want to finally discover whatever it is that’s making that same sound as tires along an endless road, but there’s nowhere else to go. Inside, there’s another message from Rebecca, and her voice isn’t hers anymore but something like that roaring, and I pick up the phone and dial her number.

  “Hanna,” she says, and I sob. She is there, and I am not alone, and the thought of it is too much.

  “There’s something wrong here. Everyone is sick, and there should be sun, but there isn’t, and it feels like there’s a road that I can’t get off. A road where there’s no sun, and that everything I think I’ve been doing isn’t real,” I say, and the panic is slick on my tongue.

  “Hanna,” Rebecca says again. “Hanna, Hanna, Hanna.” The voice is flat and without emotion, and I picture a recording on the other end, my name endlessly looping, and I drop the phone, scratching at my palms as if I could remove the stain of that alien creature speaking my name.

  Underneath the roaring, there’s another layer that is somehow worse than the first—a delicate scratching as of small limbs scrabbling along a hard surface. The sound of some many-legged insect working its way out of a cocoon or from a nest where it has slept and woken up hungry.

  I close every door in the apartment, and I do not look into the darkness contained within the rooms, afraid that I will see the shadows bend and shift into the slack faces of my students or reflect back many eyes that no longer blink but watch and wait. I go back out into the hallway and move up and down between the other apartments, pressing my ear to each door, but there are no other sounds other than the roaring.

  I tell myself I will knock, that there will be someone who comes to one of the doors, and smiles and tells me that everything is fine, everything is wonderful, and there is no darkness here, there is no road that eats up everything that once was, but the first door I come to opens when I push my knuckles against it.

  Inside the apartment, there are blank walls and empty floors—no indication there has ever been a human occupant. Here, there is only the dark pushing outward in small bursts of putrid air, an
d I back away. It’s only one empty apartment. They can’t all be like this. I’ve seen other people. The edges of their coats as they unlock their doors and scurry inside. I’ve heard their noises—the dull static of a television or low murmur of conversation. I have not been alone this entire time. Rebecca has come here. She would have noticed if there were no other people and commented on how weird it was to be the only occupant of an entire complex. She would have said it was like a haunting.

  On my left and right, the doors trail off in receding parallel lines, and in the periphery of my vision, they all seem to open at once, several pale hands all reaching outward only to vanish just as quickly. One by one, I follow the doors, peek inside those great, blank spaces, until my breath is ragged in my throat and my cheeks damp with tears. I’m not sure when it is I started crying.

  I find my way back to my apartment. The phone is still there, and I pick it up, but there is no dial tone, only that worming sound I’ve been hearing for days, and I throw the phone onto the carpet. It doesn’t break. Nothing can be so easy.

  My purse and keys are where I left them on the kitchen counter, and I fumble for them and am out the door again. My feet are bare, and they slap against the concrete stairs as I make my way down. I do not trust the elevator, cannot imagine being trapped in that metal box while the roaring gets louder and louder as I wait for this world to collapse in on itself and finally reveal whatever creature has come awake. Because surely this is what has happened. Surely, I have stumbled into the long, cold dark I have found on the road.

  There are other cars in the parking lot—twisted bits of metal that look like great, humped beasts—but they are empty, and there is no light other than a dim streetlamp that seems made more of shadow than anything else.

  But the car cranks easily, and there is nothing to stop me, no looming monstrosity or invisible barrier, as I pull out of the parking lot.