by Saro Yen
The Beast II, I shall christen you, I say to more myself than anyone in particular. Then the smile that’s been on my face this whole time, the dehydration delirium breaks. Charley’s ears flop down as I bust out into a full throaty rendition of “On the Road Again.”
****
I throw the eighteen wheeler into gear and ram it straight down Dallas’ throat.
I feel like Mad Max in post-apocalyptic Australia. That was always the money shot in those movies, wasn’t it? The big rig smashing through all the piddling little cars.
With each judder I’m demolishing another layer between us, that separates us. The cars fly away surreally. Things are suddenly urgent. Each shuddering impact sends Charley into frenzy and I have to work to keep one hand on the big wheel and the other finding purchase on the fur of his collar. It’s OK boy. Eventually, for Charley, I try to avoid impact whenever possible, but it’s not always possible. Also, we meet a few close calls: I get more judicious with the air brakes after a long steel bumper rears up and smashes the very corner of the cab and a crack grows out from the soil of leaves caught below the windscreen.
I wonder at it, pick at it, how I’ve been delaying things. I guess I fear the worst so I’m putting off knowing as long as I can put it off. Before the nuclear reactors blow. Before this place become not just uninhabitable but off limits for the rest of my lifetime, at least.
It still hardly seems real. Or it’s not real, the world as it is now. It’s a figment of Hollywood. At any time the curtain will pull back and out there, out in the rest of it all, will be my audience. How better to explain it? How? Every stop I’ve made has resulted in some incident or another. I’ve been treating this whole thing like a game. My subconscious knows. None of this is real. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m racing towards that end. Racing towards the end of this thing whatever it is.
The engine runs sure as a river under me, meaning, I stop for nothing. Meaning, it turns the light gray asphalt into a raging swell that bears me along despite my growing panic. The truck is a fallen tree in that torrent, a massive, dense oak, and it smashes easily through the clogs of driftwood. Cars go flying. Well, at least the smaller ones do. Smart cars and Minis either squish on the fender or careen into the gathering dusk. The green distance markers whiz by.
I think back, think positive and the golden afternoon on the pond with Charley is the only thing that comes to me now. I try to dig deep into my history with Amy, but it all seems fuzzy now.
We had a few perfect days in there somewhere. I know we did. Then something changed. Why am I thinking this way now? Stay positive. I’ll get there to her darkened avenue and look up and see a single light on in her window, a sheet fluttering in the breeze. She'll be there. She’ll have waited for me. Just wait and see.
We had our string of perfect days. We had plans, too. Did we have plans? Did I? Or was it only her?
The signs keep jogging past.
Dallas 96 Miles. 92 Miles. 88 Miles.
We blow through the remainder of I-45 and soon, just barely, I can see the dark spires of downtown Dallas. Then things start to get familiar. That elevated stretch of I-45 surrounded by trees that I’ve travelled more times than I ever wanted to count, but now in the powerless dusk the buildings on either side seem to crowd around like an unfriendly ocean.
So many afternoons before this the day fading into dusk and night on the way up 45. So many nights getting to her apartment dead tired after work and a silent drive, opening her door into warmth, collapsing in her arms. Now it all seems alien again. I wonder now if a person that you love, or claim to love to your rational, inventory-taking self is really anything but a figment of your own imagination. Perhaps I am only preparing for the worst case scenario.
I look at the clock on the 18-wheeler. It’s off. Even though the battery was still good, I imagine that it’s set for some other time zone. I remember the gadget laden watch I’d brought from home. I pull it from the pocket I’d stashed in. The hearty glass over the watch display is smashed but through the cracks I can still make out a nine and a colon and a four. Amy’s doorstep at 11 PM. Have I been a fool? Is this, all of this punishment for the mistakes I’ve made? A very real possibility in this moment of dusk, I believe. It makes me feel lonelier than I’ve ever felt in my life. I’d take it all back, all of it. In the dusk no lights are about and the skyline looks like an outcrop of obsidian. The clouds behind the city blow up like a curtain in the wind and the distant sun puts a polish and shine on some of the buildings, a burnish.It’s a pretty picture, yes, but I’m not sure I can go on.
It saps me, honestly. I don’t think I want to know anymore. Each moment I am another moment away from slamming on the air brake and turning the truck around. I find my mind lethargic. Reluctant to imagine. Even at the wheel of a tractor truck, my foot eases here and there on the throttle and it is my own startled awareness that presses it back down.
Things get more crowded the closer I get to downtown. I edge around the clusters of cars slowly, 45 turns into 75 and the skyline looms like a reaching hand of doom. In the distant darkness it’s almost as if I can see little fires. But I know it’s only the sun glinting off of things left behind.
But what if somebody else besides Amy is in there? I have to slap myself, mentally, as a wanderer in the desert might disabuse himself of notions of water on the horizon. What if nobody is?
I pass downtown, edging the other cars and trucks out of the way. I drive on contrary lanes when I can get over and need to to keep up my pace. I’m in some mindless, heartless flow. Just get it over with.
It’s when I get closer to my destination that the memories fail to come and I shiver. I’m delirious with some kind of fever. I’m losing track of time.
Then I’m there, past SMU, past Mockingbird station, down the little avenues to the capillary of her street. I can’t pull into the little driveway where she lives so I stop the truck on the street and walk in to the little surround of iron fencing. I’m here. I walk down and shudder in the dusk. The building is dark. The sun is below the far edge of the roof. The windows are dark. There’s just a slight warmth, quickly fading in the air. A shimmering scale of high clouds floating atop the sky.
I go back to the cab of the truck. I take the revolver that I found in the glove compartment. Just in case, I tell myself. Just in case. Just in case there be monsters, and the monsters are here, at the very end.
I look back up at the building. It’s one of these free standing six pack townhomes. I drove up here last summer and helped pick it out for her. Pick it out for us. She didn’t like the look of the other townhomes, modern and glass and facing each other, three by three as if in some modern dance interpretation of West Side Story. Instead she chose this cluster of old brick facades, the view from the ground floor at least broken by hedges and brick walls. Still, a six pack amid other six packs and eight packs in a neighborhood of old clapboards set to be demolished. Frozen like this now. Each building cold and dark and like a craggy spike rising into the sky.
I wait there for the longest time. A sense of foreboding. Something is in there and it’s not Amy. Something is in there for me. But there’s no light in the window, no sheet flapping in the breeze, a banner with my name to the wind. No. Just a half open window on the second floor, an abyss beyond.
I don’t have her keys anymore so I’ll have to find another way in. I follow the paved brick walk to the side of the house to the little sign over the hanging wooden mailbox that says Amy Seager and wonder when we would have gotten it changed to read both our names.
I take the hung wooden mailbox down and feel the heft in my hands. Then I throw the mailbox through the glass panel by the front door.
I watch as the glass shatters, spider webs outwards and crumbles down. I wonder if I could have found another way in, but only for a moment. The falling, flashing glass sets off a cascade of action in me and suddenly I’m scrabbling for the lock on her door, I’m flinging the thing open. I tear through the empty
house.
I stomp around. I flash my gun. I yell at the top of my lungs. I yell her name. I yell mine. I scream at God.
An empty bowl sits on the counter, a spoon resting against the sloped side, a crusty ring of milk and cereal on the bottom.
I spend so long looking at the bowl, it seems.
Then I hear something from upstairs. A gentle rustle. A flutter that stirs in my chest.
Is this it? Amy?
I bolt upstairs. Up on the bedroom level I find the blanket on the bed thrown back, the towel on the floor, as if nothing has changed since that morning she left for work just as any other morning.
But I also find a bird in its cage (cuckoo, cockatiel, I don’t know) lethargic and bobbing and weaving warily.
Where did the bird come from? I never remember her being particularly fond of animals. I decide that the bird is a large cockatiel. It’s got one of those distinctive feathers that look like a cowlick gone wild. It’s silver with white patches on the wings and yellow patches on the neck and head and ruddy red circles under and behind its eyes.
It nuzzles weakly at the metal nipple of a bottle of water that’s empty. I don’t know why but it gets into my head that this is urgent. I pop the plastic bottle part from the water feeder and take it into the bath room and fill it from the tank on the toilet and I take it back to the bird cage. I open up the cage door and the bird scooches over quietly. It bows and bobs several times as my hand enters the cage and gives my fingers a weak nip. I take the nipple of the feeder from its clip and screw it on the bottle. The whole time the bird is latched lightly onto my hand with its beak as if it’s holding on. Then the pull of the water is too much for the bird and it latches on to the metal nipple and the water wets its beak and drips into the dry droppings and newspaper below.The bird drinks, first its head basically attached to the nipple and then turning to look up at me before going back to drink and I’m watching it the whole time, and the whole time the bird’s eyes are turned up to me as it drinks and the claws of one of its feet are lightly holding on to my hand.
Then I notice the empty tray beside the bottle and then something over the tray that seems to be worn down into a hard little nub. It must be one of those hard little blocks of seeds because I see all sorts of husks in the soiled paper below. It must be hungry, too.
I pull my hand away, gently, and start looking around the room for a bag of bird seed or something. Yes, I know the last of the meek sunlight will be gone but I’m fixated on this.
I’m looking around for the bag of bird seed on her desk, on her nightstand. Eventually I’m everywhere around the room. I’ve thrown off the mattress (Hello, are you down there?) I’ve opened up all the drawers and taken her intimates and thrown them all over the floor.
That’s when I see it. It’s sitting on the clutter of the dresser.. She wasn’t into all that flashiness. But I knew she had all these big shot lawyer friends up here in Dallas and I knew it might get to her eventually, the judging and all that going on. She would begin to think what her big shot lawyer friends were thinking
She was always getting hand-me-downs from all her older sisters. Raised by a single dad and all. Good man. No doubt in my mind he tried his best.
I tried my best too. At least I thought I did. I really did.
For a moment it feels as if all of the world, of humanity is buried here right underneath my feet.
The bird calls sweetly. I look out the window. Where have all your bird friends gone? In the distance there appear to be markings on the skyscrapers that are like hieroglyphs and I simply have to decipher them to find everything out and understand.
I sit down on the bed and take the gun from where I had put it.
My hands seem to be able to knead the metal on the gun, to worry it like dough.
My world seems small. The world I knew, I mean. This massive container isn’t the world to me. The world is here. It seems for that moment it would be so easy for me to shrink it and compress it, the world I knew, getting smaller and smaller so that eventually, paradoxically, the whole world would fit through the hole that the bullet will make in my head. One moment I and the world are separated in this uninhabited nether region. The next the world and I are together again. Materially. The world is the ring. The world is the bullet. The world is my brain.
I look up and I see a picture of one of our engagement photos.
It was hilarious. Amy’s father fancied himself an awesome photographer. At weddings for all her siblings he would try to get into the hardest to reach angles, like in the bushes or on top of the hood of a car as the bride and groom were coming out. It made for interesting photographs to say the least.
“You saw his photographs,” she had said to me, “They’re terrible!”
I grip the grip of the gun and try my finger on the trigger guard.
I’ve had until now the slightest sliver of a reason. A tattered rag of hope. A threadbare pretense.
But I know what the ring means sitting there.
There was a time when I suspected her of cheating with a lawyer from her firm.
I still proposed, anyway.
Weekly she was begging and crying for me to move up there with her. She was in law school. Law school was tough. She needed the support. She didn’t want to find support anywhere else like all those campus social groups and whatever.
When I saw her, things were just fine. She would always run up to me as I got out of the security gate at the airport and throw her arms around me. She felt light, insubstantial as a bird.
Where were the clothes people wore when they disappeared? Did they take it all with them to the thereafter? Where were the jeweled rings on their fingers, the gold strings on their necks?
Why were suitcases and bagels and cups of coffee left behind and not piles of clothes?
The answer is sitting right there, neatly in its box.
This whole time I’ve been talking to myself.
I am so close, so close to finding the world buried underfoot again when the cockatiel speaks.
“Hello.”
Hello.
I think that would be a great tragedy, wouldn’t it. Some omniscient camera pans away and there I am in a pool of my own blood. Over and over again the cockatiel says “Hello?” Or not a tragedy but some clever little ending. Oh, and the dog. Don’t forget the dog, outside, panting dumbly in the car, window open just a crack. Charley is out there. They need me. Right? This dog and bird. And then the definitiveness of these doggie and birdie shapes. They don’t really understand the implications. We can’t know each other. They are only symbols of what I want but can’t have, what I could never have, really.
I take the ring box from the dresser. I palm the ring. I’ve been deceiving myself. I’ve been alone since the start. Then, why stop now?
I put the gun on the night stand.
“You need me don’t you?”
“Hello.”
It is at this point I feel closest to how our conversations had become near the end. I’ll let the animals free and then maybe I’ll do it. The cockatiel sits on its plastic branch as if nothing has changed, as if its imagination is too dull to do anything else. The cockatiel does not fly away. I wonder if its wings are clipped. They don’t look clipped. It walks out of the cage on to my finger. I hold my hand out the open window, then set the bird on the sill, expecting any moment for it to combust in wing beats through the Dallas dusk.
It sits there and regards me with tilted head. It’s a few moments after I back away before it comes at me. It hops from the sill, and back on to my hand. It barely weighs anything but it weighs a ton. Ten. A thousand. Sixty Sextillion. The next moment. My world is not the ring or the bullet or my brain but a cockatiel. And the dog. Can’t forget the dog.“Hello,” I say, rubbing a finger gently through the rill of feathers around its neck.
“Hello.”
“Where are you?”
“Hello.”
“When did you stop loving me?
“Hello.�
�
“Goodbye,” I say.
“Hello.”
“You win,’ I say.It then begins doing that birdy thing, edging up my arm sideways, looking coy as ever.
My Kingdom, THE WORLD…for a half dead cockatiel. The bird spreads slowly its clipped wings against the fingernail of sun and is suddenly wondrous, and everything. The living world compressed into a ball of hollow bones and feathers. I feed it seeds from the bag that’s been sitting on the table a few feet away from it these past few days. I wonder.
I leave the cage and take the bag of food, the water. I put the bird on my shoulder like a pirate. I leave the apartment without touching anything else.
Downstairs I stand outside of the car as Charley barks inside of the car. I worry for the safety of the bird, but only for the moment. Something tells me that he’s just bark. The bird and Charley will get along just fine. And I’m right. Charley sniffs the bird inquiringly and deposits the slightest lick on the scruff of its neck. The bird pecks the curious tongue. Charley recoils in horror. This might work.
I look up at the dark window above and wonder if I should say goodbye. But then, goodbye to what?
It’s time to move on. I start up the Beast and just drive.
Epilogue
What did I do after Dallas? I headed north. Oklahoma City, Tulsa. Then Whichita, where I grew up.
It was slow going (on purpose, perhaps) but I made better time than getting from Houston to Dallas. I only had a few days left. Or was that an overestimation and I was in the process of travelling North, heading towards my own, painful death? Radiation poisoning did not appeal to me, but I went north with the quickly fading hope that I’d find people up there. I don’t know why. Maybe it was simply boredom combined with some subconscious death wish. But I had a big, fluffy white dog and, of course, Amy the cockatiel.
