by Nick Arvin
In the car, in a terror of silence, I talked in a long superficial stream about the movie, about other movies, about TV shows, about the physics of the cathode ray tube. In my thoughts, I cowered. Kathy nodded. She only interrupted to ask, “Where are you going?”
I had no idea. I saw that I was driving in a direction that would take neither of us home, surging and stopping on a broad multilane street with a series of stoplights that had allowed me to keep talking without going very far. I said, “I thought we would go get a drink.”
She yawned. She had that habit, when she wanted a moment to think about a question. She let another few seconds pass, then she began to tell me she thought our relationship was not working.
I shouted. I slapped the armrest between our seats. I shouted and cursed.
I suppose I believed the appropriate response to be something dramatic. When I had finished flailing and cussing, we were both silent. At a stoplight I turned toward the interstate.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I saw her eyes filling wet. “Kathy,” I said.
“It was just dating, Aaron,” she said. “We were dating for a year, we had fun, and now I think we should move on.”
So she took the reasonable position, and I, too wretched to think past opposing, took the unreasonable. “You’re not breaking up with me,” I said. I turned onto a ramp and merged into the interstate’s lanes.
“Just take me home, OK?” She watched the lights and the dark a moment. “If you want, we can talk when you’re calm.”
A couple of miles ticked by. I passed a semi. She said, “Where are we going?”
I didn’t know exactly why I had turned onto the interstate. I couldn’t articulate myself. All I had were the dregs of my stupid urge for drama. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to drive.”
“You’re not taking me home.”
“I’m driving.”
“Stop.”
“To clear my head.”
“Pull over and let me out, OK? Then whatever. Drive.”
“I’d rather not.”
“No?”
“No.”
“This is kidnapping,” she said. Another mile went by. There was little traffic. “Aaron,” she said, “this is a little pathetic, you know?”
I said, in misery, “You look lovely tonight.”
The interstate dropped gradually downward, high concrete walls rose on either side, we entered a manmade canyon. “Please,” she said.
When I looked at her again, the wetness in the eyes was gone. She had a slightly horsey face and long straight hair. On her lap lay a tiny black vinyl purse, the size of a can of tuna. She carried in it, I knew, lipstick, a couple of keys, and a credit card.
“Your purse is stupid,” I said. “Barbie has a more practical purse.”
She said, immediately, as if she had been awaiting this opportunity, “I hate your pants. All your pants with the ridiculous cargo pockets at the knees. What is that? You’re not a Marine.”
“They’re good for carrying stuff. Unlike the purse.”
“I like this purse. Would you like to insult any of my other accessories?”
“You sometimes wear too much eyeliner.”
“OK.”
“That’s all I can think of right now.”
“Fine,” she said. “And your belt doesn’t match your shoes.”
“It’s supposed to?”
“Your shoes are never polished.”
“OK. Guilty.”
“They look disgusting.”
“OK.”
“Your fridge has nothing in it but condiments.”
“No fair,” I said. “I thought we were only going after appearances.”
“Your socks have holes.”
I laughed. “No one sees that.”
“I do.”
“You’re not being very nice.”
She crumpled a little.
“We’ve not broken up,” I said. “Have we? We haven’t.”
She sighed. “You’ll take me home?”
Surely I could love her, I thought. Yes. I said, “Yes.”
“If you want me to say we haven’t broken up,” she said, “I’ll say we haven’t broken up.”
But we had, of course, and a line of fire speared my chest.
“Aaron,” she said.
I shook my head.
“Aaron, can’t you—”
A rising engine noise interrupted her. She leaned to look in the mirror on her side of the car. The noise was a distraction, and I recall now that I felt relief.
My speedometer showed seventy, and this car closed on us fast; it must have been going almost a hundred. It was in my lane, and to get away from it I swerved a lane to the right. At the same time, the approaching car lurched sharply toward the left lane, and as it passed us its back end began to come around, like a baseball bat thrown sidearm. It slid through the left lane and entered the median with the rear end still coming around, toward the concrete barrier between the eastbound and westbound lanes.
I looked away, to check my position in my lane. We had come into a dead spot for traffic—a couple of red taillights floated far ahead, but otherwise we were alone. Kathy, watching the car approach the wall, made a faint keening noise.
The car hit the concrete with a crash followed by an oscillating shriek. The noise, however, was actually less than I had braced myself for. I looked over in time to see the front end caroming off the wall, the back end bucked upward and spinning forward, the headlights coming around like the unblinking eyes of a psychopath. “Oh,” Kathy said. “No. No.” The back corner now struck the wall with another crash and scream of metal and a long dazzle of yellow sparks.
After the second impact it spun back into the traffic lanes. I feared the car would come all the way across, toward us. But when it had gone around a full 360 degrees, and the front end was again pointed forward in the lane, the driver seemed, incredibly, to regain control. The car coasted to a stop in the second lane from the left, the lane where we had been when everything began. I said, meaninglessly, “Careful.” I had not yet touched my brakes and in a moment we were speeding past.
I drove not thinking in any coherent, conscious way. Kathy said in a whisper—I’m not sure I actually heard her so much as guessed her meaning—“We have to stop.”
All my instincts argued for speed and distance from this thing. But I understood that she had the better, less regrettable instincts, and I moved to the shoulder and clapped down on the brakes so that the wheels skidded on the loose stones and garbage.
We halted more than a hundred yards ahead of the other car. I got out and started running back along the shoulder. Only a single dim headlamp burned on the car out in the lanes. I heard Kathy’s footsteps behind me. I knew she had a cell phone, and I shouted, “Call nine-one-one!” A car hurtled by, and it made me slow slightly. If you’ve ever stood on the edge of an interstate and watched 70 mph traffic go past, you have an idea of how I felt.
But I resolved myself and sprinted out to the damaged car—a little two-door sports coupe—and circled to the driver’s window. It was open. I leaned to peer in, and saw a lot of faces. Two men sat in front, and three women crowded the narrow rear seat. They appeared to be in their mid- or late-twenties, and all had straight dark hair, dark eyes, and a familial resemblance, as if they were cousins. “You all right?” I asked. The driver, without looking at me, nodded. “Everyone? OK?” A woman in back vaguely lifted a hand.
I glanced around and saw headlamps approaching in the right lane. “You need to turn on your flashers,” I said. “Your emergency lights.” Ahead and behind us were street lamps, but we were in a dim spot between. “The flashing lights,” I said. No one moved. As the car in the right lane passed by I felt the thrum of its engine in my chest and its wind wake rocked the coupe. I couldn’t understand why the people inside didn’t move. I wondered if they could understand English. “You should get out,” I said, gesturing.
The dr
iver, with a sudden lurching movement, swung open his door, forcing me away. He wore black jeans and a tight black T-shirt, and his eyes didn’t register much. He stood wavering with one hand on the door. “You all right?” I asked. The man muttered a single, incomprehensible syllable. I smelled alcohol. A sense of something, a noise, made me glance back. A pair of headlights were already terrifyingly close and nearing much too quickly. They swerved right at the last moment, tires squealing, and swung by just a couple of feet from the side of the coupe.
The driver took two halting steps past me toward the center median. He didn’t seem to understand where he was. I touched him on the shoulder. “You need to get the others out.”
He looked at my hand on his shoulder, then turned, walked back to his car, got in, and closed the door. He sat there. I peered into the car again, at the women in the backseat. They all sat there. Placid.
A pickup roared by in the right lane.
I thought I might have more luck on the passenger side. I started around the front of the car. Kathy, on the highway shoulder, talked into her cell phone. Glancing back down the lanes, I saw another vehicle coming up directly behind the stalled coupe. It was too fast and too close, and I saw an inevitable domino action, car into car into me. I looked at Kathy, feeling I badly wanted her to look at me, but she stared at the approaching car, the cell phone limply forgotten out in the air. I thought I should shut my eyes, but instead I watched as the closing vehicle turned hard and, tires squealing, got by on the left. Wind spun around me. The driver tapped the horn, more interrogatory than angry.
I was now completely terrified. I trotted to the shoulder and stood before Kathy, wanting very badly to collapse. “They’re not getting out of the car,” she said. She had the phone pressed to her ear, and I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or to the person on the phone.
I said, “They won’t come out.”
She lowered the phone. “What do you mean?”
“They look at me like they’re watching TV.”
A black SUV flashed by in the leftmost lane. “I saw someone get out.”
“He went back in. I think he’s drunk. Probably they all are. I don’t know if they understand English very well.”
“Then we have to drag them out.”
“We’ll get killed trying to do that.”
“Come on,” she said. “We’ll drag—” And she had taken a step forward when she stopped, and I heard the whisper of a car coming. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see the impact, the explosion.
The explosion was instantaneous; the cars disappeared inside a billowing of light and flame that engulfed both and spread beyond them. The noise and the light seemed to go on and on, as if to fill the world. Then it suddenly collapsed inward to a core that briefly went quiet and dark, then shot a column upward, so huge, loud, and bright that I thought three or four cars had become involved.
When my retinas had cleared away the afterimage, however, there were still only two cars. The rear end of the coupe had been crushed forward to the seats, hunching and twisting the entire vehicle. The other car was a four-door sedan, its front mangled. Both vehicles had spun forward and now pointed at oblique angles. No one could have survived the explosion I had just seen, I was certain. Blue and white flames flickered around the brutalized rear of the coupe. Kathy said, “Aaron.”
Fogged by shock, I needed time to recall these syllables represented my name.
The passenger door of the sedan opened and a man stumbled out. Then the driver’s door opened, and someone emerged.
The sight of people, alive, coming from that car, confounded me. I know I did not move for several seconds. Then—I don’t recall how I got to the coupe. Events become blurry. I remember understanding that Kathy had gone to the men who had climbed out of the sedan, and I went to the coupe. I remember yanking repeatedly on the driver’s door, and the driver looking up at me without focus—the door peeled open with a screech and I leaned in to grab the driver under the shoulders. The chemical, searing odor of burning plastics worked shafts of pain upward through my head, and I could feel the slick of the driver’s sweating body through his shirt. I recall a skidding sensation of taking actions without framing the decisions to do so. Heat, bodies, blinding smoke. The flames at the rear of the car spread upward and forward. The light was cut with stark shadows from the headlights in the roadway and flickered and flashed with the flames inside the car. Other figures appeared around me. I remember reaching, groping, grasping for flesh, sweaty, dirty, inside the smoke and the hot. Flames flickered and moved over the floor. Kathy came up beside me or behind me, and I leaned against her once, briefly, felt her against my shoulder, or her hand on mine. Others, shadowy figures, took away the people we extracted and shouted or screamed things to me, words I hadn’t the energy to interpret. The car’s small hell was the only place of significance. Inside was a languid quiet and heat, the shouting outside muffled, a car horn faraway. The flames, however, crackled, moved over the rear seat, into the roof liner. There had been five people in the car and one by one we pulled them free. I don’t know how many Kathy pulled out, how many I did, or if we both had a hand on each of them. I remember distinctly only the last, the woman seated in the back on the far passenger side.
She had long dark hair, which was burning, curling in small, delicate yellow flames. She wore a skirt and a tank top that was melting to her skin on her right side, blackening and blistering and smoking. She looked at me steadily. When I leaned in to grab her, the smoke and the heat hit my face and tunneled into my lungs and exploded. Darkness crowded the edges of my vision. Coughing, I stumbled out of the car. I glanced around at Kathy; she looked at me with a grimace.
I took a deep breath, crawled in again, got a hand on the woman’s arm, and dragged her out.
After that, a minute or two passed that I don’t remember.
“Where is the ambulance?” Kathy shouted. “Where?” The woman on the ground between us was quietly dying. Sometimes her eyes opened. She never said a word, never screamed or groaned, but each time her eyes opened they appeared less focused, and they no longer found my face. Her left hand gripped at the asphalt of the roadway while her right lay in a blistered, bleeding, frayed end at her side. I could not distinguish how much of the blackening on her abdomen and arms was the melted material of her tank top and how much was the char of direct burns. Within the black ran channels of dark blood, and over the left side of her face lay a sheen of blood, as if exuded from the pores like sweat. Her ruined chest heaved, slowly, but otherwise she appeared entirely, inexplicably calm; it made me strain for calm myself, though my hands shook, and I blinked continually to clear my eyes. I did not know what to do with my hands, hesitated to touch her wounds, and finally put one hand gently on her left leg, which had not been burned. The cloth of her pants was saturated with sweat. Sirens closed on us, but moved slowly, caught in the traffic backed up behind the accident. Perhaps a dozen people milled around and dithered over the injured. The coupe still burned and no one ventured near it. All these useless people. “Please, get out of the way of the ambulance,” Kathy said; no one could have heard her but me. Her hair hung in disarray. Black and red smears marked the white of her blouse. Her gaze met mine, then veered off.
The dying woman was looking at me. For a moment we stared at each other. “What is your name?” I asked.
She didn’t reply, and when I looked up a paramedic was pulling Kathy away. The woman on the ground didn’t appear to be breathing. A paramedic took me by the shoulder and pushed me away. I stumbled off blindly. I feared that she had died. Later I learned that she did not die then, but later, after reaching the hospital.
For some time—I’m unsure how long, perhaps several minutes—I wandered in the milling crowd. I didn’t think of Kathy, and it seems strange now but I didn’t even think of the woman dying on the pavement. The feeling I had was profound relief. A black hole of relief. The only other time I’ve ever known anything like it was after a fistfig
ht, at the end, after all that desperate physicality, when nothing more depended on doing anything.
As I began to regain my sense of the world and look around for Kathy, men in a variety of uniforms were swarming the scene with flashing vehicles. But she wasn’t at the ambulances. She wasn’t with the cops or near the fire trucks.
A screaming ambulance exited down the open road ahead. I turned a circle, then crouched and put my head into my hands. I thought of Kathy, stooped beside me over corn ears in the uncertain light of a nighttime parking lot.
I breathed, regrouped, stood, began to walk. I moved through small gatherings of people, among the cars. Stopped headlights were backed into the distance as far as I could see. If she had wandered out that way I might never find her. I wanted badly to find her. I jogged toward the fire trucks, and I began to recall, dimly, that we had been engaged in an argument before all this began. The conversation came back to me in clumps, a little warped, strangely colored. The way we had talked seemed meaningless now, as if we had been joking in a gobbledygook language. The idea that we could have ended our relationship felt far away. That it might be otherwise for her, however, struck me with terrible, sudden fear.
I remembered my car. Maybe she had gone there. Its position on the shoulder was far ahead of the chaos and lights of the accident; I was surprised how far away. As I ran I tried to spit out the flavor of smoke and fumes. I could see no one in the windows of my car, no human silhouette, nothing.
A single lane of traffic was opened and cars began to trickle past. Another ambulance went screaming off. I opened the door of my car and startled at the sight of a huddled form on the passenger seat, so small and compressed that I thought first: a dog. As if someone had dumped a stray into my car.
