by Roy Scranton
“What’s on the itinerary, Jim?” Remy said again.
Jim folded his paper with an aggressive rustle. “What? You say something?”
“I asked what we had planned for the day.”
“We,” Jim said, gesturing between him and Suzie, “are gonna decide what we’re doing, because Suzie’s an equal partner on this excursion, as per her contract. You are gonna ride along and shoot what I tell you to shoot, as per your contract. Why? Did you have some suggestions from your research?”
“Well, Amarillo’s coming up, and there’s a lot of natural-gas fracking in the Panhandle.”
“Sounds like maybe your research last night was a little scanty.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t get to it.”
“Then what the fuck am I paying you for?” Jim laughed and looked at Suzie. “Hard to find good help these days.”
Suzie didn’t respond, and Jim let the silence draw out and fill the table. He looked back at Remy, staring him down.
“You two give me such a headache,” he went on. “If it’s not my writer contradicting every other thing I say, then it’s my assistant slacking off on the job. But let’s get back to the motherfucking narrative, aight? I was looking at this town in New Mexico called Trementina. It’s only about five, six hours away. It’s not even really a town. What it is, actually, is an underground Scientology fortress: Trementina Base. I want to get some footage there.”
“Interesting,” Remy said. “Can you see anything from the surface?”
Jim ignored him. “What do you think?” he asked Suzie. “Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, armed fanatics hiding out in a bunker. Pretty weird, huh? Pretty American? I bet we could do some great kind of po-mo riff on that, something about nomad war machines, bodies without organs.”
“I want to go to Altus,” Suzie said, deadpan.
“Altus?” Jim said.
“Yeah,” Suzie said. “I’d like to go see my parents in Altus.”
“Uh, well, now, that sort of puts a crimp in our schedule, you know.” Jim looked stricken. He tried to wave the idea away with a corner of the USA Today. “I was really hoping to make Albuquerque tonight, and if we go to Altus that’s gonna put us almost a whole day behind.”
Suzie warmed to the idea, which had surprised even herself. “Shit, Gene, it’s only about half an hour from here. Plus, like you said, it’s in my contract. I’ll go talk to my parents, and y’all can film the pawnshops and massage parlors around the air base. It’d be perfect: military-industrial complex and all that shit. Read deal fucking nomad war machine, way better than some Scientology crap.”
“I don’t, uh, know. I don’t know. Going back is against the whole thrust of the thing. The mission is to always keep moving forward.”
“Yeah,” Suzie said, “but I think it’d be good for you. There’s a mythic aspect to the land, cowboys and Indians, I don’t think you’ve really exhausted. I don’t feel like you’ve even really explored it. I mean, where are your cowboys? Your Indians? I know you want to get to the desert, but I don’t think you can really understand America until you understand Oklahoma.”
“I think Suzie might be on to something,” Remy said. “It would be a good chance to get some real people, as well. We’ve got a lot of footage of tourist sites, but we don’t have a lot of people.”
Jim’s eyes blazed and the color rose in his neck. “You . . .” he started, then fell silent as the waitress approached with their food. After the plates were settled, Jim grabbed his fork and knife with a forced grin. “Alrighty, then. Altus it is.”
But as they turned off the access road back onto 44, the plains around them a misty liquid bronze, Suzie found her stomach tightening and her mind succumbing to a frantic scrabbling anxiety. She could picture them rolling up the street, the old house growing larger as they closed in, and see her father standing faded and paunchy on the porch, holding his ninety-seventh air mobility wing first sergeant mug. He’d look at her through his hard and age-worn love with a disappointment barely distinguishable from disdain. And sitting next to him would be her mom, hair cut short, hands in her lap.
She knew what they looked like from the photos they sent with their Christmas cards. They’d tried to keep in touch for several years, but she’d limited contact to cards exchanged at Christmas. She couldn’t let them in. Wouldn’t. Every time they’d talked—and God, she’d tried—every time she was fourteen again, or eleven, or eight, screaming, livid, tearful. Every time they talked, her father was brusque and defensive, making her feel like he wanted to make sure she knew she didn’t deserve his love, first because she was a girl, second because she was a fuckup, and third because she’d betrayed the very ideas of family, tradition, and discipline, the very Calder name, by going off to New York and making a selfish, art-pretentious mess of her life. You’re not tough enough, she heard him thinking, you don’t understand loyalty, you don’t understand sacrifice. Even her academic work in high school, Model United Nations and Biology Club, second place at state in track, none of it was enough. He wanted her in JROTC. He wanted her wearing wings. He wanted to see her fly.
Mom was just crazy: three miscarriages in a row, then finding out she couldn’t have any more kids, which had been pretty much her only reason for living. The darkest years, Mom was the Joker to Dad’s Batman, suicidal depressions followed by swings into mania, a week of relative stability, then a furious, screaming, crying explosion signaling another descent, days and weeks through which Mom would linger affectlessly, barely mobile. Suzie and Dad would cook dinner, clean up, tiptoe, not speak, each retreating to their own defenses. This was where she learned to read long novels. This is where she learned to make space inside a blank page, to listen for the harmonics speaking through her.
Puberty was where she learned to say fuck you. The hormonal charge erupted with a howl, and she discovered she could use her words to batter the world around her, the world that had trapped her into a dim room at the end of a silent hall. She got into fights at school, she made her teachers cry. No one knew what to do, but she started to get to know the kids in detention and soon found she couldn’t talk to her dad without screaming. He resorted to threats of physical violence, but she knew better. Hit me, First Sergeant, she screamed, and I’ll turn you in and they’ll take me away and you’ll lose your fucking job!
Mom just started coming out of the darkness then, thanks to some new pills, and it must have been like waking from one nightmare into another. As she attempted to resume her motherly duties, she found herself confronted by a foe who showed no mercy. The fact was, Suzie didn’t recognize this woman meddling in her life; the only mom she’d ever known was the one who’d lived life sad. This new woman threatened everything. Lost in the waves of emotion, Suzie did what she could to make things right: she made her mother cry. She savaged her. She ignored and derided her, she fought and undermined, she piled on as much abuse as her father let her get away with, then more, leaving her mother blasted, addled, and afraid. The nightmare only ended when she left for college.
And now what? You think you can just start over?
The air in the car seemed to thin. Her lungs stopped working. Gray haze fuzzed the corners of the wilting sky. Suzie jammed the brake and yanked the wheel, pulling a U-turn in the middle of the highway, throwing Jim and Remy against their doors, the Valiant’s tires squealing while behind them a driverless truck bellowed and swerved, almost running off the road. Headed north again, Suzie floored it and the Valiant leaped like a lion, roaring down the highway.
“What the fuck?” Jim shouted.
“Changed my mind,” Suzie said, lighting a smoke and rolling down the window.
“What?”
“Lady’s prerogative,” she said. “Never mind Altus. Dumb idea.”
“I thought you wanted—” Remy started from the back, but she cut him off.
“Fuck all that,” she barked. “W
e head west. Start over. Just fucking start over.”
The plains fade into dirt and scrub as they cross the Panhandle, passing Childress, Amarillo, and Glenrio, then rise into New Mexico, through Tucumcari, and turn off the interstate north. Mountains lift in the distance, a gray line of humps growing larger against the horizon, leviathans bobbing ponderously in their pod. The car’s mostly quiet today, each actor settling into an individual holding pattern, accumulating haze. Five days on the road now and despite the drama they’ve got something of a routine, an established set of codes and prefixes. They know generally what’s happening and what’s expected. There’s a bodily, animal pack-being, and they can sit together for miles in total silence. The road takes a meditative shape, the Valiant a still point on a rolling highway, the wide, wrinkled world around them and the hum of the wheels, and they find themselves lost in thought.
Or maybe they don’t know what to say. Maybe the drama had upset things too much. Jim seemed closed in on himself, unwilling to engage, snappish, dark eyed. Remy, turning monkish and deferential, revealed that his ties to Jim were still stronger than any intimacy he’d established with Suzie. Suzie was shaken by the sudden plunge into memory, the unexpected turn to Altus and what seemed like a narrow escape, what was that Faulkner quote about the past? Or was it Joyce? Something something never wake up? She felt her hands moving through ghosts, the car driving through ghosts, her mind caught in a web of ghost voices, I’m still your mother and you can’t take that away from me . . . She felt far, far away from Remy and Jim and the present, no longer caring about the game being played but feeling trapped in a lifetime’s worth of bad decisions, trapped in a stupid car driving across a stupid fascist country.
She’d had to get out, she’d had to get out of Oklahoma and away, she’d had no choice—if she’d stayed or even just kept in touch they would have entangled her, strangled her, dragged her down into some state of being she couldn’t be, something un-her, some anti-Suzie, for fuck’s sake couldn’t they see she didn’t have a choice? It was a matter of survival. And from that initial no, which had been the only way she could see to say yes, things rolled out in a series of half-baked reckless zags, lunging through life as if in a drunken skid, trying to grab hold of something solid until, finally, battered back and forth between bad situations escaped from and lame fuckarounds she’d had to rise above, she found herself here, fucking one guy to fuck with another, getting paid to ride in a kitsch car and write bullshit, trapped in one more half-assed dodge, another too-dearly-bought moment of liberation from her precarious New York life, from Steve the Cat and her job and her so-called friends, her bullshit creative writing courses at the bullshit New School with all the other bullshit bullshitters, and this, too, what was this but a distraction and a fantasy? Even more than usual, because it was a vacation and had to end. No better than a fucking novel. It was the kind of temporary release we all seek, an unreality binge, the kind of release we seek from our daily life to make it bearable, a new show, an affair, an election, and now, realizing how far she’d come and how little ground she’d covered, she decided maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe a whole new something wasn’t just a mythology they were deterritorializing, but something she needed to do, to find—break the pattern for real, really start over somehow real next time for real.
She watched the scenery roll by, the western horizon out the window flat like a line drawn through space, edged by distant purple angles. You could draw a line through anything, she thought, lighting a cigarette. You draw a line and a point and that’s it, that’s life, all the way into it.
Remy watched her from the back, watched her smoke in digits counting up through the camera, wondering what she was thinking. She must be deciding what to do, he thought, about Jim and me. Or maybe she’s watching the dusty, wounded shacks by the road and thinking about her flyover girlhood in Altus. Or who knows, really, what people think, or if they even do, properly so called. Do any of us really? Think? Or do we just invent narratives ex post facto, rationalizations framing the act, explanations to make sense of the images we’re left with?
Up ahead he saw a rusted neon sign stripped raw in the wind, reading western motel. He turned the camera to track it going by.
“That’s our sign,” Suzie said, gesturing with her cigarette.
“What sign?” Jim asked.
“What the sign said. That’s us.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
Suzie smiled. “Don’t worry, Gene. We’re almost there.”
“Sure,” Jim said, perplexed. “Speaking of which, next time we stop, we need to get some sandwiches. I want to get to Trementina before the sun sets, which means we don’t really have time to sit down and eat.”
The desert rolled by like so much scenery.
They got shitty prepackaged sandwiches at the gas station at Conchas Dam, then drove to Trementina, where they pulled off the road near a sign that said danger no trespassing: area patrolled by drone. Suzie took a nap in the car while Jim and Remy walked into the desert. The two men didn’t really talk: they filmed and muttered to each other only as necessary. One time Remy tried to bring up Suzie, but Jim brushed it off. There wasn’t much to see, and after about half an hour they were spotted by a drone. It hung in the sky watching them for ten minutes or so until a Scientologist pulled up in a Land Rover. He told them they had to leave or he’d have them arrested: he would drive them back to their car. He refused to turn on the air-conditioning. He refused to answer Jim’s questions. When he dropped them off, he told them that some of their drones were patrol drones, but others were armed. “You were lucky this time,” he said. “Don’t try your luck again.” Then he drove away. By that time it was getting late, so they decided to make a straight shot to the next hotel.
They hit Las Vegas, New Mexico, at around seven-thirty, and instead of taking I-25 north, Suzie took 518, heading up into the Sangre de Christos. She didn’t ask, just made a decision and drove, and Jim didn’t say anything. Then, past Tres Ritos, she turned southwest toward Santa Fe, buzzing down through Peñasco, Truchas, and Chimayo, and finally stopping at the Cities of Gold Casino and Hotel in Pojoaque a little after ten.
“How many rooms should I get?” Jim asked.
Suzie gave him a dirty eyeball. “Three rooms, Jim. Like usual.”
He nodded sagely. They got their rooms. Jim said “Happy trails” and went up. Suzie told Remy she was really tired and was gonna hit the sack. Remy got high and watched Fort Apache on cable.
In the morning, Jim was gone.
II. Roadhouse Blues
The only question on this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning, how far can we go in the non-referential desert form without cracking up and, of course, still keep alive the esoteric charm of disappearance? A theoretical question here materializes in the objective conditions of a journey which is no longer a journey and therefore carries with it a fundamental rule: aim for the point of no return. This is the key. And the crucial moment is that brutal instant which reveals that the journey has no end, that there is no longer any reason for it to come to an end.—Jean Baudrillard
Jack watches the road road and hums hums to himself and doesn’t have to turn turn to see Jane Jane curled against the door asleep can feel her and hir feel Jane Jesse in the rearview rearview to check check on Jesse asleep under the camera recording road road and Jack’s hard hard thinking of fucking Jane Jane later Jane Jesse fucking thinking fucking skin and saliva thinking fucking thinking whispers and teeth and he smokes a cigarette or doesn’t or whatever’s cool cool and in charge driving driving across the desert while they sleep dreaming dreaming of him or the road or the car car in a movie movie driving across the desert so hot so cool pure symbol all cowboy hat and dusty squint smoking smoking so cool so hot so fucking thinking fucking no filter all tar hums hums some hard-assed cheroot burning burns and reality burning fucking thinking driving a hundred per
cent death
Jack watches the road hums to himself and doesn’t have to turn to see Jane curled against the passenger door asleep can feel her there but does glance now and again in the rearview to check on Jesse who seems to be meditating or sleeping sitting with hir eyes closed palms flat on hir knees hir chest rising and slowly falling again under the camera ze’s left mounted in its bracket on the ceiling which Jack had to admit is getting some beautiful road footage of the desert the highway and the sky like the physical representation of pure thought and then Jack’s thinking about thinking as he slips into the alpha wave of pure drive through forms drifting and nothing real nothing forgotten nothing remembered every path the slow throb of the car and he isn’t thirsty and doesn’t have to piss and isn’t hungry or tired and the car’s not riding the road but flying ever so slightly above it and he’s not sitting but levitating over the leather and nothing connects to anything except through the idea of it like the car rides the idea of the road and the idea of riding and the car is an idea too and so is not-car and not-road and even not-Jack and not-Jane and not-Jesse and trinity and God and death and if he drove fast enough they’d fly off the planet into space not-space which is the idea of non-ideas so he drives faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster
One car rockets by then another, blasting the wall with light/humming in the dark/image of the road and sand and sun still and fading to silence.
Jack’s hunched over the wheel bending the car into the future and Jane’s halfway turned watching the chase in the rear. Jesse’s in the back with the camcorder.
One car rockets by then the chase blasting the wall with light, swerves left into oncoming, gaining on them, clawing inches out the dial, needle wavering and sinking right, big numbers, big big numbers.
