by Roy Scranton
Cut to frontal shot chase car: two Russian faces in the windshield Get them, Vladimir! They cannot get away from us this time! One pulls a heavy automatic pistol from under his coat—no, he pulls a sawed-off from the footwell—no, he’s got polonium in a vial—no, he turns and lifts an RPG out of the back seat and angles thru the window, perching his ass on the door, big rocket waving at the kids in the car ahead. Hot wind blows Russki goon hair. Schas po ebalu poluchish, suka, blyat!
Chrome and glass gleam in the sun. She’s wearing sunglasses. He’s in a white T-shirt, dungarees, and motorcycle boots. She’s—ah—what? In a pale gray dress wide across wide hips and cone tits and her hair’s up in a messy bun—no, no, she’s in black capri pants and a loose white cotton blouse and a pageboy—no, no, she’s in a Death Grips T-shirt and clunky hipster frames and cutoff jean shorts, barefoot, ponytail, smacking gum in candy-slick red lips. They’re all in black and white except her candy-slick red lips. Jesse’s 8mm whirs.
Jack, Jane says, they got a bazooka.
She’s not like that at all. None of this is like that. She’s in a flowery summer dress and bug-eye sunglasses and Scarlett Johansson hair. He’s wearing green plaid pajama bottoms, Chuck Taylors, and a Team Hufflepuff hoodie. His hair’s a muss, young Elliott Gould or maybe Michael Cera. Jesse’s in a scarf, fiddling with hir iPhone 9.
Jack, Jane says, they have a bazooka.
What? he screeches, mugging for the camera. Cue laugh track.
Tracking shot, cut, cut back to the Russian pulling the trigger, sparks and light, rocket red bursts and arcs at them, but they slide out beneath the smoking spiral—it slams into the road, exploding, the chase squeals around the boom off across the sand, driver shouting—Blyad!—into the cacti.
Crazy kids speed into distance, safe now, and Jack says something dopey and Jane says something clever, sarcastic, contemporary.
Commercial comes screaming jump cuts, loud noises, product sex, cleaner, safer sex, yogurt sex, Diet Dr Pepper sex, more life. One after another, screaming jump cuts, loud noises, product sex, narrative sex, character, lifestyle, the morality of ends and means.
Dad shifts where he lies on the floor sleeping behind the child cross-legged watching the lights flickering across the room/humming in the dark/commercials end and the show comes back on, image of the road.
I can’t believe they snuck up on us like that, Jane says. You even see ’em?
They been following us since Michigan, says Jack.
Michigan! Why didn’t you say anything? Asshole!
Look, sorry, I didn’t wanna tip ’em off.
God, you’re always like that. Like you always know best. Can you please not be such a fucking dick?
Yeah, okay, fine. I just thought you’d flip out, like you actually—
Flip out? Flip out!? You want me to flip the fuck out, you keep pulling this smart-guy routine. We’ve been doing this together too long for you to treat me like I just got here. In fact—
Look—
In fact—
Would you two just—
Rosy-lipped dawn kissed the canyon’s edge, smearing it pink and bronze, while, still, all below rose and fell in a tumult of monochrome blue, a faded photo burning out along one edge studded with black burs, juniper, and creosote. It’s rock, not sand, rock and a thin layer of cryptobiotic soil knotted like scar tissue ripped apart eons ago in long-forgotten geological holocausts, archaic renditions in Wingate sandstone dating to the Late Triassic, Cutler torn from the Early Permian.
Jim’s breath caught: the awesome grandeur. No other words for it. Sweeping. Awesome. Spectacular. Awesome. Sublime. Sublime. Beyond human comprehension. Tasting the words on his tongue. A whole herd of men, a Grand Central Station riot of thousands, tens of thousands, a hundred thousand humans and their robot cars cascading over the plateau and off the edge, bodies falling in clumps and pairs and singles, would be the merest trickle breaking against the unyielding stone, a temporary organic bounty, water, carbon, and nutrients. That’s how much we mean here, and even less. Even less because nothing was good to eat, water was scarce and usually poisonous. One saw here with undeniable lucidity that God had not made the earth for man, but to sate unknowable alien desires.
Jim already knew we were only animals, like polar bears or sea slugs, but the land before him cut to the bone of it, peeled back the skin of his species’ existence. Man, woman, Republican, Democrat, artist, banker, cuck, bitch, none of it mattered here. You were a bipedal savanna primate, an animal caught in the open. You huddled squatting on the mesa in the morning chill, grunting like a chump, watching the sun come up and smoking one of Suzie’s Parliaments as the red-orange curtain fell down the wall of the canyon and slowly faded, turning everything light.
A fox came up over the edge of the rise where he sat and crossed before him, upwind, unseeing. Jim inhaled smoke and the fox spun at the quiet burning crackle of paper and tobacco, tail level, curling on one plane as it hissed, narrow muzzle baring teeth. Then as quickly as it appeared it was gone, back over the edge of the rise. Jim thought again how glad he was he’d left Suzie and Remy at the hotel. The idea had just come to him, a clear solution, and he took it. The car had been weighing him down, the camera, the script, all that artifactual scaffolding. Art was reality and reality had no audience. Here was the thing itself: deep surface. This was it, this moment, not all that confabulation. Right now. This sentence. These three words.
Once the sun was fully up, he crammed his sleeping bag in its stuff sack and, lifting his carry-on, walked back the half mile to the highway, where he waited, thumb at the ready. He was passed by two semis, three SUVs, and a hatchback before an Indian in a pickup truck pulled over.
“Thanks,” Jim said as he got in the cab.
The Indian was in his early sixties, a ropy, sunburned workingman wearing at the edges. He wore a cowboy hat over a gray mullet. A Diné College parking pass hung from his rearview mirror.
“Ya’at’eh,” he said. “Where you headed?”
Jim pointed up the road.
The man grunted. “How far?”
Jim put his hands up. “I’ll be honest, man, I don’t know. I’m just going.”
“Okay,” the man said, accelerating back onto the highway.
“I’m not gonna do anything, if you’re worried,” Jim said. “I’m just traveling. I’m not running from the law or anything.”
The man smiled grimly. “Maybe you’re the one oughta be worried.”
Jim laughed. “Maybe I should. You gonna do something?”
“Naw,” the man said. “Not if I don’t need to. I’d scalp ya, but nowadays they just throw you in jail for scalping white boys. Not like the good old days, hey?”
Jim laughed again, and the old man’s smile warmed.
“Tell you what,” he went on, “I’m going as far as Monticello. Going to see my sweetheart. Now so long as you don’t tell my old lady, I’ll let you ride that far, okay?”
“Sounds good,” Jim said. His heart felt light out here, riding these many miles. Everything was easy.
“You’re a long way from nowhere,” the Indian said after a minute. “You out camping?”
“Sort of, yeah.”
“What’s ‘sorta’ mean? I see you ain’t got no backpack, just that rollie bag. You jump out of a plane somewhere?”
“I was on a trip with some people,” he said, “and I decided to split off on my own. Filling out the pattern required a kind of fractal divergence that wasn’t possible at the level of collective meaning, and there was no way forward that didn’t move right back into the cycle of reaction, because that particular system led only to certain end states, no matter how much turbulence you put into it. So in order to phase shift to the next level of emergent self-organization, I had to disrupt the socius not only at the level of semiotic production but also at the level of the real itself.
The only way forward, as it were, was to break out of teleological progression altogether, which was impossible within that particular assemblage of affects and wills. I’m still on the trip; I just let them keep the car. Long story short, I’m making a movie.”
The Indian nodded. “A movie, hey? Where’s your camera?”
“Right here,” Jim said, tapping his mirrorshades.
“Those Google glasses?” the Indian asked, suddenly suspicious.
“No,” Jim said. “I mean me. My eyes. I’m the camera. Reality has no audience.”
“Eyyyy,” the Indian said, relaxing. “Pretty clever. So what’s your movie about, hey?”
“It’s about America and the idea of starting over and the problem of narrative, the way we get trapped in stories, the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about revolution and utopia and climate change and violence and guns and the Civil War and cowboys and Indians and space. Homo sapiens, the greatest of apes, mere geology. It’s points, lines, and space. It’s about me and you and all this.”
The wheels thrummed on the blacktop. The La Sal Mountains rose purple and gray in the distance. The Indian took a drink from his giant plastic travel mug. “So how’s the movie end, hey?” he asked.
“That, my friend, is the million-dollar question. Because it’s the end that makes the story, right? I mean, the difference between comedy and tragedy is all in the punchline. A wedding or a death? A bang or a whimper? Laughing or crying? I don’t know. All I know is I have to keep going until the end finds me.”
“You got no plan, then?”
“Nope. I had one, before this, but then . . . I was planning too much. I had to do this and that and the other, and it was all getting very rigid. Too binary, too dialectical. I had to get rhizomatic again. The essence of the road movie idea, see, is in transgressing the normative constraints on our choices, breaking through negation to total autonomy, but as long as I kept sticking to the plan, the algorithm kept getting locked into a feedback loop. Suzie taught me that, weirdly enough, with Altus. I realized that conflict works against the whole idea. Planning works against the whole idea. Form itself is the problem. I had to, you know, derange myself. Disrupt the program.”
“You sure you ain’t on drugs, hey?”
“Just tobacco,” Jim said. “I haven’t even had any coffee.”
“Well, there’s coffee there in the thermos by your feet. You help yourself.”
“Thank you. Ah, thank you—?” Jim held out his hand.
“Marvin,” the Indian said, shaking Jim’s hand.
“Thank you, Marvin. My name’s Jack.”
“Nice to meet you, Jack. Hope your movie turns out all right. Maybe you give me a screen credit, ey, like Third Indian from the Left.”
“Absolutely,” Jim said, unscrewing the cup on top of the thermos, resting the cup on his knee, then unscrewing the top of the thermos and pouring coffee into the cup. “I have to say, it’s all going pretty well right now. What kind of town is Monticello, anyway? You think I can get a backpack there?”
“Nope, I don’t reckon you can get no backpack in Monticello. But you can probably catch a ride to Moab and get you one there, at Pagan Mountaineering or Gearheads. Them are both right on Main Street.” Marvin hawked and spit out the window. “Tell you what, you sure picked some rough country to hitch through, Jack. You’re really taking your life in your hands.”
“It’s all right,” Jim said. “I don’t have anything else to do now but wait, watch the road, and make my movie. Another ride always comes along.”
I’m a wild drifter, see, a real cool customer living on the edge. I roll into town like I got nothing to lose, and that’s when I see her there in the diner, popping bubblegum like she’s breaking hearts.
I say, “Baby, you and me, we’d go a long way together,” and she says, “Honeylamb, you don’t even know what kinda fire yer playing with.”
So I grab her and kiss her and show her my tattoo. She says she never could say no to a guy in a cowboy hat, so we take off into the sunset.
Everything would’ve turned out fine, too, if’n it hadn’t a been for that state trooper. I didn’t like the way he looked at Jane, the way her legs shone in his mirrorshades, and then he started sticking his nose into questions like where I got the car.
Jane calmed down after a while, and I pulled off and parked around the back of a Cracker Barrel, where I could wash the blood out and nobody’d look too close. We’d gone off the rails, I could feel it, damned and doomed American outlaws, two kids living on the edge, dancing in the fire, crazy living, crazy life full of blood and sex magic and hard drugs. Damn that dead cop, though, ’cuz he got his revenge: his chest camera caught us tighter than any roadblock, locked down red-handed in the flicker, and they lit up the web coming after us with every drone they had.
Ain’t nobody love a cop killer no more, not since the globalists took over the Deep State and poisoned everybody’s minds with their blue-pill propaganda. Thing is, people seem to want it. I mean, they take the pill. I reckon folks is just scared of real freedom and tired of the burden of individuality, the weight of having to choose a self, be a self, forge a self from the detritus of consumer society’s endless maelstrom of bullshit.
Anyways, from then on it was a mad, bloody, octane-fueled blaze up to Ol’ Canada. We left everything we owned behind us, dirty socks dumped in rest-stop trash cans, old underwear left in the greasy sinks of two-pump gas stations, phone chargers spun like baby snakes curling in the Arizona sand, condoms jammed in ATM money slots, birth certificates folded into Chinese menus, phones left on the tables of truck-stop diners, credit cards scattered like a shot cheater’s poker deck, watches melted in the dashboard sun, skin and eyes and teeth shred in crackling folds, buried in a dumpster behind a Shell on Route 315, everything but everything until all we had left was memories, and them we burned for fuel. I never thought we’d make it, but all I knew was that me and Jane was all we had . . . It was us against the world, our one and only trueborn chance to start over.
The clouds come over and the heat shudders with the scream of cicadas. The crunch of gravel under tires. Hardly even a town, just a few old buildings peeling paint, the hotel, the church, the granary, a feed store, hardware store. Some nice old houses that once meant the world to somebody, now boarded and empty, or maybe the lights come on but it’s just some old couple, a man retired and his wife, or maybe their middle-aged daughter and her family, a woman with ovarian cancer, a man with a cleft palate and a scar across his forehead. You had to believe some day in the past boys in dark jeans with turned-up cuffs rolled hoops down the lane with sticks, laughing and playing, while girls double Dutched, two ropes flickering one inside the other. You had to believe because now there was nothing, no children, no life, and to think it was always like that, like it had never had a future even on the day it was built, would be too much.
The hotel stands back off the main street, on a gravel road, with an empty field to one side. It’s a simple, square two-story box with the word hotel painted over the door. She couldn’t imagine who might have stayed there in this nowhere town besides maybe traveling salesmen, itinerant preachers, and suicides.
Next to the hotel was an open garage where a thick man with pomaded hair stood in his overalls watching. He had a burgundy 1960 Impala parked in the grass, all lines and fins, a long cigarettey machine. Later she dreamed
Gone and where. They, he. Stained on stone.
Green pines, red rock, men and women stained on stone. Gone and where. Verb.
She lifted her hands to touch the bodies, limbless souls floating up, up, up, then held back thinking of her skin oil on the stone, staining it, the admonition from the pamphlet, the idea of how many thousands of years gone, then she had to touch it, feel the connection with the dead, whatever cost, whatever prohibition.
Gone and where.
The strangest thing wa
s he left the car in the lot and the keys at the desk, along with his production-company credit card. Like it was an invitation.
They lay together in the camp tent, Remy with his hands rebuffed, her staring up through the mesh vent to see the stars while he, turned away, tried to make her feel his frustration through the tension in his back.
She was bored with this now, with Remy, with driving, now that Jim was gone. What did that mean? Anything?
They weren’t going to find him, she knew that, and Remy’s insistence that they search never seemed totally honest. Did he know something? Was it a trick?
She thought of the figures on the canyon wall, the ledge, from earlier that day, the men and women stained on stone, and it made her dizzy to think of them living here in the sand and rock so long ago. What water did they drink? How did they . . . anything? It was an image of our future, she thought: two by two, wandering through an empty desert, slowly drying to stone. The last cannibals.
Going back to New York already sounded like the right idea, and soon would become necessity. And then what? Try to find some new life built on repudiating the one before, wait for the end of the world. Easy enough. Plenty of practice. The freedom she’d tasted out here on the road was good, but it was a freedom of rootlessness and dust. It was the freedom to be blown and scattered, which was never the freedom she sought even if it was the only one she’d ever found.
How had they lived here, the pictograph people? In huts? In caves?
What did they eat?
How. How much. How? As if life were a line you could cut into, an animal you could carve limb from limb, bones you could crack to get at the marrow inside. Is the word discontinuous or discrete? She wondered. Am I making that up? You can’t separate out the things that go together. You can’t cotton to the fact that time and space are the same space, the same thing, that space and space and space are the same space. One time, one space, one thought, but we chop it all up. Two different thoughts at the same time differ neither in time or space, so how do they differ? In content? Form? In different strobing sectors of the cerebellum? So you will, in the end, say space, yes, space, different cells and chemical romances. Deferring unification.
