Point B (a teleportation love story)

by Drew Magary

  A few more false starts and the roadster finally succumbed to Anna’s charms, rumbling down the street. She let out the clutch and eased the Cobra onto Route 101. It was like riding a buzzsaw. Lackadaisical trucks barreled past them at terrifying speeds. Anna rolled down her window for a second and the wind battered her and Lara from all sides, their seats humming with the Cobra’s insides. They settled in and drove through a perfect April late afternoon, with the trees budding larger and larger leaves as they joined I-95 and progressed farther south. The cerulean blue sky overhead was lined with flat, fan-shaped clouds that shone like mother-of-pearl but somehow consistently avoided blocking out a welcoming, drowsy sun. A small flock of double-crested cormorants migrating north flew close overhead, perhaps headed for a peaceful river to call home for the spring.

  Though she was now driving on 95 instead of lying half-dead on it, Anna couldn’t drive through the American free zones with the furious abandon she enjoyed down in Cuba. She had to keep tabs on a manual transmission this time, and she had Lara in the bucket seat next to her. There were also the armed convoys rolling down the freeway to consider. Perhaps they would take note of such a conspicuous, downright sexy car passing them by. Also: horses.

  Anna kept her left hand gripped tight on the wheel, stealing a glance at Lara’s legs only when she knew Lara had her eyes shut. She was getting the hang of the stick shift now, working the clutch like a piano pedal and feeling the engine become an extension of her own body, one that made her stronger, faster, and meaner as she picked up the rhythm of shifting gears. The cold steel gearshift—God, she was so sick of cold things—gave her right hand something to do, which was good because all it really wanted to do was reach out and touch Lara: squeeze her leg, brush against her cheek, twirl her hair. Gimme you. Anna was filled with a pure want that blocked out all other needs and desires. She needed this car to distract her from all that want. Anna was finally alone with Lara Kirsch, but the Cobra made for a loud and abrasive third wheel.

  She was far too aware of how she looked driving, as if she were being filmed while doing it. She was scared of all the trucks, of getting stopped by PINE, of Lara’s judgment, of everything. It was too loud to talk or to listen to music or to do much of anything productive. All the girls could do was trade puzzled glances and point out zombified pickup trucks sitting on the shoulder as they coasted through long stretches of open nothingness.

  Anna calmed herself by focusing on the chipped freeway paint and thinking only about tonight. Eventually they would stop somewhere and have this night together. Anna was leaden with fatigue, but still hardly able to contain herself at the thought. She was at just the right age to have the idea of tonight be loaded with magic. It was the hope—no, the confidence—that this particular tonight would be a personal landmark, that it would be indelible. Lara wanted them to get away together. Just them. There’s magic in someone saying let’s get out of here to you. They wanna get away from everyone else, with you, because only you matter. You. They want you. Anna ditched her willpower and dreamed about the night ahead on a loop with Lara sitting right next to her, possibly none the wiser. She dreamed faster than the Cobra could speed down an open straightaway. Tonight. Anna was going to get her tonight this night. Every night with Lara was an event, and this would be the biggest one of them all.

  You’ve been thinking three steps ahead since you and Lara first met. You just helped kill her family. Maybe she was high as balls when she kissed you. “Lara Kush,” remember? Maybe stop going so fast?

  Fuck off, brain.

  She looked down at the speedometer. They were going 93. She bumped it up to a 110. Life had just made them shit white. No point in slowing down now.

  A convoy of classic cars staging a gumball rally whizzed by them at even greater speeds, honking hello to the Cobra. Anna did not honk hello back.

  Somewhere in Massachusetts, they stopped for gas and food at a roadside Fermona Mart, one of a smattering of highway rest stops that hadn’t been shuttered. Anna, disguising herself in Mrs. Ludwig’s driving goggles and a white driving scarf wrapped around her face—scarves were handy like that—flipped around her passport tag so that the ID was facing her stomach, then politely asked an attendant to pump the gas for her because she had no clue how to do it herself. She went into the mart and bought an old-school road atlas, cheap sunglasses, a bulldog face magnet to adorn the lunchbox-sized trunk of the Cobra, and a dozen neon bangle bracelets: bright red, violet, emerald green, sunflower yellow, rose pink, and every other color. Lara squealed with delight when she saw them. They were on her wrists in an instant, turning her weakened arms into a bright, happy spectrum. Lara could be Lara again.

  “You feel better?” Anna asked her.

  “I feel crazy,” said Lara. “But in a good way. It’s just been intense, Anna.”

  “Well, now we get to be bored out of our minds on this goddamn road.”

  “There’s no one I’d rather be bored with. But I still need to know: how’d you get past the Harkness Wall?”

  “Climbed it.”

  “You climbed it?”

  “AHAHAHAHA, no. I let Bamert climb it. I’m not an idiot.”

  As they drove on, Lara spent her time in the passenger seat paging through the atlas, studying the curious circulatory system of the dilapidated American highway system. She unzipped a side curtain for air and the pages flapped and tore in the wind. Apart from staring at the mighty air scoop bulging out from the Cobra’s hood, the atlas was all they had in the way of entertaining themselves. The daylight receded and Anna thought of all those nights back when she was a kid when her sister drove her to the movies, the two of them always pushing forward and never looking back.

  She’d be so proud of you right now. Also she’d want you to get lucky.

  She and Lara had been on the road for three hours, crossing Connecticut on I-84 to avoid driving through Manhattan, when Anna noticed Lara was sobbing in the passenger seat. She found an open spot along a debris-ridden shoulder and cut the engine. The booming trucks and surly horns passing by offered little relief from the noise pollution. Anna placed a gentle hand on Lara’s shoulder, desperate to mask the thrill she got from it. She wanted to kiss Lara all over, and she wanted to spend the rest of her life protecting her from harm.

  Love. Love is dominion, not power.

  “Are you okay?” Anna asked Lara.

  “I’m fine,” Lara insisted.

  “We can stop for the night.”

  “I don’t wanna stop.”

  “Do you want to drive the car?”

  “Well, I did pay for it. Technically it’s my car.”

  “It is. Do you want to drive it?”

  Lara shook her head and smiled warmly. She reached for Anna’s hand on her shoulder and the world felt much more calm and quiet.

  “I’m just messing with you, Roomie,” said Lara. “This is our car.”

  “Oh.”

  “Keep driving me. Please.”

  So Anna did. After enduring an inexplicable traffic jam just outside Danbury, they crossed the lower wedge of New York state into Pennsylvania, where the trucks grew even more aggressive and reckless. The Cobra plowed through a sea of burger wrappers as they passed deserted housing developments and endless graveyards, where porters breezed in to visit the headstones and leave flowers for the departed before clapping out and rendering the dead forgotten once more.

  She couldn’t drive anymore. Her hands and her back and her psyche were spent. Her arm was a piece of wet string after all that hard shifting, and the Cobra’s pedals were just far enough away from her feet to make reaching them a strain. The sun was getting drowsy and they were closing in on 300 miles: far beyond the car’s desired joyriding distance. Their getaway was now officially a tedious road trip, and they still had 350 miles plus to go until they reached Cleveland.

  Anna pulled off of I-81 and into the parking lot of a Redford Suites—a real hotel, not a dumb ShareSpace—less than a mile from the shuttered, mo
ldering Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre. She cut the engine for a final time and there, with the Cobra asleep, there was something approximating silence for Lara and Anna to bask in. They were free now to share their trusted souls with one another. The air turned still and the retiring sun burst through the windshield to coddle them in springtime. They had both been traumatized. Trauma is an infection. It stays around far beyond your expectations. But they were still in the strange grace period of shock, with trauma gaining on them but still lagging behind. It would pull even with them soon enough. But for now, there was the sun.

  They stared at the hotel lobby. It was empty save for a single, bored clerk. There were no front doors they could enter. Take a photo of the place and it would have fit right in as part of Anna’s old WorldGram gallery.

  “Guess we’ll have to knock,” said Lara.

  “Why did you step forward?” Anna asked her.

  “What?”

  “When we were surrounded by all those PINE assholes. Why did you listen to me?”

  Lara took Anna’s hand and held it tight. Real touching, once more.

  “Because I knew,” Lara said. “Isn’t it obvious? I knew you were looking out for me, Roomie. You stayed real. And I owed you.”

  “No, you didn’t. You stayed real, too.”

  “Jason tried to tell me you were worthless. He said he’d seen all of your online history and that you were just a weird troll who would post rants about lemonade over at GizPo.”

  Oh fuck.

  “But I actually can’t stand lemonade, so I thought those rants sounded funny as shit.”

  Oh, thank God. Wait, she hates lemonade? Really?

  “You’re not worthless, Anna. My family killed your sister and tried to kill you, too. You didn’t deserve that.”

  “They tried to kill you, too.”

  “I’ve spent my whole life expecting they would.” Lara held up a forearm and the bracelets slid down to reveal one of her chafed, infected wrists. One day the cuts would heal, but the cutaneous evidence of them would never disappear. “But they’re gone now. I’ve been terrified of them for so long, I don’t know what to do with myself now that I don’t have to be.”

  Anna reached out and ran her fingers along the Conquistadors logo that Jason had cut into Lara’s arm. It rose out of her skin, embossed there forever. Another insult of a scar. Anna thought that touching it might help make it disappear. Even if not, she still got to lay a hand on her girl. The logo was sickening but touching Lara was anything but. Lara giggled as Anna felt around it. There were more normal ways to flirt, but again, normal was a delusion in 2031.

  “I know how to fix this goddamn scar,” Lara said.

  “How?” Anna asked.

  “I have a plan.”

  “You and your plans.”

  “Haven’t failed me yet!”

  “I’m sorry about what they did to you,” Anna said.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “I still am.”

  “Like I said: don’t be. You saved me from them. I owe you.”

  “Whatever you owe me, you already gave to me.”

  “And I’m sorry I kissed you,” Lara added.

  She’s sorry she kissed you. It was like Anna was back on that field in Kona, feeling a pair of hands pressing the vital organs out of her body. “What?”

  “I’m sorry I kissed you. You probably didn’t see that coming.” If only she knew how many times Anna had indeed envisioned it coming, and in every conceivable permutation.

  “Um…” Blargh. “It’s fine. You saved me when you did that. I didn’t mind.” Keep it at that.

  “That’s so sweet of you.”

  Ugh, sweet. A fucking head-pat of a word. Anna tried not to wince.

  Lara looked around. “How far are we from Cleveland?”

  “Far,” Anna said.

  “Like, how many more hours?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never driven this far to begin with.”

  “Well, you drove well. That’s for sure.”

  Anna locked the Club in place on the steering wheel. Then she and Lara unlatched the doors to the Cobra and got out, reaching as high as they could to awaken their muscles and take in the springtime air. Both of them still felt phantom vibrations from sitting in a voracious, speeding hot rod from hours on end. Their ears would ring for hours afterward, but that would only serve as a pleasant reminder that they had gotten away. The two girls smiled at each other again. They were free now to leave all potential consequences of their actions unpondered.

  Anna grew worried. “We have nothing,” she told Lara.

  “What do you mean?” Lara asked.

  “We have no food apart from rest stop crap. We have no change of clothes. I don’t even have a fucking toothbrush.”

  “Oh, and I left my vape pen at the apartment, too.”

  “Well yeah, there’s that. But I meant necessities.”

  “I need that.” Lara said. “But whatever. We can have port delivery come.”

  “Lara.”

  “Right!” Lara yelled. “We have no phones! Wow, we really are empty-handed.”

  “Yeah. But we still believe in each other. Bamert said we had to have that.”

  “He said what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “We’ll figure it out. Let’s just get a room.”

  They walked across the decaying pavement. Anna, hiding behind her faux fashion mogul shades from the rest stop, rapped on the lobby window. Lara waited behind a shockingly violet bush of fist-sized peonies, careful to not be spotted from inside. Bereft of PortPhones, the two girls couldn’t just book a room and port into it online. They had to do things the old-fashioned way.

  The clerk was startled by the knocking, then gave Anna a helpless shrug, the same shrug Anna gave Lara when she botched shifting gears. The clerk took out a PortPhone and mimicked using it. Anna pantomimed emptying her pockets to tell the clerk she had no phone. The clerk grew even more perplexed. A couple ported to the front of the desk from their room and commandeered her attention.

  Anna turned her back to the glass and sighed. “Well, this sucks.”

  “We can try another hotel,” Lara said.

  “Eh, their clerk will be just as worthless. Plus: I love that car, but I don’t wanna get back in it.”

  “Me either.”

  “You ever been to Pennsylvania?” Anna asked her.

  “Yup.”

  “I lived next to this state my whole life and somehow never stepped foot in it. Is it all like this?”

  “Most of it, yeah,” Lara said. “Sometimes you get to see a mountain. Like, a small one. I think I know how to get a room. Is the clerk still there?”

  The couple was still arguing with the clerk. Finally, they ported out of the lobby with a rude clap. Anna rapped on the window again. The clerk looked pissed and mouthed the word POLICE for her to read clearly. Anna pressed a thousand-dollar bill against the glass and that wiped the snarl off the clerk’s face right away.

  She gave Anna the best room at the hotel. She and Lara had to climb five flights of stairs to get to it, seeing as how elevators were now extinct. One more endless staircase to ascend. But once they were on the fifth floor, they found themselves inside a two-room suite with a working portwall and a scenic view of both the mall and a pool that was covered in an old mesh tarp. The tarp itself had been ravaged by both winter and by countless birds looking for a place to relieve themselves. The hotel room in Singapore was far nicer.

  Neither Lara nor Anna cared. Lara bolted for the king bed—the only bed—and made a snow angel on top of the bedspread. Anna grabbed a water bottle and drank it all in one gulp as Lara propped herself up on her elbows and made a mock angry face.

  “They charge for that water, you know,” she told Anna.

  “Oh they do? Shit. Sorry.”

  Lara laughed. “I think we can afford it, girl. No more sorrys. Toss me one of those.”

  Anna grabbed a second bottle from the bar
table and lobbed it onto the bed. Management had also left the girls a bottle of Pinot Noir to drink. Anna picked up the wine and gave Lara a sly look.

  “Actually,” said Lara, “Gimme the corkscrew.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah.”

  Anna set the bottle down and handed Lara the wine key corkscrew that the staff had left next to the Pinot: the kind of corkscrew that wouldn’t have been out of place in the apron of a waiter at Sandy’s old steakhouse. Lara flipped open the foil cutter at the end of it: a nasty fingernail of a blade that could cut you with the lightest touch. She gave the corkscrew back to Anna and traced a line on her arm, connecting the end points of the C in the Conquistadors logo together.

  “No,” said Anna.

  “Told you I had a plan.”

  “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

  “You never could. Do it. Fix this for me.”

  Anna put a bath towel under them and held the foil cutter to Lara’s arm, trying not to throw up at the thought of cutting her as Jason had, and in nearly the same spot. This was not the tonight she had envisioned.

  “I really don’t know if I can do this,” she told Lara.

  “I’m a big girl,” Lara said. “You know it’ll look better.”

  “Do you need, like, anesthetic?”

  “No. I know pain. This is easy pain.”

  “How deep do I cut?”

  “Deep enough for it to last.”

  Anna dug the foil cutter into Lara’s skin, feeling her heart bleed in tandem with it. She brought it down an inch, re-fashioning the logo into a standard Mars symbol. Lara didn’t make a sound as the blood cascaded down her arm and spattered the formerly pristine towel. Instead, she traced a small plus sign at the bottom of the newly minted circle for Anna to carve, to complete a hybrid Mars/Venus symbol.

  “Seriously?” Anna asked.

  “It’ll look corny, but I don’t mind corny things now.”

  “Me either.”

  She hacked the crisscross into Lara’s arm, as instructed. It was hard digging because Lara’s skin—soft as it was—was tough underneath, and because all her blood made everything slick.