Elphyon
07-18-2012, 02:17 PM
URL: http://elphyon.tumblr.com/post/27437175131/the-road-trip
As expected, Leah and I broke up just before the semester was over. It happened as we were sitting outside in the shade of the brick and cement dormitory that had been our home away from home for the last three years of college. We were waiting for a cab because, that morning, as if trying to delay our inevitable separation, my car, a blue 1987 Toyota Corolla, which hitherto had given me no trouble whatsoever, broke down, inexplicably and with a surprisingly human groan, when I turned the key in ignition. That pretty much put an end to our mutually assumed plan of acknowledging the end of our relationship in the privacy of its Japanese-engineered hull, where neither of us would be obliged to look the other in the eyes. We were always more honest with each other that way, in between places and time, going somewhere. It certainly hadn’t occurred to me that this was how it was going to happen, out there in the parking lot, both of us pitifully aware of the deus ex machina that was hurtling toward us in the form of a yellow cab, cramming the thoughts we’d prepared all night into few rushed words to close the relationship with a parenthesis rather than a period, like it was an interesting but ultimately irrelevant aside to our lives (which it was, in the end, but we were young then and felt we deserved a better ending).
The cab did arrive, and I insisted on loading Leah’s suitcases into the trunk myself, not unconscious of the gesture being a sort of a final token, of good will, unadulterated because there could be no recompense whatsoever. There were three of them, dented and dog-eared antiques that had supposedly carried her great grandparents’ belongings across the Atlantic, from Marseille to New York, as they fled persecution at the hands of Vichy, and into which she had now packed four years of her college life in neat compartments. She had always been extremely good at that. I had a distinct impression that that was what she was doing, packing up her college life and moving it back to her parents’ place in Arizona, back to the house and the room she grew up in, to tuck it away before heading out to live the next segment of her life. She wasn’t planning to attend the convocation. We promised we would keep in touch via e-mail, remain friends, knowing neither of us intended to.
I still had two weeks on campus after Leah left because the last of my finals had been scheduled on the very last day of the academic calendar. The first week passed by relatively quickly as I buried myself in study, first deciphering all over again the purposely obscure writings of poststructuralist literary theorists, and then comparing notes with classmates, if only to take solace in our mutual and profound confusion than to make some sense of the subject matter. But then the second week came by and I got, for lack of better terms, stuck. The only thing I could do was think about Leah and mourn our relationship over and over. Already it struck me as miraculous that we had stayed together as long as we did, four years, three of it living together in a crammed dorm room with poor plumbing. We were so clearly wrong for each other. She was Great Gatsby and I was Huckleberry Finn; she went To the Lighthouse and I followed Don Quixote. She had a tragic bend in her, a mothlike inclination for beauty that had to be rescued from all things broken and downtrodden. I on the other hand could never take things seriously, at least not then, not those things, there in the height of my youth. I suppose we had stayed together for so long because we wanted to overcome our differences—and really, each other—because we thought, Omnia Vincit Amor, isn’t that what love’s supposed to do?
After I wrote my exam, an absentminded application of Derrida’s concept of freeplay to Wallace Stevens’ poem The Owl in the Sarcophagus, I donated most of my possessions to Salvation Army and packed up only the essentials: a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, underwear, socks, shirts and jeans, a hoodie, blanket, folding map of USA highways, stash of mix CDs, notebook, manual pencil sharpener, and, finally, a box of precious Blackwing pencils (then discontinued) which Leah had gifted me and I hadn’t so far dared to open, let alone sharpen. Everything else was either dumped or left in a friend’s care. I called my parents and told them I’d decided to skip the convocation and that I was going on a road trip, alone, and that they shouldn’t bother driving down. I told them to expect me to show up on their doorstep in a week or two. Mom was disappointed and Dad was rather crossed, but in the end they caved in. Mom warned me against hitchhikers. Dad told me not to do anything stupid.
In the meantime, I’d gotten my Corolla back from the shop. It ran as good as new. According to the mechanic, the breakdown had been a fluke; it just needed some routine maintenance. I tossed my backpack in the back seat and got in the driver’s. I had all the time in the world and no particular destination in mind. My head was filled with the largeness of the continent and the interconnectedness of the highways and nothing else. I could go anywhere and everywhere (except, of course, Arizona). Such was the degree of freedom I felt then, which lent itself to, or was fuelled by, a kind of thoughtless determination to wander and be an outsider to my own life for the first time.
I drove north along route 195 until I hit interstate 90, stopping once at a gas station to fill up the tank and stock up on bottled water and big packets of dried fruits and nuts. I had two hundred dollars in fives and a credit card with a thousand dollar limit. That was still a lot of money, enough for a young college graduate to live on the cheap and on the road for couple of months at least. I could sleep in the car at rest stops and grab showers when I can at National Parks. It was more than plausible. Leah and I had taken numerous road trips over the span of our relationship, one of which was an epic three-week journey from Pullman to Denver and back, largely inspired by a timely wedding invitation and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, tracking some three thousand miles and sixteen National Parks across seven states. Out of deference to the angel-headed hipsters, yes, the Beats were one of the few things we both liked very much, we’d tried to live on the road as much as possible, not lodging anywhere, not using our credit cards, arriving just in time for the wedding to terrorize the guests with our body odour and uncivilized appetites. I remember it now as a pilgrimage of a sort; we were consciously trying to claim for ourselves that bit of secular myth belonging to a previous generation, a generation that, having so brightly embodied the conditions of being new and young in a changing world, and yet, being so securely lodged in the past, irrefutably previous from our point of view, seemed infinitely more interesting than our own.
By the time I saw the sign for the onramp to I-90, I knew I was going on a different kind of road trip, that it was somehow imperative that I make it a different kind of trip. I had a vague inclination for the ocean, perhaps because Bob Dylan’s Oh Sister was playing at the time, that unpredictable yet unflinchingly boyish voice singing Time is an ocean, and decided I would go west to Seattle, then drive south, as far as I can, along the Pacific coast.
I drove. Or the car drove me. Once on the interstate, all traces of thought, the expressible world of language and sentience, bled out of me as if by osmosis. By the time the last track on the first mix CD (Airbag by Radiohead) wound down to its final beep, I was completely fixated on the road ahead. I changed lanes to bypass trucks and took note of road signs without really looking. Things came into focus and then went out of it like objects beholden to a zooming eye of a camera. I drove past lakes big and small, past towns that weren’t quite cities and cities that were almost towns, past long stretches of trees, fir spruce cedar and hemlock surfing the elevation of the land, along the mountain range, as I drove over and under and through their shadowy gauntlet. Strange as it may sound, I felt as though I had become—or had always been—a part of that vehicle. The hum of it felt right in my bones. I could feel the friction of the road on my skin. The mechanical concentration was somehow comforting, cathartic even. It was a kind of purgation, furtive and subtle, which I recognized only in retrospect when, pulling into a strip mall parking lot in Bellevue for a bathroom break, I saw a woman whose figure and gait reminded me of Leah and felt, disproportionate to my imagined agony, only the slightest twinge of sadness.
I spent the night at a rest area south of Salem, Oregon, by Santiam River. It was close to midnight when I pulled in. The place was nearly empty except for a few semi-trailers which had their own parking lot closer to the river. There were shrubbery, wooden benches, vending machines, bathrooms, and a dingy coffee stall painted in patriotic stripes with no one inside ($1.99 for LARGE, said the sign). The furious orchestra of insects rubbing their wings together overlapped the low electric hum of the vending machines. I went into the bathroom and took a long leak, shivering with pleasure near the end, and cleaned up for the night. I got back to my car, bladder empty and teeth clean, and took out the map and squinted at it in the semidarkness (the Corolla, for all its virtues, had busted dome lights). I was yawning incessantly. I had covered more than five hundred miles in ten hours—nine discounting the time I spent at the gas station and at the strip mall in Bellevue. Sleepless Seattle and Little Beirut were already well behind me; neither had left a particular impression but the cool, crisp hue of late spring dusk had gone well with the road in between. I guessed that I would be near Sacramento this time tomorrow, after another five hundred miles. I flirted with a phrase in my head that would sum up the day, a little haiku maybe, but I was too tired to write it down. I put on the hoodie and cranked the seat back as far as it would go, where sleep, like a drunken lover, swooped down on me with all the subtlety of a brick chandelier.
I picked up Alice shortly after crossing the state line. Ours was a chance meeting. If I had slipped into the mechanical concentration of the day before, I would have missed her. But I hadn’t, despite or perhaps because of my conscious effort to enter that state of mind. Perhaps it was the greasy coffee that tied a knot in my stomach, or the crick in the back of my neck that kept me from facing the road head on and forced me to study field after field after field of enviably green grass, which in turn had me romanticizing the idylls of American rural life with great inaccuracy. I suppose it was the combination of all those things, and more, for there must have been an entirely separate series of coincidences that had taken place to put Alice on that particular stretch of Cascade Wonderland Highway at that particular moment.
That was what that portion of I-5 was called, Cascade Wonderland Highway. The name was a great deception, the same way Paris, Texas, or Paris, Tennessee, doesn’t resemble the luminous French capital one bit except for its stunted replica of the Eiffel tower. The arid brown hills, pockmarked by ugly thatches of vegetation on both sides of the road, were neither cascade-y nor wonderful, which was why I didn’t see Alice until she was already a fast-shrinking figure in the rear-view mirror, the barest of human outline. She seemed to me as though she belonged there, like a personification out of Thomas Hardy of the grandiloquently named highway, shy of being a real person.
I pulled to the side of the road, cranked down the window, and waited. She was walking in between the north and southbound lanes, on a long, smooth stretch of dirt, her pace contemplative and leisurely. A few more cars passed by but she made no effort to flag them down. In distance, she was a diminutive creature clothed plainly and carrying what seemed in a glance to be a kids’ knapsack, which was why I’d stopped—I thought she was a kid. As she got closer I saw that she was indeed an older woman, maybe in her late thirties, but by then it seemed pointless, if not cruel, to drive away.
“Ma’am, do you need a ride?” I asked when she got near enough.
She came to a sudden halt, and stood there studying my face without a word. After a minute or two she said, “Where are you headed?”
“South,” I said, and immediately felt the vagueness of my answer opening itself up to a sinister interpretation.
She didn’t seem to mind. “Oh,” was all she said. “Can you take me as far as Grenada?”
“Where is that?”
“South of Montague,” she said. Then she saw that I had no idea where Montague was either. “It’s along the highway.”
I nodded, and she walked around the front of the car and got in the passenger seat, bringing in with her a sour whiff that verged on homelessness. But there was also something else, something much more than just a smell, something alluvial and opaque that sat outside the known vocabulary of my sensibility, then as now, but nevertheless pierced me in the gut, somewhere between intuition and instinct.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m Alice.”
Alice wasn’t one for small talk. After the initial exchange, I could hardly get more than a syllable out of her at a time. The look on her face when I asked her about how long she had been on the road and why she was going to Grenada could have been interpreted either as I don’t know how to talk about these things, or mind your own goddamn business. She just sat very still, one hand on the red-and-purple knapsack on her lap, and with the other taking slow, measured sips from the bottle of water I’d offered her. I didn’t know what to make of her company, and so, in the immemorial fashion of young men to whom certainty is a gift rarely bestowed, I faked confidence—in both sense of the word. Hitchhiking was all about having weirdly intimate conversations with strangers, and if Alice wasn’t in the mood for one, why, then I would simply turn it into a confession. So I started recounting, not without a healthy peppering of self-depreciation, my breakup with with Leah: the suitcases, the yellow cab, and the impulsive road trip to nowhere which she was now partaking of.
“I don’t want to be rude,” she interjected while I was going on about Leah’s obsession with cleaning dishes and cutlery as soon as they’ve been used. “But I’m not interested.”
I could feel the rush of heat on my nape. All at once I was stricken with having done something ignoble, for imposing my story on an unwilling confessor and for having cheapened it by doing so. But I felt too a flash of anger at this perceived ungratefulness. Could she not have pretended, at least nod along?
“You’re not good with people, are you?” I said, trying my best to sound sporting.
“No.”
“Would you rather I drive in silence?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Alright, then.”
We didn’t speak again until I stopped to refuel at a Shell gas station, just south of the city Yreka, whose name struck me as an obscure joke about Archimedes. This was about half an hour after I’d picked her up. Alice gave me a look as I pulled the car off the highway and into the complex of drive-through joints and one-star motels. I pointed at the blinking fuel gauge with my chin. As I parked the car next to a pump machine, Alice dug into her knapsack and produced a ten-dollar bill, dirty and wrinkled, and held it out to me without a word. I hesitated for a moment, then took it from her hand and shoved it in the back of my jeans as I stepped out.
I filled up the tank and went inside the building. The lone attendant manning the cashier was a kid with a painstakingly shaped goatee and cheeks cratered with acne scars. He had his elbows on the counter, watching a car chase on a television that was propped on an empty roller grill. “The guy ran over two people,” he said without looking up. “Been on the run for twenty minutes.”
“Was he drunk?”
The kid shrugged his shoulders. “Does it matter?”
I picked up two ham and cheese sandwiches from the refrigerator and returned to the counter. The fugitive car was still on the run, weaving maniacally in and out of traffic.
“Where is this?”
“San Francisco.”
Several police cruisers were closing in on the fugitive now, who eventually bumped into another car he was trying to cut in front of, spun out of control, and crashed headlong into the guardrail. A plume of smoke arose from beneath the crumpled bonnet. The aerial camera zoomed into the front but all anyone could see there was the white mass of the airbag.
“****,” said the kid. “I hope he got what he deserves.”
At that moment Alice pushed in through the door. Her odor made the kid turn. He frowned.
“She’s with me,” I said.
“I need to use the washroom,” Alice said in our general direction.
The kid pointed at the hallway in the back, past the coffee machine and a stack of donuts. His eyes followed her all the way. “Is she a hobo?” he asked when she was out of earshot.
“She’s a friend,” I said, as sternly as I could.
He gave me an odd look and then quickly followed it by a smug, crooked sneer. “She could use a shower.”
I paid for the gas and the sandwiches with the credit card and left. Alice came out soon after. The kid seemed to say something to her as she left, but I couldn’t read from her face what that might have been.
“Stupid kid,” I said as she settled into her seat.
“So he is,” she said. “Is that for me?” She pointed at the sandwiches.
I nodded.
“Thank you.” She grabbed one and unfolded the plastic wrapping. She regarded it for a moment and then bit into it, looking at me right in the eyes. The first bite was slow and deliberate, as though she was savoring a delicate meal, but ones that followed were huge chomping bites that devoured the sandwich in a heartbeat. Our eyes had remained locked the whole time and there were breadcrumbs on her upper lip. She licked it off. “It’s good,” she said.
Grenada was just fifteen minutes further down I-5. I dropped Alice off at the welcome sign by the highway that announced the town’s population at 367. I offered to drive her into the town but she was adamant that I be on my way. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Sorry I made a poor passenger,” she said. Then, just as I began to pull away, she said, “If you do make it to Los Angeles, Arizona’s not very far.”
I stepped on the accelerator. I was glad to be rid of her and to have behaved with kindness. Once again she was reduced to an outline in my rear-view mirror, whose lingering odor was the only evidence of my having met her. I made a mental note to wash the seat as soon as I got a chance.
Less than an hour after I’d dropped off Alice, the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s department caught up with me just outside of Lakehead, near Shasta Lake, where Cascade Wonderland Highway finally began to live up to its name, with tree-lined streets, scenic lakes, and quaint seasonal towns all against the backdrop of a snow-capped mountain looming majestically in the distance, complete with a halo of cloud. A lone vehicle was after me, siren blaring and lights flaring. I checked my speed. It was well within the limit. As I began slowing down and pulling into the side lane, the car chase I’d witnessed at the gas station rushed into my mind.
I came to a full stop. The officer stepped out and walked over. I cranked down the window before she could rap on it. “Good afternoon, officer,” I said, before adding, like a two-bit TV actor, “What seems to be the problem?”
The officer gave me a bemused look. I noticed that she had very masculine jaws. She asked for my license and registration and I produced them readily. She took a quick look at both. “Where are you headed?”
I told her that I’d just graduated from college and was headed down to Arizona to see my girlfriend.
“Did you stop at a Shell gas station near Yreka?” She asked.
“Yes, I did, sir—ma’am.”
“When was this?”
“It was a little more than an hour ago.”
“Was there a female companion with you?”
“Yes. Is everything all right?”
“Describe this woman, please.”
“She was about five-two, and slender, dark blond hair and blue eyes…”
“How about age? Do you know her name?”
“She said her name was Alice. I guess she was in mid to late thirties?”
“You guess?”
“I don’t really know for sure, ma’am—I was just giving her a ride.”
“She’s a hitchhiker, then?”
There was something accusatory about the way she asked that question.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“‘Officer’ is fine.”
“Yes, officer.”
“So she’s a hitchhiker,” she said. “But you told the cashier at the gas station she was your friend?”
“That’s—”
She shook her head and cut me off. “It doesn’t matter. Where was it that you picked her up?”
“Just past the state line.”
“And you dropped her off where?”
“At Grenada, about an hour ago,” I said. “Please, what’s going on? Am I in trouble?”
“We’ll see. Wait here, please.”
She walked back to her car and ran my information on the computer, and then picked up her radio. She seemed to be arguing. I was all ears but couldn’t make out anything other than radio clicks and occasional pronouns. A miasma of dread fell over me as the waiting continued, but I steadied myself thinking about all the car chases that were happening all over America that would end in a lethal crash.
Eventually, she came over and handed back my license and registration. “You’re okay to continue,” she said. “A piece of advice, you might want to avoid offering a ride to every hitchhiker you see in the future.”
“What happened?”
“That woman was wanted for arson that killed a family in Eugene a week ago.”
“What?”
“The kid at the gas station recognized her from TV and called us. We put out an alert for your car. I was going to take you back in for questioning but—well, there’s no need anymore.”
“What do you mean, there’s no need anymore?”
“I’m told that not twenty minutes ago we got a call from Grenada saying a woman shot herself in the head outside a local church.”
“What? Do they—does anyone—why?”
She shrugged, patted the top of my car twice, and then walked back to her cruiser and drove on.
I sat there in my seat for what felt like a year, inhaling Alice’s odor, breathing what was in my mind an undeniable proof of her existence. Then I remembered the crumpled ten-dollar bill in my pocket. I limped out of the car and threw up on the side of the road. The sight of my own vomit, bits of half-ingested lettuce and ham, made me sick again. I threw up again and again until there was nothing left except bile and acid.
I didn’t make it to Los Angeles. Nor did I cross the Arizona desert in a foolish quest to see Leah, which is what I think I intended to do all along, had it not been for Alice. I made it as far as Sacramento, and stayed at a cheap motel on the outskirt of the city. For two days and nights I sharpened the Blackwing pencils to stubs, every single one of them, very slowly. On the third day I checked out, leaving a mountain of pencil shavings and a ten-dollar tip for housekeeping. I sold the Corolla to a dealer for a joke of a price and bought a ticket for the first flight home. Mom came and picked me up at the airport. She knew something had happened, the way mothers just do, but also knew better than to probe.
In the days following I applied to several law schools, was accepted into one, and became an immigration lawyer upon graduation. I worked my way up the firm and became a partner. By then I had married a schoolteacher with a good head on her shoulders, with whom I’d fathered a son. We built a quaint two-story home in a beach neighbourhood, not far from my parents’ place.
I saw Leah again at the ten-year class reunion. While waiting at the bar for my wife’s cocktail, I showed her the photo of my son on a tricycle. She commented not unkindly that he had my eyes. I asked how she had been, what she was doing. She handed me a business card and told me she was a journalist for a local newspaper, in Eugene, Oregon, where she also owned a small poetry press. I said I would look up the books. Then, as I helped myself to my wife’s cocktail (an apple martini), we started reminiscing. Eventually she conceded that it had taken her a very long time recover from our breakup. I told her winkingly that it took me two weeks.
“What, only two weeks?” she asked, feigning hurt with a little pout.
“I went on a road trip,” I said. “You could say it helped clear my head.”
“Do you still have the Corolla?”
“God, no, I sold it ages ago.”
“That’s a shame. That car was our—legacy. Do you remember that trip to Denver?”
“zHow could I forget?”
“That’s my fondest memory of us,” she said. “It was epic.”
“Yes, it was.”
Not long after that, just as the mist of nostalgia was beginning to thin out, my wife came looking for me. I introduced them and watched my first and last women exchange pleasantries.
Alice remained a presence in my mind. Time and again I thought about her. Or rather, the thought of her interjected itself into the contented regularity of my upper middle-class existence that sometime bordered on happiness, at odd intervals, and always, always with that unclean whiff of armpits and urine. I would smell it in the shower stall, in my son’s rockets-and-planets wallpaper, and in my wife’s damp hair after we’d had sex. In those moments I would go back the years to the northernmost tip of California, Cascade Wonderland Highway, sitting behind the wheel of my Corolla again, slowing down for a hitchhiker who’d come into my view only as a reflection. Then I would ask her about the family she burned down in Eugene, and what she kept in the knapsack, and what was waiting for her in Grenada, and she would smile and say, licking the breadcrumbs from her lips, “It’s good.”
As expected, Leah and I broke up just before the semester was over. It happened as we were sitting outside in the shade of the brick and cement dormitory that had been our home away from home for the last three years of college. We were waiting for a cab because, that morning, as if trying to delay our inevitable separation, my car, a blue 1987 Toyota Corolla, which hitherto had given me no trouble whatsoever, broke down, inexplicably and with a surprisingly human groan, when I turned the key in ignition. That pretty much put an end to our mutually assumed plan of acknowledging the end of our relationship in the privacy of its Japanese-engineered hull, where neither of us would be obliged to look the other in the eyes. We were always more honest with each other that way, in between places and time, going somewhere. It certainly hadn’t occurred to me that this was how it was going to happen, out there in the parking lot, both of us pitifully aware of the deus ex machina that was hurtling toward us in the form of a yellow cab, cramming the thoughts we’d prepared all night into few rushed words to close the relationship with a parenthesis rather than a period, like it was an interesting but ultimately irrelevant aside to our lives (which it was, in the end, but we were young then and felt we deserved a better ending).
The cab did arrive, and I insisted on loading Leah’s suitcases into the trunk myself, not unconscious of the gesture being a sort of a final token, of good will, unadulterated because there could be no recompense whatsoever. There were three of them, dented and dog-eared antiques that had supposedly carried her great grandparents’ belongings across the Atlantic, from Marseille to New York, as they fled persecution at the hands of Vichy, and into which she had now packed four years of her college life in neat compartments. She had always been extremely good at that. I had a distinct impression that that was what she was doing, packing up her college life and moving it back to her parents’ place in Arizona, back to the house and the room she grew up in, to tuck it away before heading out to live the next segment of her life. She wasn’t planning to attend the convocation. We promised we would keep in touch via e-mail, remain friends, knowing neither of us intended to.
I still had two weeks on campus after Leah left because the last of my finals had been scheduled on the very last day of the academic calendar. The first week passed by relatively quickly as I buried myself in study, first deciphering all over again the purposely obscure writings of poststructuralist literary theorists, and then comparing notes with classmates, if only to take solace in our mutual and profound confusion than to make some sense of the subject matter. But then the second week came by and I got, for lack of better terms, stuck. The only thing I could do was think about Leah and mourn our relationship over and over. Already it struck me as miraculous that we had stayed together as long as we did, four years, three of it living together in a crammed dorm room with poor plumbing. We were so clearly wrong for each other. She was Great Gatsby and I was Huckleberry Finn; she went To the Lighthouse and I followed Don Quixote. She had a tragic bend in her, a mothlike inclination for beauty that had to be rescued from all things broken and downtrodden. I on the other hand could never take things seriously, at least not then, not those things, there in the height of my youth. I suppose we had stayed together for so long because we wanted to overcome our differences—and really, each other—because we thought, Omnia Vincit Amor, isn’t that what love’s supposed to do?
After I wrote my exam, an absentminded application of Derrida’s concept of freeplay to Wallace Stevens’ poem The Owl in the Sarcophagus, I donated most of my possessions to Salvation Army and packed up only the essentials: a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, shaving cream, underwear, socks, shirts and jeans, a hoodie, blanket, folding map of USA highways, stash of mix CDs, notebook, manual pencil sharpener, and, finally, a box of precious Blackwing pencils (then discontinued) which Leah had gifted me and I hadn’t so far dared to open, let alone sharpen. Everything else was either dumped or left in a friend’s care. I called my parents and told them I’d decided to skip the convocation and that I was going on a road trip, alone, and that they shouldn’t bother driving down. I told them to expect me to show up on their doorstep in a week or two. Mom was disappointed and Dad was rather crossed, but in the end they caved in. Mom warned me against hitchhikers. Dad told me not to do anything stupid.
In the meantime, I’d gotten my Corolla back from the shop. It ran as good as new. According to the mechanic, the breakdown had been a fluke; it just needed some routine maintenance. I tossed my backpack in the back seat and got in the driver’s. I had all the time in the world and no particular destination in mind. My head was filled with the largeness of the continent and the interconnectedness of the highways and nothing else. I could go anywhere and everywhere (except, of course, Arizona). Such was the degree of freedom I felt then, which lent itself to, or was fuelled by, a kind of thoughtless determination to wander and be an outsider to my own life for the first time.
I drove north along route 195 until I hit interstate 90, stopping once at a gas station to fill up the tank and stock up on bottled water and big packets of dried fruits and nuts. I had two hundred dollars in fives and a credit card with a thousand dollar limit. That was still a lot of money, enough for a young college graduate to live on the cheap and on the road for couple of months at least. I could sleep in the car at rest stops and grab showers when I can at National Parks. It was more than plausible. Leah and I had taken numerous road trips over the span of our relationship, one of which was an epic three-week journey from Pullman to Denver and back, largely inspired by a timely wedding invitation and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, tracking some three thousand miles and sixteen National Parks across seven states. Out of deference to the angel-headed hipsters, yes, the Beats were one of the few things we both liked very much, we’d tried to live on the road as much as possible, not lodging anywhere, not using our credit cards, arriving just in time for the wedding to terrorize the guests with our body odour and uncivilized appetites. I remember it now as a pilgrimage of a sort; we were consciously trying to claim for ourselves that bit of secular myth belonging to a previous generation, a generation that, having so brightly embodied the conditions of being new and young in a changing world, and yet, being so securely lodged in the past, irrefutably previous from our point of view, seemed infinitely more interesting than our own.
By the time I saw the sign for the onramp to I-90, I knew I was going on a different kind of road trip, that it was somehow imperative that I make it a different kind of trip. I had a vague inclination for the ocean, perhaps because Bob Dylan’s Oh Sister was playing at the time, that unpredictable yet unflinchingly boyish voice singing Time is an ocean, and decided I would go west to Seattle, then drive south, as far as I can, along the Pacific coast.
I drove. Or the car drove me. Once on the interstate, all traces of thought, the expressible world of language and sentience, bled out of me as if by osmosis. By the time the last track on the first mix CD (Airbag by Radiohead) wound down to its final beep, I was completely fixated on the road ahead. I changed lanes to bypass trucks and took note of road signs without really looking. Things came into focus and then went out of it like objects beholden to a zooming eye of a camera. I drove past lakes big and small, past towns that weren’t quite cities and cities that were almost towns, past long stretches of trees, fir spruce cedar and hemlock surfing the elevation of the land, along the mountain range, as I drove over and under and through their shadowy gauntlet. Strange as it may sound, I felt as though I had become—or had always been—a part of that vehicle. The hum of it felt right in my bones. I could feel the friction of the road on my skin. The mechanical concentration was somehow comforting, cathartic even. It was a kind of purgation, furtive and subtle, which I recognized only in retrospect when, pulling into a strip mall parking lot in Bellevue for a bathroom break, I saw a woman whose figure and gait reminded me of Leah and felt, disproportionate to my imagined agony, only the slightest twinge of sadness.
I spent the night at a rest area south of Salem, Oregon, by Santiam River. It was close to midnight when I pulled in. The place was nearly empty except for a few semi-trailers which had their own parking lot closer to the river. There were shrubbery, wooden benches, vending machines, bathrooms, and a dingy coffee stall painted in patriotic stripes with no one inside ($1.99 for LARGE, said the sign). The furious orchestra of insects rubbing their wings together overlapped the low electric hum of the vending machines. I went into the bathroom and took a long leak, shivering with pleasure near the end, and cleaned up for the night. I got back to my car, bladder empty and teeth clean, and took out the map and squinted at it in the semidarkness (the Corolla, for all its virtues, had busted dome lights). I was yawning incessantly. I had covered more than five hundred miles in ten hours—nine discounting the time I spent at the gas station and at the strip mall in Bellevue. Sleepless Seattle and Little Beirut were already well behind me; neither had left a particular impression but the cool, crisp hue of late spring dusk had gone well with the road in between. I guessed that I would be near Sacramento this time tomorrow, after another five hundred miles. I flirted with a phrase in my head that would sum up the day, a little haiku maybe, but I was too tired to write it down. I put on the hoodie and cranked the seat back as far as it would go, where sleep, like a drunken lover, swooped down on me with all the subtlety of a brick chandelier.
I picked up Alice shortly after crossing the state line. Ours was a chance meeting. If I had slipped into the mechanical concentration of the day before, I would have missed her. But I hadn’t, despite or perhaps because of my conscious effort to enter that state of mind. Perhaps it was the greasy coffee that tied a knot in my stomach, or the crick in the back of my neck that kept me from facing the road head on and forced me to study field after field after field of enviably green grass, which in turn had me romanticizing the idylls of American rural life with great inaccuracy. I suppose it was the combination of all those things, and more, for there must have been an entirely separate series of coincidences that had taken place to put Alice on that particular stretch of Cascade Wonderland Highway at that particular moment.
That was what that portion of I-5 was called, Cascade Wonderland Highway. The name was a great deception, the same way Paris, Texas, or Paris, Tennessee, doesn’t resemble the luminous French capital one bit except for its stunted replica of the Eiffel tower. The arid brown hills, pockmarked by ugly thatches of vegetation on both sides of the road, were neither cascade-y nor wonderful, which was why I didn’t see Alice until she was already a fast-shrinking figure in the rear-view mirror, the barest of human outline. She seemed to me as though she belonged there, like a personification out of Thomas Hardy of the grandiloquently named highway, shy of being a real person.
I pulled to the side of the road, cranked down the window, and waited. She was walking in between the north and southbound lanes, on a long, smooth stretch of dirt, her pace contemplative and leisurely. A few more cars passed by but she made no effort to flag them down. In distance, she was a diminutive creature clothed plainly and carrying what seemed in a glance to be a kids’ knapsack, which was why I’d stopped—I thought she was a kid. As she got closer I saw that she was indeed an older woman, maybe in her late thirties, but by then it seemed pointless, if not cruel, to drive away.
“Ma’am, do you need a ride?” I asked when she got near enough.
She came to a sudden halt, and stood there studying my face without a word. After a minute or two she said, “Where are you headed?”
“South,” I said, and immediately felt the vagueness of my answer opening itself up to a sinister interpretation.
She didn’t seem to mind. “Oh,” was all she said. “Can you take me as far as Grenada?”
“Where is that?”
“South of Montague,” she said. Then she saw that I had no idea where Montague was either. “It’s along the highway.”
I nodded, and she walked around the front of the car and got in the passenger seat, bringing in with her a sour whiff that verged on homelessness. But there was also something else, something much more than just a smell, something alluvial and opaque that sat outside the known vocabulary of my sensibility, then as now, but nevertheless pierced me in the gut, somewhere between intuition and instinct.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m Alice.”
Alice wasn’t one for small talk. After the initial exchange, I could hardly get more than a syllable out of her at a time. The look on her face when I asked her about how long she had been on the road and why she was going to Grenada could have been interpreted either as I don’t know how to talk about these things, or mind your own goddamn business. She just sat very still, one hand on the red-and-purple knapsack on her lap, and with the other taking slow, measured sips from the bottle of water I’d offered her. I didn’t know what to make of her company, and so, in the immemorial fashion of young men to whom certainty is a gift rarely bestowed, I faked confidence—in both sense of the word. Hitchhiking was all about having weirdly intimate conversations with strangers, and if Alice wasn’t in the mood for one, why, then I would simply turn it into a confession. So I started recounting, not without a healthy peppering of self-depreciation, my breakup with with Leah: the suitcases, the yellow cab, and the impulsive road trip to nowhere which she was now partaking of.
“I don’t want to be rude,” she interjected while I was going on about Leah’s obsession with cleaning dishes and cutlery as soon as they’ve been used. “But I’m not interested.”
I could feel the rush of heat on my nape. All at once I was stricken with having done something ignoble, for imposing my story on an unwilling confessor and for having cheapened it by doing so. But I felt too a flash of anger at this perceived ungratefulness. Could she not have pretended, at least nod along?
“You’re not good with people, are you?” I said, trying my best to sound sporting.
“No.”
“Would you rather I drive in silence?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Alright, then.”
We didn’t speak again until I stopped to refuel at a Shell gas station, just south of the city Yreka, whose name struck me as an obscure joke about Archimedes. This was about half an hour after I’d picked her up. Alice gave me a look as I pulled the car off the highway and into the complex of drive-through joints and one-star motels. I pointed at the blinking fuel gauge with my chin. As I parked the car next to a pump machine, Alice dug into her knapsack and produced a ten-dollar bill, dirty and wrinkled, and held it out to me without a word. I hesitated for a moment, then took it from her hand and shoved it in the back of my jeans as I stepped out.
I filled up the tank and went inside the building. The lone attendant manning the cashier was a kid with a painstakingly shaped goatee and cheeks cratered with acne scars. He had his elbows on the counter, watching a car chase on a television that was propped on an empty roller grill. “The guy ran over two people,” he said without looking up. “Been on the run for twenty minutes.”
“Was he drunk?”
The kid shrugged his shoulders. “Does it matter?”
I picked up two ham and cheese sandwiches from the refrigerator and returned to the counter. The fugitive car was still on the run, weaving maniacally in and out of traffic.
“Where is this?”
“San Francisco.”
Several police cruisers were closing in on the fugitive now, who eventually bumped into another car he was trying to cut in front of, spun out of control, and crashed headlong into the guardrail. A plume of smoke arose from beneath the crumpled bonnet. The aerial camera zoomed into the front but all anyone could see there was the white mass of the airbag.
“****,” said the kid. “I hope he got what he deserves.”
At that moment Alice pushed in through the door. Her odor made the kid turn. He frowned.
“She’s with me,” I said.
“I need to use the washroom,” Alice said in our general direction.
The kid pointed at the hallway in the back, past the coffee machine and a stack of donuts. His eyes followed her all the way. “Is she a hobo?” he asked when she was out of earshot.
“She’s a friend,” I said, as sternly as I could.
He gave me an odd look and then quickly followed it by a smug, crooked sneer. “She could use a shower.”
I paid for the gas and the sandwiches with the credit card and left. Alice came out soon after. The kid seemed to say something to her as she left, but I couldn’t read from her face what that might have been.
“Stupid kid,” I said as she settled into her seat.
“So he is,” she said. “Is that for me?” She pointed at the sandwiches.
I nodded.
“Thank you.” She grabbed one and unfolded the plastic wrapping. She regarded it for a moment and then bit into it, looking at me right in the eyes. The first bite was slow and deliberate, as though she was savoring a delicate meal, but ones that followed were huge chomping bites that devoured the sandwich in a heartbeat. Our eyes had remained locked the whole time and there were breadcrumbs on her upper lip. She licked it off. “It’s good,” she said.
Grenada was just fifteen minutes further down I-5. I dropped Alice off at the welcome sign by the highway that announced the town’s population at 367. I offered to drive her into the town but she was adamant that I be on my way. “Are you sure?” I asked.
“Sorry I made a poor passenger,” she said. Then, just as I began to pull away, she said, “If you do make it to Los Angeles, Arizona’s not very far.”
I stepped on the accelerator. I was glad to be rid of her and to have behaved with kindness. Once again she was reduced to an outline in my rear-view mirror, whose lingering odor was the only evidence of my having met her. I made a mental note to wash the seat as soon as I got a chance.
Less than an hour after I’d dropped off Alice, the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s department caught up with me just outside of Lakehead, near Shasta Lake, where Cascade Wonderland Highway finally began to live up to its name, with tree-lined streets, scenic lakes, and quaint seasonal towns all against the backdrop of a snow-capped mountain looming majestically in the distance, complete with a halo of cloud. A lone vehicle was after me, siren blaring and lights flaring. I checked my speed. It was well within the limit. As I began slowing down and pulling into the side lane, the car chase I’d witnessed at the gas station rushed into my mind.
I came to a full stop. The officer stepped out and walked over. I cranked down the window before she could rap on it. “Good afternoon, officer,” I said, before adding, like a two-bit TV actor, “What seems to be the problem?”
The officer gave me a bemused look. I noticed that she had very masculine jaws. She asked for my license and registration and I produced them readily. She took a quick look at both. “Where are you headed?”
I told her that I’d just graduated from college and was headed down to Arizona to see my girlfriend.
“Did you stop at a Shell gas station near Yreka?” She asked.
“Yes, I did, sir—ma’am.”
“When was this?”
“It was a little more than an hour ago.”
“Was there a female companion with you?”
“Yes. Is everything all right?”
“Describe this woman, please.”
“She was about five-two, and slender, dark blond hair and blue eyes…”
“How about age? Do you know her name?”
“She said her name was Alice. I guess she was in mid to late thirties?”
“You guess?”
“I don’t really know for sure, ma’am—I was just giving her a ride.”
“She’s a hitchhiker, then?”
There was something accusatory about the way she asked that question.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“‘Officer’ is fine.”
“Yes, officer.”
“So she’s a hitchhiker,” she said. “But you told the cashier at the gas station she was your friend?”
“That’s—”
She shook her head and cut me off. “It doesn’t matter. Where was it that you picked her up?”
“Just past the state line.”
“And you dropped her off where?”
“At Grenada, about an hour ago,” I said. “Please, what’s going on? Am I in trouble?”
“We’ll see. Wait here, please.”
She walked back to her car and ran my information on the computer, and then picked up her radio. She seemed to be arguing. I was all ears but couldn’t make out anything other than radio clicks and occasional pronouns. A miasma of dread fell over me as the waiting continued, but I steadied myself thinking about all the car chases that were happening all over America that would end in a lethal crash.
Eventually, she came over and handed back my license and registration. “You’re okay to continue,” she said. “A piece of advice, you might want to avoid offering a ride to every hitchhiker you see in the future.”
“What happened?”
“That woman was wanted for arson that killed a family in Eugene a week ago.”
“What?”
“The kid at the gas station recognized her from TV and called us. We put out an alert for your car. I was going to take you back in for questioning but—well, there’s no need anymore.”
“What do you mean, there’s no need anymore?”
“I’m told that not twenty minutes ago we got a call from Grenada saying a woman shot herself in the head outside a local church.”
“What? Do they—does anyone—why?”
She shrugged, patted the top of my car twice, and then walked back to her cruiser and drove on.
I sat there in my seat for what felt like a year, inhaling Alice’s odor, breathing what was in my mind an undeniable proof of her existence. Then I remembered the crumpled ten-dollar bill in my pocket. I limped out of the car and threw up on the side of the road. The sight of my own vomit, bits of half-ingested lettuce and ham, made me sick again. I threw up again and again until there was nothing left except bile and acid.
I didn’t make it to Los Angeles. Nor did I cross the Arizona desert in a foolish quest to see Leah, which is what I think I intended to do all along, had it not been for Alice. I made it as far as Sacramento, and stayed at a cheap motel on the outskirt of the city. For two days and nights I sharpened the Blackwing pencils to stubs, every single one of them, very slowly. On the third day I checked out, leaving a mountain of pencil shavings and a ten-dollar tip for housekeeping. I sold the Corolla to a dealer for a joke of a price and bought a ticket for the first flight home. Mom came and picked me up at the airport. She knew something had happened, the way mothers just do, but also knew better than to probe.
In the days following I applied to several law schools, was accepted into one, and became an immigration lawyer upon graduation. I worked my way up the firm and became a partner. By then I had married a schoolteacher with a good head on her shoulders, with whom I’d fathered a son. We built a quaint two-story home in a beach neighbourhood, not far from my parents’ place.
I saw Leah again at the ten-year class reunion. While waiting at the bar for my wife’s cocktail, I showed her the photo of my son on a tricycle. She commented not unkindly that he had my eyes. I asked how she had been, what she was doing. She handed me a business card and told me she was a journalist for a local newspaper, in Eugene, Oregon, where she also owned a small poetry press. I said I would look up the books. Then, as I helped myself to my wife’s cocktail (an apple martini), we started reminiscing. Eventually she conceded that it had taken her a very long time recover from our breakup. I told her winkingly that it took me two weeks.
“What, only two weeks?” she asked, feigning hurt with a little pout.
“I went on a road trip,” I said. “You could say it helped clear my head.”
“Do you still have the Corolla?”
“God, no, I sold it ages ago.”
“That’s a shame. That car was our—legacy. Do you remember that trip to Denver?”
“zHow could I forget?”
“That’s my fondest memory of us,” she said. “It was epic.”
“Yes, it was.”
Not long after that, just as the mist of nostalgia was beginning to thin out, my wife came looking for me. I introduced them and watched my first and last women exchange pleasantries.
Alice remained a presence in my mind. Time and again I thought about her. Or rather, the thought of her interjected itself into the contented regularity of my upper middle-class existence that sometime bordered on happiness, at odd intervals, and always, always with that unclean whiff of armpits and urine. I would smell it in the shower stall, in my son’s rockets-and-planets wallpaper, and in my wife’s damp hair after we’d had sex. In those moments I would go back the years to the northernmost tip of California, Cascade Wonderland Highway, sitting behind the wheel of my Corolla again, slowing down for a hitchhiker who’d come into my view only as a reflection. Then I would ask her about the family she burned down in Eugene, and what she kept in the knapsack, and what was waiting for her in Grenada, and she would smile and say, licking the breadcrumbs from her lips, “It’s good.”