The building belonged to the department of water and sewerage. Administrative offices, by the look of it. At least it had been. But now it seemed to be the dumping ground for their unneeded junk. No one appeared to have been inside in ages.
In the garage he found four trucks: a tanker, a dump truck, and two utility vans. The keys to all of them hung in a flimsily padlocked cabinet in a wood-paneled office.
One of the vans wouldn’t start at all. The other took a few moments to consider what it would do before grudgingly coughing itself to life.
What pleased Dobbs maybe even more than the van was the locker room. They were the water department, after all, and they hadn’t bothered to shut off their own supply. The water was brown and cold, and there was no soap, but it had been at least a week since he’d taken a shower.
He stayed in the spray until his feet went numb, then dried himself off with a new blue jumpsuit, fresh from the plastic package, a water and sewerage department patch stitched to the chest.
He spent the next couple of days working on the van. He changed the oil and the plugs. He drained the old gas and bought a new battery and filled the tires. There was rust on the rotors but not enough to make him worry. At a dead stop, the van vibrated like a washing machine. Dobbs guessed the timing belt had jumped a notch. Maybe two. So he cleared away the other belts and pulleys and removed the covers and tried to remember where to go from there. It had been years since he’d done anything like this. And he’d only ever been barely competent in the first place.
He’d been in high school when he’d decided to learn about engines. At the time, he didn’t have a car of his own. He had to borrow his parents’ when he needed to. Jess was away at college then, out east. At least he didn’t have to share with her, too.
Both his parents’ cars were leases. Every couple of years they got something new, swapping out before anything needed to be fixed. They were smart people, both of them professors. His father’s specialty was nineteenth-century German literature. His mother taught political science. They didn’t know the first thing about machines.
During the summer months, his parents rarely left their offices. They each had one at the house, a personal cocoon of monographs and scholarly journals. They had articles and book proposals to keep them distracted. Dobbs liked that about them, the way they threw themselves into projects, little worlds of their own.
But one afternoon Dobbs’s father emerged into the sunlight to run an errand of some kind. He was in his new Volvo, stopped at a traffic light. At the opposite corner of the intersection was a gas station with a repair shop. He happened to look over, and there was his son, bent over a Chevy in an open garage bay, smeared with grease.
That night when he got home from work, his parents called him into the living room. They sat him down on the sofa, while they settled stiffly into armchairs on either side of the fireplace. The scene felt like an inquisition.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Even though it was July, his father was wearing a sweater. He liked to use the air-conditioning to regulate the seasons at a steady seventy degrees.
“Are you interested in cars?” His mother smiled as if the word hurt her teeth.
“Not really.”
“Then why?” his father said.
It was as if they’d caught him with a bag of weed. Although he couldn’t help suspecting they’d be more laid back about drugs — at least the suburban, recreational kind.
“Curiosity, I guess.”
The lines softened across his father’s brow. Turning to Dobbs’s mother, placing a reassuring hand on her knee, he said, “We’d talked about how maybe engineering might be a good—”
Dobbs shot up from his chair. “Not this again.”
“What?” his father said.
During a science lesson one day when Dobbs was seven, in second grade, he’d learned about the ozone layer, about the hole leaking UV rays, about Freon and aerosols and cataracts and carcinoma. That evening, over pork chops, he’d been sullen and silent. His mother spent an hour trying to get him to explain what was wrong.
“Everyone’s going to die!” he’d finally shouted, smashing his fork into a mound of cold mashed potatoes.
“It’s going to be okay,” his mother had said, guiding him into her lap, humming the same aimless tune she had when he was little.
“I’m not a baby,” he said, wriggling loose, stomping off to his room.
Later that night she’d come upstairs, knocking softly, sitting down at the foot of his bed.
“You could become a climatologist,” she’d said. “Maybe you’ll find a solution.”
He buried his head under the pillow until she left.
When he was nine, Dobbs heard about the destruction of rain forests and the disappearance of the Panamanian golden frog. At school he’d demanded an assembly. Against a backdrop of graphs Magic Markered onto poster board, he’d lectured on the perils of global warming and the extinction of species.
The principal told him afterward he was destined to become a professor, just like his parents.
At twelve, Dobbs took to washing and reusing Ziploc bags rather than throwing them away, forbidding his father from fertilizing the lawn, putting rocks in the toilet tanks. To Jess’s disgust, he posted rules for flushing.
On his fourteenth birthday, he renounced pork chops and fish caught with anything other than a pole.
Ecology, his parents had agreed.
It was as if they believed the world couldn’t be extinguished as long as there was graduate school.
That summer evening three years later, facing his parents in front of the fireplace, Dobbs said, “I thought it would be cool to know how to fix a car.”
His father removed his glasses and squinted almost blindly. “As a hobby?”
“To be prepared.”
His mother looked like a startled bird. “For what?”
“What if your car breaks?” Dobbs said.
His father folded the temples of his glasses in a display of calm and reason. “You take it to a mechanic.”
“What if there are no mechanics?”
His mother went stiff in her chair. “Why wouldn’t there be mechanics?”
“Or what if we ran out of gas?” Dobbs said.
His mother offered a patient smile. “We’d get more.”
“I mean, what if there wasn’t any more?” Dobbs said. “What if you needed to fix the engine so it would run on something else?”
“Why would you need to do that?” his father said.
He couldn’t seem to make them understand. These were potential questions of life and death. Who knew what the future held?
The final fix for the van was the city seal, making it disappear. A can of spray paint, and Dobbs was done.
He took to the highway first. Not knowing where he was going, he circled around and around, ramp after ramp, swooping and rising, as if the road were a roller coaster. There was the city, laid out before him, mile after mile of emptiness. The place seemed simpler speeding by, its vastness shrunk.
But the most promising places were ones that couldn’t be seen in passing, the dark spots on the grid where nothing seemed to be. He headed north, and on a whim he pulled off the highway near an old assembly plant. The place was huge. The miles of streets surrounding it still contained a couple of small houses. Old blue-collar neighborhoods, by the look of them. But there were no cars, no lights.
Dobbs turned east and found main street, the old commercial drag. Everything was long out of business. What made the street different was that everything here was still standing. The buildings were packed in together: a pizzeria, a grocer, a tailor, a cocktail bar, a dry cleaner with an airy upstairs apartment. And there was a nightclub of some sort done up in tar shingles, its marquee pointing the way inside. The strip went on for blocks, and at each intersection there was a traffic light, still cycling through the colors, as if they mattered. A ghost town within a ghost city.