Sarvaduhka was no fool. Izzy couldn’t tell him how to drive, nosirree. Zoom, boy, he’d bombed down the autobahn when he was twenty-two. He’d weaved through cabbies in Calcutta and Bombay and skidded along the Nepalese border on two wheels before following the venerable wing of his family into the North American hospitality racket. He knew what was on other drivers’ minds, boy: Dog eat dog.
Show no sign of weakness. The car following him from Minooka to Morris had a grill like a piranha. It was red. Sarvaduhka passed a mile marker and counted the seconds until the red piranha passed the same spot: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mis… two-and-a-half seconds. “I knew it! Too close! Pup’hula!” he intoned, one of the three or four Sanskrit words by virtue of which he considered himself a savant—Fart!
Izzy snored. Sarvaduhka jammed the accelerator to the floor. The piranha dwindled in the rear view—Sarvaduhka chuckled and rubbed his shakti’s posterior—then roared up to kiss-butt distance again. “Damn!”
Drooling slightly, Izzy plumped his wadded jacket and settled into fetal position. Sarvaduhka squinted into the rear view. A woman driver, definitely. He craned his neck out the side to check her out in the West Coast mirror. Her windshield was tinted. Clever. Bet she hustles poker, too. He speeded up a little, then jabbed the brake pedal. SCREE! The piranha momentarily slowed, then came up even closer. “Mahapup’hula.’ Very big fart!
Izzy stirred. “Rowley Junction,” he muttered. “She dumps him in Rowley Junction. The bum’s making her pay the tab on all his coffees.” He rubbed the sand out of his eyes. “Ducky, we gotta be in Utah by Wednesday. What kind of time we making…?” Then he heard the roar of the piranha, grill to their tailpipe, and he caught the mad glint in Sarvaduhka’s eye. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Tailgating devil,” Sarvaduhka explained, eyes glued to the rear view. Sarvaduhka had another trick. He weaved all over the lane, whipping their bags from side to side across the back seat. “Give me some lebensraum, bitch woman!”
Izzy grabbed his seat. “That’s no bitch woman! Get hold of yourself, Ducky, before you kill us!”
“That’s it,”—nose to the windshield, nostrils flared like muffler pipes, knuckles white against the wheel—“she wants to kill us. That’s what she does, this she-devil, rich businesswoman with judges and senators in her pocket, never has to pay, but she doesn’t know Sarvaduhka, Izzy. No, she does not!”
“Sarvaduhka, for crissakes, you’re projecting, you maniac, and… wait a minute… and she’s taking it!” He gasped. He leaned head and shoulders out the passenger window, and looked back at the red piranha.
“What do you mean, taking it?” Sarvaduhka said, while Izzy, holding for dear life onto the window frame, performed an experiment.
First Izzy relaxed his belly the way he did to hear spacemen and trans-dimensionals and future and past conversations in remote venues. All the mind gossip spiraled down there into his solar plexus, like dishwater down the drain, leaving Izzy’s noggin passably clear. The wind whipped the back of his head. Seventy, eighty, ninety em pee aitch. He smelled cut grass and diesel fuel. He heard blackbirds rasp. He looked back where the red piranha should be with the she-devil behind her tinted windshield, and saw… nothing. “Shit!”
“What?”
“Let her pass.”
“She doesn’t want to, Izzy. What do you mean, taking it?”
“Let her pass, dammit, or him, or it, or whatever the hell you’re making that thing at present.”
“Making?” Impressed by Izzy’s sudden, uncharacteristic sobriety, Sarvaduhka gradually let up on the gas.
“There’s nothing there, Doc. It’s what I was afraid of. We’re being tailed by a womporf.”
“A womporf?” Sarvaduhka’s piranha dropped back a half-second’s worth.
“This kind of shit happens sometimes when I retro-memory.”
“Retro-memory?”
“Sarvaduhka, it’s time I filled you in on a few things.”
“She still isn’t passing, Izzy.”
Everything stopped. “Stopped, so to speak” said Izzy. “Stopped, that is, old Duck, not the usual way, via cessation of motion, but by epoche.”
“Epoche?”
“Read Sextus Empiricus. Read Husserl.”
“I did. Izzy, I can’t breathe!” Sarvaduhka started leaning for air like a beached mackerel. Then he noticed that his blood wasn’t moving. He felt bloated. His eyes swelled to the size of a Balinese mask’s. The piranha hadn’t moved. His engine wasn’t humming. A fly about to be immolated against the windshield hung motionless above the hood, as if preserved in clear amber.
“You don’t need to breathe, Ducky,” Izzy said, “on account of we are between breaths here. We are between heartbeats. We are between vibrations of sound. Notice how quiet? We are between everything. My back feels great, for a change, by the way, but we can’t do this for long.
“I just did a little epoche. I put parentheses around your she-devil, plus your Ganesha and your tight httle bod and all of Interstate 80. This entire moment we’re sharing, Sarvaduhka, and everything in it and around it is now epocheed.”
“You are a remarkable individual, Izzy Molson,” Sarvaduhka said, terrified.
“I just subtract the is-ness out of it, see what I mean? Everything’s the same, but it doesn’t exist any more.”
“Quite so! Quite so!” He had no idea what Izzy was talking about. “We’re between. So we got a little time here. To work things out, I mean.”
“I feel like I am dreaming!”
Izzy grabbed the jacket out from behind him, unwrinkled it, and pushed his hands into the sleeves and pockets. “I thought I had a piece of a Danish in here. Never mind.” He laid a hand on Sarvaduhka’s shoulder. “I love Fay,” he said. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to me, Sarvaduhka. I saw her coming on Izzovision, and I did something I oughtn’t to have. I flextimed.”
“Flextimed?” Sarvaduhka tried to smile. Maybe Izzy would try to hurt him. People who talked like this sometimes did unpredictable things, especially when you weren’t breathing or circulating your blood. He suddenly realized that his hands had left the steering wheel; he clamped them back on, in spite of the fact that the car didn’t seem to be moving.
“Flextimed. Like, I took a two o’clock and stuck it between four and five pee em, see what I mean? Watch this.”
Sarvaduhka breathed. His pulse resumed. The engine hummed. The car started moving again. The red piranha, he noticed, was gone.
“Correction. Not there yet,” Izzy said.
What was Izzy correcting? Never mind that. Quite suddenly, Elk Mountain loomed up ahead on the left, and they were crossing the Little Laramie River, just as if someone had tucked in the states of Iowa and Nebraska and stitched Wyoming onto Illinois. Also, in the back seat, ex nihilo, a curly headed teenager in a blue windbreaker was gathering up his sleeping roll, a canteen, and a khaki rucksack, army issue. He leaned his head forward between Izzy and Sarvaduhka. Sarvaduhka smelled garlic on his breath.
“Hey, Iz,” the boy said, “is this guy Sarvaduhka?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Well, watch out for womporfs in Illinois then, about 1988. He brings ’em on, Iz.”
“I know, but it’s my fault.”
“Say, would you mind picking me up about fifty miles back, in Cheyenne?”