But right now Brother Van was Niko’s ticket to ride and he didn’t want to piss him off. So he got Van’s change and got him a Coke and joked a little too desperately and laughed a little too loudly and got him thinking maybe he’d get Niko on a plane after all. But most of all he got them moving.
The car shuddered idling at the entrance to the service station as they waited for a gap in traffic. The monotonous clack of the left turn signal was driving Niko nuts.
“Hey, let’s go to Vegas,” Niko said. “It’s a lot closer than Florida. Lot more fun too.”
“We are not going to Vegas. One shithole a year’s my limit, thanks.”
“Just joking. Jesus.” He smiled. “You think L.A.’s a shithole?”
There was no reason for what happened next. No cause. It was so simple. Van drove out onto the road in no special hurry. No opposing traffic. They turned left into the lane. The closest car a pale blue Dodge van waiting at the light in front of them. Niko saw the van in plenty of time. He even thought Hey if we don’t slow down we’re going to hit that van. It never occurred to him that Van would do anything but stop.
Van didn’t stop. He drove into the van. He wasn’t speeding. Wasn’t talking. Wasn’t looking anywhere but straight ahead. He just plain didn’t see it.
When they hit there was a single solid crunch and a mild smack like two bowling balls bumping. Not even very loud. Niko was wearing his seatbelt and he jackknifed forward but got his arms up in time and hit the dashboard with his palms and sprained his left wrist. That was it. Accident over. No shrieking brakes. No blaring horns. The van ahead of them rolled a foot or two and its double back door sprang open and a big cardboard box fell out.
Niko looked at his brother to ask him Didn’t you see that van? He was going to make a joke. Van hits van, film at eleven, yuk yuk. But Van was still slumped forward with the side of his head against the steering wheel. He looked at Niko with his tongue lolling and a doofy slackness to his face. Niko laughed. Yeah really cute, this stupid little fenderbender was the death of you, I get it.
Then a red bud bloomed in the white of Van’s right eye. It blossomed to the size of a penny. Dark red blood trickled from Van’s nose and flowed across his lip and still the bloodrose spread its petals in his eye. The dark blood trickled down Van’s jaw and welled and dripped onto the floorboard. The crimson flower filled Van’s eye now. Everything so quiet Niko heard the plop on the rubber floormat when the first drop hit.
“Van.” Niko’s voice small and lost inside the odd quiet of the station wagon. “Hey.” He touched his brother’s shoulder and his brother’s head lolled in an ugly boneless flop that leaned his body back against the door.
Niko jerked back. He looked out the windshield for help, anybody, someone who could do something. The driver of the pale blue van was just now getting out to see who had hit him. He looked annoyed but that was all. The cardboard box that fell out the back of the van had spilled cheap patchwork ragdolls onto the hood of the station wagon that beheld their liberation with vacant stupid grins that would haunt his nights for decades.
Moments that solidify the path of a life. Niko’s course was not bound by his brother’s death but instead was fixed when he looked upon his brother’s horribly unmoving form and thought How the hell am I supposed to score some dope now? Just a fleeting thought but there it was. That alien flower bloomed inside his brother’s head like something had invaded him and cored him like an apple, and all Niko could think to do was get away and hide and not talk to the driver of the van or to the police or anybody else, to gain a few more hours of freedom because every cell in his body was yelling that he had to find some god damned way to get a fix.
Niko glanced around the car. Hadn’t it been a while since they hit the van? Why wasn’t anyone coming to help them? Where was the driver of the van? He should have been back here by now.
Niko stared. The driver was still getting out of his van. One leg in broadcuffed jeans and scuffed workboots extended toward the pavement. An unlit filter cigarette clamped between his lips. The door half open as if he’d started getting out and then realized he’d forgotten something important.
Traffic was stopped all around the street. Drivers expressionless as if awaiting further orders. In the back seat of a white Impala two kids frozen in the midst of whacking each other as if posing for a portrait while their mother, hair wrapped in a floral print scarf and wearing enormous buglike Polaroid sunglasses, stared into the rearview and did not look away.
Nothing moved.
Niko looked at Van and had the insane thought that his brother had somehow done this. Somehow stopped and took all motion with him. Only a moment ago breathing and moving and thinking and now slumped here empty and inert and all the world outside him gone to silent stillness.
Niko found the doorhandle. Opened it. Couldn’t get out of the car because his seatbelt was still fastened. Unbuckled it and backed out of the car and did not look away from Van. As if he might suddenly grin at the terrific prank he’d pulled on his big brother the fuckedup junky. Good one huh bro? Because Van couldn’t possibly be dead. They’d only been going twenty miles an hour for Christ’s sake. Niko’d only sprained his wrist. Life could not possibly be that fragile.
Outside the car time was transfixed as if Niko had stepped into a photograph. Smoke hung suspended like dirty cotton in the midst of belching from a yellow Camaro stopped as it was pulling from the curb. Its jowly driver staring through blackframed glasses at motionless opposing traffic. A frozen guy in a Peruvian vest staring at a billboard advertising Levi’s. The ragdolls staring and staring on the crumpled white hood.
I’m hallucinating. You get thin and you get the shakes and you get cramps and chills and sweats and fever, and then you hallucinate. But that shouldn’t be happening yet. The accident must have brought it on. What else could it be?
He rubbed his thumbs across his fingers to test their solidity, their reality. Their sibilance distinct in the silent street.
He turned full circle beside the station wagon and still nothing moved. But it seemed he heard something. Some approaching sound.
Niko faced the intersection where a faint deep purr grew to a rhythmic gargle. Then it glided into view, long and dark and predatory, an old black sedan like a luxury car in a gangster movie. The only thing moving anywhere in sight. The big black vintage car turned right and came toward him and eased to a stop in the opposing lane beside the station wagon. The pale and uniformed chauffeur got out but left it running. He touched the glossy bill of his cap impersonally to Niko who could only stare as the driver opened the suicide door of the passenger compartment.
The man who got out was nattily attired like a movie producer trying to dress like an English rockstar. His hair in perfect disarray. He saw Niko standing confused and afraid there and he grinned as if he knew him. As if they were old friends long separated and finally reunited.
Petrified and sweating and dripping snot Niko stood with the station wagon between himself and this man. The station wagon in which his brother lay impossibly dead. The grinning man approached Niko holding a stapled sheaf of papers and a pearlescent fountain pen that gleamed in the Hollywood sun. With one hand he uncapped the pen to expose the gold nib and turned the pen in his fingers and slid the back end into the cap, all in one smooth motion without looking, like some kind of bureaucratic samurai.