He mouthed the names of gas stations, fiddled with his dial, ignored the speed limit, and waited, as he always waited, for something significant to happen to him, for a simple change of luck. Engrossed, he didn’t see the red light until it was flush upon him.
His foot flattened and the car groaned to a stop. After the shriek of the brakes died down, he heard that rapid and aggressive sort of chatter that reminded him of talk radio. To his left was a bearded man in a big white make. The man rolled down his window and screwed his face. He said something so angrily that spit flew from his mouth and speckled Marco’s closed window.
He was unable to interpret the English fast enough, only picking out words here and there: mother, dumbest, cunt, ugly. He felt unsure and unwanted and as if a door to a very comfortable room was being closed before him. The stranger stared, shook his head purposefully, and finally pulled away.
The shadow cast, his mood soured, Marco pulled to the shoulder of the road and sat quietly. The rearview mirror had been affixed to the front window by glue and wire. But the heat, which made dreamy lines rise from the asphalt, had melted the adhesive, so that the mirror had started to come off, and was attached only by a thin, naked wire. So now the wind pushed the mirror back and forth like a pendulum. In it, Marco saw flashes of his face, seesawing so as to make him slightly nauseous.
It was olive-skinned with slim features. His hair was the color of assorted, processed tobacco and his eyes were doleful but prying. His mouth was tight and dry, as if his face was in pincers. He viewed the reflection in the mirror, and was disappointed that this new country had done nothing for his appearance. He frowned at its smooth, unblemished contours, wishing a scar or some other mark of distinction might emerge, thinking America at least owed him that. He felt that in this nation of so many, he might never be able to distinguish himself. And surely not with a face so plain it was rendered blank.
He started the car again. He drove seventy miles an hour for as long as it took both sides of a Sam Cooke album to play on CD. At the sight of a sign that read, Middletown, he turned off the highway and went to the first bar he saw. It was just before noon but already raucous inside — tight, big-hair riffs came from the juke box, while boys in baseball caps raised hell and screamed in shorthand. A girl sat alone at the bar. She was his type — destitute — so he crawled over and asked if she liked the vodka.
“That and anything else,” she said, so he ordered two, and two again, and it didn’t stop until his vision was so blurred it was like seeing the world through tears.
When they got to the hotel she silently disrobed. He offered her his white bag, and she unfurled a line long and thin as a snow corn. She took the scraps and applied them to her gums, which made her wince, then blush.
Twelve hours later they hadn’t slept. Unaccustomed to attention, she was talkative. He learned that a perm couldn’t tame her hair and she liked waterfalls. She’d traveled. Done a tour of Texas, where her ex lived. Farthest she’d ever been from home. Sick on the plane. In a monotone voice she listed cities visited like exotic but affordable items from the market: Plano, Dallas, Argyle, Cee Vee. He pretended to be impressed, widening his eyes each time a name left her lips. But all he was thinking of was if she would lay him again, and if not, what he might do to keep her quiet.
She said they had a bond, but the bond wasn’t forever, because when the coke ran out so did she. Her possessions looked like trash, but she put them in her purse anyway, and then shuffled out, scrubbing her nose. She left the door open, letting a ruler-straight line of light into the room.
Feeling unclean, he showered, and when he returned there was less money in his wallet than there used to be. Inwardly he shrugged his shoulders: so life would be as life was. This land did not want him but he wanted it, could already taste a new existence. He slept like the dead and promised himself that he would cross the Mason-Dixon the next day.
He woke up wet from the heat. Sometime in the night the air conditioner had given out. The hotel robe was thinner than a paper napkin, but he wore it anyway. He put on a ragged pair of sandals too, and came out of his room looking like a forlorn Jesus, all disciples up and gone, no one but he and the Bible out here in a forgotten-about America, lost counties abutted by lost counties, weak radio signals, shabby concrete, and long highways, the very end of some backwoods called Earth. He wanted to say a prayer but could think of none.
He went out to the car, tiptoeing on the hot asphalt. The key entered the trunk’s lock, pricked the spring, and he heard the satisfying pop. It yawned open, revealing three gray suitcases. One would be innocuous, but three, lined so neatly, sitting so idly — made him think of gravestones in an abandoned field. He staggered back — awed yet again by his smallness and the sheer stupidity of his task. It had sent him north, south, and sideways. They told him to never go in a straight line, to never give the appearance of making sense, to always take the circuitous route of a phantom or an idiot.
He cleaned up in the shower, then returned to his car and drove the speed limit forever. Delaware looked no different to his eyes than Pennsylvania had, and Maryland was but a field of grass. To Virginia then, with a red cardinal on its welcome sign, and the instant and confused surety that he was no longer North.
The buildings were suddenly squatter. There were advertisements for grits, pancakes, and cobblers. A hotel offered rooms for twelve dollars a night. Pines crowded oaks out of the landscape and hawks flew in wide arcs over the crown of his thinning head.
A few hours in and he neared Richmond. He got flustered though, and when 95 and 64 split, he choked. The simplest decisions flummoxed him, and at the last minute he went west on 64. Then came the sense of stupidity that follows such an error. He called himself horrible things. Impatient, he got off the highway. He followed the Broad Street exit and proceeded to drive in circles. Finally he parked his car, preferring to use his feet.
Walking, he came upon a restaurant called Dune, standing two stories tall. Its first-floor windows were closed to the heat, blacked out by plantation shutters. The second floor had French doors that opened onto a short patio, with a sturdy guardrail protecting the diners. He sensed something closed about it: colloquial, clubby, but full of black sheep. He decided that it might be a pleasant place to lunch.
But instead of lunch he had five vodkas with tonic water. The day was clear and the view from the second floor laid the town out like a canvas. He was confused by the sprawl’s repetitiveness, how, in an effort to be neat, people could make things ugly.
He settled into his seat. He settled into the voice of his waitress because it too was a place — a lazy hammock in the sun. The hours passed with his eyes closed not in sleep but in something like mental dawdling.
He felt an angel touch his shoulder and tell him the restaurant closed between lunch and dinner, and so he was asked to leave so that they might clean up. The pretty waitress chatted to him amiably, said she wished he could stay. He heard her but didn’t hear her, for they spoke differently down here, vowels stretched like rubber, the pitch nasal and too sweet.