“Wait!”
Abbot stops and raises his walkie, waiting.
The young man looks at his family. One of the children is crying. The man nods to Abbot, and Abbot smiles and speaks into his walkie and the RV comes to a halt.
Abbot returns to the Hummer while the remaining soldiers escort the family back into their vehicle. A minute later, the convoy is back on the road, and the RV looks right at home among the small army of buses.
“Eight new hires,” Abbot says, leaning back in his seat with a satisfied groan. “Thought these ones might actually stand on principle but they always come around once reality sets in. No choice, when you’ve got kids.”
Abram notices no one else in the Hummer is sweating. He notices the sun is setting behind the approaching mountains.
“You got kids, Roberts?”
Abram looks up to find Abbot’s eyes watching him in the mirror. They look small beneath his heavy dark brows.
“Yes sir,” Abram says.
“Then you understand why we keep our heads down. Why we focus on the job at hand.” Abram knows he should say “Yes sir” and do his best to fade from Abbot’s awareness, but he’s distracted by the heat and the sticky seats and he hears himself say, “I’m not sure I do understand.”
Abbot’s eyes flicker with surprise and perhaps renewed interest. The girl on Abram’s left raises her eyebrows at him and even the dead-eyed drone on his right gives him a glance. Abram’s face pales beneath the beads of sweat.
“How long have you been with Axiom?” Abbot asks neutrally.
“Not long, sir. About a year?”
Abbot nods, and his gaze drifts out toward the reddening horizon. “Well let me tell you something. You make a lot of hard choices in this company and you have to make ’em fast.” His voice sounds distant, tired. “They’re coming at you down the assembly line, and if you pause to get philosophical and ask what it is you’re building, they roll right past you, the machines jam, and the factory shuts down. And then you’re unemployed, and your kids are hungry, and you’ve failed as a father and a man.” He straightens in his seat and tightens his voice. “So don’t do that, Roberts. Do your job.”
Abram wonders if he’s coming down with a fever. The heat passes through him in waves, and he sees strange things through the windows, veiled and abstracted by the dark tint—eyes blinking in the desert, bottomless potholes lit by deep fires, the silhouettes of giants ambling behind the mountains. But he blinks hard and manages to say, “Yes sir,” and the air cools a little. The sweat dries on his face.
I
I AM LOOKING at a TV screen, and there’s a man in a suit addressing the viewers, but this is not Axiom’s manic ad campaign. It’s the introduction to tonight’s episode of The Twilight Zone.
The kids found the ancient VHS tape in one of the drawers. They uncovered the little TV when they built their cushion fort. The fort is now a bed again, and Julie and I sit squeezed in with the kids, watching a distant era’s vision of the uncanny while a less sanitary one seethes all around us.
I can feel it in flickers. Subtle instances of object impermanence. The wrinkles in the blanket rearrange themselves when I glance away. The pattern of the ceiling stains is slightly different every time I look up. The hole the Boney stabbed into the rear window widens and contracts, as if forgetting exactly what made it. But this is all in my head, purely subjective, and if I tried to prove it—if I took photos or made sketches to record the current states—I suspect they’d stay as they were. It’s the things no one’s watching that start to drift.
Tonight’s episode is unusually quiet. Almost entirely wordless. I hear the squeak and scrape of Tomsen working on the axle, the occasional grunt from M when she requests his help, the whistling of wind through the window hole. On the TV, a group of Civil War soldiers is preparing to execute a man by hanging. I begin to squirm, wondering if this might be too intense for the kids, but as the condemned man teeters on the edge of the bridge and a noose is tightened around his throat, I feel a tightness in my own throat, and I have an embarrassing realization: my discomfort isn’t for the kids. This hokey bit of 1960s television is too intense for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced fiction of any kind, and maybe the desert’s blurring of boundaries is adding to the sensation, but I am identifying too strongly with the man in the noose.
I glance over at Julie, but her face reveals nothing. She is as grim and silent as the soldiers on the screen.
The condemned man falls. My stomach lurches. But the rope breaks and he sinks into the river. He swims to safety, and as it dawns on him that he’s escaped death, a surreal folk tune mumbles on the soundtrack:
A living man…a living man…I want to be…a living man…
The man laughs and stares rapturously at everything around him, the chirping birds, the sun through tree branches.
I see each tree…I read each vein…I hear each bird…upon each leaf…
He makes his way through the woods to his home. His wife runs out to greet him.
I want to be…a living man…
His wife reaches out to embrace him; it’s perfect; it’s too perfect—there’s a gruesome snap. The scene cuts. The man is dangling from the rope, swinging from the bridge, dead.
“So he didn’t really get away?” Sprout asks Julie. “He just imagined it?”
“I guess so,” Julie says, her eyebrows slightly raised. “That was…a weird episode.”
The wind through the hole in the window sounds weirdly human, like a voice singing off key. It’s right between Joan and Alex’s heads, warbling in their ears, and they both twist around and frown intently as if to shush it.
“What if that happened to us?” Sprout says. “What if we all died a long time ago?”
Julie might still be stoned enough to answer a question like that, but I don’t stick around to listen. My legs are numb and my neck hurts and I’m remembering what Julie said last night.
I’m not ready to lose you.
I climb off the bed and step out into the dry heat of the evening. The fire on the western horizon is spreading. The shadow on the eastern horizon is deepening.
“Need any help?” I ask Tomsen for the third or fourth time. The left wheel is off and Tomsen has her head deep in the wheel well, looking a bit like a lion tamer. By way of reply, she hums a brief melody.
“We’re good,” M says, taking a wrench that Tomsen hands him and replacing it with another from the bag. “She’s uh…in the zone.”
I nod. If they did need my help, I wouldn’t have much to offer anyway. Most boys raised in poverty learn basic repair skills, but when God is coming tomorrow to burn away the world, you don’t think much about making things last. The only talents I learned from my life at the bottom are how to fight, how to kill, and how to convince others to do the same.
I start to wander down the highway, toward the fire in the west, and Tomsen must see my feet because she calls to me from under the RV: “Careful. Eight minds make a small island. Don’t wade out too far.”
I don’t bother to decode her metaphor. I’m thinking about the forced smile on Julie’s face when she asked who I’d be when I finished “forming.” She tried to make it look like anticipation, but she couldn’t hide the fear.
The wind from the west is hot on my face. I walk slowly, each step requiring permission.
“R,” Julie calls to my back and I turn around. She’s hanging out of the RV doorway, one hand on the frame. “Where are you going?”