I bite my lip and look around, look up into the stands and see the videotape crew still at work, shooting across the track, some people in the stands. It is becoming like the ship again, life on the Daedalus, my life consumed by problems of navigation and confrontations with SciCom, looking for a way to go but not drifting—as I have been, I think, as I have been since we touched down in the Pacific a little more than a month ago.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?’
“Please,” Collette says. “Please don’t be like them. I am telling you the truth. Rawley, they’re going to try to take you back to Guam. I thought they had.”
“You don’t say,” I mutter.
“Oh, Rawley, please, I’m telling you everything I know. Believe me, in the end I wanted to protect you. Please let me stay with you. I’ll do anything you want me to. Even if I only have a day—you’ll see. I just want to be with you again. I want to sleep in your bed. Maybe there’s a way we can spend the rest of the trip together. In more time I can show you. I love you. When I thought I’d never see you again, I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh, shit, Collette, you dummy, oh, shit, you did it so wrong….’”
I take her smooth hand and move the gold bracelet at her wrist, feel the warmth of her skin, she’s feverish. “I saw the same men two days ago,” I tell her. “I’ve filed an appeal, but they’ve set up orders that ship me back to Guam tomorrow morning. They’re pulling me back.”
“God, how I hate this world,” Collette says in a shaky voice, looking away. Then she sobs.
I squeeze her hand and there is a distant siren, then a siren close at hand. Yellow lights begin to flash along the track, the scattered crowd is climbing the grandstand to see something in the distance, I rise, I can see it from where I stand—a column of dirty black smoke mushrooming from the far side of the course. Massimo’s pit crew is up and phoning, his car lapped a few minutes ago, he is still on the track. Nothing’s come by under the yellow—and now the track lights flash red and stay red as the fire-crew alarm moans a kilometer away and sirens whine and scream from all directions.
I see the Lancia coupe still in the shade, the chief mechanic begins telling me to go, I am going, anyway. I clamber into the cockpit and fire up the engine, rap it to a purr. Collette is standing where I left her, tall and erect, her dancer’s body motionless, her hand over her mouth. I sigh; it still makes me angry to see her. I motion her in.
There are cars scattered, stopped here and there on the course under the flashing red warning lights. I weave the Lancia through the turns cautiously in second and third, watching for Massimo’s Guidici. A red and white ambulance moves a half kilometer ahead, full speed, the wail of its siren blending with the sirens farther off.
We pass down the main straight. The pits are filled with cars, jump-suited mechanics, spectators. The crowd in the grandstand is up, watching the distance. The black smoke rises off to the west, not far off to the west now, a narrow column near the ground fanning into a growing cloud.
We swing through a wide left. Ahead is the shorter straight, the chute of its exit hairpin blocked by a welter of emergency vehicles, more than fifty people milling on the track, the brake lights of the ambulance flash red. Beyond is wreckage. I cannot see Massimo’s car; every racer on the infield border is squat Formula E.
The smoke is deeply black, dense, rising slowly in its own weight. Chemicals ooze over the road surface at the inner edge of the crowd down from the crown of the track. I slide the Lancia, barely moving, through on the infield edge, on the infield. There is a single, burning car on end against the concrete outer wall of the curve, the wall itself is smeared black for a distance, the flames are orange-red, searing, the car itself invisible in its compact fireball, the acrid smoke wafts around—and whump, there is a minor explosion. I think, Fuel, combustion, Massimo, while a piece of crumpled sheet metal catches the periphery of my vision. Clambering out of the cockpit, I see scattered fragments on the infield. Blood-red. Ferrari.
I push my way through the crowd, spectators have somehow gotten onto the track, the car is still burning, upended and burning with orange-red flames, the heat is palpable and intense. Chemicals now plume toward the track wall in arcs, the fireball abating, but the smoke for a minute becomes a dense gray fog in which we are all consumed.
The car falls to its side, its cockpit creased, charred metal unmistakably the Ferrari—its frame folded on its driver’s side—the flames begin to settle under the load of foam. I have searched the crowd with a sinking heart for Massimo, don’t want to look at the wreckage, but do, and focus, and see: the mangled sleeve of a jump suit protruding from the wrenched metal, limp as if empty. Metal crushed like wadded paper. I have to turn away.
“Who is it?” Collette is asking. “Rawley, is it that man?”
I stumble past and she turns from the fire, I feel myself gagging from the sharp odor, look into the blank reflective faces of vehicle crews, see in their faces the strange mixture of satisfaction and awe in the face of destruction so complete.
I have walked down the track. Higher toward the wall at the chute to the turn there are two wide black swaths smeared on the concrete. Someone is moving toward me through the thin edge of the crowd, a technician rolling an instrument along the road surface with fierce attention. The technician wears thin-rimmed glasses, steps carefully, absorbed in following the dead center of the lower swath along the banked surface, the ticks of his instrument just audible through the welter of other noise.
“Skid?” I yell to him, my voice uncontrollably cracking. “A hundred meters of skid?”
“More than that,” he yells back without looking up. “Don’t look like near enough, wasn’t near enough. That machine was at two hundred when it hit.”
At the hairpin, I am thinking, the decreasing radius hairpin, the slowest curve on the track.
A hundred meters away the wreckage is still smoldering; ash and acrid smoke hang in the air. The site is encircled by red flashing lights, yellow lights, blue lights, while eerie figures in silver flameproof suits approach behind their own chemical clouds, making a way for a white van backing perpendicularly up the track to the Ferrari.
I look down at my feet. Squat down, look closely in a numb daze at the wide, distinct tire marks on the road surface—rubber seared onto concrete, welded. I see only waste at first, then for an instant I am frighteningly disoriented. The rubber fragments vulcanized into oozing tar masses gather on the wreckage side of the texture of the concrete; I feel reversed on the track.
No, I think, this is not exactly a skid.
I try to follow the line with my eyes: it weaves twice, then disappears at the thin edge of the crowd. I look beyond at the wreckage from a higher point of the track.
The flames have abated, but not the smoke. Two of the men in fireproof suits are bringing the body out while the other two ease the creased cockpit with long rods as tall as they are used as levers. The body: limbs hang loose, the flameproof driving suit is streaked with char. For one wild moment I am thinking, Survived, survived, but before I can even move, the ambulance attendants have opened a large dark bag, a body bag. Massimo is laid within, his lifeless body sealed by one of the white-suited figure’s long pull of a cord.
Collette is kneeling on the infield edge of the track, up from her heels as if in prayer. Her body shakes and she sways, shudders. Her hands at her stomach, she leans forward and vomits, not once but again and again and again, shuddering and swaying, again and again and again.