1.
It starts at a four-way junction. No traffic, nothing out of the ordinary, just a stop sign and a white line on the asphalt. She sees it, drives to the line, then stops and waits. Straight ahead there is nothing. In the rear-view mirror there is nothing. To the left and right, the same. But she stays behind the line. Doesn’t lift her foot from the break pedal or press the accelerator. Just idles there a while then shifts into neutral, cuts the engine, and gets out the car.
She leaves it there, stranded at the junction, the door open and walks the last few meters home.
2.
He wants to know why, naturally, and asks her.
‘How can you just leave the car on the road? It makes no sense.’
There are more questions, but she doesn’t hear them, there is only this noise, the sound of his voice, then her own.
She hears herself telling him, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
Reason eludes her, replaced, it seems, with a metaphor that’s not her own. She hears Bowie singing, his voice low and strangely soothing. He’s in a parking garage in Berlin, crashing his car over and over and over again, and she thinks, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly how I feel.’
Perhaps she should tell him that when she got behind the wheel today, it was like a premonition. Something Bowie warned her about years ago, back when she had that record on permanent rotation. She remembers the needle crackling at the end, then the arm lifting and clicking back into the cradle. She would wait for it to return then flick the switch and listen to the needle settle in the groove again. Over and over. Again and again.
But it feels too intimate a revelation. One of those things she is prone to saying that makes him look at her askance. He would think, ‘she’s falling again.’
And how would she explain that, no, no she isn’t?
So she repeats herself. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
3.
‘It makes no sense.’
He’s right about that. So she goes about trying to make some sense of it. Which is not the same as searching for the truth. But, she figures, ‘I’ll come to that later.’
So instead she skirts around things with a list. Random ideas she jots down on the page, the indigo ink smudging her fingers, her fingerprints more indelible that the ideas. Though for a brief moment the act of doing something calms her and helps her believe that when he asks her again – because she knows he will – she’ll be ready with an answer.
‘Hey,’ he’ll say. ‘Remember that time you left the car at that junction?’
And she can reply, “yeah, did I ever tell you why?’
Then she reads through the list, seeing it for the first time, the utter banality of it.
Cars crash. They crash all the time. And people get injured and die. Every day this happens. And this is a fact. An indisputable fact. So …
I can crash. I can veer off the road and wreak havoc. I could kill a child. A dog. An innocent bystander. I could kill myself. The car would be total loss for sure. But …
… if I don’t get in the car then none of these things will happen. This is an indisputable fact. And I owe it to myself to be responsible and make sure the terrible inevitable never happens.
‘Bullshit,’ she thinks.
And he agrees with her, ‘It is, isn’t it?’
Then she hears Bowie again and the list vanishes before her eyes.
So when he does ask again she forgets reason and tells him instead about the crash. The one that hasn’t happened yet. Though it will. And it will be terrible. It will be terrible and inevitable and it will come with a soundtrack.
She asks him: ‘would you like to know how it happens?’
‘How what happens?’ he says.
‘The crash,’ she tells him.
‘Crash? What crash? Who crashed?’
‘No-one, not yet. But there’s this truck.’
He looks at her and says nothing, so she keeps going.
‘It always hits me from behind. And always at night. The lights are the last thing I see. Then, bang, it hits. Then nothing.’
‘That’s just something you saw in a film. It’s not real.’
‘You don’t you think a thing like that can feel real?’
‘I guess a truck bearing down on you would feel pretty real. Even an imagined one. Either way, as soon as it hit, well, nothing.’
‘Not a bad way to go, I suppose,’ she tells him. ‘Quick, you know?’
‘Is that why you left the car in the road?’ he asks.
And again she can only tell him, ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
And she hopes, as he looks at her that way again, that he can’t see she is thinking of the many ways imagined things feel real.
4.
And so it is for a while. She lives with the possibilities. Gets to thinking that maybe this is just the amber in between. And if things were to stay this way, idling, stopped at the junction, then she could live with it. It would be okay.
Though she knows at some point the signal is going to change. It always does. Red for stop. Then green for go. And she wonders which one it will be.
Though none of this is metaphor, and she tells him that one morning.
‘There really is a truck you know.’
But he shakes his head and walks away. He thinks she can’t hear him, but she can.
‘There is no truck, Sal. There’s no fucking truck.’
5.
She didn’t expect it to be red, though why this is she can’t imagine. When she catches sight of it in the rear view mirror, she laughs and thinks, ‘well, why not red?’
The lights are pretty like a Christmas tree, yellow and white and glaring back at her all golden in the mirror, but not sharp enough to make her flinch or react. So all she does is stare.
Then, from the corner of her eye she catches a flash of green.
‘Go!’ she says. ‘Green is for go.’
But she doesn’t move. She had always decided that. Always known that. Terrible. Inevitable. She keeps her foot pressed down on the clutch, and stares ahead through the wind-shield at the street in front of her, and she thinks, though she can’t be sure, she sees her own street.
It’s daytime, and the avenue is shady and cool. The trees in full leafed splendour. Somewhere a kid cries out, ‘mama!’ A nagging, beseeching cry that for some reason leaves her craving lemonade.
There’s something funny about the moment. It’s like looking at a faded photograph. Some old Kodachrome snapshot the colour of the nineteen sixties. Everything so much simpler. The lemonade, hand pressed and served in a jug on the garden lawn.
And then, nothing.
This story was first published in 2017 in Volume 32 Issue 1 of Folio Magazine [print only]
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