Fastback | Alexander T. Damle

            I ride hard across the desert, blue sky, sands stretch away side to side, crackle rumble snap engine beneath me roils quietly. I wear all black and man doesn’t know what to call me when I pass, and on my hip I wear a gun and it is black and the motorcycle beneath me, sleek lines, is black and I am the figure in black and in mythos biblical and fantastic you know what to call me, but on seeing me you still forget my name. I ride and you don’t know I’m coming but soon you will and then I will become juggernaut, as changing of blue skies to slate grey as storm descends, as birth of fawn and budding of wildflower in springtime. And I am pursued across empty earth endless by forces who I do not understand, and that which I do not understand, you can never even hope to know, and so on I go.

            The man turns on his signal and merges into the left hand lane, rests the crook of his elbow out the open window, feels the desert winds blowing by as he presses in with his right foot, feels his 67’ Mustang Fastback edge up past 90, passing trucks in the far right lane, the middle practically empty, this time of night. City sets behind him and in front of him sets not much, the city illuminated bright a conflagration against some kind of emptiness, air here on the highway almost clean but for scent of motor oil. He abandons the city fast as he can, pursued (or so he feels) by forces whose names he does not know but whose faces and voices and eyes stick in his head, though he wishes to remove them forever, rip out brain matter with spoon and sup on it (he wonders if this is to what that old phrase “eat your heart out” refers).

            He remembers the meal he just ate and the drinks he just drank. He remembers that a bit of chicken bone got caught in his teeth and when he pulled it from his lips, all he could do was stare at it, so he stared at it, and the woman across from him stared at him, her eyes flickering slightly in the low light, blue-gold flecks, but he was more interested in the chicken bone than her eyes, and after a few moments staring at the bone she cast her eyes down, and he frowned and she asked him what troubled his heart such, and he said it didn’t matter, then she touched his hand and her hand was warm and soft against his, and then shortly they returned to normal conversation, but he can’t remember one word of what they said.

            They said their goodnights under the street lights, standing before his Mustang, and he kept catching her face reflecting in the hood, couldn’t look into her eyes tonight for some reason, but the reflection of them entranced him. Remembers something or another Pamuk once wrote about reflections being more beautiful than their reality. Thinks it’s bullshit, but can’t keep his eyes off the hood of the car. Sees speedometer edge past 100, slows down slightly. And then she touched him on the shoulder and that touch always had a power over him. He remembers back to when they started dating months ago and he got worried he was falling in love with her. Then she disappeared for a few weeks, and when she came back, all apologies, he found he barely could put in the thought to take her out for drinks every so often. When she touched his shoulder, he looked up at her, and she leaned in and they kissed and it was nice. Taste lingers on his lips and tongue, but it doesn’t matter.

            He sees the rear lights of a car in his lane a couple miles down the highway, can see forever any light out here, most of all the stars, but he sees now only the lights of the car ahead of him, so he shifts over to the middle lane gently with turn signal and brakes and slides in, before pushing hard on the accelerator again and rocketing past the car, and for some reason he looks over at the driver as he passes. The face he sees he can’t reconcile as a face, and is instead but a mask, and he sees the same mask when he looks in his rearview mirror, as he prepares to shift back into the left lane when the other car is behind him, then he shifts into the left lane.

            He resents her, the woman, he knows he does, as much as he cares for her, as much as he finds her beautiful and charming and funny, he resents her, not for her, but for the way she seems to find him somehow special, and that’s just not something he can abide. He’s not a character in a motion picture.

            When he was a kid he once had tea at his grandmother’s house and he accidentally dropped one of her old tea cups, and when it hit the hardwood floor it shattered and pieces shot everywhere and he was terrified, but his grandmother assured him it didn’t matter and told him it was old and there were always more tea cups, and accidents happen.

            She thinks he’s something worth her having and he knows he’s not really, no one really is, and when they first started dating, he thought she was the most incredible thing in the world, beautiful and strong and perfect, and in her he saw someone he could be true around. Then he realized every interaction with her, every word he spoke to her, held in it a lie inherent, and then he realized that around her he wasn’t him. He began to notice the way he changed his cadences, forced a smile to his face, tempered his moods and his eccentricities, tailored his politics, all to please her. He wishes she would leave him because he can’t muster the will to admit he doesn’t want her, because he cares about her too much to recognize what he knows.

He turns on the radio as he approaches his exit, twenty miles still to go, these unlit other than by his headlights, then home at end of unmarked road, and the radio (signal weakened by distance, though no mountains for an eternity), crackles out something about blood. 

           

            I slow down the bike and I get off of it, stand my full height, notice shadow left across parking lot by sun just beginning its descent towards night, leave helmet on (colour stated), check gun’s position on my hip (Desert Eagle .50, black as wings of a Raven), and stroll through doors, easy, calm. The clerk sees me and her eyes go out of the light and she sees the gun and the gun doesn’t matter, not around here, lots of guns, but it’s the figure and she can’t tell what I am but she knows she’s seen me before and she knows this is the last time she will see me. I remove the gun from its holster, cup it in my two hands, and, without much thought, pull the trigger, and watch her brains run like worms running from approaching rain across the liquor bottles behind her. I turn and see a man running out of the back of the shop, and I pivot my body, cut him down with two quick shots to the chest, and the blood lays itself out across the tile floor and his body crashes downwards, like in a cartoon when the legs keep running though the cliff’s edge has already been passed, and his skull crunches as his head lands in his own blood. I walk out of the store, re-holstering the gun. The sun shines directly through the face shield of the helmet into my eyes, and I know I stand in the sun and yet the forces are always at my back, so I remount my bike, and down the road I continue.

            He wakes up and looks out the window at the desert, the clouds scorched purple and red coming home late from a bar fight, Saguaro shadows cast long over the desert onto which his house was dropped at seeming random, early morning sun falling over Mexican poppies, they surrounding prickly pear, newly bloomed for spring. He catches sight briefly, before it passes into shadow, of a coyote dragging its prey, bleeding still and just done kicking, and for a second he thinks it's a kid, before he sees that it’s just a rabbit.

            Then he does his morning fixings, showers, pulls on a shirt and jeans, makes a bowl of oatmeal, eats it. He doesn’t remember it because he’s done it so often. It’s not that he favors the flavor of the thing, it’s just easy, comfortable, reassuring that some bottom on his life can’t drop out from under him. What bottom though? Life is good and life is easy so they tell him, as he swigs down a Prozac with his black coffee and watches his vision swim slightly, reminds him of a lake somewhere in the Northern Rockies, set beside his grandfather, dead now, caught a fish that day, went back to their cabin, cooked it. He doesn’t remember killing the fish and he wishes he did, but he doesn’t know why.

            After breakfast he puts on a pair of sunglasses to go for a walk around his property and have a think about the woman and what to do about the woman and what to do about him. He thinks of maybe just packing his bags and leaving, not tell anyone, not the woman, not the waiter down at the diner in town he always flirts with, James, he thinks, or maybe Jim, or Frank, or... something, not his bartender, not... well, those are really the only three people he could tell, but he’d leave and not tell them. Go somewhere always greener, in high summer, in late autumn, in dead winter, as green as the desert in lucid climax of spring, somewhere with ancient temples tucked into verdant mountain valleys, with men in long robes who’d tell him how to live his life, or maybe down straight south, see Chile, always wanted to see Chile, or maybe just wander forever. He has the money. Didn’t expect it, the inheritance, but when he got it, all he could think to do was go away somewhere quiet, leave city madness behind, across a forgotten sea, so he fell headlong into the desert, and now he’s here.

            Sand kicks up about his boots, blows in amongst the wildflowers, just beginning to show their colours. Across a rock pockmarked by wind and time lies a bull snake, sunning itself in the early morning heat, and the man stands watching it, languorous and ignoble, living to live and dying whenever. The man thinks of what he left and why he left and he thinks of how desperately alone he always feels, and no, it’s not like that, not like that online dating loneliness, not that stand in corners of parties alone loneliness, no, it’s something deeper, something that cuts closer the nearer he finds himself to others. He remembers the taste of something sweet and slightly salty on the woman’s tongue, and that thought just makes him feel most alone of all.

He’s thought about it, thought about this being alone, and he thinks maybe when he was younger he expected that if only he reached out to other people, he’d find a race warm and kind and receptive, and even when he was a little older, and at his angriest (dirty Nirvana t-shirt, long hair, Lana Del Rey blasting through headphones), he kind of figured people were just all assholes, and he was just better than them. The problem, he realized, once he began reaching out to people, is that everyone is as lonely and scared and tired and depressed and fundamentally decent as he is, they’re just all so much better at hiding it, and so that loneliness is all he can ever feel, even when he holds the body of another to his and feels their heartbeat and the way each breath causes their entire body to quiver a little, even when a beautiful woman traces abstract symbols on his bare thigh, as if trying to calculate out the meaning of it all, in that intimate post-coital moment, even when she tells him he’s the only thing that matters to her anymore, even, especially, always, lonely, empty, alone.

            Then the bull snake stirs from its slumber, and slithers off the rock, through the sand, right in front of the man’s path, and he doesn’t step back, but simply stares. Not venomous, but mean as hell. He watches the snake trail off through the sand under the hot sun, and he wonders if it knows someday it is going to die, whether it has ever felt love or passion or care or anything at all, then he wonders if he has either, and considers that perhaps all he’s ever felt is a deep unease, a sense of a world crashing down about his shoulders.

            Then he sees the snake strike out for a rabbit (dropping like flies this morning), grab onto it with its teeth, then slowly wrap its coils around the thing’s body, holds on tight, and he thinks of putting his arms around a woman, wonders if the feeling is at all similar, as the mouse’s frantic yammering and flutterings slow, as the coils tighten and blood flow ceases, cutting off the brain and heart and then, eventually, with one final twitch, the soul, and then the man walks on, because watching a snake eat is far less fascinating than watching a snake hunt.

            I push my motorcycle up through the gears, speedometer well past 130 now, as the world slides off into incoherence all around me, twitching my body ever so slightly, ever so rarely for those still travelling these roads, trucks lonely going from nowhere to nowhere, occasional family roadtrip, kids trapped inside a falling elevator, straight to hell. And then after a while or a bit or forever or never I stop my bike and walk into a diner and I keep my helmet on, and the woman in front asks me where I’d like to sit, so I tell her a booth by the window and she leads me to my seat and I order a slice of pie and a coffee and she looks at me a little strange, so I take my helmet off and she sees my face and reads my eyes (one of those always says she can know everything about someone from their eyes) but she can’t read anything from my eyes and it doesn’t matter anyway. She brings me my pie and my coffee and I drink my coffee with four sugars and cream and eat my pie with a little scoop of vanilla ice cream, and both taste good and both are refreshing. Then the woman comes up to me and gives me the bill and I pay her and I leave. Then I ride further down the highway. I stop at a gas station and park my bike by a pump and I fill the tank, then I walk inside, pull out the gun, shoot the clerk twice, blowing out his knees, leaving him to bleed out (.50 round should mean that won’t take too long), then I look at a few other patrons scattered around the store and shoot each of them carefully in the chest, then clean a bit of blood and brain matter from my helmet with the help of a bottle of water that I take from a cooler next to the door. Then I get back on the road and keep riding.

            The man drives through the desert and, without warning, he finds himself in town, the only town left out here, windswept and rotting, cars rusted, windows boarded over, people, what few there are, backs hunched, eyes cast down. First time he came here with this car, everyone stared, Christ come home from the desert, but now he’s passed into their reference frame as all the rest, just another old man (old woman old car old dog old country) whiling away the futile final moments before inevitable death. He parks the Fastback on the street in front of a diner that couldn’t look more like a cliche if Norman Rockwell had himself designed its every inch. The man wanders inside and smiles at the waiter who he is going to flirt with and who is going to watch the man as he leaves and consider asking the man if he wants to grab a drink later, but instead, being of this town, he will probably instead just go home and jerk off like he does every night (passing time until...). The man sits down at his usual table by the window and looks outside.

            A tumbleweed floats listlessly down the main street, and all the man can do is laugh, as a traffic light blinks red to indicate it is out. It’s been out for months. The man keeps looking out the window, half expecting a starved dog to drag its bloated corpse surrounded by a maelstrom of flies, flecking off specks of dried blood, through the street, completing the tumble weed image, but no dog appears.

            Waiter comes up next to him and looks at him, and the man turns to the waiter and tells the waiter the usual, then drifts his eyes back out the window, not in the mood for conversation. The man wonders if it will rain today and this is the only thought he can find to occupy his mind as he stares out the window.

            A cloud passes in front of the sun, and shadows fall across the diner. The waiter brings the man huevos rancheros, green chili, a budweiser. The usual. The man thanks him. Back outside there is nothing and the town is silent, though it is just past noon on a Sunday. Church closed. Always a bad sign, the church closing, the man thinks. It’s not about belief in God, that doesn’t trouble him. In fact, he doesn’t particularly care either way. What concerns him is something far more deeply gone indicated by the closing of a church.

Something seems always to be coming, some spectre over the endless horizon, but nothing ever appears. So he’s here still, another Sunday passed in this diner, another Saturday dinner up in the city with the woman. She asked him to come back to her apartment, but he said no, said he ought to be getting home.

            He wonders why she still puts up with him, his distance, his incoherence, his disinterest. But then remembers she’s as alone as he is. He wishes he was the bull snake. He wishes he was the rabbit ensnared in the bull snake's coils.

            And then from some distance comes a great rumbling, and the man looks up and the waiter looks out and from in back out comes the cook. No great rumblings left, not like this. They know it's not thunder but they don’t know how they know it’s not thunder and they don’t know what it is.

            The man thinks, as the noise rises, of a car crash he once came along in a rainstorm on the highway leading from the city. He stopped as a dozen cars whipped by, not a matter of greater humanity, simply closer observation. A car had smashed into the concrete barrier on the road’s edge, and the driver had been pitched onto the car’s hood, surrounded by blood, covered all in blood. And in the back seat there was a child, its knees pressed up into its chest where the car crumpled in. The man looked at the child, and in its eyes he saw something that he’s never forgotten but he doesn’t know what it was. He told the kid it was going to be okay, but then he noticed the kid’s shirt was sopped with blood. He couldn’t see the wound, but the kid was shaking, and the man kept trying to reassure the kid but the kid didn’t say anything, he just shook and kept giving the man that look. The man called for an ambulance, but he knew somehow it would be too late, and he tried to flag down other cars, but most of them just ignored him. And then he went back to the kid and the kid just looked at him, and the man didn’t know what to do. Eventually another car stopped and the woman who got out said she was a doctor. The man sat like the kid had been sitting, only he was holding his knees to his chest rather than the car, and he didn’t half look at the woman, and the kid was dead.

            Then the rumbling reveals itself and down the street of the town I ride, and the man looks out at my figure all in black, and I remind him of the look in the kid’s eyes. And then events repeat themselves, and I dismount my bike, and I walk up to the door of the diner, and a little bell rings as I walk in. The waiter forces a smile and welcomes me. The man just stares. Then I take the gun from my hip and I, without pause, shoot the waiter in the chest, and he falls down almost clumsily, and kind of looks at his chest, and the blood rushing from it, and he dies. Then I shoot the cook who has started to run for the back, and I shoot him in the back, and he kind of flies forward with the extra momentum, and his body falls against the door to the kitchen, and it opens with the weight. Then I turn to the man, and he’s standing there pointing a 1911 at me, and I stare back, and I move my weapon to him, but he shoots me. The force of the bullet spins me around a little bit, and my left shoulder feels heavy, so I turn back in one motion and shoot him three times with the gun held in my right hand. He gets blood everywhere. I walk out the door and get back on my bike and ride away.