The two men left Ben’s house just after midnight, Devin in a Honda Civic, Ben in his Toyota Camry. Their tongues were still bitter from the locoweed tea they’d drunk before smoking a couple of pre-rolls. It was the first time either had drunk datura, and both had begun to slur their words and stumble as they stood on Ben’s porch looking into the distance at the road’s embankment that led in a circle like a 5-mile roundabout. Devin had to get home. Ben needed to make a beer run. Devin went left and drove home. Ben went right toward town.
Hour One
Devin’s skin wore scales, and the gills on his neck heaved. His forehead perspired, and sweat gathered above his upper lip. His face was tight like a mask pinned to the breeze, pushing towards the windshield like a motorcyclist daring a storm. Above him, the tree limbs lapped playfully toward the road, dancing with a demanding wind.
Hour Two
Ben lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. A thick, sweet vapor of country weeds in the moist June night air puffed and billowed inside the car. Suddenly, a mailbox lurches from the bushes on the right before springing back into place as Ben turns his head. Ben takes a deep breath to compose himself as Devin drives past from the opposite direction.
Hour Three
The trees are throwing shadows at Devin. He can feel the pulse of the trees through the ether. The bitter taste is still in his mouth. When he gets home, he is going to have a soda. WATCH OUT!!! For that deer. He didn’t see the deer; he felt it. Seems like he’s been driving a long time. Maybe the deer is leading him, he giggles to himself. There are those headlights again. If he wasn’t coming from the opposite direction, I’d have thought he was following me, Devin says to himself.
Ben’s car has taken over. It has informed him of that by taking Ben through a loop of the same scenery. Ben isn’t sure how to get out of the control of his car and decides to ride it out and hope for the best. He thinks he is supposed to make a right turn somewhere, but he is convinced that the car doesn’t want him to see it. Maybe it’s for a good reason? I am being saved from myself, somehow, Ben thinks. I don’t need the beer. It’ll make me do something stupid. LOOKOUT!!! A floater in Ben’s eye, he mistakes for a bat or an owl. No. It looked hairy, Ben’s mind interjects into its own stream of consciousness, with wild eyes.
The two pass each other five times per hour, the trees with their shadows treating Devin as a marionette, with a complicit wind bull-rushing his face to his skull, a kinesthetic pressure that spread to all of his limbs, as he sat longer behind the wheel. In his car, Ben hears the same songs looping through his brain and tries to turn them off by turning off the radio, but the radio is already off.
Hour Four
The trees are now singing to Devin, the leaves like shrieking children making fun of their conductors, the trees who are swinging their arms at them but the little leaves with their tree fingers float out of the way of the limbs like a pesky mosquito hovering and moving at the last moment from the swat. LOOKOUT!!! Another angry tree throws its shadow limbs only to recoil out of vision as soon as Devin’s head turns.
Ben is mesmerized by the rhythmic sound of static on the radio tuned to the windshield wipers. For the first time, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music makes sense. He tells the radio to play Lou Reed. The radio is an LLM. It plays something similar. The windshield wipers are better.
Hour Five
Each man grips the wheel tightly as familiar houses taunt them with flickering porch lights. Intention is being pushed by their bodily needs. Both are lost but on the right road. Just a little bit longer, and they will arrive safely at their destination. Both need to piss, both long for home, while their minds fend off the longing with a desire to carry out to the end this fight-or-flight episode. Each time they pass, their circle draws tighter.
Hour Six
A mailbox throws another mailbox at Ben’s car. It had warned Ben’s car to not drive past again. Ben had heard the warning, but the car must not have listened. He swerves left to avoid the mailbox. A tree slaps at Devin’s car, and Devin swerves right. The crash creates a space and time that is minted and withdrawn. The discordant accordion and cymbal crashing are the sound of life pricked and spewing from the bubble as time and space dissolve. Their networks implode and swallow them, while time stamps them both as would-have-been-had-it-not-been-for.
Author’s note: This story is based on an actual event.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this Kafkaesque story, here are some others:
Garage Confusion
Citation 4471B