There was a little lurch in the throttling of the old Volvo wagon - boring silver, dirty, in need of a left rear taillight - as it putted along Highway 22 outside Faredale. Bub’s head snapped up from the minutest slumber of drowsy delirium as he operated the vehicle, coming to just in time to avoid rear-ending the jet-black Expedition with the tinted windows and the stick figure-family decal just in front of him. The traffic burped along like this, like the way blood cells move in microscopic film shorts of blood moving through veins in science classes where you learn nothing but how to nap in secret.
That’s what Bub was doing, a little dance like that, appearing lucid for the benefit of the catatonic zombie-stasis commuters on the highway, but still nodding off, like a junkie in a Burroughs novel, or a sleepy baby who’s eaten too much birthday cake. Nod off… Snap up! Brake! Nod off………… SNAP UP! BRAKE!
On the stereo roiled Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy,” itself a kind of lullaby, lolling in its pseudo-Spaniard guitar arpeggios and hyper-intellectual poetic hubris. Beautiful and soothing. Transcendent and real. A reckless choice as the soundtrack to a bumper-to-bumper snail trail of pissy drivers in evening dusk, all stomachs hungry and bladders full. Everyone a knot of fussy wires wanting to rage and sleep simultaneously. Bub didn’t have the cognizance to lift his hand to change the dial. It was as if he were a mummified lummox, trapped in 500 feet of tattered bandages and caked in the rigor mortis malady afforded deific souls whose ultimate reward is to be hidden in untraceable tombs for all of eternity, or until the earth explodes, or until their worldly catacomb is pillaged by fame-hungry archaeologists whose findings will be published in the pages of insider quarterlies that almost no one has ever heard of.
…Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control; It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul. Well, I've been where you're hanging;
I think I can see how you're pinned. When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned…
Bub was this awful prototype in this awfully boring car. Anonymous. Stupid. Some thing. Appearing alive, barely, for the drivers, as noted above, but not just for them. Fuck them.
Joel rode shotgun in the boring Volvo, himself slouching in the post-work malaise of traffic, all funky stale-car body odor and droopy eyelids. They were prone to carpooling, mostly because Joel didn’t own a car. He’d reclined the passenger’s side seat back to an angle, not quite horizontally, but enough so as not to be able to accurately gauge what was surrounding the vehicle, save for the slow wisp of the passing Firs along the right lane of the highway, where Bub and Joel’d been mired for the entire length of the commute. They’d stay there, in this lane, because it didn’t matter anyway. This was post-work traffic in California. Nothing mattered and nobody gave a fuck about anybody else in this twisted thicket of idling, ozone-killing consumerism and American paycheck-flexing shit-show.
“Bub, you all right?” asked Joel resignedly. The Volvo’d just lunged again as Bub’s right foot experienced a sudden atrophy, then Bub’s SNAP UP! BRAKE! instinct mechanism snapped into place, though his foot rested on the gas. The result was a tremendous roar from the engine that skipped the two passengers into a suspended, perpendicular, pulse-like jitter that first seethed and spit and screeched like a pole car at Daytona, then abruptly halted, instigating a skeletal middle finger from the ancient driver of the posh Lexus sedan behind Bub and Joel, who’d herself likely been semi-dozing, and whom almost plowed into them. Bub noted the likeness of the skin-boned quasi-human slant-eyed in the rearview like a Southeast Asian staring at the sun with a hangover.
“Errrr, blergh…..Yep, yeah. Sorry dude. Long day,” offered Bub. “This traffic is disgusting. Unbelievable!”
Joel wished he’d cared a little. No. Not really. He didn’t wish anymore at all, in fact. He’d stopped dreaming, sparking, long ago. Loosely he’d avoided the more daunting responsibilities of the position that Bub’d secured him with as a data entry plebe at a Dotcom startup so arbitrary and milquetoast it isn’t even worth mentioning the name of.
“Maybe we should change the station, man. This sullen shit is making you doze,” said Joel.
“Yeah – ahem! – I guess maybe we should,” responded Bub. “Jesus, that day. Can you believe the paperwork they saddled me with? The next time I have to code invoices like that I’m gonna need to mainline an expresso, I swear to god…”
Joel offered a polite, thin grin, an acknowledgement of his loyalty, though equally thinly disguised for what it was, which was nothing but lethargic contempt for the whole situation. He decided not to mention the mispronunciation of the word espresso.
A few weeks earlier, Joel’s younger brother Darren had been killed in an accident at the paper mill he was employed by. The foreman’d said that the chain hanging from Darren’s wallet became caught in one of the factory’s enormous pressing machines, and that while Darren fidgeted to free the wallet from his sagging jeans, his temporary immobility and lack of focus rendered him unaware of his proximity to a malfunctioning steam valve that had been shooting out white-hot mists at wonky intervals. The steam stream blasted Darren directly into his face, prompting viscous burns instantaneously. He actually died while collapsing from the agonizing pain and hitting the back of his head on a nearby forklift fork, his face an unrecognizable blob of putty and bone with a surprised shock evidenced only by a horrifically wide-open mouth that wanted to scream in protest one last time but couldn’t.
The funeral was conducted with an anonymous, closed casket. Joel had stared at the oak thing holding his brother’s remains with a patina not unlike a plastic mannequin. His expressions, when allowed, were like Greek busts of gods of weather and luck he’d never studied and couldn’t identify. His countenance and the physiology of him was a vegetable façade. Crying on the inside but for the incredulousness of the circumstances by which he’d found himself mourning his sibling in a cold, shitty church with strange family members and his civ-like mother erupting tears into sad wads of Kleenex.
The car ahead of Bub moved forward, in tandem with the car next to that in the middle lane, as did every other car but theirs. Joel’s zone-out had reached epic proportions by that time, thinking about how his brother and he had only recently been embroiled in a petty feud about a pretty girl they both dug.
It dawned on Joel now that he could have her, that the guilt of courtship at the expense of Darren’s feelings was no longer a speed bump. He imagined what her face might look like if he were to tell her that, how horrified by the sentiment she might be, how instantaneously she might retreat, and he nauseously recoiled.
The Cohen coos howled like a lovelorn dissertation from an analog diary.
…I love you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm, your head upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm. There were many loves before us; I know that we are not new. In city and in forest, they smiled like me and you."
“What…what the fuck is wrong with me…” muttered Joel a half-second before an ocean of audio pollution from a dozen horny cars paralyzed the ambiance of the freeway into a shocking stupor. Bub snapped from his mid-lane nap looking like an ancient tweaker, and quickly attempted to let the clutch out, neglecting to apply the necessary amount of throttle. The car stalled momentarily, and Bub, still groggy, still so irresponsible, started it back up and proceeded to make up the space they’d lost.
Joel’s mind, though, was still back where they’d been parked in the freeway, Bub asleep. The haunting realities of his neuroses, the frightening polarity of his competitive spirit, the alarming dedication to cultivating depressing environments to stay depressed. To sustain the element of a broken identity became his one true gift. To stifle laughter. To ignore the beauty of a sunset or the flittering of a hummingbird sucking sugar water from the red plastic feeder. Everything was postured for so long that it became real through osmosis. Chicken? Egg? All that meant anything anymore was that Joel wanted to pay for even that one thought, that one petty jealousy that marred his final weeks with Darren.
Joel looked to Bub’s sad black eyes, flitting eyelashes indicating an imminent doze off. The concrete divider separating the road from the ravines off Highway 273 to the right faded away as the lane veered to the left around the bend of the forest buttes. There were no synthetic embankments for about a quarter-mile around the bend.
The tones of those sad Canadian love songs, and by virtue of their universality the world’s love songs, lulled the sleepy behemoth Bub into another hyphenated, half-eyed slumber at the wheel. The bend approached, and Joel saw the white lines bend left, Bub’s chin in his chest, his fists loosely gripping the steering wheel, his commuter dreams racing behind his eyelids.
Bub let out a little snore. Joel turned his head to the left to look at Bub’s sleepy visage, and whispered a tiny goodbye.
“We’re trapped here forever, and no one can change a thing. I’m sorry if sorry’s called for. But we’re in this together. We’re a flaming footnote on the ridge. Good riddance…”
As the cars ahead of Bub and Joel veered left to brace the turn on the bend, with the Buttes and sunny mountains and bushes of the valley below glinting that muted hue of a ho-hum California landscape of wild brush and Manzanita bramble, the car hummed quietly straight, toward the edge of the highway’s liquid parameters. Joel did not move to awaken Bub, and the old Volvo wagon crossed the white lines, its tires stuttering with the hiccups in the divots of the shoulder, and plunged lazily down the ravine into the void of that big green gorge, rattling the unused seatbelts against the inside of the windows.
Two cars honked in protest, but the noise of the fussy traffic suddenly dissipated and was replaced by the simple, free silence of flying. Bub continued to sleep as Joel triumphantly lifted his arms in the air as if on the downswing of a thrilling rollercoaster.
…Who by accident? Who in solitude? Who in this mirror? Who by his lady's command? Who by his own hand? Who in mortal chains? Who in power? And who shall I say is calling?...
