Sarvaduhka didn’t dare look at Izzy or the kid. He saw curls and pimples in the rear view, but he tried not to focus. Mountains. Sheep. That was enough to chew on.
“Sure thing,” said Izzy. “We picked you up in Cheyenne, then. Duco, pull over and let the kid out.”
Sarvaduhka couldn’t take it any longer. “Let him out, Izzy!? He never got in!” But he pulled over. The boy got out. And as soon as he slammed the door, Sarvaduhka remembered.
He remembered the boy standing under the billboard near the Air Force base outside Cheyenne. “Give the kid a break,” Izzy had said. Now he had said it. A minute ago he hadn’t. Someone had slipped a memory into Sarvaduhka’s grey matter, like a shim in a casement. Slow and dumb as a puff pastry on a rotary display, Sarvaduhka turned to Izzy.
“See what I mean?” Izzy said. He pulled the piece of Danish out of his jacket pocket—it was there now—and started munching. “Retro-memory.”
“How did we get to Wyoming?”
“Hey, travel is a big joke anyway, Duhka. Nobody goes anywhere. Read Parmenides.”
“Being is.”
“Now you got it!”
“Izzy, can you get me some female action this way?”
“I wouldn’t advise it.”
Izzy munched. He unscrewed the cup from his thermos, a grey, stainless-steel Aladdin he would receive as a gift from Fay in about three years’ time, if everything had worked out the way he was planning. He poured himself some coffee. “Ahh!” Fay wasn’t going to forget the cream. “Want some?”
“No. What is going on? Is this still epoche?”
“Yeah. We got till the next asterisks. Then the red piranha shows up again, and I die.”
“Asterisks? Die?”
“Listen, Sarvaduhka. I knew there was a Fay in my life. Izzovision. She’s my Sun and my Moon, Duck. I just couldn’t wait and do things the usual way, see? I already knew the punch line. So I skipped the formalities. I flextimed. Shazam! There we were, happily sharing living quarters without the trouble of introductions. All of a sudden, as they say in the normal world, we had loved each other for years. But there is a price.”
“Womporfs?”
“You amaze me. Yeah, womporfs. You get them from screwing around chronologies. They don’t exactly exist, Sarvaduhka, if you catch my drift, but they take on whatever you think of them. If I’m going to have met Fay, we gotta take care of that womporf.”
“This womporf is a she-devil because of me?” Sarvaduhka asked.
“All you saw was a red car behind you, right?” said Izzy.
“Ah! And the windshield: tinted!”
“Exactly.”
“How do we dissolve it, Izzy?”
Izzy shook the cup out the window so that any remaining drops of coffee would not accumulate at the rim and drip down the next time he unscrewed it, which could have been a long time ago. They were still idling beside the road near Medicine Bow National Forest. The boy was disappearing into the woods, not looking back.
“Orthographic propulsion, Doc.”
Sarvaduhka took a deep breath. He paused to consider whether his nervous system could survive yet another channel of Izzovision. But maybe there was some female action in it. “What is orthographic propulsion?”
“You find out in the next section. Look out. Here come the asterisks.”
Splat! The fly was a smudge on the glass. The red piranha bore down on the squareback. Sarvaduhka felt the impact before he saw it, when the piranha rammed him from behind. “It’s not a piranha. It’s not a piranha.”—the Sarvaduhkamantra. “Am I right, Izzy? It’s whatever I say?”
“Too late!” Izzy groaned, massaging his lower back. “You’ve already made that womporf my death!”
Sarvaduhka screeched into the left lane. The piranha screamed at his tail. He tried fading right and downshifting to force the she-devil to pass him. The clutch rope tangled on the stick, and as Sarvaduhka reached down to uncoil it so he could pull the pedal back up, he noticed three thin, parallel lines of blood trickling down his right arm. “Izzy, I’m hit!”
“Oh, great. Now you’ve got her packing heat… Wait a minute.” Izzy braced himself against the dashboard as their gear ratios yo-yoed and the piranha left its racing stripe in Sarvaduhka’s door handle. Izzy leaned over to examine Sarvaduhka’s wound. “Hot damn,” he announced. ‘You ain’t been shot. These are asterisk scrapes from the points of those stars when we spilled across the scene break.”
“Scene break??”
“Yeah. Everything is aces, Doc. We’re already halfway into orthographic space!”
“Orthographic…? Yaaaaaaa!” Sarvaduhka’s forehead jerked forward and hit the steering wheel. The metal over his door exploded inward in little circles, pricking up the upholstery like crowns around the bullet holes. Simultaneously, the glass in front of Izzy perforated and cracked into a network of spiderwebs.
“Sari baby,” Izzy shouted, “please don’t think about heavy artillery. I need to have an exhumable corpse for this thing to work out.”
Now the piranha pulled alongside, hubcap to hubcap. Sarvaduhka reared up in the driver’s seat and crushed the accelerator pedal to the floor. He tried to concentrate. He tried not to project. As in the ancient mantra, taught him by a Tibetan refugee in Kathmandu:
Mi no. Mi sahm. Mi chad ching.
Mi gom. Mi sehm. Rahng bahb zhahg.
“Think not. Reflect not. Analyze not.
“Imagine not. Meditate not. Retain the natural state.”
Don’t think about the she-devil. Eat up the road. Become one with the car. Don’t think about anything. Especially not movies. Ben Hur in particular. Don’t think about Ben Hur. Don’t think about that chariot scene, for Ganesha’s sake, where the bad guy comes up alongside Charlton Heston—just like this piranha nuzzling the squareback—with those blades on the hubs of the bad guy’s chariot wheels. Don’t think about that. Don’t think about how they shear off Ben Hur’s wheels, and…
“Yaaaaa!”
The steering wheel yanked Sarvaduhka to the left as the front left wheel collapsed and the squareback scraped and clanked into the path of the red piranha. Sarvaduhka, terrified, no-ing and sahm-ing and chad ching-ing and gom-ing and sehm-ing from the black hole of Calcutta to the Kunlun Shan, saw, or thought he saw, the toothy grill of the red piranha yawn open, revealing a bloody uvula. Steel incisors, triangular, dripping aqua regia and kelp, masticated the squareback’s chassis.
“I’m a-comin’, Peigeleh!” Izzy bellowed.
The squareback tumbled into a field of bearded wheat, broken and mangled. The piranha roared off. The she-devil fired her Smith and Wesson into the air, while she laughed with her high-rolling politico pals on the cellular phone. Her hub blades retracted. The grill snapped shut. She disappeared into that flat Midwestern infinitude where the road pinches out and parallel shoulders meet.
Sarvaduhka coughed and fell out the door into a pool of fish emulsion. “Izzy! Izzy!” He groped his way through smoke, past twisted metal, to the other side of the car, where Izzy lay staring at blue heaven, his bald head haloed by sheaves of wheat that caught the long rays of twilight. “Izzy, please don’t die.”
The stink of the fertilizer. Izzy’s glazed look. His Ganesha shattered. Sarvaduhka sank to his knees. “I am a very bad driver,” Sarvaduhka whimpered.