“I’m happy to drive,” I say.
“You don’t like how I’m driving?”
Okay, well, see. “I’m offering to help.”
“I’m good. I’m great.”
Sure you are. James is like some harassed sea creature, hiding behind a rock. I rub his neck, smooth down the back of his hair. I need my driver alive. My poor, poor driver. By taking care of him I take care of myself.
“Thanks,” he says. “That feels good. If only I could see. I mean, right? I feel like I’m playing a video game. What you could do is call some hotels or motels up ahead, to see if we can get a room.”
There’s a Holiday Inn and a Motel 6 in the next town. Both lines are busy when I call. I keep trying, and meanwhile I pull up the map on my phone, but my signal is getting spotty, a single bar flickering in and out, and the image of where we are never quite comes through. It’s loading and it’s loading and it’s loading. I see our blue dot, moving slowly over the screen, but there’s no terrain beneath it, just a gray block, as if we’re floating in space over some bottomless void.
James pulls over at a gas station and we get chips. Lots of them, the sort we rarely allow ourselves at home. All bets are off. I would inject drugs into my face right now. I would drink gas from the car with a straw. Inside the store, the single-serving wine bottles look exceptional to me—golden bottles in their own gleaming cooler, a shrine to goodness—but it’s not fair to James, who has to drive. I don’t want him drooling. I don’t want him jealous. I’d prefer to keep his feelings to a minimum.
We can hardly see anything save the lights and the black slashes of rain streaking past, but the same sign keeps appearing on the side of the road, every mile or two: Exit 49 Food. The third time it crawls past, close enough to grab and shake, to possibly dry-hump, I start to salivate. I picture plates of unspecified steaming goodness. Salty, crunchy objects littered over wet mounds of something achingly delicious, with sauce, with sauce, with sauce. Polenta with stinking gorgonzola, maybe, and a fork-tender bone of meat from some brave animal. A shank, a leg, a neck, cooked for four years in a thick mixture of wines. With tall drinks that fizz a little and work directly on quieting down one’s noisy little brain, perhaps even a warm cloudy drink you pour directly into your eyes. James seems to register my reverie and insists again that we keep driving. Have to have to. He slaps the steering wheel. That’s why we bought chips, he cries, trying perhaps to sound like a real human being who feels enthusiasm. It’s sort of awkward. We have chips, he says more quietly. If we stop now we are doomed, goners.
“It’s just that it’s already kind of late, and I’m pretty hungry,” I tell him.
“What are you saying?”
“That it’s late and I’m hungry?”
“If you’re not prepared to offer a solution then maybe you should not speak.”
Well, it’s an interesting rule, and I do enjoy constraints around what can and cannot be said. The deepest kind of etiquette. But if you applied such a standard to everyone, the world over, there’d be very little speech. The world would undergo a near-total vow of silence, with a few exceptions. Perhaps that would be a desired outcome. Perhaps a special island could be set aside for the solution-proffering peoples, who would slowly drive each other to murder.
“Okay, sure, I will restrict myself to a solution-based language. Here’s a solution. Let’s go to a restaurant. That would solve so many problems. The problem of hunger, the problem of exhaustion, the problem of claustrophobia in this goddamn coffin, and the very real threat of escalating discord between two individual passengers.”
“Go to a restaurant and then what? Eating will make us tired. Where will we sleep? I hate being the only one who thinks about these things.”
“Oh, is it not fair?” I say. And I will admit that my voice dips into a pout here.
“That’s right,” says James. “It’s not fair. I didn’t want to put it that way.”
“Because it makes you sound like a sad baby?”
“You’re the one who said it. You said it. How does it make me sound like anything?”
“Yes, let the record show that I controlled your words and rendered you helpless and unaccountable. I am all-powerful.”
James is quiet for a while. The rain is thundering down on us. The wipers are going so fast across the windshield it seems they might fly off the car. When exit 49 suddenly appears, James veers cautiously down the ramp and pulls the car over in the grass of an intersection.
“The record won’t show anything, Alice, because there is no record. It’s just us. I’m worried about getting stuck out here. That’s all this day has been about. I’m trying to get us somewhere so we can get a room and then we can worry about everything else after that. Could we maybe fight later, when we get home?”
“Oh, I’d like that.”
“I mean, I don’t really feel well, and the fighting is not helping.”
I look at him. So much of our relationship depends on him being alive. Almost all of it.
“Darling,” I say. “Let’s just go sit and eat and relax for a minute. We can still drive after that. We just have to get out of this rain for a minute. And after dinner, I’m driving. No arguments.”
We find the restaurant and get a table near the fireplace, which turns out to be just a storage nook for old copper pots. The waiter is a boy. Not an infant, and not exactly a man. “Are you all weathering the storm okay?” he asks, grinning.
Can one say no? I wonder. No thank you, we are not. We have failed to weather it and now we are here, in your restaurant.
The food that comes out is not disgusting. Sweet and hot and plentiful, moist in all the right places. It goes down pretty heavily, though, and I feel the day starting to expire, begging to end. James was right. The druggery of road food. We eat in silence, listening to the rain. Both of us look forlornly at the bar, thinking probably that we shouldn’t, we mustn’t. On the other hand, we could simply pass out drunk here and maybe they’d take us to jail. There are beds in jail. Soap. New people to meet.
A television above the bar shows a woman in a raincoat being blown off her feet. The clip must be on a loop, or else she keeps getting up, saying something desperate into her microphone, and then falling back down again. I’d like to tell her to stay down, just stay down and take it while the wind and rain lash at her flapping back, but she gets up again and the wind seems to lift her. For a moment, as she blows sideways off the screen and surrenders herself to flight, her posture is beautiful, so absolutely graceful. If you were falling from a cliff, no matter what awaited you, you might want to think about earning some style points along the way, just turn your final descent into something stunning to watch. On the TV there is nothing to learn about the storm, nothing to know. The numbers that scroll across the bottom of the screen are long, without cease, maybe the longest single number I’ve ever seen. Does this number describe the storm? What are we to make of it?
In the car we think it over. We are too far from a hotel, and plus, the hotels aren’t answering their phones. The driving is dangerous, if not impossible. It’s not really even driving anymore, it’s like taking your car through one of those car washes. We are exhausted beyond belief. I suggest, as tentatively as I can, that it is not unreasonable to think that we could sleep in the car. Each of our seats reclines, like an easy chair, and if we found somewhere safe and quiet to park, we could ride this out until the morning, maybe even sleep well. Then we could drive all day and maybe get somewhere where they have rooms. We’d be rested. The sun might be up. The world might have ended. But at least it would be tomorrow. Tomorrow seems like the only thing that will solve anything, ever. Along comes tomorrow, with its knives, as someone or other said. That’s not the exact quote, I’m sure, but the gist of it sounds true.