He woke up in Tupelo and drove into Memphis. It was late morning and he followed the tourist signs to Graceland but he didn’t go in. He drove past without seeing any Elvis impersonators. He stopped mid-afternoon, that day, for food and petrol. And he pressed on.
He got used to the rhythms. His mornings were startled by the brightness of sunlight. He’d wake up in a room in a chain motel, and get up and shower and check out and head onto the road when the sky was still whiter than blue. His mornings were full of optimism. Any time before midday he felt in command. He felt the star of his own film.
He’d stop early, sometimes, for lunch; or he’d have a late breakfast and skip lunch.
The wheels turned and the car hummed and the petrol needle made its half-daily journey across the dial on the dashboard. He would eat fast food, or food from gas stations. He tried monster bags of pork rinds – pretty horrible, actually; giant, chemical-tasting puffs that were to pork scratchings as popcorn is to sweetcorn – and grazed on sour-apple liquid candy. He ate microwave sandwiches and Jack in the Box burgers, nacho cheese and Gatorade. He browsed in chillers, with heavy doors, full of Vitamin Water and cardboard carry-packs of longneck beer.
The vastness of the country impressed itself on him. The road, when he was in between cities, was worn pale grey and yellow: and was only two lanes in either direction. An image came to him of the roads – arteries they call them – as the country’s circulatory system. He imagined himself swept along them like a blood cell, a platelet, shouldering past the big trucks, pumped by a huge heart somewhere miles away. That made him think of cells dying, DNA unknitting, fraying, counting down.
He drove for hours and hours in a near trance, adjusting cruise control, watching the road ahead vanish under his car, thinking about Carey and trying to imagine a joint future. Again and again, his imagination failed him.
He could imagine their past well enough. Drunken scamperings in college. Their becoming a fixture of the scene, ‘Beauty and the Geek’ – they’d gone to one fancy-dress party as that. But the future was a blank.
He started to drive into the night. As he crossed over into New Mexico the landscape changed. The neon minarets of the rest stops thinned out, became less frequent in the big desert, in between cities. It was just the ribbon of road and the car and the scrub to either side.
He felt calm but alert, as if he could go on for hours without sleep. Then, as time went on, he felt a little dislocated – as if he had gone on for hours without sleep, but hadn’t noticed it. He couldn’t tell how fast time was passing, or had passed.
There was a period of about an hour – was it an hour? – when he became hypnotised by the road in his headlights. There were no other cars around. The car seemed to be floating – just ahead of it fifteen feet of tarmac rushing in a blur in the yellow light. No sense of forward motion or acceleration. No sense of time or space passing. He was barely aware of the wheel in his hand.
Far, far ahead in the distance he could see red tail lights, but no road or horizon line to orient them against. They rose slowly, as if levitating into the air. Then they winked out and it was dark as far as he could see.
Alex eased off the pedal a little. The speedo kept steady. He had put cruise control on without noticing it. The red light reappeared – higher than it had been, and still climbing, moving off to the left. Alex started to wonder whether it was a car at all. Had there been mountains?
He looked down in front of him, saw the road coming into existence a car’s length or more ahead, churning monotonously towards him, vanishing as it hit the lower sill of the windscreen. Alone, he thought. He raised his eyes.
The whole of his consciousness seemed, now, to be zeroed on that little red light, miles in the distance. Would he, one day, remember this moment? The road fell away underneath him. Nothing was funny. Nothing was sad.
If you moved far enough out, for long enough, you lost your bearings.
The red light vanished again. The car started to climb. Alex imagined around him, unseen, trains creaking and lumbering through the night. Sleeping families. Empty forecourts. Rough sleepers mumbling. In his pocket was the ring that was going to link him to Carey, whoever she was, whoever he was.
A little later, as the Pontiac crested a rise of some sort, Alex saw a glow in the distance – not the sharp point of red that had been the lights of the car in front – rather a diffuse, blue-grey lambency announcing itself on the horizon.
It got closer. It was big – not a building but more a pool of light – huge, by the side of the road, with darkness and the empty land all around it. It was a car dealership, out in the middle of nowhere. There was nobody there. The windows of the building itself were black. It rose up from the car park like the bridge of a container ship. All around it were cars, hundreds of cars, parked hull to hull, with halogen lights burning bone white above them.
It made him think of an elephants’ graveyard. Not white bones tanning in the sun, but empty windscreens, roof props, the scratchproof paint shining under the cold arc lights.
Alex rode on, until it vanished behind him, an island of light, unpopulated, in the enormous desert night.
Isla spends the week with Nicolas. At first, he doesn’t say much at all, though he behaves as if he was somehow expecting her – an affectation of serene foreknowledge that she doesn’t know whether or not to trust.
He ushers her into the shack. She ducks her head under the lintel as she enters. He, behind her, nodding courteously. The shack has a smell of wood and something sweet and dusty, like a church. He follows her in, gestures at a wooden chair that’s pushed in against a desk. On either side of the chair are tall stacks of yellow paper. The stacks of paper are everywhere. He sees her looking at them, waves dismissively as if brushing them away, shuffles to the chair and pulls it out, turns it round for her, busily nods and points her at it.
‘There, there – please… sit.’
The old man smiles encouragingly, nodding again faster as she advances.
She sits, nervously. She still has her backpack on so she teeters on the front couple of inches of the seat, smiling back at him, hands on her knees. She keeps suppressing an instinct, like someone meeting a nervous dog, to extend a low palm, gently.
He turns round, fumbles behind one of the piles of paper and fishes out an ancient kettle on the end of a snaking orange extension lead, then fills it from a large earthenware jug. He mumbles to himself in a sing-song voice under his breath as he does so.
As the kettle starts to rattle and cough, he moves over to an arrangement of shallow wire baskets hanging one above the other from chains. She can see a couple of leeks just going dry at the ends, a red net of cashew nuts. The whole assemblage wobbles as he rummages in it, and two handsomely sized eggs, smeared with a dab of dried brown, loll against each other in the bottom basket.
He pulls something out and returns, his tall body hunched over a little as if half out of shyness, half to save himself the effort of standing up only to bend again. On the floor he puts a dark green mug. It is the colour of old copper, she can see, on the inside. He produces a cloudy tumbler from somewhere else, puts it down too, and as the kettle passes its crisis of excitement, drops a pinch of some sort of herb into each and tops it with boiling water.
‘I don’t get many visitors,’ he says, stirring each with a spoon before handing her the mug, punctiliously, handle first. The infusion smells very strongly of sage. He sits down cross-legged with a great crack of the knees and looks at her, then downwards into his beard, whose ends he worries at absently between finger and thumb.