Stopped To Fill My Car Up

It has come to my attention that some spelling/grammatical errors exist in this version (it is an earlier version, as the published one is abridged). I will correct these soon, please ignore them. My sincerest apologies.

Stopped To Fill My Car Up

Memories fixed my foot to the accelerator and despair kept it glued to the floor. My skin was not my own anymore, it had been replaced with a thin layer of dust, invisible but omnipresent, covering me, seeping deep into my pours, my mind preoccupied with its existence. The road was being built in front of me, turning from liquid to asphalt, my eyes bound to the yellow line separating me from all things coming towards me, it was all I saw, and my preoccupation saved me again; ignoring opposing cars until they slipped into the horizon, my eyes fused to the rear-view mirror until they were gone. I couldn’t tell you how long I had been driving for, all I know is one night I went to bed and the next day I was hot under the desert sun, driving down a highway that, if I were god, would never end. I reached up to the visor and pulled a cigarette from my pack, lit it and blew the smoke out the window beside me. It swirled for a moment as it chased the cars that had passed me, where it forgot its purpose and dissipated, mixing and mingling with the desert dust. I had often wondered what it would be like to die of lung cancer, I imagine I would have felt some level of relief in my despair, at least I would finally be quitting my long time friend, leaving him for a world of star-dust and muses. Euphoric despair may be an oxymoron to most people, but leaving it all behind and driving closer and closer to nowhere feels good when you are a man who always needs to know exactly where it is he is going.

The sun was high when I pulled into a rundown Texaco station, stopping to fill my car up. I had seen it almost twenty minutes ago, glittering away in the distance like a mirage to the Arabian Knight. Looking at the building now, however, I struggled to find any surface by which the light could actually reflect. I pulled the rusted nozzle from its equally rusted holster and began to feed my car. I felt envious. The wind licked my face like a rabid dog, and sun roasted my dust-skin, vaporizing the sweat on my brow before it could be whipped away. As the gas pump ticked away I looked far off in the direction where I was headed and let the wind blur my eyes. My mind left me, and I stood there, a zombie. A word a caution to anyone thinking of replicating my journey; it has become painfully obvious the last few days that decrepit Texaco stations on the boarder to nowhere often do not have any auto shut off mechanism on their gas pumps. I was awakened from my hypnotism when gas began to shoot out of the car’s tank and onto my jeans. This was most unwelcome as these were the only pair of jeans that I had in my possession and had I spent most of my money doing laundry in the last town site after this same thing happened the previous time I stopped to fill my car up. It seemed to me that being covered in car-food and smoking three packs a day was a volatile combination. I shut off the gas, placed the nozzle back into its rusted-out house and walked into the store to pay.

“$15.90” the lady behind the counter said as I entered, and I thought to myself ‘here I am starving and soon to be driving around smelling like this gas station, when if this lady skipped a meal she could end world hunger for a day.’ It was painfully apparent that this station was her home, and her only method of entertainment was seeing how many Three Musketeer bars she could eat in a day and then trying to beat that record. She shifted her weight and for the first time I realized that she was sitting on a stool which until now had been hidden beneath the folds of fat hanging down from her legs and sides. This was not without its benefit, however, for the hunger in my stomach subsided as I was forced to bear her grotesque appearance. Her eyes were almost hidden by her high rising cheeks as the fat that encompassed them tried desperately to find safety. The point at witch her face ended and her body began alluded me, her never ending chins flowing seamlessly into the rest of her, completely concealing her neck. I reached into my pocket for some silver with which to pay, but my hand was greeted only by dust and some pocket lint. It was at that moment that I realized that leaving one’s money clip on the table at Denny’s whilst they ate when one hasn’t slept for thirty-two hours wasn’t the best idea as such a situation tended to make people sleepy and forgetful. And that’s when I bolted for the door, Lardo rolling behind like a boulder. I gave her the slip when I jumped up and slid across the hood of my car, and her, unable to stop the enormous momentum she had picked up chasing me a short distance, slammed into the side of my car, bounced off, and lay there in the dirt like a turtle on its back. Taking a moment to thank the heavens that the cashier had not tipped over the car with the force of her impact, I hopped into my seat, turned the key and roared off shrouding the beached whale in rocks and dust.

I had traveled only a couple of miles when I reached up to grab another cigarette from the visor and something in the rear view mirror of a most unusual nature caught my attention. My pulse quickened and my hands turned from flesh to liquid and slipped off the wheel. I tried to swallow but my heart was in the way. The desert eroded away instantly into scatoma and all that was left was me, my old car-now no longer hungry- and a second man in the back seat.

“If you know what’s good for you you’ll just keep driving.” he said.

I didn’t say anything. He had a companion, an old burlap sack frayed at its edges. He kept his eyes on the rear-view mirror, no doubt watching my every movement for the slightest sign of my attempt to rid myself of my unwelcome guest. Sound-bites and images from some trashy TV tabloid show filled my mind. I could see the news headlines when they found my lifeless body housed by a shallow grave in the middle of the desert sea, and this was persuasive enough to keep me from trying to escape. I figured that sooner or later we would have to stop and fill the car up once again and that would be my salvation.

We drove for a couple of hours in silence straight down the straight highway, never a curve to deter us from our course to the unknown. I wondered if he had direction or if he was playing the same game as I; always driving, always looking, and yet always knowing there was nothing ahead. My chest was light and every muscle in my body tense. I craved a smoke like some parched coyote craves a cactus with no pricks. It became my essence, every thought I had was preceded by the image of me reaching up and pulling the placid cylinder from its friends, watching the flame of my lighter lick the tip, flickering and dancing until the cigarette burst into smoldering ash. Its life just begun, I would pull in the smoke and watch the fire accelerate down towards the filter, it unaware of its end. Perhaps the reason I liked smoking so much in the first place was because it made me feel like a god presiding over his flock of dried tobacco and thin paper. Five minutes of bliss was my only covet, but I was too paralyzed by fear to actualize my desires. On the other hand however, as each second ticked by my need grew and grew until it overtook my being, and with my last ounce of rationality I asked the man in the back seat if I could reach up and grab a cigarette.

“Throw the pack back here.” he said.

I did as I was told. He lit a cigarette but kept it in his hands. I wondered how long it would be before my rage at this overtook me and rolled the car without accident. In my mind’s eye I saw the car rolling over and over down the highway, the pack of cigarettes bouncing around like a bingo ball until it came to a rest in my lap. It was only half a minute later, though it seemed an eternity, that he pulled a second cigarette from the pack, lit it and handed it up to me.

Ah muse! I invoke thee. Thine who calm my soul and bring tranquility and rest to my tired mind. Like the land to a lost ship’s captain, you will guide me home. The stars and my compass, with you by my side I am happy and I am home. No matter my desolation all is fair when you are near.

I exhaled a cloud of smoke, it danced for a moment in front of me, before being sucked out the crack in the window, only to be sucked back into the car through the window behind me, swirling a two-step dance with the smoke of my companion. Our smoke bound and fused becoming one before escaping my temporary prison to play and laugh in the desert behind us.

“Where are we going?” I asked the stranger.

“We are going nowhere,” he responded, “but I’m not sure where I should end up.”

Smoking together we barreled down the highway.

Before my unexpected company, the silent road lends it’s self to be the therapist of the poor, and those countless hours are spent contemplating lay philosophy and arguing with one’s self about a world of possibilities that are entirely impossible. I wonder that in a parallel universe, where everything is the same with only a single exception that me and my captor could have known each other under different circumstances. Perhaps we could have both been lost travelers who had a chance meeting at a Denny’s on the road to nowhere, and both appreciating sleep as only a luxury for the rich, could have talked and perhaps my single-serving friend would have seen a money clip left behind. Whilst rushing, I find, one ignores the essential details that tow the line between life and grave mistakes. Four and half hours after my escape from the lady behind the counter at the decrepit Texaco my companion spoke his first unsolicited words.

“Pull off the road here.” he said.

Like a deer caught in the headlights certain of its end but uncertain of the means that realize it, I froze, staring at the road solidified in front of me. The road stretched as far as I could see, the future bare and candidly exposed. I never appreciated the lottery of life until that moment, every cadence a gift, every step a privilege. Now I could see the time ahead of me, but I knew that it could not see me.

“I said pull off here!” the man reiterated.

I pulled the car off the road slowly; a cloud of dust rose up out of the still air and trailed us as my tires hit the shoulder. The car stopped and the dust blew by us, not yet ready to rest.

“Get out.” my orders came.

I stepped down from the car and onto the hot sand. The sun scorched my skin, and I wondered if perhaps my captor had murdered me a few miles back and this was hell. Whatever doubt I had, however, was quickly erased. He pulled a gun from his jacket and looked me straight in the eye. To look upon the countenance of a truly mad man is by far the most frightening experience any person can have. And like drinking and smoking sweet tobacco with the Devil himself, any empathy or compassion for what could have degenerated what once was a small, innocent child into this horrid wretch, the empty shell of a human, vanished. The wrinkles around his eyes seemed to grow and tower over his eyes like the gates of hell, and as I gazed past them and into the infinite blackness of his pupils, any hope I had for salvation abandoned my soul and left me empty. All my curiosities were over, any prospect of escape or mercy on his part was clearly out of reach. I accepted my fate, I was to die here on the sands of Hell. I fell to my knees, slumped to one side, and let out a terrible scream.

“Your going to die.” he said calmly.

I grabbed onto his foot and begged “please don’t kill me, not here, alone in the sand for the vultures to pick at and fight over!”

Tears were streaming down my face and I could taste them on my lips.

“It gives me so much satisfaction,” he continued, “to watch you beg and cry.”

With his free foot he kicked me across the face. The world around me faded away for a moment as I struggled to maintain consciousness. As I looked up he leveled the gun to my head.

My story aired a week later when I returned home from an unknown hospital in an unknown land. I had hastened to call the media and tell them my plight. The vultures of human misery and contempt gobbled up my story like so many voracious birds that would have picked at my flesh as I lay lifeless in the desert. How had I survived? They wanted to know, I couldn’t tell them. But regardless of the inconsistencies in my story the sympathies and condolences poured in, I a whole country watching the news. It all made me smile. My solitary friend tucked away in the visor of my car had been joined by a thousand more, each as faceless and temporary as the first. The only real trouble was when the police caught wind of my story, and in the course of their investigation wanted both information about the hospital that had treated me and to see the scars my captor had inflicted on me. I showed them neither, it was the scars on my own gated eyes that had to be healed first.