GPS (5 page)

As Jeff walked out of the stadium after chatting with Ricard and well after the small crowd had gone — he hated throngs of people unless they had drinks in their hands, especially ones he had to walk behind — he found himself striding toward a car that appeared to be glowing from the inside, so much so that, even from this distance he could see it was drawing some of the moths away from the parking lot lights and onto his windows.

Sort of like a man who gets home late at night, walks up his driveway and notices that his front door is already hanging open, Jeff had an uneasy feeling about what he would see in 50 or so feet when he gazed into the Celica, which at the moment was casting out a pinkish-purple beam not unlike a TV in an otherwise dark room.

- 5 -

Jeff awoke on the floor of his hotel room in Albuquerque in the late morning. He could remember walking out to his car from the stadium the night before, and vaguely what he saw, but not much else.

An open bottle of Excedrin lying on its side next to him completed his morning junkie look. That and the almost completely empty fifth of Bushmills on the night stand, which suggested at some point he considered sleeping in the bed instead of on the floor. That might have eased the raging headache that shook his skull furiously at the moment. What was the aspirin for, he wondered.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Jeff’s lifestyle, if all of his personal problems could have been itemized onto a list, was its unpredictability. Most guys his age, he often worried, had a plan that included tomorrow and even the next day and months and years beyond. Jeff couldn’t say for sure what he’d be doing by the end of the weekend, didn’t know how he might feel or what he might have decided by then, let alone beyond that.

The greatest enabler of this was Jeff’s schedule. In his capacity, he pretty much made his own schedule from April to September, with the obvious understanding he would do his job, keep a constant line of communication open with the parent club and always see who needed to be seen.

As he tried to stir to life, which in this case began with peeling himself off the floor and attempting to piece together a general summary of events. He tried to connect a few dots from the night before with one another. Like with many drunks, the minutes immediately following the regaining of consciousness were also spent doing a general examination for bruises or other bodily damage and a check of his personal belongings such as a wallet, keys and cell phone. But not long into his physical exam, Jeff’s body decided to conduct an extraction, which sidetracked him in the bathroom just long enough for the Elegante maid to come knocking — one last time — in hopes the tenant in room 112 would get in gear and get the hell out.

“Sir, you are OK?” asked Maria Escobar from the other side of the hotel door minutes later, wearing a grin that suggested she’d just stumbled upon someone she thought to be in some sort of minor peril but who also wore it quite well. She peered into a vacant-looking face gazing back at her from behind the door. “It’s almost noon, sir, would you like to check out later or …”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be out in no time flat, just uh, I think that pleasant Albuquerque breeze must have blown something unpleasant my way last night,” said Jeff who, even in this absurd state — Maria’s fit, 26-year old frame, deep brown eyes and titanium smile were completely obscured in his half-drunk, fully hung-over, post-vomiting stupor— was trying to be charming, something he’d done in the presence of women since his first day of kindergarten.

He’d given up the habit of women for good, he thought, the day he made an honest woman out of the former — and soon to be again — Riley Peletier in the autumn of 2003. With his impending divorce now looming, however, he was entitled to come out of retirement, make one solid comeback attempt like any true veteran would. But at the moment, Jeff found himself mostly naked behind the hotel door, fighting the return of his body’s morning whiskey purgation process and not seeing well enough to realize a grand flirtation opportunity was right there on the other side of the door.

“But you are OK, sir?” Maria grinned.

Jeff was a complete mess, actually, trying and failing over and over again to collect himself. “I’m fine, just fine, my love. I’ll be out of your hair in five minutes, I promise.”

As he bustled around the room collecting his things, he was uneasy about the fact he’d apparently blacked out the night before, the thing that marks the sign of someone truly off the charts. Do people fail to function when they’re blacked out or are they awake and thinking during all of it but ultimately pass out and then forget things they would still remember if they hadn’t passed out? Now he was into the sort of stressful thinking that reminded him, as always, of the life he was trying to leave behind.

But there was no Rental Car Return lane to veer frantically into from here like there would have been last season, and every season before. No shuttle to take to the airport terminal, no ticket line, no counter, no bag check and no annoying people to either stand behind or talk to. Not on this trip and not on any hereafter, he thought, tossing all of his work-related items into one bag and his clothes and bathroom bag into his massive travel duffel. There won’t be any security lines to wade through with his shoes, wallet, phone, laptop, iPod and every other damn thing in a plastic tub moving slowly, but faster than him, through the X-ray machine. As much of a relief as all of that was, it didn’t help him remember the night before, and the night before was his greatest concern.

He sliced and diced tidbits of information in his mind, zipped up his two bags and shuffled through the door. When he emerged into the wall of sun and heat outside, Jeff looked like a man in a bad movie. He froze at the sight of his car, parked perfectly straight as always, in the spot to the immediate left of room 112. The room key in Jeff’s mouth fell theatrically to the ground as he stood motionless, mouth agape, more dumbstruck than he ever could have become from merely drinking too much.

The red 1997 Celica wasn’t really red anymore, even on normal days. The old car hadn’t had a wax in better than five years and was more like a cutesy dark pink now, but on this day that fading, oxidized paint was entirely masked by an incredibly uniform layer of dried mud, dirt, dust and general desert-borne debris, from the roof to, from the looks of it, the undersides of the wheel wells. The rear spoiler, even, had collected a mane of brush that stuck through the layer of fresh mud that apparently washed over the car in great amounts during some furious near-death experience Jeff still could not recollect. A drunk driving accident, undoubtedly.

The only thing missing from this near-perfect Hollywood snapshot was a tumbleweed blowing down over the hood. That was Jeff’s first thought after a good solid minute of staring at his car, which he found standing out there in the parking lot like a tank that had returned from a mysterious battle he couldn’t remember. His second thought was that he’d better figure out what he’d done fast. Then, a glimpse of the night before shot through his head, but shed no more light on what brought him and his Celica to this point than a flash of lightning.

“
Off-route. Recalculating. Off-route. Recalculating. Off-route. Recalculating.”

He’d heard that phrase, and that GPS voice so much, it seemed like it had been pounded into his head all night in his sleep — like those language-learning tapes — or perhaps more correctly, while he was blacked out. But there was so much more, and now he sat on the curb, somehow ignoring for a moment the car that had long since come to the attention of the hotel staff members, only they really didn’t know what to make of it. He held his pounding head, trying to recall something about the time that passed from the end of the game, which he found he remembered perfectly, to his painful late-morning awakening.

That shrill GPS voice kept spiraling through his head, and with that same, now-familiar refrain. There sure wasn’t much evidence he’d done anything low-key, like come quietly back to the hotel last night after the game and perform a repeat of the previous afternoon, sitting in his car staring at a GPS screen, only this time enjoying his usual few too many drinks while did. The GPS woman was only supposed to talk to him if they were on a trip together, and he hadn’t been on any trips other than driving back to the hotel. Had he? And that would hardly explain the evidence of mayhem that was caked to his car, so thick that Jeff wondered how hard it would be to get his door open and then, whether or not the engine underneath the hood was even still in running condition.

But he noticed, as he forced himself to his feet again and fought off a head rush and sudden urge to faint, that around the frame of his door was a perfect crack in the blanket of mud and brush which made his car look like it had been driven through a beaver dam.

What was especially troubling was the fact that he couldn’t even see into the car, suggesting it sure must have been tough to see
out
of it when he was last behind the wheel. It looked like after the Toyota had come steering back into the Elegante parking lot at whatever hour it did, it did so very fresh from whatever it had driven through. The wet mud and debris must have actually slid down from the roof of the Celica and over both the front and back windshields and even the side windows, obscuring them in a uniform layer of pale brown, hardened earth crust. It reminded Jeff of melting snow sliding down a warm car when it comes to a stop, only this stuff wasn’t going to melt away that easily.

He steadied himself in an upright position next to the car. Jeff pounded his left fist twice into the driver’s door, and with a puff of dust, a mini avalanche fell off the Celica, enough to expose the door’s handle and lock. With some effort, gently sliding his key in and out of its slot, he was able to work it into place and turn it.

Flushed with sweat and increasingly weakened by the lack of anything other than the lingering booze in his body, Jeff now had a one-track mind. He was hell-bent on getting inside that car, mainly for its comfortable, familiar seat. With one hard, steadfast pull on the handle, the blanket of dirt and mud began to crumble and tear away around the door frame, making a sound that reminded Jeff of an axed tree as it first begins to break and succumb to gravity. The tearing, crumbling sound finally gave way to the creaking sound of the car door moving on its hinges, and it began to swing completely open. As it did, Jeff was sure he saw a brief flash of light inside the car, which quickly winked back out like a dying light bulb.

The interior of the car, Jeff found, was a slight departure from the exterior in that it wasn’t trashed completely. But it was pretty bad. It looked like someone had taken a dry, clean paintbrush and dabbed it onto the outside of the car while the mud was still fresh and had simply given the interior a quick once-over. Every grain of that sand-colored muck and mud stood out on Jeff's black interior, completing his feeling of anguish about what to do next.

Overcome with dizziness and now despair, Jeff collapsed into the Celica’s driver’s seat, which had a damp feeling to it. What now? Did he simply act natural, go extract $100 from an ATM and get change at a convenience store — all quarters — and spend the next two days at a self-serve car wash in Albuquerque? And what then? Act like it was nothing and just head home?

Sometimes, life had a way of ignoring tough questions and replacing them with even tougher ones.

As Jeff sat in the darkened car’s interior, afraid to turn the key in the ignition for fear that it would be the final straw for his sanity if it didn’t start, the flash of light came again, and he wasn’t surprised to see it was the GPS, still mounted to the windshield (Jeff was already in the habit of taking the unit off its mount, putting it in its case and then under his seat after every use, and was shocked he wouldn’t have remembered last time ...). It just stirred to life all by itself, leaving him sitting there, stunned, for the second time in the last 20 minutes, as he listened to the monotone drone of the woman’s voice.

“
War … War … War … War …”
was all that came out of the speaker, over and over again.

- 6 -

A scene played in Jeff’s mind that he knew later was a memory.

The ominous, computerized voice of the GPS and the frightening word it repeated had lulled the panic-stricken man into a terrified trance, causing his brain to press PLAY on a reel of mental footage that he recognized the second it came to him, despite the fact it seemed to depict some other time and some other place he’d never been. No longer able to judge whether he was awake and hallucinating, asleep and dreaming or somewhere in between, Jeff would come to know it was his own eyes that had recorded into his brain this otherworldly scene.

It was like a dream in that it was obviously a mere glimpse of a much longer scene, one that had now been heavily edited and one to which he knew not the beginning or the end. It was unlike a dream in its appalling detail — the volume of the cries of despair and the mixed aromas of gasoline, sweat and human anguish made it not only tangible but unforgettable.

Men, women and even children were being herded, driven by hundreds of trenchcoat-clad figures on horseback. The horsemen pushed the masses of unarmed, scrambling, tripping and screaming figures with relentless strides. There were no arguments, no words being exchanged between any of them, only sounds of hopelessness coming from the horde, as each person tried to keep from becoming one of those at the back of the pack, closest to the charging, rearing horses. But those who scrambled too quickly seemed to be the first to get tangled in the struggle and fall, which appeared to prove fatal in this chase.

The skies above were pink-blue in desert dawn, but were obscured in bands of thick, black smoke that trailed off toward some unknown blaze in the distance. The scene would have been fit for a Civil War era painting or maybe even a scene from the Crusades, if not for the backdrop.