Telemachus Rising (7 page)

“Good for you.”

“I couldn't do it.”

“What?”

“I couldn't do it.  I got back to the elephant and it was still all little kids.  I totally chickened out.  I blew it.  That was my one shot, and I blew it.  Where am I going to find another elephant to ride?”

“Just go to the state fair again!”

“It was the Arizona state fair.  I might never make it out there again.”

“They might have elephants at other fairs.  Maybe that one elephant goes to all of them.”

“Yeah, maybe.  But I still feel like it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I missed it.”

“Man, that's too bad.”

“What can I say?  Bucket list.”

I sighed.  We rode in silence for a couple miles.

“Hey – you said if I came up with a good one, you'd tell me yours.  What was it?”

She looked out the window into the dark.

“I want to have sex in a public place.”

I nodded and gave a little grin.

“Okay.”

She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye and grinned back.  I switched on the radio and we took turns scanning the stations for songs we recognized.  We drove for a while like that without talking.  It was nice.

“What do you think happens when you die?”

I hadn't told her about my dad.  I wondered if she still would've asked if she had known.  It made me realize that we didn't know each other all that well.  We'd seen each other a couple times since the party, and we'd been messaging, but still...  Either way, I wasn't sure how to answer.

“I don't know.  What brought that up?”

“Bucket lists.”

“Oh.  Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“So what do you think?”

“I guess that depends on whether you think people have souls or not.”

“So what do you think?!”

“Do we have to talk about this?”

She seemed a little miffed.

“Fine, you don't have to answer.”

I felt bad for bringing the mood down.

“I don't know what happens when we die.  I want to believe there's something more, but there isn't any scientific reason to believe that you're more than just your brain.”

“That's rough.”

“Depressing, right?  Maybe there's more.  There's so much we don't know about how the brain works, who's to say the part that's you doesn't still exist on some level.”

“Doesn't sound like you're very religious.”

“I was raised religious, I just...  What about you?  What do you think?”

“I like the idea of reincarnation, but I don't believe in it.”

“What do you believe in?”

“I think good people go to heaven, but I don't believe you sprout wings or walk around on clouds or anything.  I think bad people just die.”

“No hell?”

“Not existing is bad enough.  Besides, I don't really believe in the devil.  I don't think people need a supernatural excuse to make bad decisions.”

I nodded, and a few more miles of pavement passed beneath us before I spoke again.

“I don't know if I believe it, but there is an idea I've been kicking around lately.”

“Let's hear it.”

“Time is relative, right?  So right now, today, is no more or less real than tomorrow or yesterday.  It's just a matter of perspective.  If that's true, then why does today seem so much more important than tomorrow, and why does tomorrow seem so much more important than yesterday?  Yesterday feels like it's dead and gone, but tomorrow is still full of promise.  Our perception of time is all messed up.  Sometimes it feels like time flies, and other times it feels like it drags.  And when you're really familiar with something, whether it's driving a usual route home, or cooking a meal, or hitting a baseball, you magically have more time to think while you're doing it than before you knew what you were doing.  I barely have time to blink when a major league pitcher throws the ball, but a professional ballplayer has time to see it leave the pitcher's hand, judge how fast it's going, predict where it will cross the plate, start a swing, and adjust that swing to intercept the path of the ball.  Their eyes don't see any faster than mine do.  Light doesn't travel any faster for them than it does for me.”

“You totally lost me.”

“Sorry.  What I'm trying to say is, time itself is different from the way we perceive it.  Maybe our brains are limited.  We can only take in so much information all at once, so time moves at a certain speed.  When we're really familiar with something, we can filter and use the information better, so time slows down.  Same thing if we're really bored and our brains don't have much information to process.  Time slows down.  We have extra processing power left over to notice other things.  If we're more than just our bodies, then dying would set us free from our brains' limitations.  We'd be able to experience time the way it really is, not the way we perceive it now, as human beings.”

“Um...wow.”

“It makes sense in my head, I'm just not explaining it very well.”

“No, I think I see what you're getting at, it just sounds kind of unnecessarily complicated.'

“What makes you say that?”

“Honestly?  It sounds like you picked a conclusion and then found a way to justify it.”

“Fair enough.  I don't even know if I believe it, it's just something I've been thinking about.  I guess I kind of like it.”

“At least it's something different.”

We both went quiet again and let the radio fill the silence.  I continued trying to organize my thoughts so I could explain myself more clearly, but I kept getting tangled up in the reasoning.  Maybe she was right about me starting with the conclusion and working my way backward.  It didn't really matter, though.  I didn't know what the right answer was, and neither did anybody else.

“You know -”

I looked over when she didn't seem to respond.  Her head was resting against the window.  I must've been thinking to myself longer than I'd realized.  It was well past midnight and she was sound asleep.  I'd miss the conversation, but good for her.  It was nice having her asleep next to me.  She looked pretty, half curled up in the seat the way she was.  She didn't wake up when we reached the bridge, even though it was all lit up.

The Mackinac Bridge is long – one of the longest suspension bridges in the world.  There's an open grate section in the middle.  During the day, you can see the water underneath you.  It makes it easier to imagine going over the edge.  In fact, they offer a service for people who are too nervous to drive across – they'll drive your car over the bridge for you.  It's understandable, too.  A woman actually did blow off once.  That's not an urban legend, that really happened.  She had this tiny compact car and went right over the side.  Dead.  It was my first time crossing at night, so the drive was unnerving in a different way.  The whole bridge is five miles long and over five hundred feet high, but it seems even bigger because of the context.  There's nothing on the far side.

My wheels hit solid ground in the upper peninsula, and in minutes we were surrounded by trees.  They cut the woods back from the road to keep people from hitting deer so often, but the trees still swallow you up.  There's nothing in the upper peninsula.  I knew that going in, but it felt different driving out into the wilderness in the dark.  I shut off the radio and drove in silence.  There weren't as many stations to choose from anyway.

I listened to the sounds of the engine and the road.  When I rolled down the window, it was all wind and woods.  Window up or down, it was white noise either way.  It was like having my ears stuffed.  Between the roar of the wind and the trees, I started to feel claustrophobic.  My headlights didn't seem to reach far enough ahead of me.  If a deer ran out into the road, would I be able to see it in time?  What would happen if we had an accident out there in the middle of nowhere?  I could always walk or run somewhere.  What if I broke a leg?  What if I was bleeding?  Mile markers were sparsely placed at best, not to mention road signs, exits.  The trip took on a dangerous edge when I let my mind wander far enough.

I glanced down to check the speedometer and noticed the fuel gauge for the first time in hours.  We had enough gas to keep driving for a while, but it seemed like it'd been a long time since we'd passed the last station.  “Shit.”  Why hadn't I filled up back by the bridge?  We'd left the highway that led toward Canada almost immediately, and the country here had a rough feel to it.  The modern world didn't seem to leave much of a footprint, and I reasoned out that not enough people used these roads to make gas stations profitable.  The locals, if there were any, knew to plan ahead.  I began to wonder if we'd make it.  I reduced our speed to something a little more efficient and tried not to think about getting stranded.  We had a couple gallons, and worrying wouldn't make the fuel last any longer.

I started to relax half an hour later when I saw a sign for a gas station ten miles away.  We would've been fine if it had been thirty.  I had gotten nervous for nothing.  I checked my pocket and found my credit card with a sigh of relief.  What if I'd accidentally left it at home?  God, that would've been rough.  I could've called in the morning, but how would I have explained such a stupid mistake?  It was okay.  We were already coming up on the station and I had my card in hand.  I pulled off at the exit, but had to drive several more miles toward town to find the station.  The further I got from the highway, the more my anxiety grew.  Each mile was more gas, but I reminded myself that we were going to be fine.  I was sure of it.

My confidence melted away when I saw the station.  There were no lights on inside.  I couldn't tell if they were closed for the evening or closed forever.  I had to talk myself down from the ledge.

“It's okay.  They must leave the credit card readers on overnight.  Why wouldn't they?  It's a gas station.  They have to take whatever business they can get.”

My heart was in my throat as I parked next to a pump.  I couldn't see what I was looking for from my seat, so I got out to check.  I realized immediately that I had forgotten we were in the upper peninsula.

There were no credit card readers on the pumps.

A wave of dread washed over me as I got back into the car.  The only consolation was that my passenger was still asleep.  She had no idea we were about to be stranded in the middle of the north woods with an empty tank.  Meanwhile, I had no choice.  We had to keep moving.  The next gas station had to be closer than the last one.  We'd never make it back with what was left in the tank.  Maybe if I had turned around immediately the moment I'd looked at the fuel gauge, but now?  It was no use worrying about what decisions I could've made.  I thought we would make it to a gas station, and we had.  I had been right.  We were sitting at a gas station.  How could I have known they wouldn't have twenty-four hour pumps?  

We headed back toward the on ramp.  My eyes flicked back and forth between the fuel gauge and the road as we traveled along the deserted highway.  A couple times I thought I heard the engine misfire, like we were about to run out of gas.  I'd never run dry in that car.  For all I knew, we were running on fumes.  I reduced speed again.  The car's slower progress added to the suspense as I peered ahead into the darkness, searching for a sign pointing to the next gas station.  Every mile marker had my stomach in knots.  With my window down at our reduced speed, I could hear the noises of the woods over the wind.  I started to feel sick as I ran through the list of things that could go wrong at that point.

The needle on the fuel gauge reached E, but the car kept moving.  I felt a final surge of hope when I remembered that some reservoirs held back half a gallon of gas in reserve, beyond the limit of the fuel gauge.  We weren't safe yet, though.  I breathed a little easier when I saw the next sign for a gas station appear on the shoulder of the road.  Could we make it?  Would the station be closed like the last one if we did?  The engine sputtered as we hit the exit.  I wasn't imagining it this time.  The tank was dry, and that was final.  I gritted my teeth and let the car fly around the off ramp in neutral, touching the brakes as little as possible.  I had no idea when the engine would cut.  I wasn't thinking about the fact that the car would lose power steering if the engine died, but we made it around the curve before that happened.  Skidding off the road into the trees in the middle of the night would've ended more than our road trip at the speed we were going.

As we made the narrow two lane road and the trees blocking our view cleared away, I saw the flood lights of a gas station parking lot in the distance.  The engine was giving one last gasp as it choked on fumes.  I slid the car back into gear and floored the accelerator, but nothing happened.  There was still hope, though.  The station was in sight.  The lights were promising.  The road was flat and straight.

We were going about forty-five miles an hour when the engine died.  I put the car back into neutral and began to pray.  We covered half the distance faster than I had reason to hope.  In the panic of the engine cutting, I had overestimated the distance in my head.  I realized we might just make it.  Our speed dropped more rapidly than I'd expected, but we were still moving.  At that point, I probably could've gotten out and pushed if I really had to.

In the end, there was no reason to worry.  It took some muscle to turn the wheel, but we coasted to a stop right next to a pump.  While there weren't any lights on inside the building, this station had automated credit card readers.  Thank god.  I left the pump running and excused myself to pee in the grass next to the parking lot.  I'd been so preoccupied with having an empty tank, I hadn't noticed my full one.  The road trip gods had smiled on us.  I swore to myself that I'd buy a gas can as soon as we got home.  I'd never go anywhere without a couple of extra gallons in the trunk.  I steered us toward Copper Harbor both relieved and re-energized.

It began to get lighter as I drove.  The black of night turned into a deep black blue, then navy.  The stars were less clear, but I could begin to make out the trees that lined the road outside the sweep of our headlights.  My passenger shifted positions, sat up, stretched.