by Alex Lei
Desert valleys give way to night sky when there’s enough moon. Blue hues emerge from Sawzall mountain tops, dancing in what your eyes can barely see. Luminescent greens rush off the headlights and are gone just as fast as they appeared, briefly filling everything in your world before it’s back to surprisingly fresh black pavement bespeckled with yellow. Driving through Pumpernickel, sometimes your mind doesn’t play tricks on you, and the dark rocks do make words across the white sand.
“HELLO”
“YOU ARE HERE”
“PEACE AND LOVE”
Even though he wanted to stop for gas in Wells he pushed all the way to Elko. That tank would take him clean past Reno, over Tahoe, and he might even get back before dawn. He checks the brights. Dust takes over everything even when it's not windy, not that he can tell now without branches swaying to life. Vision always gets worse whenever you switch the headlights. Whatever you had before always seemed better. He can’t see anything back on the low beams either.
He wouldn’t have known the album ended 30 miles ago if the interference hadn’t kicked in. It was sharp, not the twitchy magnetism from a passing truck-held ham coming over the speakers. More sustained. Loud.
It wasn’t apparent how hard he hit the brakes until he saw the tire marks peeking out of the red as far as his taillights could go. It is silent again. What is kicked up makes no noise while it settles back around the car's trail. Backing up slowly doesn’t do much either, just the sound of rubber on rock, nothing through the tapedeck. He pushes the nob to the right as he keeps rolling back, hoping for something to trail in. It bursts his ears, causing a reflexive foot-on-the-brakes. It was gone again in an instant. He rolls the knob way down, inching forward til he got its signal.
It sounded more sustained in passing but sitting with it for a while he can start to make out the pulsations. Quick breaks, barely perceptible. Dot-Dot-Dot-Dash? Not something for him to make sense of, or any person really. Much too fast to keep track of. It’d be better if he could record it, but even then it seems like a little digital device might miss some nuance in the rapid beats.
Luckily the highway had no guardrails. The few feet keeping the asphalt from the desert floor was enough for most. There’s not supposed to be anything to see past the road signs and the mile markers. Even the trains didn’t have anything to look at besides their straight tracks. Speculators never found much, at least not enough to stick around, and the true crime podcasters could only tell you about what wasn’t there—the people who drove alone at night and the tall tales of hitchhikers from nowhere.
Timidly at first, then with vigor, he ran the car left and right around the bigger boulders until he could identify a line in the airwaves. It never got louder or softer, only off and on as he found his true direction in an acute angle from the real road. He ran over the railway tracks with more speed than he thought, violently thumping the car over the dirt like a North Atlantic wave. The suspension rocked every wheel whooping through the valley, the sound being his only compass in his self-made dust cloud he accelerated through.
That dust kept silently breezing forward after the crash, or maybe it was the radiator too. The car’s momentum was gone, but its wind carried on.
The beam of his flashlight revealed more metal than just his fangled grill. No rock had beached him. It was cylindrical, broken at its base with a bulbous head roughly painted like the endemic argillite. Behind its cracked stem were bands of cables, fiberoptic in thickness and, when he shone the flashlight down the opening, falling infinitely into the ground. He opened the passenger door and reached for the .30-30, pointing its scope at his trail of Nevada moon sand. Nothing much to see on his way back to the highway. His foot brushed a directional line. He turned 180 around to point past the broken node. Just dark flecks on the white surface as the ground gave way to the black mountains. A world of stones and sand.
Moving the scope up past the peaks he saw an enclave of black in the blue, falling through the sky. A cross coming down to the hills. No light, no noise, just a winged absence following the same path in the heavens that he had found on the earth. He watched it disappear over the jagged horizon.
Putting the rifle down, he realized that there were no more stars in the sky. The moon had gone too. All that remained were the dancing dots made by eyes without enough light to see. Behind him, a new line of dust is rising along his path. No lights, just another soft silent cloud coming to his red and white stretch of night.
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Alex Lei is a writer, filmmaker, and bartender in Baltimore. He is the nonfic editor at BRUISER.
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