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 green rushes off the headlights and is gone just as fast as it appeared, briefly filling everything in your world before it’s back to surprisingly fresh black pavement bespeckled with yellow. Sometimes driving through Pumpernickel 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 had ended 30 miles ago if the interference hadn’t kicked in. It was sharp, not the twitchy magnetism that comes over from a passing truck-held ham. 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 from the gravel 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-to-the-gas, then gone again in an instant. He rolls the knob way down, inching forward.
It sounded more sustained in passing but sitting with it for a while he can start to make out the breaks. Quick breaks, barely perceptible. Dot-Dot-Dot-Dash? Not something for him to make sense of, or any person really. 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 pulsations.
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 he had, 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 kept accelerating through.
That dust kept silently breezing forward after the crash, or maybe it was the radiator too. His momentum was gone, but not his wind’s.
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 went to the back seat and pulled the scope off the .30-30, pointing it at his trail of Nevada moon sand. Nothing much to see on his way back to the highway. His foot brushed a directional line and he turned 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.
Pointing 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 scope down, he realized that there were no more stars in the sky. The moon had gone too. All that remained were the dancing dots of 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.
______
Alex Lei is a Baltimore-based writer, filmmaker, and editor at BRUISER Magazine.
[GO HOME.]