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Asphalt hummed in the grooves of the tires as they sailed down the I-25. Tired desert grass blurred past the passenger's window, and the engine thrummed on cruise control. The radio sat on an FM country station, volume turned low enough down to just miss the lowest twangs of slide guitar under the highway hum. She has a book open in her lap; a gas station dime romance with mealy pages that smelled faintly of menthol. She had no bookmark, and her progress through the shallow plot was marked by a trail blazed with dog eared corners. It was a book abandoned as she leaned her temple against the glass, watching Colorado disappear behind them in a seventy mile-an-hour blur. The sun was setting behind the mountains that loomed to the west, on the driver's side, so she stared at the darkening plains as they rolled out eastward, grass slowly fading into indistinct spines.
She heard the snap of a sunflower seed beside her, and she knew his mind was churning. He would suck on the salt, then snap it open with his teeth, work out the seed and dispose of the shell. It helped him think, comforted him like soul food, childhood havens. He would be thinking of where to go next, what to do, what name he would use in the next town. Peter? Neil? Tony? She had made fun of him once for his taste in names, and told him that the next time they went undercover she would get to pick. She had had little desire to reiterate 'Pee-tree, like the dish, not pet-ree what sounds like petty.' She had not imagined playing names like this. Arcadia and Rob and Laura Petrie were a far off world.
The headlights illuminated the road before them, all fluorescent ghost-light on yellow stripes. The white Alberta license plate of the car ahead reflected back at them -- 'Wild Rose Country', it advertised. They were going north, going home, perhaps. Home to family and familiar surroundings.
The country station slide guitar twanged, soft enough to sound muted in the air, and the sunflower seeds snapped and the road hummed underneath the tires. She turned her head to look at him. The red glare of the setting sun forced her to a squint. A train, coal-laden, trundled southward farther on his side. He kept only one hand on the wheel, elbow on the window sill, the other hand buried in the crinkling bag of sunflower seeds bought at the pharmacy in the last town. He had stood with her in the aisle, sunflower bag in basket, while she fingered the loops of coloured synthetic hair jutting out beneath boxes of dye. He would miss the red, he said, but there was never a question about dying it. The hand grazing the small of her back had told her enough. His support, his agreement. That was how it had always been. Words were for debates and theories and clarification. A subtle touch, a glance, were things just for the two of them. He had sat on the edge of the tub with her in their run-down motel room, paid for in cash. She had leaned over the basin for him, under the buzzing, humming yellow bathroom light (speckled on the bottom with dead flies), and let him rinse the dye out with the room's ice-bucket full of warm water. He had smoothed the hair off the back of her neck with a hand as red made way for blonde. Those hands had been smooth once - hands of a desk jockey, an academic. No longer. He couldn't afford it.
He seemed pensive as she looked at him. He was far away, and sucking sunflower seeds was not an action so much as a subconscious tic. Ten years had marked his face. She could barely remember the smooth youth he had had when she met him, except for the outdated photo on his FBI badge. It had been presented to her at his funeral -- a gesture normally reserved for widows or family. He was so young in that photo, but then they had both been.
He set a sunflower seed between his teeth and caught her looking, and his eyebrows raised, eyes flickering from the road over to her and back. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and so sat in that pothole between looking homeless and the stubble on his face being recognizable as a nascent beard. He had decided to grow it out for the same reason she had dyed her hair – look different. Be different. It wasn’t enough yet, but in a month it would be what it needed to be. She could still see the familiar shape of his jaw underneath. For now he was still just a scruffier version of the person she knew.
She asked him how much change his thoughts were worth, and he smiled and told her more than a penny, but less than cab fare. He had sidestepped the intention. He promised her that they would stop at a motel in Denver for the night, or one of the smaller towns that came up first. She could already smell it. All motels had a smell, and like the furnishings all ran into each other, anonymous and universal, so was the smell – always lightly of must and undusted corners, lightly of cigarettes, lightly of things done between the sheets in the dark. Sometimes the overwhelming miasma of canister air freshener lurched into the air at the stir of fabric, choking and mustard gas insidious. The bathroom would smell of Pine-Sol and the fluorescent would hum.
The image was so clear – she had lived it a thousand times. If she closed her eyes she could see so clearly – a thousand times sitting on her musty motel bed with the blue glow of a laptop screen, and shiny photographs and lab reports strewn across the sheets. Her hair had been shorter, then. A thousand times, she would be writing her findings, always rational, always worded just so, such that the unjustifiable could be explained away, such that the laws of science could be preserved whole cloth for one more day in the face of the unnatural, worded such that their credibility was never in question, such that they, that he, never appeared foolish in his beliefs. A thousand times she would hear him pacing in his own room when she laid herself to sleep, his brain all insomnia and manic energy. It was his way. Motel walls are thin.
The rhythms of the universe had played themselves out in motel rooms as she lay with her eyes closed – she had learned to listen for them over the years. The drip-drip of water out of the faucet playing out the formulae of gravitational physics, the mathematics of surface tension breaking and holding and breaking, making water into a metronomic drum. The mechanical, humming drone of an air conditioner, spitting swirling fluid dynamics eddies into the air, spiraling Coriolis hurricanes. Doppler effect cars going past on the road, singing their wind high, and then lowering their pitch as they sped by, compressing and expanding sound waves, like light waves in space, redshifting and blueshifting. The air rushing in and out of her lungs like a bellows and the beat of her heart intertwined in one medical process – erythrocytes oxygenating and speeding flash-flood quickly to her veins, keeping her alive. His pacing in the other room was rhythmic and predictable as rain on a window, comforting; the one-two of his feet like a heartbeat. There was a universe of patterns and waves and rhythms all in a motel room, just as the patterns in the car – harmonics in the hum of the tires, simple Newtonian laws in the physics of their motion. The lazy tap of his fingers on the steering wheel. These were sure things, solid things, things measured not in terms of imagination, but in mathematical and biological certainties. Sureties. Universal constants. Such things comforted her.
The sun was behind the mountains, and the sky was creeping darkness from the east. The text of her dime novel would be unreadable.
The radio started a new song.
She was sure every country song was about driving, always a Chevy or a Ford, always big American-make trucks. She always imagined them a faded blue, and rusting. She mentioned this to him, and he smiled, tapped the dashboard and offered to change the channel. He flicked the dial experimentally, the air now white noise, now a few bars of a top-40 hit, now a few words of an out of context talk radio station, now ads in Spanish, each somehow muted, muffled by the air and the low volume.
She closed her book, stuffed it into the glove compartment, crossed her feet at the ankles. She had done the same thing every day in their cramped little office – crossed her ankles. She would sit in her spot in front of his desk (his desk, their desk, the desk) and cross her ankles, and he would sit behind, giving her any range of expressions as he played their usual game of exchanges. He would let out a little, she would push back, they would dance around the subject until he finally put forth the clinching piece of evidence, or would spill out his theory, always one or two steps more absurd than she could have imagined by herself. He would have raised eyebrows and a smile behind steepled hands, or a pencil twiddled between his fingers, the eraser pressed to his lips like it was keeping in a fun secret, a coy expression and swiveling his chair side to side lazily, or he would be leaning languidly against that desk, waving an arm in gesticulation as he clicked through his carefully-prepared slide shows, catching her eyes while he enthused about the case. The projector would hum and clack with new slides next to her. Dust motes would swirl, candescent, in the light caught between them.
She reached up to the radio and nudged his fingers out of the way, turning the volume all the way down. The only sound was the road under the tires and the rush of the wind. The sky was dark now, and they were lit only by the indirect glow of their headlights on the road. A car would speed down the other side of the road intermittently, and she would see the yellow ghost-light cast him into shifting relief; deep shadows cutting mobile angles into his skin – and then it would be gone.
His eyes flickered over to her again. He asked her if she was alright – said that she seemed distant. Kettle meet pot. She did feel distant, as if she was watching herself from over her own shoulder. She felt detached from herself, as if she was moving through fog. The smallest details felt sharp and clear, as important as galaxies, but the world felt somehow unreal. She was having a hard time seeing the forest for the litter of leaves on the ground. She supposed it was a sort of distance, this feeling, but the word felt unsatisfactory, insufficient. She shook her head. She was fine. She’d seen his own distance, though, how far away his mind wandered sometimes. He’d taken to chewing his nails when he had no sunflower seeds to occupy his hands, and over the past days she had seen him with his thumbnail between his teeth at intervals, eyebrows drawn together, thinking. He’d been making tight, drawn faces, sucking his teeth and pursing his lips while he thought, a million cogs turning simultaneously. Sometimes he would look so tense, every movement reading like springs drawn out too far; but then sometimes he would let out a great heave of breath, and he would look almost limp, deflated – so very, very tired, and older than his years.
She thought of the bright young thing on his FBI badge again. So long ago; that was back when she had a sister, and they each had both sets of parents, and she still went out on dates and had a life with her friends outside of their work together. So long ago, before the way the pipes above their heads in their basement office creaked in the winter became more familiar to her than the hum of her oven, before she spent almost more time in motel beds than she spent in her own. Before her entire life and social circle collapsed in a tumble of simultaneous paranoia and disinterest until he was the only friend left to her name. Midday calls from friends on the weekend, chatting about life, became midnight calls from her partner about killer cockroaches, the Loch Ness monster and vampirism. Some days she resented him for it, for everything. She knew she had chosen her path, and she would choose it again if given a do-over. Most days she knew he resented himself for everything far more than she could ever resent him. He had a knack for self-flagellation. Jewish guilt, he’d quipped once, on one of his down days when it was all he could do to sit on his sofa with his head in his hands. She’d parried with the notion of Catholic guilt and made him dinner that didn’t come in or from a box. What a pair they made.
She reached across the car again and took his hand in her own, felt his fingers twitch for a moment before closing around hers. He heaved that breath and released it into the aether, and she watched him relax, almost imperceptibly, back into the seat. She felt his thumb brush across her knuckles, and she turned her face back to the window. The moon was a stark silver circle over the plains. She remembered the halo of atmospheric ice it would get in the middle of a Virginia winter, when she could stand on a sidewalk at night in her jacket, clouds of breath illuminated orange by street lamps and headlights, the winter chill raking her cheeks and her nose red. She had turned her face to the sky to see the moon over Alexandria, a silver dollar wreathed in a hazy winter crown of its own light. It had had a white glow over the ice on the Potomac, and his hand had been a warm anchor under the lamplight. It was too dry for a moon halo in a Colorado summer.
A sign rushed past. Castle Rock, it said – the name of the next town. A great rock loomed on her side of the road, a great electric star lit up on its summit, like a great granite Christmas tree. It was gaudy, but somehow she knew she would remember it – a flash of light shaped into a star on the top of a mountain. She didn’t know why.
He pulled off of the highway and into the town, the Alberta car continuing its northward, homeward journey, and the gold glow of life slowly filtering in through the windows. She watched the shops roll by; simple restaurants bustling with people lit by cheap tabletop candles or dimmed overhead lamps. She held on to his hand, somehow feeling the need for that anchor even more now, surrounded by people, than when it was just the two of them in the highway silence – suddenly life pressed in on all sides, and that golden glow burning into her head. They would stop at another anonymous hotel (probably some yellowing Super 8 again) and eat dinner at one of these restaurants – or maybe they would order pizza and sit cross-legged on the bed with the television on static, chat about nonsense. She knew he would fiddle with her hair – he hadn’t gotten over it being blonde yet – and they would settle for the night.
She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed it back.
The Castle Rock star glowed behind them.
Tomorrow it would start all over again.