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It’s sometime in January. Cold. The air is bittersharp, spearmint and vomit. Yellow as the cough drops he stocks the linen cabinet with. He nods off a couple times. Wakes up shivering, near freezing. Swallows a handful of 714s like m&ms. Paces the room, the floor shifting in vertigo. Laminate, mattress, laminate. The vinyl in the kitchenette.
Checks his notes. Like he might see something he missed.
Lights a cigarette.
Reads Industrial Society and Its Future.
Another cigarette.
All the experts say Ted Kaczynski has an IQ of 167. Harvard graduate, mathematician, PhD. Goodness knows why he turned out a fruitcake, they say.
He thinks about it for a little while, digests. The pills turn to dust in his stomach. Briefly he experiences the sharp clarity of quaaludes, but it’s mostly fuzziness, like mildew coalescing in the corners of moth-eaten rooms. No kidding he turned out how he did, surrounded with stupidity, unable to do anything about it. So, then, it’s a question of maybes. Maybe he wanted to expunge human idiocracy (total annihilation of certain undesirable anthropomorphic idiosyncrasies like comfort and dependency). Maybe he really did want an anti-industrial insurrection (global unearthing of televisions and rotary phones and automobiles and toaster ovens).
Or maybe he just wanted to get away from people.
Probably, yeah.
Marty says, “You wanna stop somewhere?”
They’re surrounded by miles of wet earth. Bayous clustered with bald cypress, patches of air black with blow flies. Mud so red it looks like blood, crows sweeping overhead. Murders.
“Alright.”
They pull up to a fast-food joint on an empty road, a road between roads. A sort of purgatory. Underfoot, the gravel is a million skinned knees, sluicing off in pale layers. Reminiscent of limestone, calcium carbonate, strata in reverse. Subsoil bleached bone white. Liminalities he’s seen in dreams.
Despite himself, he thinks about Dora’s mother as they settle into a booth in the corner of the joint. To him she is both distinct and unremarkable for her self-flagellation: veins miles of bad road; pustulant eyes like maggots protruding from flesh; curlicue nails, yellow as jaundice. She said she’d worked in dry cleaning for twenty years. The chemicals, she said.
It comes on suddenly: sickness in his stomach. Irrepressible nausea. He throws his half-eaten sandwich in the trash and pushes a finger into the leather booth like he’s probing a wound. Marty watches, says nothing.
Occasionally, he tastes blood in his mouth. Imagines he’s licking the salt rim off a cocktail glass, lips dry as mimosas. Just as often, he tries to explain to Marty that the world’s not just what you see. There’s a whole cast of other senses, conducting the universe on puppet strings.
Marty, because he’s Marty, says, “Yeah, you spew out loads of crud like that, yet you can’t possibly conceive of higher meaning in the world. Funny how that works.”
This is a ridiculous statement for many reasons. “You can’t feel something that don’t exist, Marty,” he says. “And even if you could, it wouldn’t do nobody any good.”
Marty huffs. “That’s a crock of shit,” he says. His nostrils flare like a horse. “You know, you… you can’t even consider the possibility that you might be wrong, can you? You’re so goddamn sure of yourself.”
“There you go, man, you got it,” he says. “I am sure that I wouldn’t want to live in a world that lets girls like Dora be bumped off and strung up. But I happen to, anyway.”
“Fine,” Marty says, “you win. Everyone’s a fucking moron and you win. Happy?”
Nah, man, he wants to say. Doesn’t.
After a while they’ve gotten out past the swamps. The air tastes green and Marty’s buzzing with so much nervous energy he can feel it through his corduroy. Marty must not be able to keep it to himself because he starts talking again, this time real soft and hitched. “Christ. I didn’t mean it like that, guy. I didn’t mean… I, I just—you know, sometimes you’re a real bug up my butt.”
That’s the extent of Marty’s grace. But it’s true. He does try. That’s more than what can be said about most.
“You think a man can love two women at once?” Marty’s voice is quiet, a little neurotic. For once, Marty’s not driving.
He has his eyes on the road but his mind is wetting its whistle. There’s a hellstrip in the corner of his vision that looks like a shred of trackmarked skin. He thinks about Dora’s old lady, pinched as a raisin, flattened by misery. He thinks about Dora’s ex-husband, face like a bulldog, flesh crawling with cheap ink. Ugly ass motherfucker.
“I don’t think man can love.”
He keeps his eyes on the road. Watches the world turn yellow, whiskey-smeared. Fuzzy at the edges.