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I.
Look, I’ll get to the moral of the story right up front, so you don’t have to wait for it:
Never let a man negotiate deals with the gods for you, especially when it involves things like “ever seeing your home again” and “being alive”.
Also, don’t die.
See? Right up front. Both things I should have known before shit went from bad to worse.
II.
The underworld looks a lot like New Mexico.
That said, so did life, not that I remember all that clearly. You forget things, down here, like who you were before. But I’ll tell you what I remember:
Dive bars, mostly. Always work to be had, bartending or waitressing, especially when you’ve got a cute face and a grabbable ass, and my ass is pretty great. Everyone there is either passing through, or burnouts who never got out.
But look, I got out! All I had to do was step on a rattlesnake, and like the proverbial chicken, got to the other side of the road.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
I fell for a guy who was just passing through. That happened often enough. But this one, I fell hard. His name wasn’t really Orpheus; that was just for the stage. Down here, though, it seems to be a real enough name.
My name’s not really Eurydice, either, but that also doesn’t seem to matter. You don’t give your real name around here, even if you do remember it.
Orpheus, though. Johnny. He played guitar like he could make the thing sing, and damn if it didn’t try for him. He’d set up in the corner to play and you felt like you got the last ticket to the best show in town. I got into trouble a few times for giving him free bourbon, but I didn’t mind. The way he sang turned my legs to rubber. Sometimes he would sing just for me after we made love in the back of his pickup, looking up at all the stars in the desert night sky, and I felt like I could see the whole universe. Like there was more to it all than just a dead end off the endless highway.
Johnny kept passing through town, gigs from Texas to Los Angeles. I started going with him sometimes, thinking I’d leave when I caught him with some other girl after a show, but there was never anyone else.
No, there was just the music, and in the end, that might’ve been worse. He was always leaving, chasing down stages, going where he thought he’d be inspired to write new songs. I never got as far. Somebody had to make money, and I hadn’t paid off my trailer yet, so I was the one stuck behind the bar.
Maybe if he had been home with me, I wouldn’t have been walking to the gas station for lotto tickets and stepped on a rattlesnake and died like roadkill on the side of the highway.
As it turned out, there was something of the infinite universe in his music, enough to let him come down here and bargain with the god of the underworld to let me come back. He’s probably the sweetest boy I’ve ever met. Smarter than most, too. But I shouldn’t have let him do the bargaining. The only way Hades decided to let us go was if Orpheus went out first, and I followed him, and if he looked back to see if I was following, I’d be lost forever. And because it was a trial from the gods, I couldn’t just hook my finger into his back pocket and go with him. No, we’re both in the dark. I can’t see him. I don’t remember what he looks like. I have to hitch a ride out of hell and hope I’ve picked the right man to go with. And if I stop moving, the road disappears, and my ticket out with it.
So that’s how I got here, thumb out on the side of Route 66’s detour through the land of the dead, having just thrown my suitcase out of the window of a moving car and then myself with it.
Don’t be like me, girls.
III.
I wonder how Johnny’s doing. What his road looks like. One of these losers is him, so I guess his journey involves picking up every hitchhiker he sees and hoping it’s me. I don’t know how he’s supposed to not look back at me before he drives out of the underworld once he’s seen me and knows it’s me.
I wonder if that means he has to decide one of his hitchhikers is me and the exit ramp appears and he finds out if he was right once he’s out. Am I stuck here if he picks wrong, hitching forever, living in hope when I’m already damned?
This is the land of the dead, this is the underworld. There’s no reward or punishment awaiting you when you die. But that? That would make this place hell.
I don’t even know how to think about him knowing me so little that he couldn’t tell he was taking the wrong girl home.
So I won’t.
IV.
After hitching with several men going nowhere, I was getting impatient. You can only stare at the unending road so long, the driver going on and on and on about how underrated acid rock is, before it’s time to get the fuck out.
I’m sure every girlfriend wants to believe her musician boyfriend is going somewhere, but Johnny actually is. His talent is going to get him his big break, but his travel and determination will get him there faster. So I know I’m looking for someone with that kind of drive and direction.
“Where you going, handsome?” I ask a new man, chin perched on the latest driver’s window —he’s in a van I almost can’t see into— and this driver is the first one not entirely focused on trying to get an eyeful of my tits and ass at once. Like, I know I’m a ghost here, but you can’t stare right through to see both simultaneously.
He’s the first not to say, “Depends where you’re going, sweetheart.” No, he says, “I got a truckload of Coors to get from Texarkana to Georgia in twenty-eight hours.” He pauses, checks his rearview mirror. “But I got room for one more if you help out. My blocker ended up God only knows where, and I need someone to ride shotgun.”
This sounds familiar. Familiar in general or familiar to me, I can’t say, but look, this is a man with a destination, so that sounds good to me.
We’ve been traveling almost twenty minutes when I see flashing lights in the side mirror. “Aw, fuck,” I groan. The last thing I need is Hades’ bloodhound on my tail. I’m desperate enough without its’ three mouths nipping at my heels.
“You’re gonna have to help out, if you’re riding shotgun,” my man at the wheel says.
“Gas, grass, or ass, right?” I ask, grinning. Maybe my suitcase will produce more than just clothes. Some weed wouldn’t hurt.
He grunts. “I don’t got Bandit here to draw him off, so, I mean, you’re riding shotgun. It’s under your seat.”
“Oh!” Hell, that wasn’t what I was expecting. I feel around, and sure enough, I feel a cold metal barrel. I pull it out. It is very much not a shotgun.
I’m not uncomfortable with guns. I grew up shooting cans off the fence with my brother and cousins in the desert. One boyfriend kept a rifle in his trailer to shoot rattlesnakes, and I had to use that a couple times. Even got held up at the gas station once, on a particularly bad date. Could’ve used a gun, for the snake that killed me. Even though this AK-47 might have been overkill.
Also, I don’t have much to fear when I’m already dead, and so is everyone else on this road.
Alright, so, I’m doing this. “You can aim better out the back,” the driver says, so I crawl over a giant sleeping basset hound and around the cases of Coors, brace my foot around a strap on the floor, and pop open the back door.
Yeah, we’re being chased. There’s some traffic, but there’s a police car wildly swerving from lane to lane. A red-faced man with a megaphone leans out the window. “This Sheriff Buford T. Justice, and I demand you pull over right now!”
“Fuck the police!” I scream, and start spraying bullets.
The effect is immediate. Windshields are shattering, steam is shooting out of new holes in cars’ hoods, tires are popping, everyone around us starts skidding and spinning. My driver does some quick maneuvering and I’m glad to have my foot secured so I don’t fall out; we dodge each of the out-of-control cars.
The Sheriff’s car hits the new pileup head on, moving with such speed that it flips right over, landing on the other side of the crashed cars upside down. I can hear the hollering and swearing from where I am, as we drive away.
Once we’ve shaken that hellhound, I pull the door closed and make my way back to the front. “Got him,” I say with satisfaction. “ACAB, am I right?” I put the AK-47 under the seat again. It’s a nice gun, I think my old boyfriend with the rifles told me once that ones with wooden hand guards like that are usually Romanian.
“Hell yeah,” the driver says, and I give him a high five, and the dog some head scratches.
He drops me off at a roadside diner. He’s got a quest of his own; he’s got his own man he’s trying to find. He’s not Johnny, but I wish him the best.
Time to find another ride.
V.
Five rides and six outfits later, I get picked up by an artist. He has a mustache and dresses like he stepped out of some BBC show. I’m pretty sure Johnny is too grunge to ever clean up to this, but since I can’t remember his face, I don’t know. But artsy guy! It feels significant. Right?
He’s a romantic, he tells me, as we get in a boat and he rows us out to the middle of the lake. The poems of Byron and Shelley and Keats, the paintings of William Turner and John Constable. He likes nature, a lot. I’ve done some desert hiking, but frankly I’m not much of an outdoors girl if I can help it. I don’t know if Johnny is, I realize. We’ve talked about touring, we’ve talked about music, we’ve talked about… well, not a lot else, really.
Johnny just gets so passionate about music, you can’t help but be drawn along, and I… I don’t remember if I ever had the chance to get that passionate about anything. I was always so focused on getting through life. Getting through high school, getting through finding a job, getting through my lease, getting through finding another job. I think that’s what attracted me most to Johnny— he wanted to be in the moment he was living in, and when he was there, so did I. I wasn’t just trying to make it to whatever was next and missing the present. And now I’m dead, possibly forever, probably forever, and there are no more things to get to anymore in the land of the dead. You’re just dead forever. It’s always now.
Sometimes I don’t know: is Johnny the only ambition I ever had? Or if, as I attempt to follow him out of this land beyond life, it’s the only thing I know? These are the things a girl thinks about as she’s rowed across a lake after watching a genuinely sweet guy drive away and straight off a cliff.
“You have soulful eyes,” my boat-rower says. “What are you thinking about?”
“Living in the present,” I say with a smile. “Being here with you.”
He blushes prettily, the pink high on his cheeks. Like an alive boy, and my Johnny is alive. But… I’m not feeling anything. I feel like I’m supposed to feel something.
“You can eat the flowers, did you know that?” he says, nodding towards the plants flowering across the surface of the pond. I don’t know much about plants, coming from the desert, it’s all just scrub and cacti and tumbleweeds as far as I know. He plucks one out of the water for me, and holds it out.
It smells so good, like something I can’t quite remember but once was so comforting. I don’t think my mom ever smelled like that, but it feels like she ought to have, when tucking me into bed. I bite into it, and it’s sweet. Before I know it, I’ve eaten the whole thing, and grabbed another, and then another. “They’re actually the fruit of the plant,” this boy tells me, but I barely notice.
I’m just so comfortable when I lean back in the rowboat, my white dress artfully draped open. I wish getting high felt like this. I can hardly remember what I was doing, what I was striving for; I can just be beautiful for this pretty man who wants to sketch me.
The day is so pleasant and the sun so warm that I’m starting to fall asleep, listening to him go on about Percy Shelley being convinced he would die in a boating accident. But there’s something bothering me, under it all, and I wish it would go away. I just want to nap here, in this beautiful day, with this beautiful boy, and forget it all. I don’t have to worry about tomorrow, or what happens next, just stay here in this moment…
This isn’t Johnny.
The thought snaps me right out of the pleasant haze I’ve been in. How could I think he was? Johnny wasn’t obsessed with old dead poets. Not like this. He wanted to sing about stories bigger than worlds, sing about old gods and their follies, about the seasons going by while you demand to make them stay for you. About summer, eaten bite by bite, days bursting in your mouth like the juice of pomegranate seeds.
I wobble to my feet, unable to balance in the boat. “Take me back!” I cry; have I already been off the road too long? It feels like we’ve been here an eternity, totally blind to time passing. “I have to get back to the road, you have to take me back!”
My outburst surprises him, and he tries to stand to calm me, and that’s when the boat tips right over.
Luckily the pond is shallow. All his supplies get waterlogged, and he scrambles to catch them all before they float away as I find my footing. I try to pull my top back into place but give up; everything is sodden. He follows behind me as I tromp out of the lake, all pleasant feelings gone.
My suitcase is waiting on the shore; I can’t believe I let go of it. It has a nice dry outfit for me, and I change behind a tree into a fresh set of short-shorts and a crop top, and slip on a pair of heels, their heels digging into the grass. I abandon my wet clothes: what do I care? There’s always something new in the suitcase.
“Which way is the road?” is the last thing I say to this man, this lure off the path I was to stay on. He points, wisely keeping his mouth shut.
I make it back to the road, just as a truck with a tree growing out of the back comes over the horizon. I hold my thumb out, and try to get in the right car once again.
VI.
The road goes on and on. I’m not moving every second; that much is a small mercy. There are something like days and nights, though they’re not on some 24-hour schedule that lines up with the sun; they could be seasons, or years, for all I know. Sun rises and sets, sometimes in front and sometimes behind me, like I'm just traveling east and west again and again; the night sky is dark, with no stars in its depths. New clothes appear every time I open the suitcase, and I wish it would give me something more useful than just the ability to be sexy. That I can do on my own. I want a fucking map, maybe. It gives me some crumpled cash, so I go buy a pack of Camels from the motel machine. What the fuck, right? I’m already dead, what are cigarettes gonna do, kill me again?
There’s a comfort in knowing the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette, and the attention to breathing in and out while you experience it. Felt that way when I was alive, too, before I quit. Five minutes to just stop jumping to the next thing and live in a single moment.
My search continues; I meet plenty of duds. Went back to the motel with a guy I line danced with in the bar, and found out that’s about where he wanted to stop, even though he told me he was driving on through to Reno, and kept smoking his stupid fucking cigarillo in my face even as I asked him what the fuck, and then shit went so sideways his car ended up in the pool and I had to sort someone out with a wrench. Another guy I was so sure was Johnny that I let him kiss me, and as he groped downwards and slobbered on my neck, I found that he definitely was not the man whose hands and tongue used to make me scream.
I can’t tell if sleep makes me less exhausted of the bullshit but I try it anyway, when I can. Reality isn’t quite real here, I have to remember that. One night alone in a motel room, with a gun under my pillow because the thing with the wrench and the pool went bad enough that my suitcase gave me a loaded revolver, I stare at the ceiling for ages, unable to fall asleep, watching the headlights of passing cars move across peeling paint. The thought that one of them could be Johnny’s keeps me awake, but I can’t think like that about every single car.
So I count sheep. I remember getting as far as four hundred and thirty.
Later when my door is kicked open, the cheap wood splintering in the frame, a guy I left sleeping in a bathtub as I escaped out the window is faced with me, my revolver, and the glowing eyes of an enormous, seemingly unending herd of sheep.
When the screams, both human and animal, finally die down, I dare to step out of the room, barrel first. There’s nothing but a parking lot empty of any life, and a sooty black streak on the concrete sidewalk. I don’t think that man will be keeping sharks or anything else in his pool anymore.
I bitch about this as I sit in the sidecar —sideshoppingcart— of a biker. He’s definitely not Johnny, that I’m sure of, but I gotta vent sometimes.
Then one morning, I open the suitcase to find a pair of roller skates.
VII.
I have to dive and roll out of another loser’s car, and another one doesn’t come along right away, and I don’t know what to do. So I put on the skates. Keep on rolling, right?
This is not the rate of speed I am used to going, but I’m not too shabby on skates, at least on the parts of the asphalt that aren’t totally cracked and fucked up. Some of the towns I’ve lived in over the past few years had a skating rink, and not a lot else, so sometimes I’d go there and wish for a roller derby league to join.
Maybe if I get out of here alive, I’ll go somewhere there’s a roller derby league.
I’m rolling past a mailbox and trashcan, out in the middle of god damned nowhere, not a driveway to be seen, and a garbage truck starts rumbling up, the first vehicle I’ve seen in hours. It slows down, but I guess the driver sees no trash in the can, cause he doesn’t stop.
And then, like lightning, certainty strikes me: Johnny’s driving this truck.
I don’t know how I know it’s him. I’ve been looking for guys with destinations, guys with something to sing about, guys who don’t stop moving. Cause that’s what Johnny was to me, from the first time he stopped in my diner. He was life, a life I wasn’t living. He was following a dream, because he had a dream. He was stopping in the moment to look at a galaxy of stars out above the dark horizon in the desert. He was seeing moments in life that were worth singing about, not because nobody had ever lived them before, but because he looked at them like they meant something. He left his small town and hit the road, never looking back, and never getting caught in an identical dump to the one he came from.
I hopped in his car all those times because I wanted to live like that.
Johnny’s driving this truck, and I can’t hop in, because he’ll look over and see me and it’s all over. Also I can’t hop up that high in skates. But I can see the way out of here like it’s printed on a map.
I’m gonna skitch right outta hell.
I skate as fast and furiously as I can to catch up, and I grab hold of that trash truck’s bumper. It starts picking up speed, and when the rumbling dies down enough that I think he can hear me, I shout: “Orpheus, it’s me! It’s Eurydice! Keep your EYES on the FUCKING ROAD!”
“Eurydice?!” he calls out, disbelief and mingled joy. It’s my name; it’s not my name; it doesn’t matter, because sometimes a name is who you are and sometimes it’s what you wear to walk through the world, and that name is just like one of the little outfits that comes out of my suitcase. The fact that it’s him using it is what matters.
For the first time that I’ve seen on this endless highway, an exit sign appears on the side of the road.
I’m laughing in joy, my hair blowing in the wind as the truck picks up speed and I rush over the asphalt on my skates, faster than I could ever go on my own as I hold onto the side. It’s our way out, at last. Johnny, Orpheus, pulls to the right, taking the ramp off the highway towards the world of the living.
We’re gonna beat this. We’re gonna beat Hades. My man did it.
I’m so caught up in my triumph that I don’t see him turn his head until our eyes meet in the driver’s side mirror.
It’s him. It’s him. My Orpheus, his curly hair and his green eyes, and his soft lips that I’d know in any world. How could I have forgotten his face? It’s as familiar as my own. I know nothing so well as the way he looks at me.
He has looked back at me, at the threshold of life, and we have failed.
It would have been better if he had just punched me in the stomach. All the air goes out of my lungs, and I can’t draw breath. The wind whips tears from my face as fast as my eyes make them. He failed me. All he had to do was keep his eyes looking forward. That’s all that was asked of him, just keep your eyes in front of you. Keep your eyes on the fucking road.
And he couldn’t even do that much.
Fuck my life. Fuck my life. Always fucked by incompetent men.
My hands start slipping and I’m losing my grip on the truck. It’s speeding up. One hand slips, and no matter how hard I grip it, the other one goes too. I trip, and my skates go out from under me. I fall forward and eat shit as the truck disappears in a cloud of dust.
It hurts, it hurts so much I can’t breathe. I don’t even care that I’m in the road, I curl into a little ball on my skinned knees and sob. Let a car hit me. What, like there’s so much traffic out of the underworld? We did what no one ever does, and that’s why I am utterly alone on the exit ramp.
Eventually my sobs are just dry heaves, no more tears left in me; eventually I just know I’m a tiny nothing rolled up and looking at the cracked asphalt beneath me. It’s done. It’s over. Orpheus and Eurydice failed again.
I rub my face and sit up, expecting an empty road and nothing but desert. But that’s not what’s there. The sun is setting on the horizon, and my trailer is there in front of me, my dog asleep in the shade beneath it. I stole that dog from a methhead breeder, nearly got shot in the process. I get to my feet, still in skates, and walk towards my home, not sure what’s going on.
The dog wakes up, and runs towards me, jumping on my legs. “Hey, Princess,” I say weakly. “You hungry for dinner?”
I don’t know where I am, if I made it back to life or not. I know Johnny sure as fuck isn’t here, and I don’t want him to be.
My trailer looks the same, and I change into the clothes in my closet; I don’t know what happened to my magic suitcase. I feed the dog. I’m not hungry, and I don’t know if I’m still dead or not. But it’s not like I was really living, back when I was alive, so I’m not sure if it matters.
I sit on the trailer steps and light a cigarette as the stars come out, and I think I want to sit there and watch them. Let the glow in my hand answer the glow in the sky.
Maybe I'll write a song about it.