How to Find Peace at the End of the World Read online

  I idle there for a few more minutes, my mind going through all the various scenarios, worst case, that could happen. In my mind my foot falls solidly on the Beast’s gas pedal. Decades of physics engine based video games have equipped me with just such foresight, or so I like to believe. Well, for one, the Beast could carom off the side of the car and go flying into the mud and protruding rebar of the undressed sections of the freeway. That is possibly the worst outcome. Well, my mind then greets me with another possibility,that I could carom into the protruding rebar after a quarter flip of my car body, the rebar impaling my car through the windshield or the roof of the Beast, leaving me an eternal human skewer. Nice. I begin to wonder if this video game developed capability is a boon or a curse. Although, there is another distinct possibility. And for this I rely on the tens, if not hundreds of Monster truck nights sprinkled throughout my childhood. For this possibility to bear out, I will need suspensions that are just springy enough, for it involves a slight jog to the left right before I leave the ramp, and a glancing of two tires off of a high UPS truck stuck in the mess. Otherwise it is imminent death, either for me or for the Beast, and I’ve already put too much effort into this baby so that if I lost her, it would be a definite emotional set back, to say the least.

  I take in a breath and let it go slowly. I focus and my gaze settles in on that ramp, the exact movements that will produce the outcome I want playing through and through my mind. Enough. I ease down and the Beast lurches forward, toward the ramp. My arms twitch, ready to produce the movement slight enough so that the Beast will present the correct wheel to rebound off the UPS truck and hard enough so that it wont go straight off into the pit of mud and spikes.

  The impact is much harder than I expect. Like this morning I am knocked forward and again hit my head against the steering wheel in the SAME MOTHERFUCKING PLACE and I jerk the wheel much too hard, as if in reaction to the impact. I jerk the wheel so much in fact that I can feel the top heavy Beast tip and go flying wheels forward towards the pit of mud and rebar and I hunker for the eventual impact and impaling.

  But it doesn’t come. The expected worst case. All of a sudden the Beast is flying straight. I feel free floating in my stomach realizing that I’ve presented both wheels to the UPS truck while flying towards it. With a great jarring the wheels strike the truck broadside and the Beast bounces off and tips a little and, I can barely believe it, rocks back onto its over-sized wheels.

  Luck. Luck. Lucky, I say. I put the Beast into park and turn back and check the contents of the rear of the cab: all of the guns have spilled out of the canvas bag but luckily I had the foresight to keep them unloaded. Easily resolvable. Suddenly, the smell of sharp vinegar reaches me, even in the cab of the Beast. CRAP, I think back to the jars of pickled preserves swaddled in the blanket under the bed cover of the truck and smell the pickled whatever and think of the juice leaking all over the other supplies I had brought, primarily clothes. But clothes are replaceable. Where else am I going to find the harbinger signs of my childhood, again, my childhood encased so strongly within boiled and pickled eggs and vegetables and other such embodiments?

  Well, nothing for it. Maybe a few jars are still salvageable. I think nothing of getting out of the Beast because getting out right now would probably mean a nasty spill.

  I kick the Beast back into drive and ease my way forward. Let me say, the first dip is a doozy, the Beasts suspension is possibly only for cosmetic reasons and thus not accustomed to it. I fear that I’ll be a mile deep into this mess and suddenly the suspension will give, but decide to press on.

  The dips and bumps are jarring and a few times the wheel slips out of my grasp and a few times my head smashes against the side panel or the ceiling of the Beast. Still, despite my jogged vision, pretty soon I get good at picking out the smoothest and surest way against the smashed together cars, aiming for the columns of subcompacts, one after another, and dutifully avoiding the taller SUV’s and skirting around the stopped and overturned tractor trailers.

  Then, just a bit ahead I see the end of the pileup. I slow and look back and I’m surprised at how short the crushed section of cars has been. Just about a thousand feet to go and I freak when I see right below me the long flat of a pallid arm.

  Shit!

  I curse and panic.

  The thought that I had crushed somebody.

  What’s more the insane belief it might be the last somebody, the only person I have come upon for nearly a day and a half.

  It sends a shiver right through me.

  I stop the pickup and put it into park, disregarding the possibility that it might not start up again. I carefully lower myself from the high saddle of the Beast onto the hood of the car, a CRV partially crushed underneath thick 33 inch wheels. The smell of pickle juice and partially unburned gasoline meets me. I drop down into the artificial cavern created by the high clearance of the Beast and the space between the cars below and bracket my hands against the windshield to peer inside. A dummy. The tension releases from my body and a laugh escape into the lonesome air. I open the passenger door and the mannequin falls out into my arms. I wonder of the purpose of transporting one in the car dressed up and I realize I have my answer in all this traffic brought on by the construction. The high occupancy vehicle lane had ended just a few intersections before due to the road work. I laugh at the thought of it, the person having repurposed a store display as a toll cheat, a free pass through the HOV lane, the real looking wig more able to fool the cops that waited at each HOV exit to nab cheaters.

  I don’t know what it is. It should freak me out, the unblinking eyes and the shiny polyester hair, but it doesn’t. I make to climb back into the truck but the mannequins eyes regard me as if asking “So you’re going to leave me here?”

  I’ve been noticing a lot of my usual inhibitions and objections to things have been sort of melting away in my solitude.

  I attempt to pick the mannequin up. It’s much lighter than a real person, I find. Lighter than Amy.

  Thinking about Amy should make me drop the thing like a hot potato, but I lift the weight, about fifty pounds, up onto the hood of the other car being crushed by the Beast. I pause to consider if I am going crazy, like Tom Hanks in that castaway movie. The mannequin is my Wilson. “Aren’t you sweetie?” I ask her and laugh like a crazy man.

  I hop onto the hood, making sure to step around the mannequin’s head. I open the passenger door to the cab. All right, one smooth motion, I think, pep talking myself. I don’t make it quite, the first heave. It might be more than fifty pounds. Wow, Teresa, you’re putting on a little weight there, aren’t you, I think to myself. I decided to name her Teresa for no particular reason other than she looks like a Teresa, even though I’ve never really known any Teresas, but that’s what she’s looks like. When I get her up there, I adjust her in the seat and smile to myself: Yep, I’m definitely going insane. Mlady, I think with a sweep of my arm as I close the door gently. Then, carefully, I make my way to the other side of the cab, with a little hop from one hood to the other. I climb into the driver’s side of the Beast and start him (I’ve decided the Beast is a HE. I’m not sure when I decided this, possibly right after I had discovered Teresa, and I decided, you know, for balance) up again and flipping the truck into gear start to ease out of the clutter of wrecked vehicles.

  I look over. Is it just my imagination or is Teresa smiling at me? I shake my head. It’s a mannequin. Don’t all store mannequins have that impish smile, no? That might be most appealing. Of course, slightly open for, well, you know. Anyway, I put that thought out of my head. There will be none of that going on, no ma’am, so you have nothing to worry about, okeydoke? I’ve got a fiancée. I hope that little something puts you at ease, ma’am. My God. The insanity.

  It’s slow going, but steady until with a giant, lurching crunch the Beast makes it past the wrecked car carpet. I stop the car and look back through the rear windows and admire the trail of cratered in car roofs that we’ve made. Cackl
ing I turn back to the road before me, open again, and step on it.

  2 PM. It is another five miles and I’m nearing the towers of downtown Houston before I realize something: where are all the pets? If my own brain (and its theory of sudden human vanishment) is to be believed, then there should by animals all over the place, former pets that eventually escape, somehow, the confines imposed upon them by their vanished masters. Unless there are all sorts of pets and what not now pacing inside their house or apartment or yard sized cages, still obedient, hungry, waiting. The thought saddens me a great deal as I pass the inner loop neighborhoods, the scrim of trees and the pale, gray roofs and bright siding peeking right above.

  I hesitate but decide that I cannot waste any more time to stop and check, ALTHOUGH, and no offense to you my sweet Teresa, a live companion would be nice. I don’t immediately see a way to get off the highway right now. This sudden desire brings a psychological tick, a question to the table, namely, why all of the delays?

  There was a time, before I met Amy, when I very deeply would psychoanalyze myself, specifically for the key to my social awkwardness. I mean, I’m not a bad looking fellow and I can have pretty smooth social skills when I put myself up to it, but there was a long time where I simply could not get a girlfriend to save my life. A girl might even smile at me and I would find an excuse to pretend like I had not even seen it, that I had been checking my phone or looking at something more interesting. I decide that the delays mean something even though I’m immediately quite sure what it means. I assume it means I’m dreading finding out what awaits me in Dallas, but a dunce could have told anyone that. Yes, I’m dreading finding the same thing in Dallas that I find here, and then what would I do? But a part of me believes myself to be capable of continuing on. If not in Dallas, she must be somewhere in this whole wide world. I would go on like some tragi-mantic figure out of story, the wanderer restless to be rejoined with his lost love.

  Amy often disabused me of such sentimental thoughts. A partner—even a junior partner—in a law firm is not a sentimental creature. She also disabused me of my awkwardness around women and other people in general and easily I can say I am better off having known her. Thinking about her more makes me miss her more so I set Amy aside for a while and just concentrate on driving.

  I’m surprised I didn’t see it earlier, or at least see the smoke. Maybe the clouds hid it all away. There’s a giant hole through the broad faced Heritage plaza. Every time I crest an overpass I see the angry orange glows in the distance, but they look muted, as if they are being extinguished by the little droplets now spitting down from the sky. There are large patches of charred black through the green tree carpet of Houston. I wonder at that, how our own neighborhood had not been consumed by a great fire, all those breakfast omelets and eggs and bacon cooking in their pans when whatever happened happened. Well, then, the small percentage of those that had a chance to catch fire so far. Once I’d left a pot of chicken soup on the stove before being called away for six hours and though there’d been a lot of smoke (my entire apartment smelled like burnt metal for a month) and the alarm had almost screamed itself out (the neighbors were probably too stoned to do much of anything) all I’d ended up with was a broken resistor on my stove and a rock hard clump of ash and a pot with a burned out bottom. Though nowadays who really has time to cook eggs on the stove? Cereals and microwaves don’t suffer the same consequences after being left unattended.

  I crest another overpass and the downtown skyscrapers loom into view again, that smoking hole burned into the face of Heritage and the tail of a jet liner sticking out, like giant cigarette had been snuffed out in the face of the office building.

  Jeeesus.

  I so need a smoke.

  I want to be at Westley’s more than anything right now (well maybe not more than being in Amy’s arms). I want to plop down into his giant, floppy couch and have him hand me an already loaded pipe and just blaze up and forget the world for a few hours.

  Then I remember all the dank, mysterious buds I’d found in the tight shorted lady’s house. I step on the brakes, much more suddenly that I realize. For some stupid reason I felt I was going to miss an important exit. Then I realize what exit I’d been thinking about.

  No. No way.

  But why not? Why not stop and see Westley? Or at least if Westley is still there... He’s on the way. A few more hours won’t hurt, will it? “Will it Teresa?” Teresa shakes her head. No. Of course not. All right then.

  I dodge a few more wrecks for a couple of miles and then take the Scott exit ramp before the downtown split. I’m held up when I get to a clog of cars on the Scott elevated and have to backtrack (no way I’m going over the clog Big Foot style on the elevated, forty feet into the air). This, I have to admit, is a new sensation for me. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I guess the societal programming is just wearing off. I’m actually quite enjoying now driving whichever the fuck way on the freeway that I please. I U-turn into the feeder exit under the Scott ramp and tread the same familiar way to my drug dealer’s house.

  Driving down the street I almost feel normal again. Wes doesn’t live in the most respectable neighborhood to begin with but it seems to have escaped a lot of the crashes and burning wrecks that make the other areas look like a warzone. Normally there’s very little commerce, except of the clandestine variety. Only the rare visitors looking for a hit, or to visit the many brothels where women are kept coked out, addicted to their next fix that they can only earn seeing johns. I never patronized, of course (well, beyond the moral implications, there was always the risk of contracting something seriously nasty), but they were always pretty apparent when you passed them by: the large wraparound porches always contained half naked and overly friendly women that spilled out of the house in much the same way that their ample bodies spilled out of the skimpy clothing they wore. All of the porches are empty, of course. All gone now.

  I park in front of my dealer’s house. It feels so strange when I get out. I’ve parked here and gotten out so many times before and I’ve always heard a dog barking in some proximate yard. Now there is only a much too still silence.

  The front door is closed and locked. Furthermore, there is an iron gate over the door, and I happen to know in the middle of that door is a one inch thick slab of solid steel. All the front windows are similarly barred. One of the necessities of being a drug dealer, I guess. In one such visit he had told me all of the every workaday precautions he took. The windows in his car, a very expensive luxury sedan hidden away in the detached garage in the back, are made from ten layers of laminated glass and can take fire from an AK-47 without shattering. I consider taking this as my ride for a while before deciding that the high ride and bitching suspension the Beast offers would be far more useful to me now.

  I look over the dark and quiet face of the house, exquisitely secured. The only way I think I’ll be able to get in there and gain access to all that banging paraphernalia and the dankest varietals, I think, is to break in through the back.

  Oh, the things one will go through to get that much needed hit.

  I remember there being a doggie door somewhere. Has to be because Wes had like six dogs of the guard variety. Now, don’t ask me why somebody who goes through so much shit to armor and grate everything in his home would introduce such a weakness to his palace. Too much faith in his five blood thirsty pit bulls, I guess. I edge around the chain link fence in the back just in case they have not yet run away, or the rapture didn’t happen to take beloved pets as well.

  For a brief moment I wish this, that Westley has been transported somewhere with his beloved guarddogs and his favorite bong and is smoking out like a villain. It gives me a little chuckle, actually.

  I get to the chain link in the back and edge to the farthest spot to get a better look at the back yard. I bang on the fence a few times to see if I can draw the attention of any pits that might be in the house. I stand there for a good ten minutes banging and shaking the gate. Nothing
. Then I take off my jacket and start climbing towards the top. At the top, and I don’t know where I learned this, probably from some action film, I double the jacket in a loop and throw it over the razor wire. Then I lever myself over the top of the gate.

  Wow. Well, fuck. What the movies don’t tell you is that the razor wire still hurts like a bitch, even through two layers of heavy wool jacket. I pop over and release my gritted teeth after scratching the fuck out of my chest, stomach and thighs. No time to get over excited now, Dan. I cling on for dear life, or at least the preservation of my ankles. Then, when I’ve climbed down to about two feet off the ground, I drop down onto the concrete driveway below.

  For some retarded reason I crouch and start running in a zigzag pattern across the back lawn as if some sniper has a bead on me. Part of me knows this is silly, but my body responds anyway, my heart pounding by the time I get to the back door.

  This is where my plan comes together: dogs gone I should be able to get in through the pet doors and load up on Shaggy’s reserve. The premium shit. Doubtful the stuff I lifted from the old lady’s house is anywhere near as good. I rub my hands together and stoop down and stick my head through the doggie door. It’s darker in the house than outside and it takes a while for my vision to resolve. Despite my size I slip through the massive doggie door. The memory comes to me now that I’d seen before two of Westley’s pits going through at the same time, that’s how big the door is.