Every summer when I was a kid my parents took me on a road trip across America. They’d save up their vacation days and we’d drive west for weeks from our home in Nova Scotia. The destinations varied. Texas, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska (twice), California. It was during a trip to Los Angeles—the last trip we ever took—as we were crossing Nevada, one of those stretches of land that seems to go on in barrenness forever, that my dad pulled off the highway into a rest stop so he could take a break from driving and we could enjoy a bite to eat.
The rest stop was empty.
As we slowly crossed its newly-paved parking area, the sound of tires on asphalt spread like butter on a heated pan across the flat landscape, which awed me with its expansiveness, running impossibly in every direction before ending on a distant promise of mountains so much like paper cut-outs that I imagined they must be as false as the the idea of infinite space beyond the passing clouds.
We stopped near a small strip of grass on which a picnic table had been set up, chained to metal stakes in the ground.
The air-conditioned interior of the car was comfortably cool, but already through the windows we could see the outside air shimmer with the dispersing heat of the accumulating earth, so that when dad cut the engine and we opened the car doors it hit us like a weight of cosmic gelatin.
Mom started unpacking food from the car. Dad stretched.
I took in the surroundings.
After mom had fixed the meal (sandwiches, coke and a few hard-boiled eggs left over from yesterday), we sat at the table and started eating.
A few cars passed by along the highway.
Then—when we were almost done—as dad smoked a cigarette—one of the passing cars pulled into the rest stop.
We watched it methodically circle the parking area several times before stopping in the middle of the lot with its front windshield facing us. The only person inside was the driver. Nothing about the car was threatening in any way except the fact of its presence, which had upset our solitude.
The driver kept the engine running.
What do you think he’s doing, mom asked dad.
I don’t know, dad said.
Eat your food, mom told me, but she had stopped eating hers and dad was merely holding his cigarette in his hand, the end burning—becoming a column of ash that crumbled eventually to the grass.
The driver, who’d been keeping his hands on the steering wheel, took them away and appeared to reach into the glove compartment, from which he pulled an object that looked to me like a dark box and placed it on the dashboard.
What’s that he’s got? mom asked.
Dad said nothing. Dad said, Gather up our stuff and get in the car.
The driver opened the box.
Oh God, mom said, is it drugs? Is he going to inject himself?
The driver took something out of the box—He’s got a gun, dad said.—and mom wrapped everything quickly in the checkerboard plastic tablecloth we’d been eating on and shoved the resulting ball of dishes and food into the car’s trunk.
She shut the trunk.
Get in the car, she said to me, her voice breaking. Dad got up, tossed his cigarette aside and stomped on it. Don’t look at him, he said.
Mom pulled me into the car.
Dad tossed the car keys to her through the open passenger’s side door and told her to start the engine.
What are you doing? she asked as he stood there looking at the driver.
Dad didn’t reply.
Mom tried the ignition—but the car wouldn’t start. I think he’s going to kill himself, dad said, and for the first time in my life I felt my nerves squirm like tentacles getting themselves into knots inside my body, inside my soul.
It was even hotter than it had been on the grass outside. Mom was panicking. Dad shut the passenger side door and began walking toward the other car. Where are you going? mom yelled, but he ignored her, and I watched in hot fear as he walked off the grass onto the black asphalt.
I was sweating.
Dad reached the other car and knocked on the glass. The driver lowered the passenger’s side window. Dad said something, then the driver said something. Then dad looked at us—his eyes even at such a distance sinking visibly into a depth many times greater than that of his head—and he opened the car door and got in, taking a seat beside the driver.
Mom, who still hadn’t gotten the car started, was repeating, What’s he doing? What the hell is he doing? and sweat slid down my face, my back, down my thighs, shins, calves, into the grooves of the rubber mat on the car floor. What’s he doing? Just what in God’s name is he doing!
Dad talked to the driver.
The driver talked to dad.
Dad talked to the driver.
The driver talked to dad.
Mom punched the car horn—again and again, and in the other car, in the backseat behind both dad and the driver a third figure appeared. It hadn’t been there before. I knew it hadn’t. When the car had pulled off the highway the only person in it had been the driver.
Now the third figure, whose eyes shone crimson, reached its arms around the sides of both front seats. Arms ending in claws. Inhumanly large, with long and slender fingers that concluded in dense talons. And the talons closed around dad’s head, and the driver’s head, and it pushed their two heads together—pushed them both, one into the other!—so that dad’s body subsumed the driver’s.
Oh God. Oh God, mom screamed.
Where before there had been dad and the driver now there was only dad in the driver’s seat, reaching into the box on the dash—pulling out a gun.
The driver’s side door opened.
Dad got out and began walking towards us, his face a shifting contortion of smiles, laughter, tears and anger, madness, uncertainty, his movements jerky, uncoordinated. I remembered playing a fighting game once where a glitch caused both controllers to control the same character. That’s what he looked like. That’s what dad looked like as he crossed from the middle of the parking lot to where mom was crying and screaming, trying desperately to start the car, and where I felt like I was drowning in my sweat. I felt underwater. I felt under-fucking-water as
Dad’s body took a few steps forward—
wrenched itself sideways.
Fell.
Got back up.
The arm holding the gun pointed it at us.
The other arm grabbed it.
The two arms wrestled and the first got free and smashed dad’s face and the second grabbed the first’s wrist, but it didn’t drop the gun, and—and—
Mom finally got the engine started.
Dad fired—
The bullet hit our car.
But not us.
Dad reset his aim and I could see him pointing the gun at me. My own father was pointing a gun at me. My own father—his arms shaking, his lips making the shapes of words I could not understand—wanted to kill me. But despite seeing it I couldn’t believe it. I was crying. Mom was crying. But I couldn’t believe it even as I prepared for death, and as I did, dad’s face became grimacing pain and in a sudden, overpowering motion he lifted the gun to his head and pulled the trigger and bang!—mom pressed the accelerator, our car shot forward, swerved and skidded, leaving marks on the surface of the parking lot, and we were on the highway, flying down the highway, leaving dad’s crumpled body behind on the hot black asphalt…
We drove stunned, our cries subsiding gradually to an uncertain, whimpering silence, the result of a stunted understanding of what had come to pass. We didn’t speak about it, then or ever, but the lack of dad’s presence was monumental. Gazing out the window I saw: the distant mountains had disappeared, and as far as I could see in all directions there was nothing but boundless desert.
At the nearest town we reported the incident to the police. We gave statements, and the police concluded, contrary to what I’d seen and what I knew to have happened, that dad committed premeditated suicide. That’s how they explained the presence of the second car, which mom and I both saw arrive at the rest stop but that the police decided had been there the whole time, apparently planted by dad, who hadn’t been away from us for more than a few minutes in the past two-and-half weeks.
It was a wrong but “rational” explanation, one that in time even mom accepted as true because it was easier to believe than her own fading memory—which leaves me as the only person in the world who can attest to what really happened, even if that reality remains beyond my ability to comprehend.
That’s why I wanted to share.
To give a touch of permanence to the flickering of an ever-passing world.