realitycheck

Reality Check

Although his absent harmonizing with the radio static should have been a sign of trouble, it wasn't until he asked me about the dogs in the truck ahead of us that I began to wonder what we'd gotten into.

"Black labs," he amended, squinting to see a bit closer in the dark. "Big black labs, leaping out of the back. Do you see them?"

I didn't, I reassured him, impressed by his cool under pressure.

Reality check. That seemed to be my function for the week, and I served it well, every raw synapse gleefully aware of the irony. The devil on my shoulder took mental photographs of the world through my eyes and tried to process them to verbal imagery, but some primordial survival instinct translated them to fit my current responsibility.

So I kept up a steady stream of support, bolstering his confidence with pseudo-intellectual, semi-articulate patter about these nights turned into days into weekends. Excessive self-analysis is inherently dissociative. The childhood game of turning a certain word over and over in your head until reduced to absolute nonsense; translated into a valuable life lesson. Bubble gum, bubble gum, bubble gum...

Denial. Rationalization. Acceptance. I'm sure there were more stages in dealing with this problem, but these are the ones that stuck.

"Yeah," deny, peering at the road - "you're fine. In the lines, dead-on."

This is a half-truth, as I was unsure of how to field this paranoia. The lane markers seemed to shift and flow in unfamiliar paths, contesting most laws of physics or common-sense, and in one place they dissolved completely into a jello-like mosaic of reflected unidentifiable light. However, to the best of my observation and guesswork, the car seemed to be cutting a fairly coherent path through the mess.

A truck drew near on our left, and I craned my neck to check the driver's side for angry gestures and shocked stares. It passed quickly, oblivious to the chaos on its right, and we soon settled peacefully a comfortable distance behind. We both kept our eyes fixed warily on the taillights, watching for unexpected twists to account for. Distrust of this new apparent geometry in the roadways channels the accepted policies of safe driving into uncharted territory. I liked to consider it creative stimulus.

The most recurring problem in this entire challenge, naturally, was the persistent transmutation of innocent headlights into the enemy red and blue flash of the cops. Every glance in the side-view mirror tensed a new muscle in my body as I tried to assess different angles without attracting attention and new paranoia from my driving partner, always with the same ambiguous results. Deny. I flipped the mirror as far up and out as it would go.

"Glare," I offered in explanation. "It was hurting my eyes."

Not an invalid suggestion, considering the bloodshot sensitivity one's eyeballs acquire after this many hours without rest, but a pointless justification for a pointless action as my eyes continued to search for ominous reflections in any surface.

My vigil was finally interrupted by awkward shifting in the driver's seat. At this point, odd movements hardly merited the focus of my attention, but I sensed his trouble before he voiced it. I prayed for my intuition to be wrong; the hours logically did not lead to this yet. But the raw sensitivity scraped into my nerves by this self-abuse instills some uncanny perception, and I cringed prematurely.

"Where's the road?" he mused; far more unnerving than the problem itself was the nonchalant concern with which he tackled it, as though searching for car keys dropped on a desk. He glanced at me and back to the road, blinked a few times, and shook his head.

"Next exit... I need food. And cigarettes."

I nodded; the blue signs offered us four different gas stations within 1.5 miles. Two sheriff cars parked on the side of the only one open nearly shattered our resolve, but the promise of cigarettes, soda and any form of nourishment, coupled with the reminder that we were doing nothing wrong, reinforced our fragile self-assurance.

$12.73 and safely back inside the car, we fumbled with a giant bag of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky, cigarettes already lit between mottled fingers. The pungent smell made my stomach turn, but I was in love with the idea of eating; I had two chunks in my mouth before feeling the gag reflex begin to tick in the back of my throat and spit them into an old paper towel. I wanted to cry; I felt violated that something so intrinsic as the pleasure of eating had been so violently denied me. I considered the plain miniature doughnuts, but my throat remained solidly closed to anything but Mountain Dew and cigarette smoke; reduced to bare necessities.

"Are you okay to drive?" I finally asked.

"I don't know. Are you?"

"I don't know."

His hands were visibly unsteady on the steering wheel. The end of his cigarette seemed to twitch between his fingers as he brought it to his lips for one last drag.

I glanced down at my hands, and the slight blotchy tint began to intensify and seep under more skin. Eventually the ebb and flow of color gave way to deepening lines tracing fleeting contours into bones and tendons that I may or may not have. I reconsidered my intention to volunteer to drive.

I lifted my right hand to turn it over and examine my palm but my attention got stuck on my fingers, and the almost-imperceptible tremors running down the length of each joint. He looked at me, and pulled a nickel from the doorhandle.

"Heads you drive, tails I drive," he offered, and flipped the nickel. I heard it land somewhere in the back seat, and shrugged.

"Look, you've got to be steadier than me," he said. We held our hands out for comparison.

"You're doing that on purpose, you bastard," I said, as his fingers spasmed uncontrollably.

"You think I've got the self-control to regulate my twitching?" he responded, and I had to concede his logic.

"Yeah, but look at the colors on mine. That's fucked up." We studied our hands in silence for several moments longer, absorbed in the novelty of their shapes and colors, until they began to take on an alien appearance.

"Cool," he said finally, twisting his fingers into a clawed grasp.

Fuck it, I thought.

"Fuck it," I said. I grabbed a doughnut and swallowed it as quickly as possible, ignoring the uncomfortable thickness in my throat, took a couple swigs of mountain dew and opened my door.

"Move over. I can drive. Jesus, it's cold." I ran to the driver's side and slid into the seat as he climbed over empty soda bottles and cigarette packs to the passenger seat.

I flipped down the visor mirror to check out my appearance, in case I needed to adjust my manner and/or story in order to present a slightly more cohesive image. I winced; it wasn't pretty. Red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes, underscored by dark semi-circles dyed into skin alternating between unnaturally flushed and unnaturally pale. The strung-out appearance lends itself nicely to any given sob story, should the situation arise. It would have been easier if I were alone; cops like unhappy girls.

I took a deep breath and turned on the engine, taking a moment to familiarize myself with the car and locate the key necessities. Brakes, accelerator and steering wheel came instinctively; little else did. Turn up heat. Turn up music. Locate cigarettes, locate lighter, utilize and store nearby. Check lights, check mirrors, check for potentially intrusive hallucinations in peripheral vision. My brain methodically sifted through its half-formed mental checklist of pre-departure tasks; all seemed clear. Maintain.

The return to the highway was smooth. Caffeine and necessity had forced my visual demons back into their cages, and while I could occasionally see or hear them rattling the bars, the road remained a road, give or take the details. I acknowledged the appearance of flashing lights behind every car in the rearview mirror, and concentrated instead on adjusting the cruise control to 65 mph exactly, and keeping the car on a logical path.

Having settled comfortably in the rhythm of driving, my brain allowed a slight relaxation of its dogged fixation on the road, as well as its white-knuckled grasp of the steering wheel. Somnolent fantasies began to creep into my head: first of my bed, warm and spacious and welcoming, but I soon grew bored with imagining the same cheap sheets on my flesh. In the library, muscles as lax as possible with posture like a jellyfish and my face hidden behind hair and a carefully-chosen book. In the back-corner booth in an all-night diner, hoping the open notebook and pen still caught between two slack fingers would justify my physical presence for a short time. Eventually the settings evolved into elevators, metro cars and picnic tables on sunny days, but always, always involved a pillow and fuzzy blanket. If I am reaching the point of taking pornographic pleasure in sleeping, alone, I don't concern myself with plausibility.

This is a dangerous game, however; I could feel my body finding curves in the seat like broken-in jeans. I imagined myself a high priestess of Bastet, reclining in my throne by the Nile River valley and surrounded by kittens wishing cuddling by their celebrant. The plush grey of the car seat yielded perfectly to my weight; my eyes grew heavy-lidded as my face is bathed in warm air from giant palm fronds fanned by worshippers and slaves.

Suddenly an unfamiliar head and torso loomed from the shadows in the rearview mirror. I was jerked alert as my subconscious frantically tried to incorporate all the discordant elements into a logically-acceptable compromise. I gripped the steering wheel harder, reasserting my shaky confidence in reality. A human figure remained silhouetted in the mirror approximately where my seat should have been; I do not question this. It seemed nonthreatening, and I had learned a surprisingly relevant lesson years before during an educational adventure to the bee-keepers: don't fuck with them. I keep this in mind.

Fortunately, the jarring convergence of multiple realities had shaken the weight off my eyelids; my nerves were set on edge once more. I noticed my companion - the tangible one, as far as I could tell - had finally been lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the wheels. Any remnants of a conscience would have compelled me to leave him blissfully unaware, but my already questionable morals had been ground down still further by the tension of the journey. I also thought he should be alerted to the new presence in the back.

My leg jerked as my initial instinct advocated kicking him awake. My body had begun responding to these visceral inclinations before my brain could account for current circumstances, such as the inconvenient positioning of my legs and the steering wheel. Despite this malfunction, my grunt of pain accompanying the resultant collision of my knee with unyielding plastic interrupted his brief tranquility.

"Huh? What happened?" he mumbled, as I risked taking one hand off the wheel to gingerly rub my knee.

"Ow. Nothing. Wake up, you're the navigator. Navigate."

"We're on the highway, jackass," he replied. "Where are we, anyway?"

"Mile 141.7," I offered.

"Where's that?"

"I don't remember." I knew we'd passed a theoretically familiar exit not long before, but each sign faded into a green blur with the rest within moments after going by.

"Want me to drive again?" he asked, yawning and stretching. I hesitated. I am typically inclined to bank on my own dysfunction above anyone else's, but my previous surrender to the demons of sleep, along with a now-throbbing pain in my leg, had weakened my confidence. The sky seemed to be shifting subtly overhead, but I couldn't tell if my eyes were painting spontaneous new art into the world, or if it was just another sunrise.

"Sure," I agreed finally, "if you can." He appeared to be assessing the intelligence of such a move for several moments, but eventually nodded.

"Whatever, I'm fine. I slept for a little bit, that takes the edge off, right?" he said. That's right, rationalize, you fucking idiot; at least I accept the lunacy of this situation and play by its rules. Nothing is more dangerous than a man who thinks he is fully capable of dealing with a world he can't even effectively discern. Fucking black labs.

"That's right!" I replied cheerfully.

I drove for several more miles, consciously ignoring those deceptive mile markers, until I reached a rest stop at which I hoped we could actually rest, without cops distrusting our inertia from the sanctity of their cars. A police car sat in the middle of the near vacant parking area: typical nighttime security, and I ignored it.

An unexpected break in the trees revealed a spectacle more jarring than any prior delusions: one tiny shaft of light shot skyward from a nearly-indecipherable glow in the east. This nearly broke me; I tend to keep myself safely shut away from the banging of daylight on my door. The brilliance of the breaking dawn and the unreal absurdity of our condition were too incongruous to exist in the same place, but I didn't know which was mocking the other.

"Bathroom," I muttered, trying to tear my eyes from the luminous sky.

The rest stop bathroom was far more in tune with my current state of mind; the dirty mirror reflected a face fairly harmonious with the broken stall doors and cracked yellow paint. The dilapidated facilities were oddly soothing, so I sat down on the edge of the sink to collect myself.

The sky was in full blossom by the time I returned to the car, and my partner had fallen asleep in the driver's seat in my absence. I slid into the passenger seat, compassion or defeat preventing me from awakening him. Accept. I rested my head against the cold window glass, and closed my eyes to the turning sky.