One for the Road

Kat Allison

Like everything else, pleasures come and go over the centuries, changing as I change who I am, but one pleasure that's always endured for me, never staled, is the joy of hitting the road at the break of day. Leaving yet another city in the rear-view mirror, and driving off into the sunrise.

Yes, I know, riding off into the sunset is what one's supposed to do. With all its implications that one has done a good day's work, and is heading out leaving the simple townsfolk better off than they were before. ("Who was that stranger?" "I don't know, but we sure owe him a lot...")

Well, screw the good day's work, and the simple townsfolk into the bargain. Riding into the sunrise means that one has a full day to cover ground, and a good head start on any townsfolk who might have reason for pursuit, and a clear road ahead.

And speaking of riding, you can keep the horses too. Trust me on this. A far, far better thing it is, to be driving off, in a warm, well-upholstered, comfortable car, a thermos of coffee ready at hand, heater running, good music on the tape player.

What a blissful relief it is, to be leaving behind the tangled snarl of old involvements, old personae that have worn thin, old roles that no longer convince either the audience or the actor. Alexander had it right—cut the knot—although he sure as hell doesn't deserve the credit for coming up with that bright idea.

I can remember the image that used to keep me going on a long day's march, that picture of the world rolling up behind me with every step I took. No turning back, because everything behind me had rolled up and disappeared. Rolled up like a scroll, with endless stories on it that I never needed to read again, a scroll I could tuck in a corner and forget. Or that I could simply stick in the fire.

_______________

I left Mac dead asleep, snoring like thunder, all tangled in the sheets. Poor kid. I wore him out last night. Knowing, as I do know from experience, that it meant he'd sleep til eight or nine at least. But when he wakes, even as wiped out as he'll be, it should only take him a minute to discern that my sword's gone, and my laptop, and the car. That should clue him. I should, perhaps, have left a note ... the thought of him, sitting alone and hung over, in that cheap efficiency, amongst the litter of belongings that I never valued, no longer need, couldn't be bothered to take along ... it's painful, and so I shut it off, drop the image in a box and nail the lid shut and toss it out the window, to bounce on the cement behind me and be lost. Losing it, I feel such lightness, such lightness—it's as if the tires are barely skimming the pavement.

Perhaps it's stretching it a little to say "sunrise." The sun isn't up yet, there's only a pink glow in the east, and a lightening of the darkness. I'm glad I got through the city outskirts before it got light enough to see them clearly; that random spew of ugly neon-infested puke across the landscape depresses me. Now I'm almost in open country, dodging around semis. There's more traffic on the other side of the divider, the exurbanites heading in to work, poor saps.

I want to get off this freeway soon. It's a boring way to travel. Efficient, yes, I'll give it that. A masterpiece in its own way, actually, the interstate system, I respect it even though I don't like it. I've done enough engineering in my time to recognize good work when I see it, and this is fine stuff, as solid and well-designed as the suburban sprawl is cheap and flimsy. Be interesting to see what this'll all look like a couple of centuries hence, not that I'm likely to get back this way that soon.

You'd think he'd understand all of this better. He knows, he heard me say for god's sake, that I was born long before the age of chivalry. Could he not have seen the obvious corollary—that I was also born long, long before the age of romantic love?

I've probably tried, at one time or another, every drug that humanity's ever come up with, every mind-altering substance discovered. And of them all, romantic love's the most powerful, the most endlessly tempting, the most addictive. I give in to it every so often, in recent centuries, go on a bender. As I have these past few years. But I always know it for exactly what it is—an indulgence, a fall off the wagon. The day comes when I need to detox, get myself clean and sober, and get on with life.

I suppose the problem is that for him, love, this kind of love, isn't something that's tasted and then set aside. It's part of who he is. Has there ever been a time, I wonder, when he hasn't been in love? With someone or something?

He's so like them, in that way as in so many others. He grabs onto things, onto people, clinging to them with such tenacity, it's as if he truly believed he had a chance to keep them. Mortals can, I suppose, be forgiven that particular fantasy. There's no excuse for it in him.

It's as if he refuses to understand that the most important skill for our kind—well, second to fighting, of course—is letting go. Anyone can hang on—infants, clams, lichens. A baby monkey will cling like grim death to a lump of terrycloth, for god's sake.

But to let go, stand up straight, and walk away—the first time you do that, that's the moment you take over the wheel of your own life and start driving.

I'm not saying it comes easy, not for everyone. It's always been easy for me, it'll always be hard for him. But he'll learn it, eventually. Assuming he lives.

I have no route planned, and on impulse I pull off on the next exit, County Road something-or-other. I've no idea where it goes, but it dips invitingly into a little valley and then curls behind a swell of hills, and it draws me. Bliss, to feel the draw of the road again, and to simply follow.

I realize, too, that some part of me is trying to throw Mac off the trail, just in case he'd be trying to follow me. Pointless, because he wouldn't anticipate I'd be driving anyway, he'll check the airport first, and waste at least half a day there. My mind unhelpfully supplies me with an image of him, frantic, belligerent, hectoring the airline clerks; and then one of him driving up and down the endless aisles of the car park, searching for this rusty sedan. Pictures that sour the coffee in my stomach, and so I shut them firmly away. Turn the page.

It must have been a colder night than I thought; the dampness in the autumn air has crystallized into frost on all the trees, the shrubs, every twig, every leaf and blade of grass. Where the first shaft of sun hits it, it glitters. Incredibly beautiful, especially because it'll all burn off and be gone in an hour.

I push the car a bit on these winding roads, testing how hard I can take it into turns and up hills. Even now, after sixty-some years of driving, I get the giggles every so often, at the weirdness of automobiles—how bizarre it feels to be sitting here, enthroned, zooming up a hill with only a quarter-inch movement of my right foot. There's a lot I've forgotten, but one thing my body remembers vividly is the feel of a thirty-mile march, the burn in the feet and legs that turns to deadness. I don't miss it.

_______________

He'll come after me. Eventually, yet again. To think otherwise is self-delusion. He won't want to, any more than I want him to, but he will. It's part of who he is.

I know exactly what he'll do, once the drunk he'll go on is over, and the hangover, and the blind rage. He'll sit down, and he'll get his forehead all creased up, and he'll think, he'll try to think with my mind, reason it through as I would, and deduce where I would have gone. He'll be looking for a plan, a strategy, and he'll think as hard as he can, with both hands, until he comes up with something, and follow it through, and when it doesn't pan out he'll do it all over again. Nothing if not persistent.

He'll probably start by assuming I've gone somewhere warm, Bora Bora or someplace silly like that, or else that I've gone to a big city. That is, after all, what Adam would've done. He'll probably tromp through the entire South Seas and all the world capitals, one after another.

He'll make himself crazy, trying to figure out what plan I might have had. The one thing he'll hang onto, even in his craziest moments, is the conviction that, no matter what, I had a plan. The Methos that he knew always did, probably two or three, wouldn't leave home without one. And that's why he won't find me. He won't understand that sometimes—sometimes I don't have a plan. Sometimes I just throw life up in the air, like a handful of jackstraws, and let the pieces fall where they will.

I have no idea where I'm headed. It'll be interesting to see where I end up. Who I end up.

I find myself wanting some music and in no mood to subject myself to the tastes of drive-time DJs, so I reach around behind the seat and grope around in the duffle bag and grab the first tape I find, popping it into the player without looking. I don't know what to expect, but when the voices swell from the tinny speakers my breath catches, as it always does at this music.

Gesualdo.

It takes me back, always, to the first time I heard it, in Ferrara, end of the sixteenth century it must have been. I'd been lying low for decades—centuries, really—collecting and translating manuscripts, moving every so often from one university to another.

It had been a cold time in my life. Odd, given the blazing period of history I was living through, but I didn't know then it was the damned Renaissance, the glories of which are far more clearly visible from the bleachers of historical retrospective than they were to those of us down in the mosh pit. If I'd known then some of the things I was missing out on ... but all I knew, really, was that I had the chance to recover so many things I'd thought had been lost forever. Plato, Herodotus, Pliny, Tacitus, Petronius, Sophocles, Aristotle, Galen... I buried myself in them, dedicated myself to their restoration. It was the first time in—a long time, I'd say—that I lived for something outside myself. But it was a cold life all the same, living only in words, losing myself for weeks on end in a world that had ended ages before.

I'd heard of a supposedly lost work of Columella's that Alfonso d'Este had bought from a traveller, and which seemed worth the risks of travel to view. The trip was a hell of heat and dust and keeping watch for mercenary troops on the road—I remember having vague thoughts about relocating to England, where it might be freezing but at least the government seemed secure. I remember how hot it was in the palace antechamber where a flunky left me, with all the windows open to catch a breeze. But mostly I remember the music, drifting through those open windows.

It was like nothing I'd ever heard before, and at first I thought it was the work of a lunatic. Insanely chromatic, shifting keys all over the place, it sounded grotesque. But it grabbed me, it pulled me in. Turbulent, dramatic, emotional, sensual. Erotic.

It moved through me like a Quickening, that music. I could feel it all through my body, in my head, my guts, my heart, my cock. It was like being hit with fresh air, after centuries in a tomb. Waking out of a coma.

I stayed on in Ferrara for a bit, hearing as much as I could, doing a little teaching at the university. Until the day came when I packed up my clothes and sword, and rode south, and took ship for Constantinople. Leaving behind all the manuscripts, the words of men long dead. I came back to living in my body, and left the scholar behind, for a long long time.

Almost drunk on the music, I realize I'm driving too fast into a small town, and I give myself a good shake and slow down. I have no desire to create a paper trail of any kind, and getting picked up by the local yokels would be a good way to do just that.

I creep through the empty streets at a sedate 35. Sober up, I tell myself. That's what this whole trip is about. If you wanted to keep binging on emotion, you should have stayed back in that apartment.

God looks after fools and drunks, they say, and for years now you've been testing god's vigilance on both counts. Acting like a drunk playing in heavy traffic, wandering across the Beltway in rush hour. Why you weren't smashed to shit seventeen times over I don't understand.

I need to start thinking, soon, about who I'm going to be for the next bit of time. What I'm going to do. I have a feeling that the next few years will be a good time for me to keep very, very busy. Very preoccupied. I need to keep working on the computer stuff—I'm close, so close, to being able to hack into the Watcher database. Get all that information without having to go through Joe or anyone else. And then tap the other databases, give myself the tools to fabricate an endless array of identities. Essential stuff, in this tight-assed document-mad world they've built.

I think sometimes about easing back into medicine, working my way into one of the well-equipped biomed research labs. Establish a plausible front, a nice unexciting well-funded project, and then, on the side ... I wonder if, with the new equipment, the DNA tests, I could begin to figure just who we really are. What makes us what we are, different from all of them. Something I've always wondered.

And what would be the use of knowing that, I remind myself, as I have a million times before. Not all knowledge is useful, not all things are knowable. We're different. They survive by bonding, joining with their kind. We survive by shunning or killing our kind. That's what we are. The DNA is irrelevant. We kill to live and we travel alone. Cats are cats and are different from dogs, and the reasons matter little.

Beyond that, though ... I wonder sometimes, what will I do when this planet is used up? Driving through this landscape, it's hard to imagine that day will come. The countryside is beautiful here, soft folds of hills, trees starting to turn, little tangles of brush and shrubs in the creek bottoms. It's easy to see how this must have looked a few hundred years ago; it seems little harmed.

But the evidence is accumulating. Mortals don't, won't, see it, shackled to the short view as they are. It won't happen in my lifetime, they think, so I won't trouble myself about it.

But it'll happen in mine.

Run the numbers. This cannot go on forever. Catastrophe is one option, collapse. I'd live through it, just as I always have. But departure ... to move on, if this world should become uninhabitable ... I wonder if any other Immortals are thinking about this. I haven't discussed it with any, needless to say. None except Mac, and he spluttered and puffed til I thought he'd explode. Not him, never him, as I didn't need him to tell me. He's loyal, Mac is, attached, grounded, rooted.

But me ... I tuck the idea away, something to take out and toy with on occasion. I follow news of the space programs, and I attend to the wranglings of the environmental scientists and the doomsayers, and I keep my options open. It wouldn't do for me to become too strongly attached, not even to my home of the past five thousand years. No matter how beautiful it is, how much I love it.

I wasn't surprised that Mac turned up hammering on my door yesterday evening. I knew he'd track me down eventually. I didn't leave a trail, exactly, but neither did I conceal myself with any particular care. I knew he'd come looking, and I figured the final thing I could give him was the satisfaction of finding me, this one last time.

Well, OK, not the final thing. The final thing was last night, and I couldn't have not given him that gratification, not without feeling like even more of a bastard than I am. To have granted him his final appeal, his summation to the court—and he has good instincts, to have realized that his body was his most eloquent advocate. He gave it his best shot, pulled out every weapon in the arsenal. I couldn't deny him that chance, doomed as it was, though god knows it probably will just make everything more painful for him.

Beautiful farmland here, rich and prosperous. As early as it is, farmers are out already, harvesting in the fields. I beep my horn at one as I drive past, and he lifts a hand in reply; another small pleasure of the intimacy of these back roads. Driving a combine around a field all day must be boring work indeed. I remember... out driving one time with Mac, when he got all huffy about mechanized agriculture, the death of the small farmsteads, the—what the hell was it?—spiritual impoverishment of humankind in our divorce from the natural cycles of the earth, and so on and so forth. He must have read an article or something, he had quite a head of moral indignation about it. Quite a lot for someone who was driving an automobile over the aforementioned earth at 70 mph at the time, as I refrained from pointing out. We were having a good time that day, and I didn't want a quarrel...

Refocus. I turn outward, again, looking at the landscape. The cornstalks are thick in the fields, this patch here must be soybeans, I'd guess, although I've never grown them myself. Another curve, and there's a pastureful of cattle, fat and placid, with ample udders and full bellies.

Seeing country like this—so rich, so lovely, so soft—tickles something very ancient in me, something atavistic. Makes my mouth water, just a little. It's like the feeling I sometimes have, moving my lips over a lover's belly, and thinking of what lies under the smooth skin—the layers of muscle, the gleaming viscera, the blood. A thought that lends a little extra fillip to the proceedings, just a tickle of excitement.

It's not something I want anymore, mind you. A man might feel his mouth water at the memory of a childhood sweetmeat that would nauseate him today. Mac would have had trouble grasping that fact, understanding how someone can get a tingle from a memory of something they no longer want, so I never mentioned any of it to him. Never really felt it around him, even, it wasn't part of who I was with him. But he's not here, and I let the tingle ghost through me and disappear. Not even a hint of a temptation to do anything beyond run an appraising eye over this lush land, and drive on.

I still have a taste for plunder, to be sure, but it's grown far more refined over the millennia. I still take what I want and ride on, but instead of leaving a havoc of fire and blood, I leave a man lying alone, asleep, in a rented room. Does this constitute progress? I could've asked Mac, I'm sure he'd have an opinion on it. But I don't really want to know.

The voices on the tape soar, twining and then sliding apart, wrenching discord into weird harmony. It's not just the beauty of this music that makes me shiver, listening to it. I hadn't been in Ferrara long before I heard the whispered stories about its creator. Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa. Lutenist and composer. Psychopath and murderer.

They say now that he didn't do the murders himself, the atrocities to his wife and child that startled even me. That he ordered them done. But I fail to see the difference, whether the blood's on one's hands or merely in one's mind.

Even by my standards, he was a twisted man. And to realize that someone with such capacity for evil, so damaged, could create such beauty ...

It healed something, for me. OK, if that sounds corny, so be it. It speaks to me somehow, his music, on some level, in an almost-familiar voice, whispering silently in my head — Brother...

The "Deer Crossing" signs I've passed remind me that this is rutting season for the deer, a time when they get even stupider than usual, and likelier to wander out into the road. I don't see any, though, until, rounding a curve, I have to swerve hard to avoid hitting a buck that's lying sprawled half across the right lane. I hit the brakes, jerk the car over to the shoulder, and throw it into park, and just sit there a moment, breathing hard, studying it in the rear-view mirror. It's a magnificent animal, muscular, glossy, with a proud rack of antlers. Barely damaged except for the odd angle of the neck, and the bloating that's just starting in the belly. He must have been hit during the night; probably out seeking after a doe, addled with lust, and wandered onto the highway. Probably didn't even realize that this thing speeding toward him was his death. Maybe he thought it was just another animal. Something like him. Something he could understand. Never knew what hit him. A beautiful animal, and likely someone soon will come along and take the head; it'll make a nice trophy on someone's wall.

I bite my lip until the blood comes, and then I put the car into gear and drive on.

Who is it who feels all this pain? If the man I was is dead, if the one I'm to be isn't yet created, who is it who feels so much pain? Who is it who still loves Gesualdo, and remembers how to curse in Phoenecian, and delights in the feel of leaving a city at dawn?

Gas is running low, and in good time I come across a gas station and convenience store, on the outskirts of another small town whose name I forget as soon as I note it. The store is a squat cement-block square, draped with garish plastic banners that flutter in the chilly breeze. Off to one side is a forlorn-looking produce stand, heaped high with pumpkins and otherwise deserted. Halloween's coming soon, I realize. These pumpkins were planted, cultivated, watered, weeded, tended over the whole length of a summer, for one short moment of glory when someone might carve them up to watch them glow scarily through one autumn night. Treasured for that one night, and then done with. I wonder what happens to the ones that don't get bought, and then I have to laugh at myself. All of them, the whole lot, bought, unbought, cherished, ignored, by next spring they'll all be compost.

Tank filled, bladder emptied, thermos replenished with coffee that I can tell from the smell is going to be bad, I head to the counter where a drowsy young girl glances up at me through clumsily made-up eyes. She can't be more than sixteen, and looks like she should be in bed, or at least in school, instead of behind this counter.

She slowly counts out my change, yawning, and in a moment's flash I can see her life: the parents, the brothers and sisters, the loutish boyfriend, the early marriage, the three kids, the little rambler with the pressboard furniture bought on credit, the Christmases, the fights, the jobs, the meals cooked, the clothes washed, the friends' birthdays celebrated down at the supper club, the kids' soccer team, the neighbors, the co-workers, the in-laws, the grandchildren. I see her enmeshed, snared, a fly in the webbing of other people's lives, caught in the sticky trap of their love.

For a crazy minute I think about asking her if she'd like a trip—a getaway car, to take her to, oh, Chicago, or LA, someplace big and anonymous where she could start over, start clean. The idiocy of the thought makes me smile, and she gives me a slightly suspicious look. So I merely thank her and wish her a nice day, in an accent I've dialed over to standard-US midwestern. Just a harmless skinny shabby geek passing through, nothing that will stick in her mind for more than two seconds.

I get in the car and drive off, feeling her life blink out and disappear behind me, forgotten.

There was one moment, last night, when I thought Mac might be getting it. He was storming at me about why, why had I left him, why wouldn't I come back, why was it over, what had he done wrong, what should he do instead, how he could make me come back. I let him go until he ran down, and then I asked him if he was still living on the barge, in Paris.

He looked suspiciously at me. "You know I'm not."

"Right. You left Paris. Left the barge. Why was that?"

"Why are you asking me this?"

"Humor me, all right?"

He didn't like it, but he complied. "There were just—too many memories, I guess. Too much had happened there."

I nodded. "Bad memories, right. It'd make sense you'd want to get away from those."

"Yeah." He was looking off into the distance. I could easily imagine what he was seeing—Richie, maybe, or Darius. Their headless bodies. I gave him a moment.

"But the memories—they're not all bad. Right?"

"Hm?" He pulled himself out of wherever he'd been.

"I'm saying you have good memories too. Of Paris, of the barge. Friends you had there. Good times. Right?"

"Well ... sure, of course." He was wary of agreeing with me about anything, at that point.

"Wonderful times, in fact. With people you loved. Tessa. Amanda." I paused. "We had some good times there too, of course."

I paused again. He said nothing.

"But you left Paris," I said in a marvelling tone. "Left it all behind. Now how could you do that?"

He was sulky, seeing where I was going.

"Mac?"

"I was—I was done with that," he finally said. "Done with that part of my life. I needed—to move on."

I just sat, letting the words echo around the room.

"But damn it!" He flared up suddenly, beautifully. "I wasn't done with you! I'm still not done with you!"

"Maybe not," I told him. "Maybe you're not. But Mac—I'm done with me. I'm done with the person I was with you. That part of my life's over. I need to move on."

For just a moment there, as he stared at me, I thought I'd gotten through. Thought he finally had a grip on it. But if he did, he flung it away again, just as he flung the bottle across the room, flung more words at me. Flung me onto the narrow bed, when he'd finally run out of words and the bottles were all empty.

He does know. He just has a terrible need not to understand.

Oddly enough, it was probably the best sex we've ever had. Maybe because it was the last time, and we both knew it; maybe because, knowing it was the last time, I finally let go of all the constraint I'd held myself under, all that time. It could no longer do any harm to show too much, let on what I was actually feeling. I could finally give all that, once it no longer mattered.

I stayed with him, through all of it, more present with him than I'd ever been. Held him until he crashed into sleep. Then I slowly got myself worked free of him, one limb at a time. Lay on the mattress beside him for a while, the narrow strip he'd left free, and let my hand rest on his shoulder. Finally got up and sat and watched him a while, not touching him any longer—never that again—just holding him with my eyes. Feeling myself sliding away from him, the distance growing, until somewhere around four-thirty I could feel the fine-drawn connection between us part. Free again. I packed up a few things and put on my coat and left without looking back.

The sun is high now, well up in the sky, and all the fog's burned off from the valleys. It's been pleasant, this meandering little back-road drive, but there's a cutoff to the interstate coming up, and I realize I should probably take it, hop back on the freeway for a bit and put some miles in. And then stop for something to eat; I'm getting an appetite, at last.

I also realize the Gesualdo tape's been cycling around and around in the tape player for the past couple of hours, and the dense rich weight of the voices is suddenly too much for me. Suffocating. I pop the tape out, and, in the sudden silence, hold it in my hand for a moment, remembering. This music meant so much to me, once upon a time. It changed my life, for a while. And it's lovely still. I'll always have a taste for it.

But just now, I don't have a need for it. What I need is to travel lighter.

On impulse, I roll down the window of the car, gasping at the sudden blast of chilly air, and fling the tape out the window. In the rear view mirror, I can see it smash into the pavement and explode into a messy tangle, for just a moment, before it vanishes behind me. Gone.

Exhilirated, I reach back and grab another tape out of my bag. Let's have a purge, maybe, toss them all out. But first, we'll give each a fair trial. I glance at the label—Talking Heads, OK. I pop it into the slot and after a moment it starts up, and a moment after it starts up I start smiling. Start nodding to the beat. I know this song.

And you may find yourself
living in a shotgun shack.

And you may find yourself
in another part of the world.

I'm grinning now, banging out the rhythm on the steering wheel.

And you may find yourself
behind the wheel of a large automobile.

And you may find yourself
in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife.

Ah, there's the turnoff to the freeway, coming right up.

And you may ask yourself

and I start singing along:

 Well . . . how did I get here??

I zoom into the freeway on-ramp, taking the curve right at the edge of spin-out speed. Acting like a kid let out of school.

 Letting the days go by—

On impulse, I crank the window down again, all the way, and the morning air blasts through the car. It's amazing—cold as hell, yes, but so fresh, so sharp. In an instant all the stale warmth in the car is blown away.

 Into the blue again...

My arm'll be numb in a minute, hanging it out the window in the cold wind like this, but I'm having too much fun thumping out the rhythm on the roof of the car, zipping past truckers and RVs. Time to make tracks, burn some miles.

And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
my god! What have I done?

I weave my way through a clot of traffic, clearing the pack, and put the pedal down, pulling away. Seventy, seventy-five, eighty. The other traffic's disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

Letting the days go by,
Letting the days go by...

Pulling away, feeling the road roll up behind me. Seeing it wide open and empty, ahead of me.

Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.

The sun is shining. It's going to be a beautiful day.

Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was . . .

 

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