The Dissolution of It All

I watched a pair of deer wander into a field as I drove past, the wind seeping into my bones through the rolled down driver-side window. A sea of cargo bobbed around me. Any who peered into my hovel of a vehicle would think me a hoarder. It was like that. Everybody was like that, after a spell. They didn’t call it the Rust Bowl for nothing. The infrastructure was in shambles, they said. Unemployment was over thirty percent. Somehow, half the head-talks spun that as a good thing.

A man wrapped in an ancient war-time bomber and older-than-that looking jeans crouched by a low-burning fire, warming his hands. I thought for half a second to stop and talk with him. Then again, the car was worth more than what most of us had in those days. A moving shelter, practically an armored tank, compared to the bicycles some people used to traverse the waste.

I barreled past him, a cloud of dust swirling in the wind behind me.

I drove on for miles, eventually came to a stop on top of the Parkway, somewhere deep in the Appalachians. A few other cars populated the trailhead I’d parked at. I pulled a Black and Mild from the glovebox and, as the sky waxed purple, lit it. I cracked the window just enough to let the smoke out and the cold air in. A can of tuna lay open and half emptied in the cup holder beside me. Plastic bottles full of dirty water swished in the passenger-side footwell. I’d filter and boil them later.

My tank floated just a tick up from empty. I’d be on my own two feet from here. Maybe I’d use the car as a metal tent for a spell. Maybe someone would happen across my path with gasoline in tow, and I’d put in for another four hundred-odd miles before stopping for good.

Then again, where else would I go, if not here? Back to the roots.

I let the cigarillo die off and set it aside to finish later. Watching the last of the smoke as it swirled into the vast great nothing, I wondered if she was happy now. Probably, I reasoned. Was I? I felt no more or less stressed than I had at any other time in my life. It had always just been this one prime directive.

Maybe that was my mistake. I mean, it certainly was. What was it Murakami wrote? In the opening chapters of ‘Hear the Wind Sing’, he talks quite a lot about writing. In a passage describing his discovery of his love for writing, he wrote:

“I was in my teens, I think, when I discovered this, and it so completely blew my mind that I couldn’t talk for a week. If I could just keep my wits about me, I felt, I could force the world to conform to my will, overturning whole systems of values, and altering the flow of time.

“Sadly for me, it took ages to see that this was a trap. When at last I caught on, I took a blank notebook and drew a line down the middle; then I listed all that I had gained from this principle on the left-hand side and all that I had lost on the right. It turned out that I had lost so much—things long abandoned, trampled underfoot, sacrificed, betrayed—I couldn’t even write them all down.

“A gulf separates what we attempt to perceive from what we are actually able to perceive…”

I dog-eared the book and shut it, setting it in the passenger side seat. I moved my chair back, kicked my feet up, and re-lit the Black and Mild.

Yeah.

That about summarized it all, I thought.

Even there, high above the world, some part of me knew I was still light years off the mark. It is a fool’s errand to summarize the complex, most of all in a medium as constrictive as written word. And yet there are mountains taller than this one which could be constructed from mankind’s collective attempts. Such is art. For me, at least, such is life.

Tired of pontificating, I tried the radio. Only static.

I let it play at a low volume, pulled my notebook from the pocket in the back of my seat, and began to write. I was tranced out and two pages deep when a rapping came at the window. The sky had gone black, and the cosmos twinkled above us. I jolted and turned to catch the homely visage of a man maybe a decade older than me. He was wrinkled; his short crop of dark hair was tinged with white. His eyes yellowed along the edges; his irises were mellow green; his pupils were deep dark wells, sucking in all the light they could. He was shivering.

“Can I bum a sm-smuh-smoke?” He rasped.

I glanced instinctively toward the console. I had two more cigarillos tucked away in there. I had no idea how long it would be before I came into more. Yet… If it were me, I figured, sat on the edge of the world, civilization collapsed and still collapsing around me…

“Yeah,” I said, and slid one through the gap between the top of my window and the door. “Here y’go.”

He took it and produced a set of matches from his breast pocket. He struck it once, twice, and it lit on the third try. A few seconds later, he was exhaling a voluminous cloud. It was gone quickly. As though locked in step with the disparition of the cloud, some of his tension melted away. He slouched and made to lean against my car, then backed off, thinking better of it.

“Go ahead,” I called through the window.

He looked back at me, one palm turned up as if to ask, ‘you sure?’

“Yeah. Seriously, go ahead.”

“Thank you,” he mouthed, and then clamored up onto the hood and laid back. He pulled a blanket from his backpack and swaddled himself in it.

Together, the stranger and I watched the night sky. It’d become a common act once the real dissolution of it all had set in. With city lights growing sparser by the day, one could see the entirety of the Milky Way’s arm spiraling out and out and out.

I entertained, for a spell, the thought of driving out along that arm and straight into oblivion. Maybe I’d meet a Tralfamadorian who could show me the true meaningful pointlessness of it all.

Probably not, though.