Hitchhikers by Noble Dust

[i]Ere Babylon was dust,
The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,
Met his own image walking in the garden.
-Prometheus Unbound, Percy Shelley[/i]

It was a hazy late summer afternoon when a pickup truck cut Mark off on his way home. The truck swerved and bounced slightly in the ditch, forcing him to break. As the truck took off, he noticed it was swerving slightly; not drunkenly, but erratically. The truck’s speed decreased, and as Mark drove closer, he saw the passenger swing and hit the driver in the face. Mark’s senses heightened as he saw the driver throw a heavier blow. The truck slowed to a halt, the passenger door opened, and a woman in a dark summer dress fell out unto her knees, awkwardly catching herself on the pavement with her elbows and forearms. With a shriek the truck sped off. In slight shock, Mark slowly drove past and watched the woman stand up. He quickly turned at an intersection, looped back around, and within thirty seconds was pulling up again beside her. She was walking quickly in the direction the truck had gone, her dress and light tangled hair blowing unceremoniously in the caustic breeze.
“Hey...sorry, excuse me. Hey...I saw you were pushed out of that truck. Are you ok? Do you need a ride?”
“No, I’m fine”. Her voice was broken. She staid her course.
For a second he watched her walking away from his passenger window, tottering on high heels. His stomach knotted up with a soupy blend of embarrassment, shame, and some semblance of pained compassion. He gently idled up until he was just ahead of her.
“Hey...it’s just that we’re on the outskirts of town...you’re walking towards the national forest park. I can drive you somewhere...are you hurt?...”
As she walked up he saw her bruised forearms, bloodied and already beginning to purple. He caught site of her dusty tear-streaked face. Her eyes met his briefly like a sudden sun-glare and he instinctively looked down.
“I’m fine...thanks. I’ll call my sister, she’ll pick me up.” She folded her arms as she continued to walk. The holes in her voice were patched by a sort of fortitude not heard, but felt in the air around her, like a change in barometric pressure. He reeled from this, but idled a little longer beside her.
“Hey I’m sorry, I just feel like I shouldn’t leave you here...I mean, I’m sorry that happened to you, he seems like...” She said nothing. He looked at the road. “I can at least call the cops? Non-emergency line or whatever?”
“I’ll just wait for my sister. She’ll pick me up.”
“You’re gonna call her?”
“Yes”. She made no motion to do so, and he wondered if her dress had pockets.
“Ok...but really, I can give you a ride to wherever...”
“Thank you. I’m fine”. Eyes on the ground, walking, sniffling. Her pace never slowing. The soup in Mark’s stomach began to boil over until he felt helpless. He heard a hallucinatory buzzing in his ears and the color of the sky seemed to change to orange as he turned towards the open road. He slowly rolled the window up and accelerated.

Without thinking, Mark sped up far past the speed limit as any semblance of humanity quickly vanished on either side of the road, replaced by hoary oaks and maples towering over nameless parched bushes and vampiric weeds. The weird sense of orange subsided as his feelings reflexively closed in on themselves; the road buzz and lazy late afternoon sun glancing at odd angles off leaves and branches formed an opiate for his thoughts. He rode the high for as long as he could, staring blankly out at the winding road, feeling it’s un-repaired ruts boosting the blankness of his consciousness. Inevitably, the sobering guilt he anticipated slowly began to boil back up into his lungs. What was he supposed to do? What would a stronger person have done? Forced her to get in his car just as she had been forced out of one? He could have called the police. That would have meant some kind of report created, something on record. Instant shame at the fear this created. Domestic violence happens all the time, he reasoned. He did everything in his power. You can’t control other people. They make their own decisions.

She’s waiting for her sister, he thought. But she was walking, not waiting. He wondered if the sister would come, or if she was real. Did she anticipate the truck turning around and picking her back up? He imagined her living a life of waiting to be picked up by an imaginary sister, shutting out the physical pain of blow after blow and visualizing a savior; eternally waiting by the side of the road for a ride that never comes… Addicted to future salvation, caught in a cycle of painful reality on the one hand, and limitless imagined opportunities to be saved on the other... Waiting for a hand to reach into the chaos and pull her out into the passenger seat of a humble sedan, there a woman, her twin, driving her to safety, her twin sister’s voice strong and calm like hers, but marked by a different sort of strength, a strength of knowing through a totality of lived experience, not from birth to death, but from birth to infinity; a twin sister living a parallel life to hers but in which every imaginable obstacle was faced and overcome. They would drive out from the town, down a country road with exact opposite turns than this one, flowing in the exact opposite direction, in both space and time, moving parallel and backwards to the beginning of a reverse world in which everything was brand new...

A deer flashed across the road, breaking Mark from his thoughts. His foot overcompensated on the gas, causing his seatbelt to gently knock out his wind; his hands wavered on the steering wheel momentarily, then straightened. A twin sister, he thought. Don’t know where that came from. His thoughts drifted absently into a memory of a conversation with his ex.

“I just feel like God is calling me somewhere else, but I don’t know where...” she looks at him meaningfully. He could never understand what the meaning was.
“What makes you feel that way?”
“Well, I don’t know, but...I was reading this morning about how Jesus instructed the disciples to go from town to town and to not even bring food or clothing; to rely completely on their faith to provide. I want that! I want that faith.”
“Yeah...”
“I just don’t know where God wants me, you know? What if he’s calling me to a life like that but I’m like...in the wrong place?”
“When will you know when you’re...in the right place, you know?”
“It’s just that I know that...when I hear his voice...”
He pauses in thought. These rationalizations always rub him the wrong way, but he can never place his finger on why. And he can never articulate himself. Suddenly it boils over into his conscious mind.
“Do you ever wonder if God is the one waiting? That you just need to do something and see what happens?”

A bend in the road startled Mark, and he realized it wasn’t because it was unexpected, but because the afternoon sun was changing into evening. It was just that time of day when idyllic golden stains across the mid-horizon begin to degenerate into the night’s first shadows. The ambient roar of rubber on asphalt had lulled him, and the seductively imperceptible change in atmospheric color only served to further the effect. He snapped out of it fully now, focusing with unnecessary energy on the details of each subtle curve in the sticky country road. To the left...to the right...a little more right, now just a little left...straight ahead...left-ish... his focus was becoming grainy in this sudden weird obsession with the road’s every detail. I’m waiting for a big change in the road, the thoughts now came unbidden, like weird little voices that say clownish things in your ear in the borderline state between waking and sleeping, I’ll know it when I see it...left...a little right...now back left, no too much left, you’re careening!…just a little back to the right, don’t go over the dividing line…yes, you got it… he found himself now fully devoted to the little idiosyncrasies of every change in the direction of the road, waiting for something, the thoughts came, waiting for a sister – no, not a person, you’re waiting for a change, waiting for a single moment, that moment of enlightenment, a single fucking singularity, something unprecedented...I’ve been waiting all my life for this, yes, for one moment out of a million, that one time that something new happens, the sort of thing you were always reading about, already reading about before I could read, reading about how in one single fell swooping motion everything could change, from the beginning to the end, your entire consciousness just swooped out from bellow you like an eagle catching a rat, just totally gone, but gone in the best way, some kind of kinetic juxtaposition with a mental mutability, a full awareness and indication of a connection between the mental and the physical and the mental-

His glazed eyes snapped back to the road, time slowed to almost a standstill, and he saw something bizarre. Just ahead but slightly to his left a subtle aberration in the foliage emerged: A mirage-like glow was emanating in a perfectly straight line from two feet above his windshield all the way down to one foot above the ground, but the image was only three inches thick; it resembled a giant see-through chopstick suspended in the road ahead of him. As he drove on, it slowly began to swing open; it was as if someone was showing him a sheet of paper from the side and slowly turning it to reveal the page. He was hypnotized. Lost in the image, he thought nothing of the car or the gas or break pedal, until, as the mirror slowly opened, he suddenly saw the tail end of a car ahead of him seemingly coming from some incomprehensible angle towards him. Immediately he snapped back into reality, only to find his arms and legs physically paralyzed; for less than a single second, he comprehended the real state of his paralyzed body, and simultaneously comprehended the real state of a giant all-encompassing mirror slowly turning in on him, until the other car began to mercilessly bear down, and he quickly lost all sense of real and unreal. He heard a comically bass-heavy explosion sound, and in slow motion, almost in a sort of underwater drug-like state, he watched the approaching vehicle confront him, and in that split un-real second he made eye-contact with the driver – with himself -

Only seconds later his eyes snapped open. The first thing was the pain in his left arm. The second was the throbbing in his head; the third, the dirty yellow glow of the setting sun blinding his right eye. He found his body draped across the drivers seat like a blanket. He observed this fact absently. There was extreme pain in several parts of his body, but as his eyes quickly adjusted, he noticed the undisturbed steering wheel in front of him. This unnerved him more than any pain, but his attention switched to the windshield. It was then he noticed the several little cuts from glass on his chest. He shifted his legs, and felt a weirdly comforting pain; his legs moved freely. He leaned on the door latch and swung himself out of the car. Dusk was fully covering everything, and he stumbled towards the front of his vehicle. He surveyed the damage. Totaled, he thought, with inappropriate clarity. Absolutely no ability to drive it. The shape of the damage to the front of the car was sickeningly symmetrical. He turned in desperation to see the perpetrator of the accident. There was none. He turned to the right, the direction he had come; many miles. To the left: unknown. He would have sunk into his thoughts, but he found none. Alone on the road, in acute pain, he began to wait.