What We Are (44 page)

“Chuckie. What? ... Yeah.... Well, that's exactly right.”

Nothing worse than a punk-ass superior like Glory Days guessing your alibi, which this time actually happens to be true.

“Why would I lie, man, and to you of all people? ... Nah, nah, this cop just gave me a little warning and a sit-down. I'll be in in ten. Don't worry. Or nine now. I'll be there in fucking minutes. I'll be right there.”

Click
—the cell snaps shut, both hands grip the wheel like a driver in training for the German Autobahn. New freeway now, north to the formerly known Barbary Coast via 280, “the most beautiful freeway in the world,” whose untouched rolling hills and ridiculously wide lanes are so out of place in this valley you've just got to speed, high on the unfamiliar. Acceleration and whine of the engine and then—brake, downshift, brake, downshift: bumper-to-bumper traffic! Stop-and-go for a mile. Five minutes. Shit. Long time. Lose time. Lose
money. Lose self watching the instinctively aerodynamic v-flock of birds soar over the most beautiful pollutive artery in the world. The uncurling fingers and palms return into gesture form, out the window, the last free space left on the freeway. Private-public boogie sessions going down with a brainless house DJ. Unfazed, generic, thoroughly entertained Americans. Everyone gets along if they're shut off in their own house, sealed up in their own car, the visors twisted to block the right and left view both, an idyllic
American Idol
in pump on the system.

“Fuckin' cop,” I say, twisting the rearview mirror toward myself. I meet my eyes and wink. Calm, cool, but white as chalk, whitening with every blink. “He wouldn't make it a day in the business world. Lecturing asshole. See a ring on my finger? I don't think so. A tanline on my finger? What kind of investigating asshole are you? Do I look stupid enough to be a father? Or a husband? Asshole.”

Traffic spreads at last, and I pick it up and slide into place. Stanford exit: three miles. The movement again, good illusion of movement, revolution of tires. No squad cars anywhere to be found. Time is rolling now as fast as time's inhabitants. I straighten the mirror onto the car directly behind me, too directly behind, but not for long.

I speed up but gain nothing. Ascend a minor incline at the Foothill exit and coming down it the cars in their lanes look like beads on the strings of an abacus. A 2006 Hummer two lengths ahead is slowing down. Shiny spit-black coating, tinted windows, tank on wheels, white nonchalant elbow out the window like a flag of fleshy bone, a statement: unperturbed by the rush, not late for life.

I move into the sacred unused diamond lane, remembering the last Hummer I'd seen, or had registered, the modern American family
of the leash, remembering my newfound anonymous friend, his sprinting through the shadows of Campbell, accelerate past a (last year's trend) Beemer and finger the passenger side window down. The Hummer is so high off the ground I have to lean all the way across the seat to find the driver.

“Hey!”

Salt-and-pepper-haired man looks over slowly and then down, speeds up. I stay with him at sixty-five miles an hour.

“Hey! We're on the most beautiful freeway in the world! It's all ours!”

He snickers at me or at my car or at both me and my car. The son of a bitch.

The engine on this relic's about to blow up, but I don't give a fuck. Not any longer. He pretentiously raises his eyebrows, and I shout, “Join the army if you wanna drive a fucking tank around town!”

The monstrous Hummer's wheels sound like it's in an invisible wind tunnel of its own.

“You Schwarzenegger wannabe! You ain't no Terminator! You got nothing!”

He tilts his head with amusement and pulls his elbow flag in, as if his skin is being corroded by my words, the Rolex shining against the darkness of his tightly wrapped leather interior. Condescending eyeblink, effeminate purse of the lips, tinted window rising.

Before it's sealed shut he veers over and cuts me off, his bumper tapping my front end. I swerve left to avoid an accident, shouting, “Hey!” as the door kisses the divider, then seems to be stuck to it, grinding into it, steel on concrete. His tank rapidly shrinking into a black dot as I slice back across the lane to regain equilibrium but go airborne instead. All this in an instant.

I know, suspended in the silence, that it's all over.

Time has finally stopped and will finish itself off....

Then the world slams a palace door across my face and I'm spinning through the wash cycle of—“arrrrrrrrgggg!”—two-hundred-and-seventy-one dollar diamond-lane pavement of the most beautiful freeway in the world until—
click
—everything in the 1982 two-door Honda Civic goes black.

THE
tup tup tup tup tup
of slowing vehicles. Their labyrinthine undersides like the roof of the mouth. The wiry tread of tires straight-lined in the spin. Then the exhaust. No one stops. Only the vehicular slowdown occurs, sand lining up for the middle of the hourglass before the freefall. Above my head, behind my body, a hundred feet past the 280 North exit, the race resumes: my spill means merely minutes lost to the masses, nothing more. It's like a
Godfather
hit: it's not personal, it's just
tup tup tup tup tup
business. I too have lost minutes before, have lost a lifetime of minutes.

I am thinking of the middle-aged man in the Hummer. I do not think of the feeling in my legs, which I twitchingly amazingly still have—and would certainly be thankful to have—had I thought for even a moment of the alternative. I do not think of the alternative. That's how I've been taught: everything is an alternative. Nor had I thought of the
tup tup tup tup tup
of my beating heart when I'd first awoken and known, in a widening pool of my own blood, that the
tractor tires of the Jeep Wrangler treading 3-D into pavement would flatten any part of my body not flattened already.

Am I a stain in the road? A drop of bird shit on the roof? A dead branch shed by the manzanita bushes lining the side of the freeway? Am I, at most, worth someone stopping?

I cough
tup tup tup
the blood curdling in, up, and out my throat like an angry Nevadan geyser. The tractor tire and the swerving Jeep Wrangler gone. Two other Jeeps just like it, gone. Mine, the 1982 two-door Honda Civic, done. A smoking heap of uninsured junkyard scrap metal. Yet still, despite their horizon-riding, fading-vision gonedness, more cars come and come and keep coming, climb out the opposite horizon line of the Fremont Hills. Jeep Wranglers, Ford Rangers, Volkswagen Bugs. Lexus hatchbacks, Mustang convertibles, a juiced cherry-red '62 Impala. Buses and utility trucks. Sixteen-wheelers. Motorcycles and, somehow, the beehive buzz of a moped. I cough
tup tup tup
again, so spasmodically that my cheek kisses the pavement, a quick chicken peck.

No one stops. My eyes are on the undersides again. Eyes wide, head leaking, supine. Between the flash of automative arrival and departure, the pink stuck diaphanous sky. Now the cry of nearing sirens, their cry a distant song of death, whose death I do not know. It cannot be the death of the prim and proper middle-aged man, gone forever into the squeeze of the undulating traffic.

I, Silicon Valley native ingrate, Donkey Kong king at age four, bastard child of the Data Generation, am conditioned to the flashing thoughts of my own head, the flashing photos from a satellite, the flashing lights of an intersection, the flashing international news briefs, flashing billboard commercials, flashing Hollywood films, flashing clocks, flashing perverts, flashing finally boring heroes, flashing, flashing, flashing your regrets of the past.

That's what it is: The middle-aged man has something you don't. A verifiable past, a measurable yesterday, and thus a verifiable future,
a measurable tomorrow. He had known, too. He had salt-and-pepper hair in the way that salt-and-pepper hair says, I have a past. And this is the result.
Hey, asshole. I have a story
.

But I have one, too. It's just that it's cut right down the middle of everything. I am a half-breed American man who can claim the brown pride of Polynesia or the white wisdom of western culture, land on opposite ends of the valley. I have been the best and I have been the worst. I am smart and yet I am tough, or reverse it. Walking through the hallways of decorum and posing in shiny ambition or sludging across the swamps of gutters and tiptoeing about in rocky prison yards. I know the mermaids on the bed of seaweed and I know the barnacles on the bottom of the boat. I have loved God and lost him and I have tried to regain him and failed. I have tried to love in an era of lovelessness. I have ridden both the GOP elephant and the Jeffersonian donkey both and have been tossed from their saddles through no poor handling of my own. I have written poetry in a hallway of charcoal portraits and have walked across the street to spend ten bucks at a liquor store on porn. I am beautiful and I am ugly, noble and depraved, I see too much and am therefore confused as hell; I am trying desperately for the rights to a story, something that lines up, goddammit, that lines up.

But there is only the
tup tup tup
of the tires on the speed bumps of the divider like the
tup tup tup
of the blood in the throat and the piercing song of the ambulance sirens rising. What is it that makes no one stop? That pushes forward onward outward upward? What plants this carnal chaos, the swallower of reflection?

I must stop now and think. For good, goddammit, for good, or my head's gonna explode. Feel an urgency I've never quite felt before. Linked—and what's this?—to the
tup tup tup
of the final moment.

Cars again!

Cars always again!

Not one square inch of pavement gets a rest, pavement serving over 99 billion miles of tire tread!

Dread the day the piston-pumping came and kept coming out from the horizon and over the hills and down through the fertile plain of my head to ride it, electrodes, tendrils, cortexes, smoke like clouds out the ears and nostrils and even the
tup tup tup
gurgling mouth. Dread the day I walked into Wendy's and ordered nothing, burning for a five-star meal. Dread the day this life destroyed my laughter, my fear of loneliness. Dread the day, the first one, where I had no discernible thought of bedding down a woman, all the yearning gone. Dread women, dread men. Dread the
tup tup tup
of my throat, my fucking throat. Dread what I am and what I see, dread what I hear, what I think I know.

“Can you hear me?”

I
tup tup tup
say, “Middle-aged—”

“Don't speak. Don't say a word.”

“—bastard.”

“Don't speak!”

They are latching on to me in all ways now: strapping devices to my arm, a wind-cold mask over the mouth still
tup tup tup
spurting like a fountain. Everyone is touching me in every place except the pockets, and then even that.

“Here's his wallet. Do you have any relatives? Don't speak!”

“How about this?” someone says. “
You
don't speak, rook.”

“Hey! I've been on this job for eighteen months!”

“Act like it then.”

“Hell with you!”

“Yeah, that's right. Let's get pissed off and feel proud and good while the poor fuck dies.”

I swallow the
tup tup tup
ensuing argument and realize that I am the poor fuck of fatal reference. It hits me like a car crash. I have not been prepared accordingly. I am like a medieval bride on the
baptismal eve she sees her very first cock: I am shocked. I have seen it at a distance so far off that the word, a breathless, ubiquitous, dark-eyed foreigner, has become less personal than business itself. I haven't pondered the word in ages, not since Cowboys and Indians with BB guns on the rooftops of Scott Lane Elementary School. In the last half month, the insouciant web of the Silicon Valley mocking its very existence: “We killed 'em, boys, knocked 'em
tup tup tup
.” Or, “That deal was
tup tup tup
in the water before it ever begun.” And, “Better alive than
tup tup tup
.”

It has been there all along, hovering behind the cars on the horizon, as pink and living as the sky, the tender abscess of the sun.

Maybe
, I think,
it is the sun. An old wound. The moon's eye. It is all that filth up there gathering for the big boom
.

Apocalyptic energy blurs my eyes and someone yells out, “We're losing him!”

But I will not go. I need to figure the sky and the middle-aged man and my evaporating life out for good.

I will not go.

I levitate onto the cloudy plastic bed and then I am rolling. I can find resilience somewhere within beneath the
tup tup tup
gurgling blood where I've heard words like soul spirit faith hope love take
tup tup tup
residence. I am lifted high off the ground by the thought of the words into the inside quarter of an ambulance. I am floating on plastic and then dropped into hygienic sanctity, everything inside these walls orderly and clean. Heavenly middle-of-the-cream-puff white. The faces youthful, angelic, the prodding massaging fingers, the coaxing words—”
Come on, baby! Don't give up, baby! I got you now, I got you!
“—selling me into believing, even after all the mess, that I'm worth something.

I see the
tup tup tup
of the intravenous machine sucking into itself, plastic-hearted prune, looking down on me like a streetlight.

I will end with this
beeeeep
—

“Give it a go!”

“Go!”

—thought: I am unbothered that Chuckie Chinaski and La Dulce and Tali and General Cyrus Rohan and Sharon and my eternally split-up parents and six daddies and torn Uncle Rich and the middle-aged bastard in the Hummer or whomever the fuck
beeeeep
—