Have you named your car?

Yes I have.

What is the name of your car?

I don't want to tell you.

Will you tell us your name?

Certainly. My name is Tracia Manghanger.

Do you enjoy driving?

I suppose so. It gets me around.

Does that mean that you enjoy it?

I'm not sure.

Do you like your car?

I suppose so. The type of car isn't as important to me as it is, for example, to my husband.

What about your co-workers?

I sometimes get the impression at work that people think I should have a newer car. My boss, in particular, avoids driving next to me. I don't think she'd want to get caught in an accident with an older model car like mine - if she were to have an accident.

And you?

And me? Do I want to have an accident with a car better than mine? I'd rather not have an accident, but sometimes they do happen. I don't seek out accidents, like my husband does. He feeds certain temptations, I think, and sometimes just has to drive into something he sees. If it's there, if it's close to the road or on the road, he feels the temptation and he might just try to run it over, to knock it over.

And you're not like that?

No.

Even if it means that you are in the minority of drivers, that you are somehow different, that some might even say that you are anti-social?

It still doesn't mean anything. Sometimes I think I'd rather not drive all the time, but it's hard to get out of it once you've started. Plus, I probably wouldn't be able to stand for it long if I got out of my car and tried to walk.

Are you bitter about this?

I don't know. I get excited about things like everybody else does. I cheered at the news that pedestrianism was being reduced globally. It was nice to know that so many people had adequate transportation, vehicles and roadways, and didn't have to move about in poverty, on their own rickety feet. But sometimes I think that progress may have its down side too.

It's all political

And the roads

Are the cover-up

'Livius, what was the war like, to see it, really?"

"It was awesome. It was really neat. After we liberated all the cars from those lands the people took to the streets. They took to the streets on their feet, that is. They had to - we had taken all their cars. They burned all the roads and bridges so we had to find alternate routes back home. They emptied the libraries of books and burned them in the public places, and then they burned the libraries. They broke the windows in the shops and the boring museums, and took out what they could carry and burned the rest. They were so happy to be liberated that they burned everything. Water was in short supply, but fire was not. Burning flame is like a certain friend that smiles so wide. If you are down the street you cannot feel the heat but you can still enjoy the strong color. You can stay away from it and drive in your car. That's what I did. The animals escaped from the zoo so I could race after them and run them over. It was exciting. I found a pack of watches that were still ticking and I lit them one by one and threw them out my windshield. Much of the city burned down to the ground, but that's what you do when you get excited. Good thing they didn't light my new car on fire. I was able to drive it all the way home. Pretty exciting."

It's just a street

But with its brothers

It thinks the way for you

Car drivers jockey for the closest parking space. Sometimes this means parking on the sidewalk, sometimes it means driving into the plate glass doors and down the aisles inside the Walgreen's. You might have to take out the other cashregister to drive past the remaining one to make your small purchase of a comb and a tissue. You might have to create a new opening next to the door to get out, for other cars have noticed the opening you made to go in and are using it for their own purposes and are driving their own way on the trail you first blazed down the aisles to the toothpaste in their own vehicles.

If you could drive

Over everything

You have made a good start

From his observation spot just off the street, but hidden well in the brush and the shadows, he squatted for some time to observe the faces in the cars passing by. He aimed his eyes thru the windshield glass, past the glare, past the glass, to try to identify the faces of the drivers, the faces swallowed up inside in their postures and their rigidity and their tiny human frailty. He checked to see if any of them were the faces of the pedestrians who once came to his classes, but it didn't seem possible. All the faces had a certain dead roundness and flabbiness to them. As they drove by in their cars he saw the world reflected back at itself in their windshields, how the textures and towers and surprises of the trees and buildings were bounced back and away with the thick grey of their faces and the car inner world just behind it and safely shielded. He saw just the round faded heads in the grey envelopes. Their expressions stayed the same, a forward stare, passive yet somehow ugly in anger too. They were all scary toys frozen inside an ice cube and in your drink to surprise you at a party.

If only you could choose your own face

From all the options on the showroom floor

But you can

"When I drove it in Enematia, when I drove it around the world, my plunder car drove very fast. I could speed across the deserts and the oceans, I could speed thru the cities of Asia and France, but when I got back to the United States it only went very slow. It ground up the road in its tires in all those far away places, but in my own land in my land it slow-poked down the road, it could not keep up with my wishes and expectations, it just inched along and made me late to my architecture job every time. Because I was late for work every time the metal storage buildings that I designed were always missing something. One was missing a door, one was missing a part of a roof, one was missing a big hole of wall in its side, one was missing the familiar logo, and one was missing something that I have not discovered yet what it was missing to this day, and they were missing things because I was late because my plunder car went too slow for my life in my country. And yet I still love it. Maybe I can train it to go faster. Maybe I can train it to fly above all the other cars. It is shiny and blue and it is full of possibilities; it has the wide seas and the spit-less skies in its transmission and its fuel tank. I nearly died to make it mine – as a matter of fact I had to kill some people to get it in my possession. I had to run them over with my front bumper and my back; I had to snap into their kneecaps and flatten their faces with my round tires. I had to demonstrate who was boss with my superior-sized gas tank and commuting priorities. I had no time to sob for their stories, in fact, I could not understand their stories, I could not understand their unusual language. They spoke gibberish and I was the word. If only I could burn down all their cars and cities, that would truly show them."

Draw a map

Only the roads

That's called planning

The sandy dirt ground is naked after winter. The plants that had died and been buried and somehow held their breath for the long cold months now stab a curled-up umbrella pinch above the surface, waiting for water, waiting for heat and light to show their green faces, to show their blooms and reasons. If only the sun could find its way thru the car exhaust to hold them. They will try, they will wait, they have held their breath so long against the cold, they can stab their listening points in the wind and the rain, they can wash the world clean with their threats of blooming and tall, they can eat up the air and make it with their leaves now light green miniature but soon dark green and mighty.

If you are idle or if you are not. If you are broken or if you are hot. If you have things you can throw in the fire, if you have round wheels or misshapen tires, if you have a hat that you wear in the night, if you cannot put up the last breath of light, if you are a mattress to feel all the sky, if you want to live before you fall down and die.

The rain makes for more headlights; it shines up the dirty road into a special sweet lake of flat. The wind blows tears on the windows, the whole world melts in the dark cloud morning. Here's where our frustration starts and ends, why so many sit in their car with the weather all around, so frightened of melting, of blowing away if they had to face it with just their body and clothes. They need the metal and glass all around them, they need it like a capsule of strong powder to fall down into the stomach, they need it against the chaos that their jobs and families beat back the sticks, they need their enclosure because the world is too much, too unstable, too daring, too unpredictable, too incomprehensible. They need a hard skin because their own skin is too vulnerable. They secretly desire to be insects, with their hard bones as a shell around the rest of their green sickness of life. They are hermit crabs, finding their skins under the waving flags of a car lot. They line up forever and may crash because they are just too impatient. Many decide to put on their extra jolt of speed to make their destination, but there is not a gap between their car and the next and so that jolt just squeezes both their car and the one in front into a pile of twisted lies and broken glass. Their legs might be chopped off in such a sudden impact. Their eyes might be smoldered in the knife shards of flying glass. Their face just might be mangled beyond recognition because of the way their radio flies out of its spot and into their mouths. They might end up eating their air bag, it super-inflating inside their intestines and exploding their guts and ribcage out in all directions, in all seriousness and blood.

If there is silence somewhere

If just for a moment

A car will surely break it

They sat in the War Bar and they talked, but the words didn't quite work right, they didn't come out quite, they didn't go too far. The explosions came orange on the screen, and yellow, and the colors tore the room up from the screen for a moment but the dust didn't come out, but the cloud didn't come out. Still, they coughed at it, they all did, but just once, just a single cough, and they felt the new dust of it on the tender finger skin shielded by their fingernails, they felt the grit of the blast, they felt the dust there, stabbing.

Penny had her next too many beer, and she knew that she had had too many but still she had this next one too. She knew it made her sloppy, made her slosh like the water rolling, but she took the next sip and still another while the glass was tilted back and at her mouth. Sip enough and the explosion is twice as loud, sip some more and you feel it even better in your toes and she put it inside her, like she had to for a good secret keeping, and it went down like liquid and it made her an ocean.

It wasn't the dream, it wasn't the feeling, it wasn't her dream of a feeling but it was a feeling, but it could set her dreaming in her daylight in her make-up and she could feel it like her head was up tall, like it could be in bed, like it could go there with a snap, and she could feel something, that disconnection, that soft smoothness of something, and maybe it was the feeling or maybe it was just a stupid approximation but still she liked it and that's when and why she took her next few sips. That's when and why she reached for her keys in her bag, to run her car to add movement to the feeling, to make it so and make it even better.

She had to drink before she drove, she had to do it to get the feeling, to start the feeling and then to add the movement, to go to that place, to get to that condition, to administer her knowing and the twitches and the action. She could get there, to the unfurling, to the flag-waving of her body on the holy highway sea, if she drank so much and drove so much and that was her mission each night at the War Bar and that was her mission each night on the drive home.

Walker just watched her; his beer bottle lasted forever; he'd have the one and she'd have the three four eight and he could tell that she was leaving her body and turning into ocean and that her hands were seaweed and her feet were anemone and still she went to her car and sometimes he tried to take her keys and sometimes he stood in the doorway to try to stop her but she was so much bigger than he was, and rounder than him, and a battering ram to him and she could bounce him out of her way or she could set her brown teeth on his fingers and she could have her way with her weight and her ocean, and she could get her way to her keys and her driving and her drinking and her feeling.

She could push her way, she could ocean her way, she could war her way like the explosions and the earth in the air. She could look him aside with her face like an anvil, she could press him to inconsequence. She could throw him like shrapnel. He moved aside, he had to, for the feeling had her like fire and she was burning, burning to drink the beer to feel it and burning to drive to add the movement and the sensation or its lack and the movement or the rolling, the hover of it, was like that dream in a very basic way, was like the dream that she remembered from those years, was like the dream she forgot with all that liquid, was like the dream or was the dream or substituted for the dream which had fallen in the ocean, which had sunk down forty leagues, and could never be recovered, not with her size or her eyes or her memory, or with all that drinking and that driving for the sensation.

If you cannot

Get it in silence

You will have to drive it away

As civilization revolved more and more into one single on-going traffic jam, the people inside the cars were not so concerned about their own appearance and shifted all consideration to thoughts of how their car appeared to their fellows. Women stopped putting lipstick on their own lips and instead applied it in long sensuous curves around the front grills of their cars while men let their chins go to seed while carefully shaving off dead insect bodies from the face of their car with shaving cream and razor. Those who wanted their cars to appear as cool as a cucumber had their headlights fitted with gigantic sunglasses that closed the auto emotion off from all the other cars in line. If you were ill you let the snot run down your face but used your hanky to carefully polish that bit of grit off of your car's hood.

The people inside grew into immense ragged things fed from drive-thru windows, dirty from lack of any shower but the occasional splash they'd get when they sent their car thru a car-wash, hair matted, eyes crossed and unfocussed, while their cars all sparkled as if they were still in the showroom. The people inside eventually lost their ability to smile or frown or show any emotion at all with their faces. Instead, they all aspired to mold their face into the face of their car: headlight eyes, grill mouth of teeth and chins as bold as bumpers.

Four wheels

At once

The crouching pounce

Tracia worries about her best friend Penny. She worries about her husband Livius. She does not worry about herself, because she is not the worrying kind. But she worries about the two of them because she has her reasons, and they are worrisome reasons at that, and because she has her reasons and they are worrisome ones at that.

Car moon

Rolling June

Round like always

"This is Super Livius coming from my dash board to yours to let you know that my wheels are spinning like midnight moonlight and I can run my Enemymobile over anything: the road, the streets and oceans, and even the sky in fact. This is Super Livius and now I'm going overboard. I have left the roads behind and their cages the curbs to drive the earth and slide along each horizon as far as the sunlight and midnight will take me. I'm playing the newest songs by the youngest artists and I feel fine, I feel the wheels beneath me and I don't care what I run over because my car has an engine and it just takes things over. I'm driving faster and faster than you ever could, all you can do in my debris is turn your radio and listen to me rant about my racing. I'm a big bad racecar driver in my Enemy a-stolen machine and I can drive as far as far is, to all the ancient places, and I can run over them and all their artifacts, and I can spin my wheels on the mud that god kneaded with his fists like tires. I am god almighty, that's me, Super Livius, and I have the steering wheel to prove it. I have the shiny keys that turn the whole world power off and on with a little twist of my wrist; I do that, in fact. It's called night and day. I have the old white ham and all the convincing and entertaining melodies. I punch one or another with my life-giving fingernails and then I turn my vehicle to a new direction and I tell you the weather by eating up the sky, by peeling out in the sky with my rubber and I tell you the sports by running all the races and I tell you the farm report by harvesting all the crops with my rear bumper and my front one. I am the traffic report because I am the traffic. I am the eye in the sky and the eye in the soil and the black of the roads and the tires of all rush hours. I know your route so listen to my words and you will find your way with my radio and my suggestions in ranting rant time for you. I am the tall antennae that sometimes wave in the wind so I can tell you how it's blowing. I make the wind by swooshing past your truck too fast; I'm there in fact but invisible to your eyes because of my speeding movements. I drive the radio waves themselves, I drive up halfway above you all and if you twist your neck up too fast you might see my butt going by, or the back flap of my tires ripping a hole in the blue sky fabric. I peel out on the stars and I spew my exhaust to the distant galaxies. I am Super Livius and you are my children, the fetuses born in my many trips. You can call triple A or you can call me any day and I will laugh the loudest at your car crash problems because I will just drive by in glee and with the tunes cranked so I cannot hear your screams of distress or whispers of upset. It's just me and my feet and hands of car speed and I'll just munch you under my four five six seven eight wheels going so fast they multiply, wheel-births from knowing how to go and where and how to flap my trap for the radio listeners, to all you in your little cars as the bombs drop and the stars themselves. If you got a convertible you'll be the first to go because I'm dropping them, baby, like the songs you know so sadly, I'm dropping my world globes down from the sky, I'm rescuing you with more words like curling wisps of smoke but when that gravity hits them they can fall down hard and they'll squish you if you're not so careful. This is Super Livius signing off because I see a cliff ahead of me that I've got to climb. I've got to turn off the radio too and use that additional power to aid my driving hill ascension. So here's the latest tune from the Crybaby Boys, 'Drive me crazy, big momma.' See you all later, drivers and drivettes."

One last call letter

One last radio wave

One last call

Tracia finds his car wedged into a small but growing pile of crashed wrecks.

She knew where to find him because she had been following his taillights in a series of newspaper photos. In the cracked and speckled windshield she can see his body twisted in a backwards moon curve as if he had just leapt in the air, as if he thought he could leap his car with his body over the pile and down to the other side.

Tracia extracts the body from the smoking wreckage. She hoists the body over her shoulder. Bits of car debris cling to the body of Livius, snapped onto him by the power of the collision. The pieces, various filters, gears and belts, clang together when his body moves and ring on him in the wind and the movement like so many wind chimes hanging from the eave of a house.

She curves his moon curve body to the hearse that she was driving and tries to bend his body flat again but it still insists on its curve of death. In the back of the hearse his silent body is like the roller on the bottom of a rocking chair.

She sits in the driver's seat and expects a storm of sobs at any minute. She intentionally waits for the cries and the sniffles to come and go, but she sits there and they don't come in the first place. In her silent mind she plays back some of her favorite memories of her husband, of the drives they took together, of their trips to the auto showrooms, of mutual gas stops in the early days when they could never be apart, when they could never drive down different streets, when they could never stop at different gas stations but had to refill together at the same one. She plays the memories back like movies in her mind and expects that at any minute she will twitch and the uncontrollable tears will commence, but they do not. She doesn't cry she doesn't wail she doesn't beat her breast. She sees the pictures in her head but none of the images is even enough to bow her mouth like Livius' body into a rocking smile. She blinks her eyes a few times fast to bring on water, but she can't even do that enough to form a drop to fill or slide down her cheek. Maybe when I start driving, she thinks, but even then the tears don't fall. Maybe when I fall asleep tonight - she thinks, but she has to do the trick and blink her eyes even then to make them wet. She drives his body to the undertaker and because of the bend to his body they have to fashion a custom coffin that looks like a big smiling smile, like it made its own joke, but then when they have to put his body in it, face first, it turns over, so it makes the coffin into a frown. Even when they lower that big frown into the hole and the minister has his mouth like it too, even then she can't cry, she doesn't break out sobbing. She watches it go down as the rain hits her windshield. She drives slowly with the whole rest of the funeral procession.

The car

Makes the wind

When it takes the curve

All Walker says is, "A rolling boulder has an eye to surprise you."

The key in the ignition, turning, scraping, the sickly circling fox of sound. Then it's rev once and then it's rev once again and a third time and the car roars out like all the oil wells screaming, like all the gas stations on the planet exploding into sound. The car has started, the day's journey has ended.

Some day

There will be sufficient parking

But no room for anything else

Tracia is waiting for her emotions. She's not going to drive so fast she can catch up with them; she doesn't figure on that happening. She starts to figure that maybe she's driven past them long ago. Maybe she left them behind, maybe she left them somewhere when she was going much too fast, going much too back and forth. Maybe she needs to drive backwards to see if she can find them somewhere back there, somewhere in her slow-falling dust. Maybe she needs to just wait and see if they could ever catch up with her. Maybe they need their own car keys, maybe not. Maybe her emotions don't even like to drive, maybe they don't ride in a car, and that's their inclination, maybe her emotions waited behind for her in the garage long ago and got tired of waiting. Maybe she'll just find them some time, on a road that she drove down years ago when she still could shake with a sudden feeling or laugh to herself. Maybe they'll catch up with her if she waits long enough, if she waits long enough for their limp and their crutches.

Flower bent dead

At its ankles

Car drove thru

Penny has the full and empty liquor bottles in her car even tho the traffic's going so slow and she can push her pedals down when there's a gap in the jam and she can sip a long sip until the whiskey warms her body and gives her that feeling, kind of like her dream of a feeling, and it lasts until the next sip is necessary but if only there were space in the long traffic jam for her to make more movement and she goes kind of sideways and her driving has a stagger but she feels it on her sides and in her head and to her hair and it is dizzy and it is gentle and it is like a bright light that only she knows shooting halfway across the wilderness and in the gaps where the lawns hold the buildings like a big cartoon smile at the commercials and she could be dreaming but she is slowly driving and a few more gulps of whisky get her going even more so.

It is simple emotion, it is true direction and the wheels in her knees regulate the modest spins of the others, and she thinks about it less when she can grab so strong at the feeling, like a coat hanging in the air and just out of her fingertips but a sip and a steer will take her there and that will save her from the opening cold, from the breath of the morning air on her skin bare arms and that coat hanging there she can burrow in its fur she can fluff it in her face. With one more drink of whisky and one more mile of driving and it tickles her nose but her arms are still cold just a little further in her jump front jump back driving in her car going so sideways it slides against the next long steel scrape like Pete.

Ohmigod but a little steering wheel a little small sip under the dashboard cover and the lines in the dream, she is silent but they go and the long pole blanket that the coat can have for dinner and the spinning glove can spin you to sleep in the long dreaming of feeling, in the long sensation of the traffic jam road.

When she gets to work, if ever, she'll have to write about it for her next new ad sensation.

Car tire

In the wet mud

Crazy razor tread

He noticed that his feet were turning grey. They seemed to be disappearing. But it wasn't so much his feet alone as it was that everything down there was disappearing to grey.

A low cloud of smoke or haze clung to the ground. When he made a step he splashed his foot back down in it, sending ripples of mist in concentric circles across the entire smoke carpet that led from the whole horizon to him. He could have been stepping thru a pool of water but it was a thin layer of smoke at his feet that kept him from seeing his shoelaces clearly.

Each step made a smoke splash – the image was so strong it should have had a sound with it but it was silent, like a step in a TV puddle with the sound turned all the way down. When he stood in place for a second or a moment the dust cloud settled like concrete, but when he lifted his next foot it took no extra gumption to break it free.

He could walk a few steps and forget about it, but still the smoke along the ground was there and grey and spilled in every place and made ghosts of the low grass and something for the flowers to keep their bouncing heads over, if they were the tall ones. When he looked off in the distance, which was down for the low world as far as the eye could see, it was as if it was all disappearing – everything above the tires was there, everything below had to be remembered.

He walked across a street that sometimes had cars but now had none. Halfway across he stood quite still and forgot that the smoke at his feet was just smoke and stood there as if it were cement that had set. It looked a little like that could be the case, a supposedly soggy smashed paper mache grey like a weak setting thing and if he didn't tug a muscle his feet were indeed trapped in it and that's what happened as he took a look around. He wasn't in danger, he wasn't stuck except for his own sense of it, and he stood there as a single dot car in the long away distance exhaled into something much bigger and approached him in his temporary stickiness.

He thought that he was fine to move his feet but he thought that maybe he really couldn't, or maybe that he really wouldn't. He saw the car coming but he knew that the low smoke heralded a new kind of time, a new way of moving. Something was changing or building slowly to the sky and now it ground his feet in place as the car turned into something bigger, its wheels turning gone and vanished in the low cloud everywhere.

Perhaps I can stop it with my head and my thoughts, Walker thought as the car got bigger and he could hear it now and its acceleration toward him. Maybe it won't hit me if I think those things so strong, or maybe if it hits me nothing will happen with my feet embedded as they are. The car was as threatening as they always are for walkers but somehow this one, going so fast and strong and steel, didn't seem such a threat, not today, not with the smoke down below and the world so empty of anything but tailpipes up above.

Now he could see the smoke around the car, how the mist was dancing like storms at its front and its sides. How the car cut thru it with its wheels and bumper churning, and how the haze could have been leaping or boiling all around to take its speed, to melt its steel.

Walker just stood there as the car got so much closer. He thought it wouldn't hit him if he thought so hard enough. If he could will the steel and speed to the side, if he could memorize it away to pieces, so he stood his spot of road and his feet in the grey mist concrete which boiled slightly now from the approaching car's nearing displacement, and if my thoughts are correct and mighty, he concentrated, he remembered, he looked at it so strong that he could say it if you asked and the smoke held him higher like having feet above your feet and he thought so hard that it wouldn't hit him it would not hit him it wouldn't hit.

The car seemed to be getting faster or maybe that was just because it was getting bigger. But on the last block or so its speed went down, and Walker stood his ground and the low smoke held the ground down so you could forget it and the car rolled more slowly and Walker thought so and even harder and the car stopped right in front of him, in front of his feet and his legs and the grey mist below him the car stopped and absolutely. And Walker saw the silent screaming driver trapped inside like frozen in an ice cube but Walker kept standing right in the middle of the street, and he was exposed, he was naked without a car of his own to hold the road, and he stood there for a long time and the driver inside frozen and shouting and like an insect scrambling from your finger about to squish it. And then the car at his feet went into reverse and made a half circle, a turn around, a go back, and went away back the same way it came.

Walker thought: I thought so.

A one and a two and a

Million or maybe so many more

One failure of surprise after another

Hundreds of cars drifted in and out of consciousness in the long, ever-growing traffic back up. Headlights flipped on and off in dimming and hiccupped back to wake. Inside them all, shoulders slumped and rose back in bleariness but the bodies inside, larger now than they had even been before, didn't really matter. All that mattered was the steady car consciousness, the occasional rumble from an engine going more than a foot in the ongoing world traffic jam, the purr of so many motors running, their own conversation of stasis, and the smells that rose up in invisible smoke growing more visible by the mile-less miles. It was all a big dream, backed up twenty miles, backed up twenty years, backed up the entire system, one lane after another filling like what a pie crust is for with the latest commuter waiting for the light to change but there was no light, just the car in front and to the sides that kept him in place, or the concrete Jersey barrier or the bridge as well above her creaking and swaying with its weight of backed up traffic.

It was all a dream of movement, car stories from the engines still running. The smells that distracted you, the exhaust that played the rhythm of the open road, that spun your wheel across uncharted territory, roads new, black, and untamed by your wheels. The expression of speed as a memory, as a bell ringing somewhere deep in your sheets, under the cushions, strapped to your seatbelt, and when your eyes opened it was all the same as if they were closed. Just one line of humming and listening along, the echoing radio voices from car stereo to car stereo, allowed and bathed by the eight lanes creaking, cracking with the steady weight of the steady wait.

There flies an angel, a death behind the wheel and that drive turned so completely to dream and dust to dust. The last gas will burn off and the whole thing will dissolve, if only there were an exit or a battlefield to take the life taken.

They are all dreaming, or are they driving, or are they driving the dream or dreaming the driving. Take your time taking that photograph.

The air was alive with tiny particles. It was dust it was soot it was everything that exited the tailpipe. First everyone thought it was just the tall white rays of the sun, but on some days it covered everything. You could touch it you could taste it you could cut it with a knife. There were days when if you could see past your windshield enough to see it clearly you would notice that the whole world outside was made up of thousands of small dots, like tiny balls rolling in and around each other.

First the haze made distant things seem far away. Then the haze made close things appear to be much further from you. You'd get in your car ready to drive a long trip but then you'd be there right away and have to go nowhere, and have to remember - yes, the haze. On some days, with all those short trips building it up even further, the haze grew so thick that you could barely even see close objects - later it grew so thick you couldn't see anything.

The growing crazy haziness made the secret walks of Walker much easier to do, for he no longer had to seek out the distant and odd and unseen places and the shadows, and the trusses beneath the bridges to get to his destination. With the growing thick haze he could walk just about anywhere and never be seen. On the days when the haze was the hardest he could walk in the middle of the street with all the cars, he could even walk over them sometimes, trunk to top to hood, and nobody inside would notice anything except for the sound of his metal-denting footsteps.

Car drivers think they know where they're going, even when they cannot see it, but they really don't, they really don't know anything anymore because they left all that knowledge behind in the mind of their cars.

Penny got into her first accident because she was sure she knew where she was going, she was sure she knew where she was. She pressed down the gas to get there much faster and then boom she hit something. She wasn't even sure what she hit because the haze was so thick that she couldn't see the thing she hit, let alone her own thoughts of the moment.

Walker visited her in the hospital. The indoor air was still clear in these days so he was able to find his way from the signs on the walls.

"Oh, hi honey. Thanks for visiting," Penny said when she saw him walk in. She was well-bandaged and had a cast on her head because she'd had some kind of concussion but she still had the use of her limbs.

"I'm not feeling too good but the doctors say I can be out and driving in a week or so."

"You should take it easy," Walker said, slowly and carefully, as if each word was a lovely sight he had to go past so slowly so that he could really enjoy it.

"I've got to drive home soon and take care of some things. I have work piling up, the new campaign you know, for the Fogbuster 88. I've got to come up with the script and storyboard. If I don't and somebody else at the firm beats me at it, I'll be crashed, I'll be crushed. Maybe they'll let me work in my bed here. Maybe they'll let me have a pen and some paper."

"I'm sure they will, but now you must rest."

"I know. There's something wrong with my head. I can't think of all the things I usually think about, the scenes from the ad. I'm trying to see foggy landscapes near the sea but all I can imagine is big empty shopping mall parkinglots. I don't get it."

"You need to take it easy," Walker said, so slowly and stroking the air just above her. He could almost feel her thru the particulate at that level.

"I need to get in my car to think out the ads, I need to get in my car to think about anything," she said, looking at him, even tho he was growing fainter in the haze that was everywhere. "Maybe you can drive some more to think out my dilemma. Maybe you can drive a drive and think out my ad for me. After all, you are such a safe driver."

"It's because I..." He nearly said it but then he didn't. He almost told the truth about his feet and the way they knew the road, the way of his walking and his far away car days, but he did not. Somebody else might be listening. Penny might be listening and then she'd hold it against him so he didn't say a word.

The orderlies gave her a pen and a paper and for two hours straight she just stared at the paper. There were parkinglots in her brain and the paper on her lap and her head was still bandaged but wiggling a little better inside it now. She stared at the sheet of paper, she in her white bandages and her white hospital gown in her white hospital bed and its white sheets and she stared at that white paper until the parkinglots turned to snow and the snow turned to fog and in the fog she could make the first few pen marks and these were the high-beams of the Fogbuster 88, the newest vehicle in the long line, the one to see you thru the thickest fog, the one to bore you thru the mighty mist and the fog of white that was thick as a blanket but the headlights and rolling wheels could paint black and all the other colors with them, could blast a trail thru the rock of white, could sail thru the thick soup of obscurantism, could take you to your job or shopping even if you couldn't quite see thru to the steeringwheel.

Walker walked back home thru the thick fog of morning, thru the dots and spots that hit him like rain. He could hear the cars of the busy roadway just beside him but they could barely see him with the mist so thick, and they didn't bother. He walked his way home, his legs knew the way, he could count it in his sleep and the fog could choke him but he breathed very carefully, he breathed very slowly so his lungs could do the sorting, so he could breathe the tiniest air in gaps like bubbles. He stepped very carefully thru the thick haze of the day and he thought about walks he'd taken, and he thought about the old days and ways.

Sometimes he thought about the other pedestrians in the old days, when he still ran his pedestrian safety classes, and how he would sometimes run into his pedestrian friends on his secret routes for secret walking, and how he'd tell them hi and how they'd chat for a second or two and then they'd be on their separate ways, or if their ways weren't separate how they'd walk side by side under the girders or over the stones but watch their voices and watch their quiet when the cars grew near, and watched their colors and watched their gestures when the cars got in sight. There was Brutus and there was Jessica and there was Lydia and Roscoe and there were all the others, but slowly on the grapevine the word came that Mark was hit and dead, or that Judith was hit so badly she would never move her legs or brains again, or that Reginald had been hit bad, too bad to say anything now, maybe a report would come down the grapevine much much later and so Walker would run into his pedestrian friends much less often as they all died out and then the mist and the muck in the air grew so thick he couldn't see them anyway. He could hear the cars but pedestrians were quiet; they had to be. There could be millions marching so closely beside him and he could never see them and they were all so quiet that he could never hear them, but he could imagine them sure enough, the stride of their legs and the impact of their shoes and just a few steps away thru the thickest murk and fog they were there, or they could be, and kept him fond company.

Brutus told him that Jessica would never be back but Jessica wasn't around to explain why Brutus never seemed to walk the old ways anymore, and Walker had some nice shoes for walking and he carefully hid the wear and tear on them from his wife, he could make them look new with his writing pen and so he did that with some black ink applied appropriately.

Crazy bugles

Flashing eyes

Somewhere close a car alarm

Part Twelve

Sloppy BooksContact

: E-mail me