Penny's face is rounder and rounder. She used to work out at the gym but that was long ago. She spends more and more time in her car. She needs to do that; she needs to stay there to go anywhere. She needs the time to get to her destination, to make her way thru the traffic.

"At first I thought I'd beat the traffic by leaving half an hour earlier, then an hour earlier, then 90 minutes earlier, then two hours earlier. Now I need to leave that much earlier because it takes me that long to get to work. Now I try to do my first hour of work in my car."

"I know what you mean," Tracia says, talking to her cell phone on her own trip to work. "I can see the trend. I get to work and then have to get back in my car to start the commute back home."

They both look at their own world of traffic, motionless all around them on their different highways.

Tracia says: "I'm not going to work today anyway. I'm going to my great grandmother's funeral."

"How old was she."

"Ninety-six."

"Was she still driving?"

"She drove until her dying day."

"Oh, that's good. I hate to hear those stories about people who get so old they can't drive and they die because they can't get some important medicine that they need, or water, or something. At least she didn't die like that."

"No, she died because she was going too fast when her car hit a telephone pole."

"That's sad. But I guess her time had come."

"I guess so too."

I wish I had

A piece of the sky

For every piece of broken glass

They had talked about having children, Walker and Penny did, but they didn't, and they wouldn't, have children that is, at least not until some serious legislative changes happened at the state or the national level. Penny thought that children should be able to get driver's licenses so they could get around on their own. "Who even needs to walk these day," she said. "Kids should be taught to drive once they've mastered crawling. I've seen too many people my age give up their own lives because they have to drive their kids around everywhere. Let the kids drive. I'd have kids if they could drive. I'm not going to sacrifice the things I want to drive to, or that I need to drive to for my career because I need to drive the kids somewhere because they need to be somewhere or need to get something. I'm not willing to do that."

Not even born yet

A yolk in a shell

A body in a car

Tosk has a screwdriver and a smile and he's talking about the war. He stabs out the points he's making, "Like the guy on TV said, it's just so necessary for us to be over there and fighting. He said it so well; I wish I had taken down some notes. I can't remember his name, but he had some real good points. He would convince you too, that's the nature of his good points."

"Hmm, that's too vague," Gearhart says. He is skootched down low on the vehicle he's working on. "What did he have to say generally, what was his point all about?"

Tosk squeezes his face for an oncoming sneeze. Instead of covering his nose for it he grits down on his face, squeezing completely so that when the sneeze comes it is completely repressed. His face rocks like a bomb blew off somewhere deep underground, just barely jumping the dust on the surface way above. "I don't remember rightly," he says, recovering from the squeeze to his whole face from the sneeze, "but it was quite convincing. It was about the war, and reasons why we should be there. You have to see it for yourself."

"Hmm, but if his ideas were so convincing, you would have at least one to share with us so we would understand why you were so convinced."

"Like I said, I don't really remember any of the specific points he made. He used all the usual words, but the way he put them together would convince you for sure. He talked about why the war was so important, and why it was important that we be there."

"Hmm, it must not have been very convincing if you can't remember what he said."

"It was convincing, and he was right," Tosk says, and he has shifted his weight so that when he waves his hands to speak, the screwdriver he has in his grip nearly stabs Gearhart in the face instead of the air.

"Hmm, I believe you," Gearhart says, looking up, looking down.

Walker has his own way to polish a car. Walker's way involves whorls of movement instead of up and down strokes. It polishes in such a way that the surface is nearly a series of mirrors. He is polishing the car that Tosk is working on and he has got a good shine going, a shine going to the point where there is a reflection in it and he should be seeing himself, but he sees someone else instead, someone he doesn't even recognize.

If you

Were a car

You could go much faster

Walker, Roscoe and Lydia were down by the river to walk in their secret places. They walked to actually go somewhere but their walking was an adventure too, a party that slowly moved the earth beneath them. They walked some rickety boards between rocks that some Huck Finn had set up years ago and had forgotten, or grew up and away. They wondered if the boards would hold their weight over the water - the boards did that in fact. They walked part way across a silent abandoned railroad bridge - the rails were rusted and forgotten, and they looked out from on top of it as if they had the whole city to themselves. They were far enough away from all the cars and their sounds, they were behind the backs of all the drivers, and only the slow river moved in the gaps between the boards under their feet, the slow river like a mighty ribbon, soft like gelatin beneath them, smooth like pudding but moving, and if one fell or the other they would be dead for sure, but the river moved so slowly and with such certainty that it was easy to forget that and imagine yourself forever stuck so high in the air by a single board and some railroad ties.

They stood on the rust and the boards with burn marks. Someone had signed someone else's name, someone had drawn a long laugh out on a rail, "he he he he he he he he," it said in yellow paint and it was enough to make them dance and chuckle too.

They walked away from the road in the naked thickets beside it, those stalks washed by the river riding the cliffs below and they stopped at a brick wall to admire all the secret signatures, all the people who had painted their names or a word or just lines like they really needed to. Other pedestrians walked this route in other times; they could feel the footsteps of the other walkers if they got quiet enough. But instead they talked and it was every such thing that came to their heads, but they left behind the ultimate topics, the very basis of their walking, and their absolute fear and horror.

Lydia knew that Marigold, one of the other pedestrian defense classmates, lived somewhere near there and Walker pulled out his notebook of secret ways so they could find their way to her backyard. Where most people might have parked their cars, Marigold's yard had a rusted ancient car with weeds jamming it in its permanent parking place. There were abandoned things, towers and chairs and steering wheels and car seat cushions and duck decoys arranged like art for sitting and staring. They knocked on her back door but there was no answer.

The backyard was theirs for a few minutes and they wondered what it would be like to live in such a place, such a place of things to always amuse them, like a permanent walk in spots they had never before discovered. But they worried about the neighbors looking, and maybe seeing them invading the space of Marigold's yard, and so they found a gap in the back bushes to get out to the gravel path beneath the long gone railroad tracks that led them further into the slipping afternoon.

Day after

Car after

And then you sing the song again

The traffic crept along, or else he just imagined that it was moving. Livius was on the freeway or maybe he was confused and had already parked.

He turned his head around, front and back and side to side and Smiley's war bar was nowhere to be seen. He was still on his way.

He reached into the pocket where he thought he left his phone. It was in there, and it said that there was a message for him. He kept his eyes on the road ahead that got no closer from or further to him as he held the phone to his ear to hear it.

The message was left just a minute ago. He must have drifted gently to a dream of being in a parkinglot, or a dream of wondering if he was in a parkinglot or on the freeway, or no, here it was, it was a dream that he was wearing a tall hat and walking, yes, really walking, and other people were walking too and passing by and around him like traffic on a sidewalk and they all swept a look at his hat and he as they passed him by or from the side. They all held their hands out in front of their bodies as if they had steering wheels between their fingers, but they didn't have steering wheels, just empty arms, stiff and forward, like they were doing pushups but got a wrong start at it. All arms were bent at 90 degrees and ended at two stumps of fist in front but the fists didn't hold anything but themselves and their air. He had missed the sound of his phone ringing somehow and now he had to listen to the message.

"Hi Livius. This is Tracia. I'm stuck in this traffic on the U-590 and won't make it to Smiley's in time. See you when I see you."

She had talked to his phone just a minute ago or two, but now it was too late for him to talk back directly. He almost said, "Me too," when she finished, as if her voice was proof that she could hear him. After all, it was just the same for him today, exactly what she said could apply equally to him – he was even on the same freeway, but whether she was in front of or behind him or even to one of his sides, he did not know.

He looked in each car around him to see if Tracia was in one or another. No, that was a guy who he would never want to marry. No, she has a real bad complexion, or else it's her windshield, but the hair is all wrong, the lean of the body is all wrong. No, but she looks nice. If he were married to this one his life would be very different. But would it be better or would it be worse? He wasn't sure. Tracia wasn't just around him, and neither was her car, and none of the people around him even looked like Tracia. He probably didn't want to look like any of them, but maybe he did in a way, in a driving way, in a growing bigger and sitting in the car seat way. Maybe they all looked too much like he did.

He had hung up from his voice mail but he still held his phone up beside his ear. The traffic still wasn't moving and he needed something to do with his hands so he kept his right hand on his phone and up to his ear while his left hand stayed on the steering wheel in case he had to use it.

The phone in his hand rang and first he reached over with his left to turn off the alarm clock on the bedside stand like he did every morning, but his hand wouldn't go any further than the window beside him. The phone was like an alarm clock, and its ringing woke him up fully and scattered his disorientation like spilled rice krispies.

"Hello," he answered. "Oh, hi, Penny. Give me a second while I hook up my handsfree. I'm in traffic now." He used both hands to plug in his headset in the side of his phone. The tiny microphone on his lip and the elfin speakers in his ears allowed him to set down his phone and keep both hands on the steeringwheel, where they could do nothing together.

"I'm set. What's up?"

"I'm stuck in traffic. I'm going to be late," Penny said into her own handsfree headset. Every five minutes or so she would apply the tiniest bit of pressure to her gas pedal to lurch her car forward an inch or two. She would do this right after the car in front of her did it. As soon as she had stopped her roll of an inch, the car right behind her did its own version of the same, followed by the car behind it and so on and so on and so on and so on.

"I was just thinking of the cars that we've gone to war for," Penny said. She had turned down the sound of the radio when she made her call but she still sometimes heard an explosion come out with the tiny voices, like there were dolls in her dashboard making their own small war and shouting their tiny reports about it.

"Those are some nice cars that the Enemy took from us," Livius said. "But none is nicer than the Torquemada."

"The Torquemada?" Penny said, almost offended. "The Torquemada is the least of them. My favorite is the Vicarious."

"But the Torquemada is more powerful."

"But the Vicarious is more stylish. And those stories about the Torquemada being more powerful are really just myth. The Vicarious is actually more powerful, and studies prove it, even tho you wouldn't think so just looking at it."

"That's a misleading study you consulted and you know it. Go to the web site. Check the information for yourself. You'll see. It will win you over."

They each answered back with a silent curse, with a groan of gritted teeth loud enough to be carried by cellular transmission.

Their words had hit a concrete median. There was no way to resolve their conversation, other than with cluster bombs. Penny said, "I think the traffic is loosening up. I need to go."

"Same here," Livius said. "Bye." He hung up.

They both kept their hands clenched on their steeringwheels, their knuckles turning white in righteousness. Neither went anywhere for hours.

If there was a shout

You could make

By driving it all out

Walker, Roscoe and Lydia walk together in the bent and broken places, past the twisted rails that used to carry important things and people and the overgrown gravel and the paths long taken by weeds. They follow the under curves of bridges and the occasional back yard and they walk but they mostly talk, because that is what you do when you walk beside others. They talk about whether pedestrianism is waning or rising, about the quality of the air they eat and how it has subtle flavors and textures it never had before, or that they never quite noticed alone - you need a few people to discuss it to put the full picture of taste together. They talk about little things in their lives, the things they do in front of others and the things they hide because it's necessary. They grab their shiny conversation out of the air to fill the spaces, and tho their feet walk in a bent and broken world, their down eyes take them to so many in and outside places, their talk travels even further on foot.

Sometimes it's something in their environment: they can be sensitive to the smallest nuisance. Sometimes it's sparked by the last thing said, like a fire that jumps from one toy to the next, and sometimes it's just an old memory back for the trip and just the up and down action of their feet that drew it from its hiding cave, that gave it a face and a frown or some freckles.

They are so deep in their conversation, the world of words that they make so completely and fall in like its own environment, that they do not notice that their walking has strayed closer to a street. It is a kind of forgotten street, a street not often used because it does not feed in or out of a freeway, but it still is a street nonetheless. The three are so deep in their talking, their Walker Lydia Roscoe words and stories, that they do not notice that they are actually walking on the edge of this street, and so they must do this for there is no sidewalk. They are so deep in their conversation that they do not notice the car behind them, the car speeding way to their rear but going so fast that it is upon them before their ears even start to take in the sound, but it's not even a noticed thing because their conversation is so strong.

Roscoe walks the furthest from the edge of the street; the others line back to the curb, their heads down and talking. Roscoe is the one talking, he's saying something about cars, but you could never remember what he is saying, because he's only part way thru his point and then he has to stop so suddenly.

The car comes from behind them and strikes Roscoe in the back. There is a massive thump but the rest is not in pictures and sound. All that Walker and Lydia can notice is that the car's speed is such that they still feel its wind biting on their hands and in their ears. The conversation they were having has flown away forever. The car is gone around the corner like it never even was. Maybe it never did happen but they look down for a second, only long enough to see that Roscoe is in so many pieces that he could never be put back together again. They each run off in a different direction.

All that cold hard steel

We try to put a sexy grin on it

On death

"I can't stand that Livius. He gets these strange ideas and holds them so strongly." Penny is lying on the couch as the glowing TV faces speak of war and as she speaks of Livius.

"Maybe he thinks your ideas are strange, too," Walker says and he has more to say but he gets a look from Penny that stops him abruptly. He sits on the chair and the war coverage is on but he's not really watching it.

"I mean, how could he like the Torquemada? It's obviously a badly made car; you can tell that from the commercials - they're badly made themselves. Obviously, someone who likes the Torquemada is not someone with good taste. And he's so sure about it, like that's the only way anybody could think about it - he's so sure and won't even consider a counter-argument."

"Well," Walker starts to say, but he starts off too slowly and Penny cuts him off.

"Livius has such a big head. He really needs something to happen to him that will cut him down. He needs something to happen that will show him his place, that will humble him," and she describes some of the possibilities: accidents, or a certain serious set of circumstances that would achieve the desired purpose, from war in his own home to death taking someone close to him to an act of God that takes away all his possessions to a sudden health problem that incapacitates him seriously.

"Maybe we just shouldn't..." Walker starts, but Penny covers his words with her own, with her descriptions of calamities to strike down Livius or upset him, these shocks to his system by a bomb or by weather or by his own heart shaking him steadily to sickness or radiation and its slow painful effects and how this would change his appetite and the way he looks at the ads and the shiny cars he could wish for. She rolls him in dough and cooks him for dinner, his face a bloody pulp, his hands and eyes unable to seek out his old unfamiliar opinions.

"Maybe if his eyes popped out he'd be humbled so much that I could stand the guy," Penny says, and her words have such a picture to them that it's almost like she has to jump across the room and collect his popped out eyeballs before they roll into the other room and get lost under the sink.

Walker jumps for his chance in the break and finishes his thought.

"Maybe we shouldn't see him any more."

Penny's eyes glance quickly to Walker and back away and then she's seeing her own things again and forever. "And Tracia's been so weird lately too. I don't think I can stand the person that she's become. It's not anything she said, it's not any particular movement she made, but there's something about her that I can't stand any more. I can't put my finger on it but I wish I could." And she continues, describing what this feeling might mean, and that Tracia is an old friend but she has changed in ways that are bad for everyone around her. Penny doesn't know what these changes are, but she has a sense of them, and she describes her premonitions in great detail, and why her intuitions should be trusted. And how she senses something about Tracia and if Penny truly comes to understand the changes that have happened in Tracia that it might be too late, and it's best to be suspicious now even if it's just a feeling and nothing substantial.

"Maybe we..." Walker starts, but Penny cuts him off to continue her description of her suspicions. Like that shirt she saw on Tracia, and how Tracia never would have worn a shirt like that long ago when they used to be friends. There was something so wrong with that shirt, it was like the Torquemada, and you'd have to be dense to really be bold enough to wear it. Penny may not even remember exactly what it was about it, but there was something about it, something truly dark and scummy, something.

"Maybe we should just stop seeing them," Walker says, "if you feel that way." He drives his words over Penny's words still going. "Maybe we should stop seeing them," he repeats when Penny's words have gotten smaller under his.

She doesn't say yes, she doesn't say no, she gives him that quick look again, to him and away, and then her attention is back to the war or her own silent distractions.

You can drive

An insult

If you choose the right model

"This is Super Livius, your drive-time driving deejay. I'm going slow but I'm going far. Here are the hits from my car radio to yours. As if I was twirling the dials on your very own dashboard. Next up, the traffic report, but here's a little wisdom from my driver's seat. Let's smash those Enematians for stealing our cars. They are dirty dogs, those people, and we all know it. I know there are some of you out there who don't agree with the war; you might be against it, and sometimes the war resisters are out there, walking. They have to put their ugly soft bodies out there on display instead of in their sleek and shiny vehicles. But we know where to find them, don't we, drive time chums? So find them and make them pay with a nice roll-over, why don't you. And here's the latest hit from nine year old Shy Tina, 'My mommy lets me press down on the gas when her foot gets tired, and I push hard.'"

When you sit in the driver's seat

All your friends and enemies

Are metal robots

Walker never saw Lydia again. He never saw any of the other pedestrians after Roscoe got hit. He went to the next car defense class, at the usual place and time, but nobody else came. He sat in the empty room alone for an hour looking at his hands and marveling at his thumbs. He paced back and forth, going over in his head the lessons and routes that he would have taught were there others in the room, but he did not speak his lesson out loud.

When the next week came, he did not go to the scheduled class. He assumed that the room was there on its own and empty.

All time comes in one furious moment, all the pictures blurring all at once and so to black. The car approaching you and you can't move - it has taken all the movement, it has sucked all the speed and movement out of the universe for all the speed it takes to hurl its body straight at you, to your spot, the sidewalk, your eyes.

The eyes of go

On high beam

Or low

Tracia: "Livius has always knocked things over, it's just something about him. An envelope on the table, he'd knock if off; an empty glass, he'd knock it over. Sometimes he'd put a hat on his head just to knock it off with a curled up fist. It's not that he did it because he was angry, he didn't do it to release his aggressions, he'd merely do it just to do it.

"Lately, tho, he's been taking it just a little further. For instance, in the past he would knock over an empty glass, just knock it over on the table - now he'll knock over a glass full of liquid, or knock that glass off the table and break it to the floor. He'll knock over full pieces of furniture. He asked for my help in knocking over the refrigerator the other day. I refused him so he did it himself and broke all the eggs inside. He knocked over the TV, and now it only gets the news channels. He knocked out all the windows on one side of the house and then he went outside to get his car to help him.

"He got in his car and started knocking down other things. He knocked down a ladder while someone was standing on it, he revved up his engine and knocked down a shed in the backyard of our neighbor, he aimed his car at an old garage and it came crumbling down, and then he tried to knock down the neighbor's house and then back over all their tulips to flatten them to color. I had to tell him No.

"I said so to him, I told him to knock off the knocking over but all he could do was bat at my breasts as if he could knock them off, or if they were loose and would topple with his swipe."

Your name

Your car's name

Which is most accurate

Our army has already captured a number of cars from the Enemy and sent them over the oceans to a car showroom close to you. These are particularly odd cars, unseen before in these lands. They are nearly the same shape as the cars in our land, but just not the same in many other ways, like the eyelash in your eye or your toenail that grew last week in an unexpected thrust. You have to blink to clear your eyes from older seeing before you can start to see it all over again new.

Some of the cars have small dents from the shrapnel of our bombs. Some still have spots of blood from the Enemy hands that would not let them go and had to be chopped off to fulfill the mission and destroy. Their grills can either look back at you with the ugliness of Enematia or the sadness of so many deaths, or maybe you can imagine what the neighborhood kids will think when they see it, and how they will scatter in fear to clear a way for you.

Livius is in the crowd that's looking over the newly sent back cars of war, but Tosk has already pre-ordered his. He saw the photo first on the internet and that was enough for him. It will be delivered to his house this afternoon on the back of a big truck stacked with other captured cars. He will try to wash out that streak of blood but will find that he cannot. He'll tell anyone who asks that it's a racing stripe, and it will inspire him to further feats of speed.

The journey

To home

Has no construction zones

"This is Super Livius, on the Rocking 26, and I've got hits in my words and hits on the music and hits on the freeway too. It's a minor accident but I'll give you a little report. I busted a headlight and she busted her license plate, but just a little. We exchanged our insurance numbers but that's as far as the accident went, baby, that's as far as the passion went. I know you expect more from your Super Livius, but I've got the traffic to keep me on my toes. Now we're both slowly moving back into travel velocity like the fish swims up the river. The traffic is thick, but there's room for all of us. Come on and drive in your car, steer your wheel a little back and forth, to the tempting rhythm of I'm Eight, the new boys' band on the Bedroom Label. Here's their number one raceway favorite, 'Don't run into me, I'm just closing the cardoor on a love that's true.'"

The way

To know yourself

Has no mile markers

He kept his eyes closed for a while before opening them again. When they were all the way open he was fully awake.

Bit by bit, item by item, a coat, a hatrack, a hat, a chest of drawers, two tickets to a concert, a little Buddha statue, Livius knocked them down because he wanted something, shoes on the table, a cuddly bunny, brownies wrapped in a napkin and the whole hall of brick walls. He flicked his fist to knock them down. Old faces forgotten and new ones not even known yet, bare air and flagpoles and the naughty mind of an old man. He looked for his routes and assured the weakness and knocked it all over to get his own way with something else.

Tracia had to pick it all up. She had to follow after and set right what she could but she couldn't set everything. Some things were still tumbling, and would again for quite some time.

The path

To change

Is not marked on a gasoline map

Here is the story of the cars and their people, how the freeways move like blood and how long it takes to get from point A to point B. Here are the people who fight the war every day with their metal bodies and the cigarettes they eat and the sausages they smoke. If you will look straight thru the great mists we call the air, your eyes will get sick, but it will still all be revealed. Here you will find the ticking of the clocks, and how to face the morning when you have so much territory to cover.

This is what it is like to be so far from your destination. To be time and a wide ribbon of road away, and still the justifications do not seem worth their measure. Here are the empty mouths flapping over the huge desert of their bodies, how the seats depress with their rear ends and hold them deep and hold them down. Here is what you must look at if you cannot hide your anticipation, as if the roads were not so furious, as if you had all the lifetimes in the world for waiting.

Here is the message that sings out from a tailpipe, that tells the world its shapes and sizes, as it rises up to the sun, or at least the last tall band of the ball. Here is what you remember, as if you had no body, as if you were floating up, a helium balloon let loose and rising red to a dot so high it vanishes from us, so far up it has nowhere to go but forgetting.

Here is what glows orange on your television screen, what you have to pull over to release from the bolts, what a cigarette lighter and some gasoline can do to race the combustion. Here's what you will drive past, the grandeur of your own greed, the power of your own face, the limits to your own ability to correctly see what pain your whole lifetime breeds with its transportation.

Here are my friends; they have no more faces. One drives across the earth because he wants to be the center of attention. He keeps driving, even if it means the enemy lines, even if it means that there are some places that you cannot drive to, he still drives and there. He wants to be with the reporters and the action, he wants to drive his car so far it collapses in exhaustion, and then he must run with fat legs across the playing field as if he still had legs under his round bell of body, all to steal his own car from the Enemy, even if they still have guns to fire. Maybe the bullets will get lost in his flesh, and open the creak car door and there are the keys left so cleverly behind so he can drive back to his own driveway, all the way, as if space were a circle and could move as fast as a television signal. He'll even scrape his name, "Livius," on the side of his newfound stolen car to claim it as his own, and when he drives into town all the other cars will come out of their garages to meet him, to cheer him on with their horns and engines to further victory and commuting.

Here are the smoldering ashes of your own last head, of the ideals and time that could have formed but have whittled away to statistics and badly retold at that. The images that grew with you could clearly tell, but all you can do is stutter and stammer and pull down the clocks and knock down the newspapers. Maybe you can yell back at your TV screen because that will really matter. Maybe you can sing with the radio sermon at the top of your lungs and the road might hear you if it could. Here's what you have mistaken for memory, here are the coals that might cook something, that might make some dinner with your whole life and thoughts, but the drive-thru window is better, and a little paper sack instead that holds the bricks of your brain.

Here's what they say when they talk to each other, the lyrics they mistake for words, and the slogans that have turned into conversation. If they would just stop the chatter they might even notice their eyes, but not even that is enough, because the air is so thick that you can't even be sure or not.

Here's how you can really say it, with your foot pressing out your conversation, with the hand pushing at the tender belly of the steering column, and turning so wide you might even bend its long body like a snake, or like the last identifiable....

A last chance

A new driveway

A false hope

Your name?

Livius Manghanger.

Please respond in full sentences.

My name is Livius Manghanger.

Your occupation?

I am an architect, and a drive-time radio DJ.

What kind of architect?

I design metal storage buildings. All kinds of types of storage buildings. I design them.

Must be interesting.

It is difficult. The pressures from the client, maximum storage in a minimum space, height requirements, you understand. And I do my radio show too on my drive to work. It's very popular. I could tell you more about that.

You have a new car?

Yes, I have a new car. I got it from Enematia.

You paid for it?

In a manner, yes, I paid for it. But not with money.

Then how did you pay for it?

The sweat of my brow, the cunning of my brain. I paid for it with my actions, my intelligence. These are legitimate means.

You stole it?

I went behind enemy lines. I looked danger in the face. I traversed many foreign lands; I drove thru them with my old car, now abandoned. Behind enemy lines, the customs were strange. The clothing was in odd styles. There were many people on foot. They did not always look at you in kindness when you decided you wanted to show your driving skills by taking out some pedestrians. I also realize that my reluctance at taking out pedestrians may have been caused because I was a bit rusty. I haven't driven into a pedestrian in my own land for a couple years now. There are so few left these days.

You killed some pedestrians on your journey?

I did a little of that kind of work where there were pedestrians to kill. It was my duty. They might have looked at me strange at the time but they will be thanking me later.

You drove across the ocean and all of Asia to Enematia?

I did. I drove all that distance in my old car and I must say that I wore it out, so it was essential that I get a new one.

Describe the conditions there.

Chaos, storms, despair, the yellow sky, the brown crusts of land, so few usable roads but the world went on flat as it passed to the horizon. That's what it was like. There were people on foot running in all directions.

What else?

There was looting, there was screaming, there were ripped robes and nobody smiled back even when I drew a permanent smile on my own face with a marker pen. The wind had blown a lot of dust in the air, so it's difficult for me to describe it in great detail. Everything had soft edges, as if it had been sanded down. There were pillows, and tranquilizers, and music that might have been relaxing but it wasn't my kind of thing.

Did you see our own army and the media attached to it?

I did sometimes. They were strong and brave and true and drove in big tanks and big vehicles that took up much of your field of vision when they passed. They were wide vehicles and wide soldiers were inside. I waved them on. I gave them encouragement with my optimistic hand gestures. And then I was on my way to my own purposes.

What purposes?

By this time my old car was less valuable to me. I couldn't even get up the appropriate speed to make a full and complete kill when I tried to run into a pedestrian. I left many foreigners writhing with some life left, wiggling on the yellow desert floor because my car did not have the power to knock them all the way to death. It could still do in small children, yes, but not adults.

So then?

So I looked for the stolen cars. I looked on streets and in alleys. I knew they were in a locked compound somewhere, I had seen them on television with the super greentastic telescopic lenses that the media has. I had seen the cars thru the dust and the desert. I knew they were there to be captured.

How did you find them?

I found them by accurate driving. I had a map, but it was useless. The war had reshaped the entire horizon. It had blown up entire cities and plucked them down elsewhere. It had rerouted roads to trick the Enemy soldiers, and rubbed away many images so that they could no longer hide you. I was deceived by mirages too, but the last mirage was absolute truth.

And this was?

A long fence. It went from my nose to the far horizon. It was made up of a material, orange plastic, and had flashing lights at even intervals. I found a weakened section, leaning low, fatigued, ransacked, and drove into it. The plastic was not strong but it did appreciably weaken my old vehicle. I knew I needed to find the Enemy cars soon or there would be little hope for me. I would have nothing to drive and I would have to take to pedestrianism.

But that wasn't necessary?

Thank God, it wasn't. Only for the short time when I had to run from my car to the car that I chose. The car that you will find parked outside your studios, out in the hallway. That's the one. I found it. I saw it clearly, there, in a corner of the corral. It was just the car I had been dreaming of, tall and sleek. I had seen it on the television, I had seen its spirit and its style and I knew that there was no other model for me. I had to have it.

Did it put up any resistance?

None at all. It welcomed me as if it had been waiting forever for my butt and my fingers and my feet on its pedals.

And then?

And then I shut and locked the door behind me. I rolled up the windows. I tried to find a good American radio station but there were none. I knew I would have to have the radio repaired. I knew I would need to take the radio in to a shop to get checked so it would get something other than Enemy stations in that gobeldy gook talk and music, but as I drove back home for miles and miles the radio slowly started picking up the music that I love, and the talk that I agree with in my own language. It's like it knew that it had to try harder, now that I was in command.

It's a good car?

It handles very nicely. It's sweet and has great speed. It is mine and it breathes the desert air. It gives a great power, and commands respect when I am within. I have started sleeping in it lately, for that is also about its power. I am married to my wife still, but this new car is very important. I don't know how to describe it to you.

Have you named it?

Yes, but the name is a secret between me and the car.

The car you live

The life you take

The way it is

Part Eleven

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