Hitchers

CHAPTER 2

I snapped awake.

The TV was on.

“This is not good. This is not good,” a woman said. She was crying.

I thought it was the woman I’d swerved to avoid in the road, that she had pulled me out of the water and for some reason taken me to her house. But I was in the same seat as the woman, like she was sitting in my lap, only she wasn’t, because she wasn’t blocking my view of the TV. I tried to look around, but couldn’t.

I leaned forward and retrieved a cigarette from a pack of Camels sitting on the coffee table. Only I didn’t. It was as if someone else was moving me. I didn’t smoke. I never smoked.

“Oh, Christ,” the woman moaned. I looked at my hands as I lit the cigarette with a red plastic lighter, only again, I didn’t mean to look at my hands—my eyes just went there. They weren’t even my hands—they were a woman’s hands, slim and pale, with rings on three fingers. They were trembling. The cigarette came to my mouth and my lips wrapped around it. Not my lips, this woman’s lips. I was watching from behind her eyes. She didn’t seem to know I was there.

I felt her heart pounding, and that at least felt right, because I was terrified. Her heart was pounding for her own reasons, though, not mine.

We looked toward the TV. A reporter wearing a medical mask stood in front of a hospital, its windows dancing with reflected red lights from emergency vehicles. Behind the reporter people raced around, all of them wearing masks.

The supporting title at the bottom of the screen read: Anthrax Attack in Atlanta.

The reporter was speaking in a breathless voice. “Peter, Emergency personnel are scrambling to find some way to handle the crush of victims in what is now being described as a terrorist attack that may have originated in the MARTA subway system.”

I thought of Annie, hoped that somehow, against all odds, she was all right.

I stood, or the woman stood, and went into the kitchen. We grabbed a bottle of red wine by the neck, and, as we turned toward a drawer, I caught a glimpse of the woman reflected in the microwave. It was Lyndsay, my date.

We took a long swig right from the bottle, set it down on the coffee table, then picked up a phone, punched a number, got an “all circuits are busy” recording.

“Shit!” We threw the phone down.

I tried to make sense of what was happening to me. This must be a hallucination. I was dying, and for some reason my brain was creating this vivid, pointless hallucination of what Lyndsay might be doing at this moment as it flickered out.

If that was true I had to snap out of it, move my arms and swim. I didn’t want to die at all; I wasn’t like Annie.

On the news they showed Fifth Avenue, an impossible tangle of cars and people.

“Authorities are instructing people to stay in their homes, but clearly, Peter, thousands are not heeding these instructions…”

For a second I considered that this whole thing was a hallucination, starting with my phone call to Annie, or even back to the date. I had stayed home, went to sleep, was having an incredibly vivid dream.

My vision broke apart, splintering into a million colorful shards. The shards morphed into geometric shapes again, and I watched them fly by, twisting and stretching out to an unseen horizon.