The Complete Drive-In

FADE OUT

We were back.

“What the fuck was that?” Grace said.

“I thought the old man died,” I said, “taking us with him.”

“He must have had a moment,” Reba said. “A mild stroke.”

“Don’t matter,” Grace said. “Tree!”

The plane, which really had no guidance system other than windup, aim, and point, went straight for a large oak. I threw my hands over my face, and the plane hit the tree and knocked me loose of the seat.

I woke up lying on the fresh-cut lawn.

I sat up slowly. Nothing seemed broken. I eased my pack off my back, tossed it aside, made it to my feet, staggered toward the wreckage. I saw Grace crawling out of the cockpit. There was a thin line of blood across her forehead.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” It was Reba, calling from the other side of the plane.

When I got there, Reba was on her knees, bending over Steve.

“He’s dead,” she said. “His neck.”

Steve’s neck was twisted in such a way it reminded me of a neck-wrung chicken. His teeth littered the moonlit grass around his head.

Grace came around the plane slowly, her forehead bleeding more now, running over her pretty features like a flood. She looked at Steve, then eased toward him. “Goddamnit,” she said. “Goddamnit.”

She dropped down on her ass, cradled his head in her lap. It rolled over as easy as a sock puppet’s head. Blood ran out of her mouth and onto her bare legs. Her naked breasts heaved in the light.

I looked away, back at the house. The lawn was littered with my journal papers.

“And the fun just keeps on coming,” I said.

“Yeah,” Reba said, reaching down to touch Grace’s shoulder. “Look.”

She wasn’t excited, just stating a fact. The distance was squeezing in. The yard was constricting, the houses were fading. It was like an invisible fire had surrounded us and was burning toward us, taking everything in its path. Where there had been something to see, lawn and trees and houses, now there was darkness.

Above us, the moon and the stars winked out.

We, me and Reba and Grace, the body of Steve, our plane, were at the center of a long, narrow, valley. The walls that rose on either side of it were dark and bumpy, pulsing and sparking. Wires ran along the bumpy walls like veins. The sparking gave off spotty, strobe-like light, so it was hard to see how far the valley, or to be more accurate, the trench, ran.

“Now what?” Reba said.

“His brain,” I said. “The old man’s brain. Made of flesh and wires and micros smaller than virus-sized chips, made of this and that and things we don’t know. His brain’s business, my friends, we’re inside it.”

“That makes less sense than being part of an android’s dream,” Reba said.

“He can’t create the world out there anymore,” I said. “Can’t project his thoughts the way he could before. He’s dying. It’s all pulling into the source. We’re inside his head. We’re impulses in the grooves of his mind. He’s probably in a coma. We were never part of any kind of dream. We were invented. And we are real. What happened to Steve is real. How I feel about it is real. He has sparked us to life. He is God, and we are his creations.”

“You don’t know that,” Reba said.

“No, but it’s as good a theory as any, and it’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

Grace rose up slowly and laid Steve’s head carefully on what served as ground-pulsing meat.

“I wonder if there’s anywhere to go,” she said.

“One thing I’ve learned from you, Grace,” I said. “Don’t be a quitter.”

“That’s the goddamn truth,” she said, taking off her ragged fur bottoms, using them to wipe the blood from her face. She tossed the rag aside, stood there in all her magnificent naked glory.

“Look there,” she said.

It was the drive-in world mist. It was flowing down the brain-corridor, white as a geriatric’s head.

“As Steve would say,” Grace said, “ain’t that the shits?”

She turned to us, put out her hand.

“As long as it lasts,” she said.

“He could be in a coma for moments, or years,” Reba said.

“Or there may be more to it than we know,” Grace said, “if as soon as we peel one layer off the onion, we find another. My guess is there are plenty more layers, more truths to discover. Fact is, we don’t even know how true our recent truth is.”

“It’s really nothing new,” I said. “It’s just like the way we thought life was, and certainly must be. Unknown. Unfocused. Unpromised.”

“You are one fine-ass philosopher, Jack,” Reba said.

“How long do I hold my hand out?” Grace asked.

I smiled, put my hand on top of Grace’s. Reba placed hers on mine. We said, “Hoooyah!”

Slowly, we gathered ourselves, then, standing shoulder to shoulder, we started down the long, dark, sparking corridor through the mist and all its specters, moving onward to someplace or no place.

It was our mystery to discover.