Virtual Light

31. Driver side

Probably come back anyway, we stick around here. You crawl up there and toss me those?”

She edged through the door and between the buckets. Saw Rydell’s head there, by the open door. Grabbed the keys and threw them sideways, without looking. Snatched her pants and scooted backward, wondering could she maybe fit in the fridge, if she folded her legs up?

“Why don’t you lie down flat on the floor back there…” His voice from the driver’s seat.

“Lie down?”

“Minimum silhouette.”

“Huh?”

“He’s going to start shooting. When I do this—” Ignition-sound. Glass flying from fresh holes in the windshield and she threw herself flat. The RV lurched backward, turning tight, and she could hear him slapping the console, trying to find some function he needed, as more bullets came, each one distinct, a blow, like someone was swinging an invisible hammer, taking care to keep the rhythm.

Rydell must’ve gotten it lined up how he needed it, then, because he did that thing boys did, up in Oregon, with their brakes and the transmission.

She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming.

Then they were in a turn that almost took them over, and she thought how these RV’s probably weren’t meant to move very fast. Now they were moving even faster, it felt like, uphill.

“Well fuck” she heard Rydell say, in this weirdly ordinary kind of voice, and then they hit the door, or the gate, or whatever, and it was like the time she tried to pull this radical bongo over in Lafayette Park and they’d had to keep explaining to her how’d she’d come down on her head, and each time they did, she’d forget.

She was back in Skinner’s room, reading National Geographic, about how Canada split itself into five countries. Drinking cold milk out of the carton and eating saltines. Skinner in bed with the tv, watching one of those shows he liked about history. He was talking about how all his life these movies of history had been getting better and better looking. How they’d started out jumpy and black and white, with the soldiers running around like they had ants in their pants, and this terrible grain to them, and the sky all full of scratches. How gradually they’d slowed down to how people really moved, and then they’d been colorized, the grain getting finer and finer, and even the scratches went away. And it was bullshit, he said, because every other bit of it was an approximation, somebody’s idea of how it might have looked, the result of a particular decision, a particular button being pushed. But it was still a hit, he said, like the first time you heard Billie Holiday without all that crackle and tin.

Billie Holiday was probably a guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat.

Skinner had this thing he got on about history. How it was turning into plastic. But she liked to show him she was listening when he told her something, because otherwise he could go for days without saying anything. So she looked up now, from her magazine and the picture of girls waving blue and white flags in the Republic of Quebec, and it was her mother sitting there, on the edge of Skinner’s bed, looking beautiful and sad and kind of tired, the way she could look after she got off work and still had all her make-up on.

“He’s right” Chevette’s mother said.

“I-I am?”

“About history, how they change it.”

“Mom, you—”

“Everybody does that anyway, honey. Isn’t any new thing. Just the movies have caught up with memory, is all.”

Chevette started to cry.

“Chevette-Marie” her mother said, in that singsong out of so far back, “you’ve gone and hurt your head.”

“How well you say you know this guy?” she asked.

Rydell’s SWAT shoe crunched on little squares of safety-glass every time he used the brake. If he’d had time and a broom, he’d have swept it all out. As it was, he’d had to bash out what was left of the windshield with a piece of rusty rebar he found beside the road, otherwise Highway Patrol would’ve seen the holes and hauled them over. Anyway, he had those insoles. “I worked with him in L.A.” he said, braking to steer around shreds of truck-trailer tires that lay on the two-lane blacktop like the moulted skin of monsters.

“I was just wondering if he’ll turn out like Mrs. Elliott did. Said you knew her too.”

“Didn’t know her” Rydell said, “I met her, on the plane. If Sublett’s some kind of plant, then the whole world’s a plot.” He shrugged. “Then I could start worrying about you, say.” As opposed, say, to worrying about whether or not Loveless or Mrs. Elliot had bothered to plant a locator-bug in this motorhome, or whether the Death Star was watching for them, right now, and could it pick them up, out here? They said the Death Star could read the headlines on a newspaper, or what brand and size of shoes you wore, from a decent footprint.

Then this wooden cross seemed to pop up, in the headlights, about twelve feet high, with TUNE IN across the horizontal and TO HIS IMMORTAL DOWNLINK coming down the upright, and this dusty old portable tv nailed up where Jesus’s head ought to have been. Somebody’d taken a.zz to the screen, it looked like.