Philipp Meyer - American Rust

It took a minute before he could focus on the objects they passed, just watching them made his vertigo even worse. Someone made this, he thought. He looked over at the driver, sitting behind the wheel, listening to AM radio. Noises came occasionally from the CB. Mind can adjust to anything — voices coming out of a metal box. Two different metal boxes. Meanwhile you look over the road and the body knows it's going too fast. But it adjusts as well. He watched things appear and disappear, trucks, metal signs, houses, roads, and overpasses. Made all of it. Even the air, radio waves and satellites. Feels like that should all mean something. Doesn't — it's just what we do. What has it gotten us, our difference from animals. Better rifles and antibiotics — they come together. Smart bombs and cancer surgery. Don't get one without the other, even our own nature keeps itself in balance. Colonize Mars, it won't matter— babies and cheatin’ hearts. Democracy and hemorrhoids. Preachers with syphilis. A kid jerking off in his moonsuit, thinking about his older sister. He began to giggle. The kid's on fire, he thought.

“You mind sharing,” said the driver.

“Been by myself for a while,” said Isaac. “Plus it's the first time I've been in a truck.”

“Playin hooky or something? Or you in college — I can't tell, no offense.”

“Neither. I ought to be in college, probably.”

“You're kind of a sight. At first I thought you were one of those Christ lovers, going around converting people in truck stops and whatnot, and then I saw you closer and thought maybe you were one of those people, only you'd gone off the rails. Then I wasn't sure. That's probably why I stopped.”

“Mystery of the day.”

“Basically.”

“Well, I appreciate it.”

“Never know,” said the man. “You might have been Christ himself and I would have been well rewarded.”

“Might still be.”

“Now you sound like a proper crazy hitchhiker.”

“Busted,” said Isaac.

The driver chuckled. “I'm just joking you. Actually you mind listening to the radio at all? They're saying those nuts in Korea just built a rocket big enough to tie a nuke on.”

“You mean North Korea?”

“But I can tell already you're not into that sort of thing.”

“A little.”

“Myself personally I think we ought to hit them right now, just flatten them. Next thing you know they'll have a nuke in Toledo.”

“They probably think the same thing about us.”

“Well,” said the driver. He was quiet for a few seconds. “You give yourself twenty years and see if you don't start appreciating everything just a little bit more, you follow me? Maybe that's what I'm trying to describe here.” He looked at Isaac. “You don't follow me.”

“No, I do.”

“Wait twenty years, you'll know then. Course you're young so I'm sure there's plenty I'm missing out on as well. I wasn't old enough in the sixties and now I'm missing all this. Sometimes you get it coming and going.”

“I doubt you're missing much,” said Isaac.

“Nah, I watch all the shows, I know. Only thing I feel bad for you is all the girls you can fantasize about, you've already seen them all naked. Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, all the rest, there's penetration shots of all of them. For me, Bambi Woods was big news. That was all you could hope for. But it was probably better like that.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, we sure got to the heavy stuff quick, didn't we.” The driver winked at him again. “You mind holding on a second? You ought to listen to this guy who's coming on.”

“Alright.”

“You know him?”

Isaac could hear the voice chattering away. “I think my dad likes this guy.”

“G. Gordon Liddy” He shrugged. “I don't always agree with him but he's interesting.”

Isaac settled himself while the driver turned the radio up. Then suddenly he turned it down again.

“I realized my point,” he said. “There's no mystery for your generation. But back to our programming.” He turned up the radio again.

Isaac started to disagree but it was okay. The kid will be fine, he thought. Plenty of mysteries. The universe is fourteen billion years old but a hundred fifty billion light- years across. There's quantum mechanics versus relativity. The kid will have to make new rules — immune to the laws of man beast and fruit, he'll live the fourth way. His mind occupied by higher systems, he'll discover flight. The stratosphere. Cold up here, he'll think. Cold and blue. Nitrogen — makes skies blue and plants green. Building block. Who dreams of flying most — men in wheelchairs. The old men of the world, trapped in their humidity. As for the kid, he returns like Odysseus. A long exile. His only allegiance to the king of the cannibals.

“You alright over there?”

“Doing good,” said Isaac.

“You know how to keep yourself amused, don't you?”

“Hope I'm not annoying you.”

“No, I'm glad I stopped. I promised my little girl I'd be home so I've only slept about an hour since yesterday morning, and then when I pulled over to refuel I realized I better find someone to talk to or I'd end up asleep in a ditch. Anyway, there you were. So in a way, if you think about it, you're saving my life.”

“That's the Jesus in me.”

The driver nodded solemnly. “Yup,” he said. “That's exactly what it is.”

— —

A few hours later he dropped Isaac off at an on- ramp in Dayton. As he got out the driver said, “You wouldn't spend it on drugs or anything would you, buddy?”

“I never have.”

“Well, at least get yourself some dinner first.” He gave Isaac five dollars.

Isaac walked a mile or so to a truck stop on I-70 and ordered a meatball sandwich. He sat at a table inside but it didn't feel right yet so he went back out again and ate on the curb. There was the hammering of diesel engines and the smell of it and trucks coming and going like a train station. He thought he might have to wait awhile but ten minutes later he was picked up by an eastbound rig with a load of tractor parts. This one asked where he had been and Isaac said Michigan and the driver said you gotta make it a little more interesting than that if you wanna ride free, so Isaac told him he'd been riding the trains and was now going home to his family. The driver was happy to be a part of it and they rode the rest of the way without speaking much.

After dark, the driver turned south on I-79, leaving Isaac a few miles past Little Washington. After walking east for a while, he climbed to the top of a hill and sat looking out over the dark highway, toward the Mon River. How far? Twenty miles, maybe. Probably hitch if you can make it to a gas station. He sat and thought about it. Nah. Go in the same way you came out.

What is Lee doing right now? Used to be you could know it. Still might be able to. The three months between when she got into Yale and Mom dying — think about that. Everything made complete sense. All of us going to the Carnegie Museum, dinosaur bones, looking up at the tyrannosaurus. Old man saying I don't want to look at anything that can bite me in half. I'm happy they went extinct. But even he couldn't help staring at it for a long time. Imagine being the guy who found that thing, he said. I mean imagine being him before he'd told anyone else he'd found it. Think about that, Watson. That was the old man.

He looked out over the hills. He couldn't see the river but of course it was there. If he walked it would probably take two days to get home. No, day and a half. That's okay, he thought. Familiar ground.

The next day instead of sliding his dinner under the cell door, they told him to cuff up.