Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

He sat down and considered how he felt.

He felt pursued.

So he ran. He left the room less than an hour after renting it.

The crash’s activity had spilled into the Sheraton’s lobby. A group of men who had helped in the rescue efforts stood around a fake stone fireplace telling a few of the hotel staff what they had done and the gruesome sights they had seen.

Max waited at the front desk behind a television crew who were loaded with equipment. A reporter, or at least me only one in a suit, told the desk clerk they were from ABC.

“National news?” the clerk said with a hush in his voice.

But the clerk got no answer since the network reporter, overhearing the rescuers’ talk of the crash, had drifted in their direction.

“I need to rent a car,” Max said to the awed and distracted clerk.

The reporter gestured to his crew to start shooting while he interviewed the rescuers. They answered eagerly. A camera appeared and was pointed at the storytellers.

“Excuse me,” Max said to the clerk.

“What?” The clerk had contorted his position behind the desk to put himself in the background of the cameraman’s shot.

“My car’s going to be in the shop for two days. Where can I rent a car?”

“The mall,” the clerk said and pointed behind him.

Max left without checking out. They had an impression of his credit card anyway.

The car rental was a glass room set by itself in the middle of the mall’s parking lot. The agent, a skinny red-haired girl, probably a high school student doing a summer job, asked him: “Is something going on at the airport? My boyfriend drove by and shouted that he heard a plane had crashed.”

“I don’t know,” Max said, wishing to make sure his business was transacted without conversation.

Unfortunately she got a phone call while writing up Max’s agreement form. “No shit,” she said to the receiver and then apologized for her obscenity with a look. “A jet’s crashed at the airport,” she explained. “No. A customer,” she said to the phone. “Oh my God,” she gasped, hearing a horrific detail. Her pen was idle. The paperwork lay half-done underneath.

“I’m in a hurry,” Max said softly.

She ignored him. She had paled at another ghastly item. Her face went slack. “Really? I’m never getting on a plane. I swear to—”

Max knocked on the counter, rapping it hard until she looked at him. “Fill out the form and call him back. I’m in a hurry.”

She stared at him, in dumb outrage.

“Please,” he said.

“Yeah…” she drawled sarcastically to the phone. “Story of my life. I’ll call you back.” She put the point of her pen on the form and demanded angrily: “You want insurance?”

The question reverberated for him. He couldn’t answer right away.

“I thought you said you were in a hurry. You want insurance?”

Max smiled. “No,” he said. There were tears in his eyes even though his mouth was spread wide in a goofy grin.

“That means you’re responsible for any damage to the car.”

Everything seemed to be chock-full of ironies. “I’m responsible,” Max said and he let out a laugh. It sounded loud and a little deranged.

“Okay,” she said and now hurried, obviously leery of him.

He took what she had available, which was a small white Ford, not glamorous or fun to drive. He was thrilled to control it, however.

He studied the map the redhead had included in the envelope containing his rental agreement. He understood it with ease. That was unlike him. Usually maps blurred into incomprehensibility, service roads melting into freeways, turnpikes becoming rivers, huge urban centers disappearing; and what he could decipher inspired little confidence: he worried that what he thought he understood would inevitably turn out to be wrong in the greater reality of the road. It was embarrassing, he thought, for an architect to have so much trouble reading a blueprint of the earth’s surface design.

Not this time. He found the interstate just where the map said it would be and he got on. His heart soared at the sight of the almost empty road. He put the air-conditioning on high, was pleased to discover that the previous renter had tuned the radio to a rock station, and flattened the gas pedal, delighted by a novelty: the speedometer readout was in digital numbers. He watched the old numbers blip off, the new numbers blip on, seventy, eighty, higher and higher, until he was driving into strange territory going faster than he had ever gone before.

Max saw that death was everywhere, had been everywhere all along, only he hadn’t seen it as death. On the highway he passed four cemeteries and a car being towed from an accident that was probably fatal. He noticed the stains of several recently killed animals on the pavement; and there was the corpse of one, lying gray and squashed, on the road’s shoulder.

He laughed when, after driving east for a little more than two hours, he saw this sign: WELCOME TO PITTSBURGH. He had gone to college at Carnegie-Mellon and at age seventeen the same words, maybe even the same sign, had always made him laugh, especially because Carnegie-Mellon’s location was the best argument against enrollment. “Pittsburgh is the asshole of the United States,” his Uncle Sol had commented when Max announced his intention to go there.

Recently Max had read that Pittsburgh was voted the most livable city in the United States by a survey. No doubt its air had benefited from the collapse of the steel industry. The article said Pittsburgh had made a particularly successful transition to a service economy, the same transformation that had become the fate of the United States generally. Max knew what that meant. It meant lots of yuppies and renovated brownstones, maybe even the same ramshackle ones that he and his friends used to rent. Actually he remembered there were plenty of great old buildings whose dilapidated utility could be converted to the current fashion of living in work spaces and working in living spaces. He could easily imagine young lawyers turning the ruined town houses into offices and the old warehouses into living lofts. Pittsburgh had always had pretensions to civilization. Even in Max’s day there had been Carnegie’s guilty and self-ennobling charities to the arts, housed in great buildings that probably looked much better without the air filled by the belching of his money machines.

Truth is, Max had liked the asshole of the United States. It was a real melting pot, where you could see steel sizzle and glow: a town of genuine production. There were workers who hated him because he was young, dirty, and free. There were students who wanted to become engineers and get ahead even if it cost them participation in the sexual revolution. He thought both groups admirable. He also liked his own kind, the students who wanted to act and take drugs; or play music and take drugs; or write plays and movies, and take drugs. And, above all, there was a higher purpose: the Vietnam War to march against, and a black population that had been taking shit for centuries and was amazed you were on their side. At least for a while. What he didn’t know, and understood now as he toured through his old campus, was that he had been in the middle of death all the while, the end of both Americas, imperial and idealistic.

Max drove to a hill only a mile from the campus where he and three buddies had rented a four-story turn-of-the-century brownstone. He pulled into a spot in front of a hydrant and looked up into the windows. The predictable had been done: root-canal therapy on the decay. The inside had been gutted and replaced with the embalming fluid of renovation: plasterboard, polyurethaned pine flooring, Thermopane windows. In what had been his bedroom he saw a young mother carry a baby across to a dresser. From his angle he guessed she was changing the infant. Her long hair was straight and brown. Her expression was intent on her chore, neither happy nor harassed.