Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

In the run-up to the Intercept, lines had appeared and stayed. Sleeping madmen were babbling the same things thousands of miles from each other, at opposite ends of America. These lines on the map formed a double-looping cat’s cradle with two huge empty patches. The lines intersected in Atlanta, where an unnamed vagabond – he had signed himself ‘Nobody’ in a smudgy scrawl when he’d been admitted to the Salvation Army shelter where he’d had the seizure and been tagged in ’98 – was saying, by the look of it, the same thing as his brother lunatics coast to coast.

The utterance charts for the media involved in this event were highly unusual. Underneath the noise, some consistent patterns were emerging: Nobody was producing them most consistently and urgently, but fragments of these utterances were uniting media on a sweeping continuum of tangents up the south-east.

A disyllable or trisyllable that seemed to be ‘Meat hook’, ‘Me door’, ‘Meet her’, ‘Ammeter’, ‘Umma’ or ‘Ramada’ was coming up. ‘Ankara’, ‘Gon’ and ‘Nameless’. ‘Wadis’, or ‘at ease’, or ‘hotsy’, too. Nobody had been able to make any sense of it and, in truth, Sosso would probably have been as freaked out as anybody else if they had. Most of the time Sosso – who was a true believer but inclined to the comforting notion that whatever signals came through from wherever would be deliberately impossible to understand – would affect excitement if they could coax half a line of a Kraftwerk lyric out of the whole of the continental United States.

It was the pattern and consistency of the affinity tags that was striking. It seemed impossible to account for by chance alone. And perhaps, Sosso had speculated, that was all they could hope for.

But in the last twenty-four hours, the blue dot that was the crossing point of the weird figure of eight started moving west – in fits and jerks. Right at that crossing point – still, apparently, ranting like a champ – was Nobody. The transmitter showed he was on the move, and his direction and pace seemed to be shadowing the data from the casino numbers.

The point of the journey, for Alex, had become the driving itself. He felt as if he had left his old life – not for a holiday, or for a week, but entirely and irrevocably. He had moved deeper into his solitude. Even while he was moving forward towards Carey, he felt as if he was moving further away from everything else.

Road sadness crept up on him. He used the car stereo less and less. At first, he had driven with the windows down and the air rushing in, but as the hours passed he found the noise not exhilarating but distracting, and he stopped it. He wound the windows up, put the air con on. It made a gentle whoosh. When it got too cold, he turned it off. Then as the car heated he turned it on again. He did this automatively, unthinkingly, until day cooled into evening and he left it off altogether.

The road sadness was half pleasurable: less sharp than his initial homesickness. But it was what was going on, and he gave himself to it. The America he was driving through was familiar to him from films, but it wasn’t the America in the foreground of films but in the background: the highway America that was endless and the same everywhere.

He woke up in Tupelo and drove into Memphis. It was late morning and he followed the tourist signs to Graceland but he didn’t go in. He drove past without seeing any Elvis impersonators. He stopped mid-afternoon, that day, for food and petrol. And he pressed on.

He got used to the rhythms. His mornings were startled by the brightness of sunlight. He’d wake up in a room in a chain motel, and get up and shower and check out and head onto the road when the sky was still whiter than blue. His mornings were full of optimism. Any time before midday he felt in command. He felt the star of his own film.

He’d stop early, sometimes, for lunch; or he’d have a late breakfast and skip lunch.

The wheels turned and the car hummed and the petrol needle made its half-daily journey across the dial on the dashboard. He would eat fast food, or food from gas stations. He tried monster bags of pork rinds – pretty horrible, actually; giant, chemical-tasting puffs that were to pork scratchings as popcorn is to sweetcorn – and grazed on sour-apple liquid candy. He ate microwave sandwiches and Jack in the Box burgers, nacho cheese and Gatorade. He browsed in chillers, with heavy doors, full of Vitamin Water and cardboard carry-packs of longneck beer.

The vastness of the country impressed itself on him. The road, when he was in between cities, was worn pale grey and yellow: and was only two lanes in either direction. An image came to him of the roads – arteries they call them – as the country’s circulatory system. He imagined himself swept along them like a blood cell, a platelet, shouldering past the big trucks, pumped by a huge heart somewhere miles away. That made him think of cells dying, DNA unknitting, fraying, counting down.

He drove for hours and hours in a near trance, adjusting cruise control, watching the road ahead vanish under his car, thinking about Carey and trying to imagine a joint future. Again and again, his imagination failed him.

He could imagine their past well enough. Drunken scamperings in college. Their becoming a fixture of the scene, ‘Beauty and the Geek’ – they’d gone to one fancy-dress party as that. But the future was a blank.

He started to drive into the night. As he crossed over into New Mexico the landscape changed. The neon minarets of the rest stops thinned out, became less frequent in the big desert, in between cities. It was just the ribbon of road and the car and the scrub to either side.

He felt calm but alert, as if he could go on for hours without sleep. Then, as time went on, he felt a little dislocated – as if he had gone on for hours without sleep, but hadn’t noticed it. He couldn’t tell how fast time was passing, or had passed.

There was a period of about an hour – was it an hour? – when he became hypnotised by the road in his headlights. There were no other cars around. The car seemed to be floating – just ahead of it fifteen feet of tarmac rushing in a blur in the yellow light. No sense of forward motion or acceleration. No sense of time or space passing. He was barely aware of the wheel in his hand.

Far, far ahead in the distance he could see red tail lights, but no road or horizon line to orient them against. They rose slowly, as if levitating into the air. Then they winked out and it was dark as far as he could see.

Alex eased off the pedal a little. The speedo kept steady. He had put cruise control on without noticing it. The red light reappeared – higher than it had been, and still climbing, moving off to the left. Alex started to wonder whether it was a car at all. Had there been mountains?

He looked down in front of him, saw the road coming into existence a car’s length or more ahead, churning monotonously towards him, vanishing as it hit the lower sill of the windscreen. Alone, he thought. He raised his eyes.

The whole of his consciousness seemed, now, to be zeroed on that little red light, miles in the distance. Would he, one day, remember this moment? The road fell away underneath him. Nothing was funny. Nothing was sad.

If you moved far enough out, for long enough, you lost your bearings.

The red light vanished again. The car started to climb. Alex imagined around him, unseen, trains creaking and lumbering through the night. Sleeping families. Empty forecourts. Rough sleepers mumbling. In his pocket was the ring that was going to link him to Carey, whoever she was, whoever he was.

A little later, as the Pontiac crested a rise of some sort, Alex saw a glow in the distance – not the sharp point of red that had been the lights of the car in front – rather a diffuse, blue-grey lambency announcing itself on the horizon.