Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

A string of lights passed through the woods in front of her. Josie got out of the Chateau, the air faintly toxic from some unseen fire, and ran to the road, where she saw a convoy of fire trucks, red and chartreuse, racing by. The firefighters inside were only blurry silhouettes until the last truck, the seventh and smallest, where a face, in the second window, seemed to be looking into a tiny light, maybe some instrument panel, maybe his phone, but he was smiling, and he seemed so very happy, a young firefighter on his way somewhere, his helmet on. Josie waved to him like some European villager liberated in WWII, but he didn’t look up.

Anyway, she was done. With the town. With her practice, with ceramic fillings, with the mouths of the impossible. She was done, gone. She had been comfortable, and comfort is the death of the soul, which is by nature searching, insistent, unsatisfied. This dissatisfaction drives the soul to leave, to get lost, to be lost, to struggle and adapt. And adaptation is growth, and growth is life. A human’s choice is either to see new things, mountains, waterfalls, deadly storms and seas and volcanoes, or to see the same man-made things endlessly reconfigured. Metal in this shape, then that shape, concrete this way and that. People, too! The same emotions recycled, reconfigured, fuck it, she was free. Free of human entanglements! Stasis had been killing her, had in actuality turned her face numb. A year ago, during the start of the lawsuit spiral, her face had been numb for a month. She couldn’t explain it to anyone and in the emergency room they’d been stumped. But it had been real. There had been a month where her face was numb and she couldn’t get out of bed. When was that? A year ago, not a good year. A thousand reasons to leave the Lower 48, leave a country spinning its wheels, a country making occasional forays into progress and enlightenment but otherwise uninspired, otherwise prone to cannibalism, to eating the young and weak, to finger-pointing and complaint and distraction and the volcanic emergence of ancient hatreds. And leaving was made inevitable by the woman who had sued her for apparently causing her cancer or otherwise not holding back the tidal onslaught of carcinoma that would eventually kill her (but not yet). And there was Elias and Evelyn and Carl and his Goebbelsian plans. But most of all there was the young man, a patient since he was a child, who was now dead, because he’d said he was enlisting to build hospitals and schools in Afghanistan, and Josie had called him honorable and brave, and six months later he was dead and she could not wash the complicity from her. She did not want to think about Jeremy now, and there were no reminders of Jeremy here. No. But could she really be reborn in a land of mountains and light? It was a long shot.

JOSIE WOKE TO A KNOCKING, a relentless hollow knocking somewhere beneath her. She opened her eyes to find that at some point she’d gotten back in the Chateau and had climbed up to the sleeper. It was dark outside and Paul and Ana were both out cold, though Ana had found a way to rotate herself such that her feet were now at Paul’s head.

The knocking paused, then came again, louder. It was Carl. He’d found her. She’d done something illegal. Crossed state lines with her children? Was that unlawful? She hadn’t bothered to check. In truth she didn’t check because she knew it might be unlawful and she didn’t want to know for sure.

Then a voice. It was a man. A different voice, not Carl’s. She thought about where she could hide the kids. She thought about the velvet bag of cash she’d hidden under the Chateau sink.

“Wake up in there. State trooper.”

Josie climbed down to find a man in uniform walking outside the Chateau, his flashlight scanning with quick slashing strokes.

Josie had no reason to disbelieve this man was who he said he was, a state trooper, but the night was grey and the dark mythology of her dreams were still with her, so she did not open the door. Instead she sat in the driver’s seat and waved to him.

“Hello,” she said through the closed window.

The trooper did not ask her to open the window. He didn’t ask her to provide identification or insurance or any explanation at all.

“Can’t park overnight here,” he said through the window, and pointed to a sign in front of her that said the same thing. “Okay?” he asked, now gentler.

She felt a rush of gratitude. Her recent life was full of gushing moments of gratitude to strangers, whenever they did not yell at her, curse her, almost kill or harm her in some way. Any time she escaped an encounter unscathed — and more so when someone was actually kind — she nearly swooned with appreciation. “Good. Okay,” she said, and gave him a thumbs-up. “Thank you so much, Officer.”

When he was gone, Josie started the engine and the dashboard clock read 2:14 a.m. She was a fool. Now the kids would be off their sleep schedule more or less permanently. And where would they all sleep if they couldn’t park this thing, a recreational vehicle, in an enormous parking lot overlooking a postcard bay? Stan had said something about the RV parks all over the state, but Josie hadn’t thought this would be their plan. What she had wanted was the freedom to just pull over anywhere, and eat, or sleep, or stay indefinitely.

She contemplated waking Paul and Ana and strapping them in before driving off, but she harbored an irrational hope that if she left them alone they might sleep through the night. It was improbable — it was a joke, really — but her style of parenting was predicated on hoping for things over which she had little or no control.

She turned on the radio and found nothing. She spun the dial left and right, then, thinking she’d found a faint signal, turned the volume up. It faded, and there was nothing for miles.

Then: “I’ve got big balls!” It was a man’s voice. A song played by a man in a schoolboy’s uniform. She turned it down, hoping it hadn’t woken up the children. This had been the rule since they’d left Stan’s driveway: the radio, which he’d called temperamental, would find no sound for hours, then would come alive with a sudden burst of song.

She drove south, looking for signs, but instead she saw the face of Evelyn, the dying woman who now owned her practice, and she saw Evelyn’s malevolent son-in-law, and then she saw the face of the dead soldier. What fool goes to Alaska alone in a vehicle like this? She had guaranteed herself limitless stretches of driving like this, her children occupied or asleep, while all she could do would be to contemplate her many mistakes and the fundamental mistake of knowing other people, all of whom would ultimately die or try to kill her.

Finally she saw the words RV PARK on a hand-painted sign, and pulled into a gravel lot. She drove slowly past a tall wigwam, a totem pole next to it, leaning heavily to the right. The office was a pink aluminum trailer, and within there was one dim amber light. She knocked on the door, producing a weak tinny sound.

“Second,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere deep within.

“Thank you,” Josie said to herself and said it again to the woman who answered the door. The woman was about her age, with black hair done up in a beehive. The sight of it, almost a foot high, brought Josie briefly to a cheerful 1950s place where the future was bulbous and sleek and reaching upward.

“That yours?” the woman said, her chin giving a quick acknowledgment of the Chateau. “One night?”

Josie confirmed one night and, in a rare burst of chattiness, asked the woman, “How you doin’ tonight?” dropping her g for no reason she could account for.

“Hoping for rain,” the woman said. “Need some rain.”