Hour Six. Hour Seven

Hour Six

For some reason, the stretch of I-95 just south of Florence, South Carolina, is the place to drive a car on a Friday evening. We get bogged down in traffic for several miles, and even though Radar is desperate to violate the speed limit, he’s lucky when he can go thirty. Radar and I sit up front, and we try to keep from worrying by playing a game we’ve just invented called That Guy Is a Gigolo. In the game, you imagine the lives of people in the cars around you.

We’re driving alongside a Hispanic woman in a beat-up old Toyota Corolla. I watch her through the early darkness. “Left her family to move here, ” I say. “Illegal. Sends money back home on the third Tuesday of every month. She’s got two little kids — her husband is a migrant. He’s in Ohio right now — he only spends three or four months a year at home, but they still get along really well. ”

Radar leans in front of me and glances over at her for half a second. “Christ, Q, it’s not so melodratragic as that. She’s a secretary at a law firm — look how she’s dressed. It has taken her five years, but she’s now close to getting a law degree of her own. And she doesn’t have kids, or a husband. She’s got a boyfriend, though. He’s a little flighty. Scared of commitment. White guy, a little nervous about the Jungle Fever angle of the whole thing. ”

“She’s wearing a wedding ring, ” I point out. In Radar’s defense, I’ve been able to stare at her. She is to my right, just below me. I can see through her tinted windows, and I watch as she sings along to some song, her unblinking eyes on the road. There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined. I feel like this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly, the way pythons eat, but before I can get any further, Radar speaks.

“She’s just wearing that so pervs like you don’t come on to her, ” Radar explains.

“Maybe. ” I smile, pick up the half-finished GoFast bar sitting on my lap, and take a bite. It’s quiet again for a while, and I am thinking about the way you can and cannot see people, about the tinted windows between me and this woman who is still driving right beside us, both of us in cars with all these windows and mirrors everywhere, as she crawls along with us on this packed highway. When Radar starts talking again, I realize that he has been thinking, too.

“The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo, ” Radar says, “I mean, the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined. ”

“Yeah, ” I say. “I was just thinking that. ” And I can’t help but feel that Whitman, for all his blustering beauty, might have been just a bit too optimistic. We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system like so many leaves of grass — but the game makes me wonder whether we can really ever fully become another.

Hour Seven

We finally pass a jackknifed truck and get back up to speed, but Radar calculates in his head that we’ll need to average seventy-seven from here to Agloe. It has been one entire hour since Ben announced that he needed to pee, and the reason for this is simple: he is sleeping. At six o’clock exactly, he took NyQuil. He lay down in the wayback, and then Lacey and I strapped both seat belts around him. This made him even more uncomfortable, but 1. It was for his own good, and 2. We all knew that in twenty minutes, no discomfort would matter to him at all, because he would be dead asleep. And so he is now. He will be awoken at midnight. I have just put Lacey to bed now, at 9 P. M., in the same position in the backseat. We will wake her at 2 A. M. The idea is that everybody sleeps for a shift so we won’t be taping our eyelids open by tomorrow morning, when we come rolling into Agloe.

The minivan has become a kind of very small house: I am sitting in the passenger seat, which is the den. This is, I think, the best room in the house: there is plenty of space, and the chair is quite comfortable.

Scattered about the carpet beneath the passenger seat is the office, which contains a map of the United States Ben got at the BP, the directions I printed out, and the scrap paper onto which Radar has scrawled his calculations about speed and distance. Radar sits in the driver’s seat. The living room. It is a lot like the den, only you can’t be as relaxed when you’re there. Also, it’s cleaner.

Between the living room and the den, we have the center console, or kitchen. Here we keep a plentiful supply of beef jerky and GoFast bars and this magical energy drink called Bluefin, which Lacey put on the shopping list. Bluefin comes in small, fancily contoured glass bottles, and it tastes like blue cotton candy. It also keeps you awake better than anything in all of human history, although it makes you a bit twitchy. Radar and I have agreed to keep drinking it until two hours before our rest periods. Mine starts at midnight, when Ben gets up.

This first bench seat is the first bedroom. It’s the less desirable bedroom, because it is close to the kitchen and the living room, where people are awake and talking, and sometimes there is music on the radio.

Behind that is the second bedroom, which is darker and quieter and altogether superior to the first bedroom.

And behind that is the refrigerator, or cooler, which currently contains the 210 beers that Ben has not yet peed into, the turkey-that-looks-like-ham sandwiches, and some Coke.

There is much to recommend this house. It is carpeted throughout. It has central air-conditioning and heating. The whole place is wired for surround sound. Admittedly, it contains only fifty-five square feet of living space. But you can’t beat the open floor plan.

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