She'd been so full, remember? Southern bright.
—
Evenings are hardest. It's not so much age, he supposes, as wear; and it's not so much mechanical wear, as spiritual. And let him be clear: Doc does not typically pay heed to the spiritual; even as late as the 50s, doctors were still eager and desperate to separate themselves from witches. Yes, even in town.
But if it were mechanical, Doc knows of a certain impulsive, dramatic, and overly-wealthy someone who would overnight parts from the moon if he thought it would do any good. Doc knows it won't.
For this, there are no moonshots.
—
Rushing down the mountainside. Saplings wilt beneath him. The jugs he's running slam hard against the side of his trunk, but their weight isn't enough to pose an issue. Junior, before him, anadromous, leaps the next hill. It's a long way yet to Fireball Beach.
The moon on the water, remember? Even bigger below than above.
Remember Florida? That first time. February.
Lightning.
—
"Where'd you go?" Sheriff asks softly. It's 10PM. They're in the desert.
They are home.
"I don't go anywhere," Doc replies. He's groggy. He says, "The memories are how I get back."
But Sheriff knows. It's the getting back that matters most to him; in his mind, if he can trace the paths Doc takes, know the memories that lead him home, then maybe he can help. If Doc ever needs it—when Doc needs it. And he will. It's how this sickness works.
It's like your body forgets how to be alive. It's something med school had never quite explained to him. Things like cows and trees were alive—they had certain processes that defined them. They don't teach organismic biology at med school, of course, but Doc's been around enough farmers to know that it's somewhat like them. Organisms like that have metabolisms, which are like combustion. They have vital systems of their own. Their claim to life is something called a cell, which contains something called a nuclei. They are simple creatures, in that way. Their life can be pinned down to a measurable, visible (albeit microscopic) process.
Cars aren't like that. They have systems—electric; mechanical; and in younger generations, computerized—but you can be alive if your engine blows. If your intake strangles. If your body is mangled and you become all new panels, all new drivetrain. After all that, you can still be you. You have a ghost. It travels from one set of parts to the next.
But sometimes it travels without you.
—
Used to be you could turn in early in a sleep town like Radiator Springs, and no one paid much mind. There hadn't been much to do at night, so near everyone did. But now there are movies on great and hulking projectors. Now there are guests. There is neon.
Still, Doc sundowns. He does to bed. The town lets him, because he is Doc and Doc has always done what he will always do and that's his character, not his illness. In the same way that Sheriff is a night owl, because he is their police force—their protector, and of course he is up all night, checking in on folks. It's his way. Of course it has nothing to do with Doc.
"My sister," explains Sheriff one night, when Doc's ghost spends a long time wandering—longer than usual—until finally Doc wakes to Sheriff keeping watch. Hoping. It's already dawn.
"She had a similar trouble."
Why, it's difficult to say. All Sheriff's tales of his sister end sometime before Sheriff's tales of Radiator Springs, so either she'd been much older or she'd died quite young. She'd been sick quite young.
"Had she wrecked?" Doc asks. It's his working theory: That you can be rebuilt to a T but maybe your ghost can't. Maybe your life can't hold to your newness as well as it could the old. After all, everyone knows that mods are dangerous. Fewer are familiar with the dissociation, the pain of major rebuilds, but that's there too.
But Sheriff shakes his head. "Never. She was a dancer. Not a soldier. Not a racer. Not a cop."
A dancer.
"Oh," says Doc, as his hypothesis falls from grace.
"Probably one of the hardest things to be," Sheriff notes, however. "There's so much pressure. I think that hurt her."
—
Under the guise of pulling racing data, Doc gets Sally to show him how to work a computer. At the beginning he has trouble understanding . After a few weeks, he can breeze through even the most arcane data repositories, build his own spreadsheets, cross-reference university archives of regional newspapers. Sally is duly impressed.
"But you won't play Words with Friends?" Lightning frowns.
"I will never play Words with Friends." Doc utters the phrase with audible distain. "I don't know why anyone would."
"But it's magical!"
The key to Lightning's conviction is that Lightning is surprisingly good at Words with Friends. That element of surprise only makes him better. Doc hadn't supposed Lightning knew all that many words, and in spite of Lightning's prowess he still doesn't suppose he does. Even so, the only one in town who can always beat him is Sally.
They're in the middle of their West Coast swing, Phoenix behind them and Los Angeles upcoming, so free time is more generous than usual. Much to Mater's chagrin, Lightning spends his full Thursday doing nothing but Words with Friends.
Doc hits the books.
It's amazing, the sorts of patterns you can find when you have the right tools at your disposal. For instance, Doc learns that the average lifespan of a racecar is not long. Blessedly few have died at the track—and that number has become less and less over the years, as safety has become more pressing, and technology more apt to meet its needs. But Doc wonders if such a story is only half the picture. Hundreds of cars have raced in the last fifty years; some are still racing. Most have been forgotten. Such is the way of things, of course, but most of the forgotten are dead.
Doc's gaze flicks to his Piston Cups, which are no less dusty and no less scattered than they had been before. The way the afternoon sun hits their dust screams, Let me let you in on a secret.
—
After Los Angeles, Doc plans to pay a quick visit to UCLA. There are firewalls his private practice does not afford him; there is data behind closed doors, in the repositories of the academy, that Doc requires.
He does not get it. Because this is how Los Angeles goes: It's a good track for Lightning. Superspeedway, his specialty. And it's an old surface, which is Doc's. No crew chief in the world can understand tire falloff like one with a medical degree. But Lightning cuts a tire on debris nevertheless. It smokes, but he saves it—keeps out of the wall, off the 78 as 78 zooms past him. He saves it up up until the 32 in front of him gets sideways. Lightning brakes, slams him anyway, and the car behind him destroys them both. Lightning's tail flirts with the catchfence before he topples down hard and slides across the whole wide breadth of the track towards the infield.
Let me let you in on a secret, scream the dust motes in the hospital garage afterward.
Doc stays with Lightning the entire time. UCLA goes unvisited.
Lightning is fine. The painkillers prove emetic, but his only lasting damage is that he gets bored of Words with Friends.
"Are you okay?" Lightning asks, once they're back at home. They're at the Butte, as usual. "You're not pushing me."
"You need to get your tires under you first," Doc says authoritatively, though by his own admission Lightning is fine. Lightning just turned a 173 mile an hour warm-up lap.
"I'm fine," Lightning says, and Doc has to believe him, because Doc does not believe that Lightning would be able to lie if he weren't. Lightning is fine to the point of confusion—he can't imagine a scenario where he wouldn't be. It hadn't been a particularly close call. But here's Doc, suddenly pussyfooting.
"Are you?" Lighting asks again.
After that, Doc puts his research away. It's a little shameful, that he'd rather abandon his research question than be forced to answer Lightning's. But that's his way, isn't it?
—
What next? asks Smokey. It's December, raining. It's been six hours since the news came down. The 51 belongs to someone else now. Smokey probably has a binder full of potential what nexts.
Doc abandons them all.
—
"Are they sad memories, or happy ones?" Sheriff asks.
They are whatever Doc can get ahold of. It's getting worse these days. Now he's awake, alive again, but Doc still doesn't feel quite in charge of his body. Part of him still believes he's only steel. Only as sentient as a jack stand, a lawnmower. Slowly, and slower, he comes back to himself.
It's not like Lizzie, whose dementia is chronic but seemingly harmless, in the scheme of things. She is old. Doc is sick.
Most of the time, you can't tell. During the day, he is sharp and hale.
But he tires, and his ghost wanders. Sometimes he feels as though it is running away.
It is leaving him on purpose.
Sometimes, when he sundowns, the sun is still in the sky. Lurching, lazy and red. Lightning is at the butte, practicing for a night race. Trying to pay attention to the feel of the air and how it changes as the sun departs like Doc told him to. The sound is a constant drone, the kips of his engine as he slides around the turns bleeding into pattern as he goes around, around, around. Most of the townsfolk don't even hear it anymore. Doc does.
—
"Don't tell Sally," Doc tells Sheriff, the first night Doc almost doesn't wake up.
Lightning, Doc is not concerned about. Sheriff treats that boy like a child more than anyone else in town; Lightning, Sheriff would never tell.
But Sally.
"She'll be cross with you," says Sheriff. Doc's noticed this is the way Sheriff argues when he's feeling serious about something: Quietly. Passively.
"You can't be mad at the dead."
"You surely can," says Sheriff.
"Don't tell Sally," Doc insists. But he puts his files in order, such that she can find them if she needs them. All his data, all his notebooks. He trusts that Sally knows enough about his otherwise poor filing habits that this is an apology.
But then Doc goes a long, long while without much of a scare at all. The files find their dishevelement again. They get pushed to the back of the office. A can of nails falls into them. Mice nibble. When it occurs to Doc that Lightning might be the one to find them, he burns them.
This would hurt him more than any crash. More than any race. There are secrets not worth telling.
That is, all of them.
"Great idea, Doc!" exclaims Sally, of the bonfire Doc starts at the edge of town. She tells him it reminds her of the beach bonfires she used to have with her family in Los Angeles, and then her peers at law school. They always put her in a celebratory mood.
Not that she needs any help with that tonight—Lightning's just won his first Piston Cup, and its delayed gratification makes it all the sweeter. Doc's bonfire is surely only the first of many desert tributes that night.
Doc will miss them. And this will be the night, he thinks, that his secret gets out. He can't miss this without raising questions. He stares deep into his bonfire.
"Don't tell Sally," Doc still says when Sheriff idles up to him, checking in.
Sheriff nods.
—
Doc's secret gets saved, because it turns out that night he is not the only one who is absent from the festivities. Sometime between the bonfire and the voluminous cake Flo brings out to much fanfare, Lightning himself goes missing. He is found hiding behind the Sarge's surplus hut, so deeply asleep that he does not wake for the dancing, the singing, the fireworks—all of which proceed with or without him, because once the town finds its momentum for such things, it becomes difficult to stop. He doesn't wake, even when Mater tows him to the Cone and deposits him in one.
The next morning, he wakes up exceptionally well-rested and utterly un-embarrassed.
"You know, this is all starting to make sense to me now," Ramone comments. "I always wondered how you fell outta the back of a truck on the Interstate and didn't notice."
Mack blushes.
Doc makes it another year. They hold the next party at high noon.
"Hey, one more and he'll tie you!" Fillmore points out.
"We can host a tea party," Doc replies blandly. Fillmore guffaws.
—
Sheriff is talking. "I remember," he begins, coaxing memory. "Doc, do you remember when—"
"Doc, do you remember—"
—
She's dancing. Narrow, nimble tires. He's never seen anyone bring that much movement into their suspension without drawing sparks from the ground. She is beautiful.
She is no one.
This is not a memory; this is only the story of a memory.
It's all he has.
I don't even know your name, he thinks.
But remember the moon?
Remember—
—
Remember—
Remember
—
She is so fast, his ghost.