Chapter 9: Cars
"I can't believe you, Mac. At some point you're going to have to ask this girl out, you realize that? How are you going to do that if you don't even talk to her?"
I tried to concentrate on the test. The questions were easy enough, but Bloo was making things a lot more difficult by talking nonstop.
"You know who I haven't seen around at all? Brian. You should call him, he was cool. Did he leave the school or something?"
To my surprise, I managed to finish the test before anyone else. I got about ten yards past the door before realizing I had nowhere to go. I leaned against the wall, trying hard not to looking like I was trying hard to look a certain way.
I was started to see Frankie emerge from the door, heading in my direction. What did she want?
"See?" said Bloo. "She's sick of waiting for you to ask her to hang out after school, so now she has to ask you. You're a dick." I didn't let my facial muscles betray my annoyance.
"Hey," said Frankie, "I was wondering if maybe you'd wanna hang out after school?"
"Sure."
"Alright, cool." She smiled and went on her way. I watched in amazement as she disappeared around the corner.
"How did you know?" I whispered to Bloo.
"Because I pay attention to everything you miss. She wants you bad, Mac."
"I'm not so sure."
"She wants you to get all up in her titties, for real."
"Shut up." I was starting to get the feeling Bloo was planning to make my life very, very awkward sometime in the near future.
…
Somehow, Frankie and I ended up at the trail entrance near our school. "I think I've been down there," she said. "It goes in really deep."
"There's a bunch of weird stuff in there," I said, "like broken-down cars hundreds of feet from any roads."
"Really? I would think you couldn't get them past the trees."
"It's a mystery."
We stared into the forest, the trees swaying, beckoning us to enter. "You know what?" said Frankie. "We should go in there this weekend and you can show me where all that stuff is."
"It's really not that interesting." Bloo elbowed me. "I mean, some of it is. We should go."
We talked for a while longer before she said she had to go. As I bid her goodbye and went on my way, I wondered if there was some way to separate myself from Bloo.
…
That night I dreamt I was deep inside a cavern, crawling like a parasite under the flesh of the world. The walls were so damp that as I slid my hands along them to feel my way forward, a strange feeling came over my fingertips—not wet, but watery, as though my natural resistance to homeostasis had somehow gone offline. I was dissolving, being digested; the slime around me was eroding the barrier between myself and the rest of the universe. Was this dying? It didn't feel like it. I felt like I was growing, which was even more terrifying. What would it be, to be completely removed from the self as we never are in life? Swaths of my melted skin stuck to the cavern walls, slithering away like worms, carrying my still-active nerve endings into tiny crevices in the rocks. I could feel the rock; I was the rock; everything was everything.
Drip. Drip. Something was dripping from the ceiling, something not of myself. I held my breath in terror.
Eyes dripped down, a face dripped down. A smile that shouldn't be, the eldritch horror of a cruel universe that hears us crying out for guardian angels and teaches us to be careful what we wish for. I frowned so hard that my mouth melts off, swallowing the floor of the cavern just as the floor swallowed my mouth. I shook my head furiously, urging the abomination to be gone from my dream, gone from the universe. Blue, luminescent moths flitted about, in and out of the ceiling, dripping their essence into my wide eyes as they whispered soft hymns of a paradise that has never been and will never be.
The mouth opened wider, sucking away the air as I tried to breathe it and my thoughts as I tried to think them. I heard an impossibly strange, backwards, inhaling scream that rang through my every nerve. Somehow, I understood it as an expression of anguish from the loneliest being in the universe, the clarion call of greed incarnate. In moments, my thoughts could no longer be called thoughts and I could no longer be called me. A single question shot out into the darkness like a bullet, singing sharp and clear:
What do you want from me?
…
I woke up. Instinctively, I sat up and looked around my room. There, as I'd expected, was Bloo, sleeping (or pretending to sleep) in his normal spot. I stared at the ceiling, thinking that I'd never fall asleep right up until I did.
…
By the time the weekend came, I had given up hope of getting Bloo out of the way. When I got to school, I found Frankie waiting by the trail entrance with a backpack.
"Why'd you bring your school stuff?" I asked as we embarked.
"Actually, I just have water and trail mix in here." I wondered why I never brought that kind of stuff.
As we passed through a small clearing, I explained our possible destinations: "So there's this old, broken-down shed that no one seems to be using, near this abandoned construction site by the road; a giant area that's been clear-cut with just one tree standing in the middle, with a tree fort partway up; this weird scarecrow thing that my friends and I made years and years ago…"
"Where are the car crashes?"
"Oh, those are pretty close. We just take a right up ahead."
I listened to her eat a mouthful of trail nuts as she walked behind me. "Do you want some of this?" she asked.
"No thanks, I'm good." I stopped walking as I saw a sudden flash of motion up ahead. I squinted and realized Bloo had emerged from the bushes and was waving at me.
"What's wrong?" asked Frankie.
"Nothing, I just… thought I saw something."
"There are bears in here, right?" She didn't sound scared, but she lagged behind as I resumed walking.
I looked at her over my shoulder. "I've never seen any."
"Yeah, but they live in this area, so they must be in here somewhere, right?"
"They live in the woods. Just not these woods."
Glancing from side to side in hesitation, she caught up with me. "Woods are woods, though, aren't they? Why would a bear care if it was living in these woods or any other woods?"
I shrugged. She had me there.
Bears or no bears, she seemed to relax as time wore on. To my surprise, Bloo remained completely silent.
"This seems like it's be a good place to come out and draw."
"Not really. There's nowhere to sit down."
We arrived at our destination. There, down in a ravine, sat three rusting cars in a tight huddle, facing each other, as though plotting their escape. The forest had seeped into them over the years, covering them with pinecones and pine needles, dirt and rot, rendering them unfit to even sit in. Something about them seemed distinctly unsanitary, as though mixing nature with machinery in this way was like mixing orange juice with milk.
"Whoa. What's with that one over there? How did it get like that?" I looked to where Frankie was pointing and saw the fourth car, ostracized from the rest, watching them from afar. Through its hood grew a mighty tree, rising up a hundred feet or more, just like any other in these woods. The front and sides of the car were unbroken.
"The tree must have grown up through the bottom," I said. "It's the only way."
Frankie started clambering down into the ravine. Couldn't she see how gross the cars were? I held back as she inspected them close up, peering through the smashed windows from various angles. As she climbed back up, she started to slip on the unstable slope, producing a small cascade of something between dust and dirt as she scrambled to grab onto roots poking out of the ground
"Help her up," suggested Bloo. I walked forward, reached out my hand so she could grab it, and pulled her back onto the trail. "Keep holding her hand," hissed Bloo. I let go.
"I like to think there's a story here," I said. "I just don't know what it is."
"Maybe the cars didn't crash and they were just left here. I mean, they're not touching each other."
"Yeah, that makes sense… and whoever owned them is probably dead by now, judging by the size of that tree."
"He treasured them. He refused to let them go. They were like his children."
"He loved them more than his own family. He was a cruel man, with a short beard and a cane that he used to whack his wife and children."
"He was obsessed with the idea of owning things. He became furious when so much as a mailman set foot on his property."
"He had a collection of antiques that he would count every day, just to make sure they were all there."
"As he lay on his deathbed, looking into the faces of his loved ones as they tried to look sad, what killed him wasn't the pneumonia, but the horrific shock of realizing how empty his life had been."
I smiled at her. This was a moment of sharing. It's nice to make up stories. It's nice to pretend that the things that happen to us mean something.
Bloo circled around, looking up at me from Frankie's side. "Now is a good time to ask her a slightly personal question," he said. "Something vaguely artistic-sounding that someone would ask in a sappy movie. It doesn't matter if it's cheesy; she'll appreciate the thought."
"Do you ever feel like we're just living out someone else's dream?" she asked me.
I blinked. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, what if this is part of someone else's story? Descartes said 'I think; therefore, I am.' But what if someone else is doing the thinking? What if we're just complex, self-contained thoughts?"
"You mean imaginary." I looked at Bloo. His expression was inscrutable.
Frankie went on: "It's so strange to think that it could even be possible. Someone, somewhere would have to dream up the whole world. But as long as they thought all the thoughts we think and felt all the feelings we feel, it could happen."
"I try not to think about that." It wasn't until too late that I'd realized what I'd said. Would she suspect this was a possibility I often dwelled on, something that secretly terrified me to no end?
"Well, it does seem pretty unlikely. I just thought it was interesting to think about." I breathed a silent sigh of relief.
On the way home I learned that she volunteered at a soup kitchen; that she thought Drake's equation was reason enough to assume there must be someone else out there, and that therefore no one should ever feel alone; that I should draw her sometime. Bloo was waiting for us just outside the trail we'd entered on. I stopped, staying just inside the woods as Frankie brushed based him. He smiled at me and silently mouthed "you're welcome."
