A Comprehensive List of Things I Saw on the Road:
Road Sign: BEWARE OF FALLING ROCKS
I'd glance at Craig now and then. We were driving around the red rocks near Trinidad. The air conditioning turned us blue - I could see veins in his hand swell as he gripped the steering wheel. Rain beat on us in bullets. It was that thick, goopy summer rain that comes only with mugginess. His chest rose, sharp as a half-beat. Looking at him, I'd forget to breathe.
When we entered downtown Trinidad, people stood under the awnings of Main Street. Water flowed along the titled brick roads and spilled in curtains off the history museum.
Road Sign: HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES
Sacrifice Issac this time.
My mind repeated this like a mantra, praying that Rabbi Kohut would sabotage this Rosh Hashannah service. He was a bird, the way his arms outstretched across an elaborate stage of golden pillars and white roses behind him. In every other sentence, he would move an arm up, move the other one down, scrunch his eyebrows, or put his hand to his chest.
I hoped the story would change this time.
God orders Abraham to take his son Issac into the mountains and sacrifice him in order to prove his loyalty. Abraham hesitantly sets out to do this. Seconds before Abraham strikes Issac down, God sends an angel to spare Issac and instructs Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead.
See if God rewards Abraham for listening to him or condemns him for killing Issac.
I looked to my own father.
Maybe it wasn't God, after all, but a demon with a Godly mask. Turn Issac into a vengeful spirit.
Ike was 12, sitting next to me with his arms crossed. When he stretched his legs out, they were almost as long as mine. I used to tell him his biological parents must be moose, he was growing so large.
Our stomachs growled. Fresh challah was baking in the communal kitchen down the hall, and it lingered in the back of our minds.
In between Rabbi Kohut's bellowing passages, his assistant would blow a shofar, a ram's horn, for emphasis. Our mother would nudge Ike to sit up straight, but he always sunk back into place when the horn's echoes died out.
"Why are you staring at that guy?" Ike whispered to me.
"Huh?"
The man Ike nodded toward was the cello player.
In my mid-morning, hungry stupor, I did find myself fixed on him, the way a child will stare at a fascinating stranger. I don't remember quite what he looked like. I remember only a bun of brown hair on his head. A lot of people were watching the small band. I thought my staring was normal.
"I've been zoned out," I whispered. "He just happens to be in my line of vision."
"Bull."
"Shut up," our father leaned across my lap. "You're both being extremely disrespectful right now."
We were now at the point of the story where Abraham resolved to slaughter an unfortunate ram in lieu of his son. Time rise for prayer.
My family was glaring at one another.
Ike tilted so that he was an inch from my ear and whispered: "You can't be horny on Rosh Hashannah.
"Ike!" Our mother clamped his ear between her thick fingers and twisted. He didn't cry out but quietly squealed until she let go. My father whipped my prayer shawl over my head. A tassel hit my nose. For a moment, I couldn't see. My family was gone, Rabbie Kohut and his pillars and roses, gone, though I could still hear his lilting chants. Cello man, gone. My hunger ceased.
Later, on the car ride home, my mother turned in her seat to face me.
"I was looking at the cello player too. I've always wanted to learn an instrument."
They both heard what Ike said. I think she was trying to dismantle or bury what they heard. Ike stared out the window. I wanted to roll it down, undo his seatbelt, and throw him out into the mud.
There was a house we passed by then - a house I gazed at on the way o the bus stop every day, that had scrapped cars all over the lawn. It even had a school bus.
Two trucks full to the brim with pigs. Snouts and ears sticking out from every hole. Smelled awful.
I saw houses like this as Craig and I went through some small towns in Colorado and New Mexico. A result of what I assumed was purple-faced fathers swearing these junkers were worth saving. Projects they could work on but turned into lawn ornaments. Rusted bodies were too close to their hearts, and the thought of scrapping them brought too great a sense of failure. For years, in the most tender place of my mind, I desired to see my hometown again. Seeing similar towns while on the road with their junkers, low-lit malls, plazas with conjoined pizza parlors and nail salons made the tenderness rupture and infect the rest of my mind.
I had to see it again.
I needed to see it as an outsider, put up against my childhood perspective. Boulder is too beautiful. Too functional. It needs rust.
Read More Books and Fewer Memes. Readers Become Leaders, Memers Become Followers.
An hour into New Mexico, we stopped at a rest area. It stood atop a steep hill, a fortress of floor-to-ceiling windows. In the distance, mountains behind clouds were the background families taking vacation photos in circles around us.
Inside, a monstrous brass globe hung in the middle of the lobby. Salt and pepper-haired people with hunched shoulders waddled around it. Gumby children crawled under.
I grabbed a brochure for the UFO Museum on our way out of the bathroom. I planned on photoshopping Kenny and Cartman in there somewhere. When we went back outside, I noticed all the winding walkways. Greenery and gravel lined them all. A looming sculpture of three metal rings inside each other, split into different directions, took the sunlight and cast blinding glints on us below.
Craig elbowed me.
He was trying to subtly turn my attention to a van of caged dogs across the lot. All of them were white and tiny, with curly coats. Their elderly owners were letting them out, one at a time, to pee in the grass. I counted seven.
Talk about a dog's day out, Craig had said.
Road Sign: ROUTE 66
Billboard: Ortega's Family Restaurant of Route 66. It's a painting of a family happily eating together. Their table is in the middle of the desert. It reminds me of a Muse album cover.
I looked at Craig's phone, mounted on the dashboard. The little blue car on the map, us, vibrated slowly along I-25.
"Do you think your dad will text you?" I asked.
Craig shrugged.
Hundreds of feet below us, bison were grazing.
"I'm sorry you have to put up with him."
"I survive." Craig looked into his rearview, then behind, and changed lanes. "I don't care about the way he treats me anymore. And I don't care what happens to him."
That can't be totally true, I thought. Craig watches after him. At least, he makes sure his father doesn't drink himself to death. He cares enough.
Craig continued, "A good day with my dad is the days we don't speak to each other. We pretend the other doesn't exist."
I thought about the last good day with my father. It was Take Your Kid to Work Day. He let me sit in the corner of his office while he gave advice to people on the cusp of divorce or in a neck brace from an auto accident. The clients seemed uneasy that I was there with my own desk in the corner, reading. My father assured them I wasn't truly there. I was 12.
"Don't worry about it, bärchen." Craig reached over and squeezed my shoulder.
I opened my brochure and read about the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, the disappearing scientists (undoubtedly assassinated by those who did not want the public discovering "the truth"), and the short, pale bodies found in the darkest places of the desert.
Notes:I'm sorry for not updating in so, so long. The issues I was having with my family came to a head and it was just one horrible thing after the other. It's been difficult to get back into a mental space where I can write/be creative in general. But I never stopped thinking about this story and wanted to get back to it badly.
Thank you for understanding 3
P.S. I don't remember who, but someone asked a while ago why time is always bold. According to what Kyle has told me, the passing of time gives him anxiety, the word itself seems to linger...
