Nowhere

In the pale light of dawn, he loaded the van. A thread of mist traced the horizon like vapor left from a wayward ghost. He had condensed his existence to three duffel bags and one box. He didn’t want the box, but he could not bring himself to discard the orphaned contents as he had discarded the rest. His goal was to discard the box along the way. Somehow. Somewhere. And as he stepped into the front seat of the van, peering gravely into the grey essence of a waking day, he began his drive to nowhere.  

            He set out from the acres which, in two days’ time, would no longer bear his name on its deed. Sold and signed. He had known nothing other than the Texas Panhandle. He watched her and all her varying faces slide by beyond his windshield. There were canyon of red rocks throbbing beneath the sun. Yucca and dry scrub dotted cliffs topped in crackly patches of calcium carbonate. Faint clouds of orange dust spelled stories of ranchers awake since before even he had taken to the pale dawn, their herds set free to chomp and trod the land. Soon the horizon was less of a horizon and more of an infinite belt rolling him forward towards whatever substance composed infinity, each square acre given distinction and orientation only because of that which surrounded it.

            He crossed the state line before lunch. He exhaled a shaky breath. In his rearview mirror, the Lone Star flag bid him farewell from a green interstate sign, hoping to see him again soon.

            Roswell emerged from the grey, roiling distance. The town clung tightly and unapologetically to its one claim to fame, an otherwise unremarkable collection of brick lost in the vastness. Martians peered down on his van from every street corner, from billboards and storefronts. Tourists wore headbands with bouncy green orbs on springs. Even the McDonalds had received the branding memo and sported a UFO pummeling into the side of its building. He considered embellishing the weak ploys of fanaticism, cruising the streets with the windows down and maybe even infecting himself with some of the simple, childish energy teeming from the sidewalks. But his foot weighed on the accelerator, like a beached fish too heavy for its own breath, and the rear axle of the van squeaked and moaned as if crumbling beneath the weight of one tiny cardboard box.

The desert folded around him once again, white and gritty and bleak. Thankfully, all things came to an end.  

            The Lincoln National Forest sent him up and down mountainsides bathed in pines and smelling densely of sweet sap. Banded sunlight peeked through the trees and swiped over his dashboard. He stopped for a meal in Ruidoso. He found the nearest parking spot and stepped out into a coolness somehow alive against his skin. He smelled the sweet pines, the saturated soil. Thick clouds of gunmetal grey in the distance threatened rain, breathing over the peaks. On one of the mountain faces brushed in greenery, there was a large burn spot. He stood on the sidewalk, gazing at the blackened trunks stabbing with their barren branches, as the lunchtime crowd streamed past him. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and went into the restaurant.

            Polished cement floors. Wood paneling imitating a cabin’s interior. Black tables with black chairs that shrieked at the slightest movement. Patrons filled most tables. As he moved towards a seat, he became fixated with a nearby family. A young brother and sister having lunch with mom and dad. The dad stared dimly at a Rockies game on TV. Mom had her chin perched on laced fingers while the kids devoured fries and soda alike. 

He found a table and slid into the chair. It squeaked.

            A waitress came to his service and he ordered without looking at the menu, a plain cheeseburger and a water, thank you. As the waitress set off, the tone of his inner voice became suddenly apparent to him. It was a kind of whining, moaning child. Too upset and petulant to consider devising a solution. Even his order was sad. He wanted a bacon burger with the works and slathered in barbecue sauce. He wanted the biggest coke they had with extra sugar, please and thank you. He did not fault himself for his ways of recent, but he did acknowledge them. He thought it best. He had to look—

            “Excuse me.”

            He looked up. A girl stood in front of his table. Brown eyes and brown hair cropped short, just behind the ears. “Girl” was the first word to come to mind, but her features seemed stuck in some kind of limbo between weathered knowledge and doughy innocence.

            “You were driving that van out there, right?” she said. “The camper kind.”

            “That’s me.”

            “You traveling somewhere?”

            “I am.”

            “You mind if I ask where?”

            “Nowhere.”

            “You don’t want to tell me.”

            “I told you.”

            She squinted at him. “Which way are you headed?”

            “As of now, west. Probably stay west for a good while.”

            “So you’re really not going anywhere?”

            “I do believe that’s what I said.”

            “You have a funny accent.”

            “I’m sorry, did you need something?”

            She helped herself to the seat across from him. “I’m thinking we might make a good team.”

            “That right?” He peered over her shoulder, searching for the waitress—maybe it wasn’t too late to take the food to-go.

            “I’m not really going anywhere either,” she said.

            “So you’re a hitchhiker.”

            “I’m Nala. And I’m hitchhiking, yes,”

            “Well then. My apologies.”

            “So what do you say?”

            “To what?”

            “What do you mean to what?”

            “You haven’t asked nothing of me yet.”

            “I thought I made it pretty clear.”

            “I make a habit of not making assumptions.”

            She rolled her eyes. “If I’m hitchhiking, and you got a van on the way to, I guess, nowhere…”

            “You choking on something?”

            “Now you’re just being mean.”

            “No, I’m pulling your leg.”

            “No difference.”

            “Big difference.”

            The waitress returned and slid a plastic mesh basket topped with wax paper and a sad, plain cheeseburger. Before he could ask for the to-go box, they were off to their next customers. He switched tactics and swiped up the cheeseburger and bit into it with his eyes set on the meat and nothing else. When the silence grew too long and too pregnant, he let the hamburger flop from his hands and made a big sigh.

            “You got any money?” he asked.

            “I can pay my way.”

            “Aint what I asked.”

            “Well, I—”

            “You hungry?”

            Her shoulders slumped forward. “I could eat, but I don’t need you buying me things.”

            “You got a funny way of answering questions.” He hailed the waitress with two fingers.

Nala ordered the burger he wished he had ordered. The waitress set off once more. They got to talking. All the while, he thought of his box in the van. He pictured its crumpled cardboard stuffed in the rear like he didn’t want it to be there and yet worried someone might steal it, as if it held the same intrinsic value to everyone that he had placed on it. Even if they stole it, his mission would be accomplished. The box, gone.

            And still the burger flipped sideways in his stomach with the idea.

            “How old are you anyway?” he asked.

            “Sixteen.”

            He shook his head. “Go home. You’re hot commodity for bad people.”

            “That’s dark.”  

            “Call it like I see it. Don’t be stupid. Aint nothing out there in nowhere that’s gonna satisfy whatever it is you want.”

            “Then why are you going there?”

            He chewed.

            She continued: “I got emancipation papers two months ago. I’m an adult. So quit looking at me like you need to call somebody and quit giving me your creepy advice. You have to get a court’s permission for emancipation. I got it. And, no, I wasn’t being neglected or raped by my stepdad or whatever. Not every girl comes with trauma lore.”

            “Why are you hollering at me?”

            “I’m not hollering.”

            “Just feels young is all.”

            “Wisdom has nothing to do with age. Time isn’t real.”  

            That one got a laugh out of him.  

            When only grease resided on the wax paper, they left the table together, bound by some unspoken agreement of wanderer’s camaraderie. She convinced him for the north towards Albuquerque. As grey mountains passed in the hazy distance, molting into simple, rocky plains stripped of water and anything green, he listened to Nala’s life and spoke very little. He asked questions, though. She was a good storyteller. She came from Shreveport and a middle-class family with competent parents. She had her own way of relaying the information, but he deduced the facts from her spin-cycle reporting all too common among youth searching for the Better Place. She had a cousin she thought of as a brother. This cousin, driven by the same boredom gripping her in this very van, had chosen his escape in a more dangerous defiance. Like any town—anywhere and nowhere—trouble was there if you wanted to find it, and if you wanted to make money with it, well, the risk equaled the reward.

            She never clarified what had happened to the entrepreneurial cousin, a boy born as a visionary but shown the wrong world, but one of her well-timed silences punctuated the end of Nala’s story with enough clarity.

            She stayed with him as far as Flagstaff. Red buttes danced in psychedelic heatwaves like an urgent portal to a different realm. Red canyons with red, chapped faces. All around, spires and mesas and craters contorted themselves into alien shapes seemingly defiant of physics. Together, they stood behind a failing wooden banister meant to somehow prevent someone from strolling into the warped wilderness and hiding in the stony labyrinths forever.

            Nowhere.

            “This is it,” she said.

            “I’ll say.”

            She turned to him. “I feel like I’m owed some answers before you leave.”

            “Trust me, kid, get used to the idea that you’re not owed nothing.”

            “I’m not a kid.”

            “Them papers may say so, but you’re a kid to me.”

            “And I don’t think we’re so different.”

            He smiled thinly. “What is it you think you should know?”

            “What’s out in nowhere? Why are you doing this?”

            “Aint you ever heard the definition of nowhere?”

            “Why are you going?”

            “Didn’t know I needed to find myself a reason.”

            “I guess not. But I know you have one.”

            He toed the dirt with his boot. A stale wind ruffled his hair and chittered across the asphalt.

            “My brother died,” he said. “Now I don’t really have a reason to be anywhere. So I’m just going.”

            “I’m sorry…”

            “Hell, sounds like you know what it’s like.”

            “I do.”

            “Some sorry son of a bitch took out his anger at the world in the middle of a shopping mall. Took five people away from their families. Then he was too much of coward to face what he’d done and put that gun to his own face.”

            “I think I heard about that.”

            “Probably. Anyway, I sold everything we had. Land. The house on the land. Bought the van.”

            “So, what is it you’re hoping to get out there in nowhere?”

            “I don’t know.” He stared at the wilderness. “Maybe I’m just looking.”

            They said goodbyes and exchanged phone numbers. He loaded himself into his van and sat idling in the lookout, watching the traffic breeze past on I-40. He rolled his window down and leaned towards Nala.

            “Hey,” he said, “what made you decide this was the place?”

            Nala panned the buttes and their contorted buttresses, striped in reds and yellows and whites. Then she looked at him. “Just felt right, I guess.”

            He nodded. “You may know some things yet, friend.”

            “I know I do.”

            He drove on.

            The interstate became a river pulling him in its current, requiring no action of himself. He crossed the state line to Nevada as a sunset seeped up and away from Earth’s gravity. Further on, in the deep silence of night, speckled starlight became a pulsing neon womb named Las Vegas. Vibrant and luminous, alive and raucous. Green and yellow and blue and pink, all mingling atop the nighttime’s black fabric like an electric aurora. He parked at the first place his van could fit. Up the strip he went, brushing elbows and shoulders, hailed by performers and homeless, taunted by great fortunes waiting in the faces of kings and queens and jacks. He stopped and watched a ragged man sitting against a brick wall, cloaked like a wizard by a thick, dingy blanket. In front of the man, four rats sat in a disciplined line. The man shuffled the rats as if hiding a chosen ball beneath them. He tossed a rat to the side, which quickly ran back to its place in the line, then he did so with each rat and they all ran back to their proper positions. With a lift of his finger, all rats stood on their toes and wiggled their whiskers.

            He approached the man and offered a dollar bill. The man looked at the dollar and looked at him and then tossed another rat to the side and paid no more mind to the cash.

            He took his dollars to the bars, instead.

            In the morning, there was no night. He lay on the floor of his van, groaning and cursing as he woke. His arms had somehow sprouted scrapes and bruises like a mean rash. His pulse throbbed on the back of his eyes, threatening to pop them from his skull and declare Nowhere was right here on the floor. His wallet lay open by his face. Only his ID remained. As he lugged himself from the floor and stumbled into a white, painful morning, he surmised a mugging had ended his colorful city adventure. Perhaps somewhere after his seventh drink, if he remembered correctly. And there wasn’t much memory at all.

            But they had been nice enough to leave him his identity.

            He drove on, across Nevada’s barren, hostile lands scabbed by heat and salt. What else was there to do? The anger of his assault still burned like Death Valley. Where was Nowhere if not safe? Where was safety if not in transit? Where was the future if the road behind remained where it always was, staked in eternity and truth just as a tree would always make a sound when felled no matter who or what was there to observe the reality being made so?

            The road offered him no answers, nor the many dusks and dawns as he curved his path northward.

            In Oregon, evergreens peered down on the van. They folded over him and locked branches in a single canopy. Not too dissimilar from Ruidoso.

His fingers drummed atop the wheel. Somewhere in his chest, lost in the hollow reaches where only heartbeat spelled the existence of time, a compass not of his own making was at work without his knowledge.

            The Pacific Ocean unfurled as he crested the top of a steady rise in the road. White froth lapped at beige shores, their sands studded by violent outcrops and coves. The evergreens dared their reach to the very edges of the surf, as if longing for a great journey unpermitted by their roots. The compass swayed and swung behind his ribs, turning him as his hands turned the wheel.

He found a vantage point much like the one he had shared with Nala in Flagstaff—a moment now relocated to the bleary world of mashed memory. Gravel and pebbles crunched beneath the tires. He parked the van and stepped out. Cool winds swept above the water and curved downward to his head, salting him gently and thoroughly. He breathed deep. He looked outward, his gaze restricted only by the capabilities of his ape eyes. The ocean heaved upon itself. Waves hushed him.

Out there, in the great distance, he thought Nowhere surely lay in wait. A great featureless plain of blue and white, devoid of signs and markers and mileage. An entity composed of only itself and made significant by nothing. An eternity very much akin to death.

            He pulled the box from the back of his van. He took it to the wood railing and set it down. His hair flapped about his skull, longer and greasier than he had ever known. Through his hanging bangs, he looked down at the box. The tape had not been broken since he first sealed the cardboard flaps months ago. And as he stared at the box, running a mental catalogue in his mind, he found himself uncertain about the contents inside the box. He squinted at the sealed tape, thinking.

            Surely he did not forget that.

            Not that.

            How could he forget it?

            He was at the box then, picking at the edge the tape, fumbling and picking, trying to catch the corner, his hands shaky. He found a firm hold and yanked. The taped screamed like an animal, broke off halfway through. He plopped the box onto the ground and fell to his knees, panting, questioning himself. He jammed his hands between the partially liberated tabs and heaved at them like an ape, like a strongman trying to pull apart a log—

The tape broke as easily as tape, and he flung backward with miscalculated force. He crashed onto his back. The air leapt from his lungs. He choked on nothing. He gaped liked a fish.

Slowly, air squeaked into his throat, down through his chest. When he sucked in a clear, full breath, white spots bloomed and swam across his eyes and disappeared, like fireflies hiding in the dark. He groaned and rolled over to his hands and knees. He blinked hard, and when he opened his eyes, there was a small foldable knife between his outstretched arms. The handle was a deep blue, its surface rugged and beveled like an unfinished jewel. The blade was tucked in, just a small ridge of silver along the front of the handle. His brother had found it in Juarez. Just lying there. Like it was meant for him, he had said.

Rising from his hands and knees, he saw most of the contents had spilled from the box. And as he stood there, panning his eyes across that which he had deemed valuable enough to carry across the country in the name of its ultimate destruction, his eyes turned hot and tight.

Snakeskin wallet.

A small leather photo booklet.

A denim jacket repaired large and small with flannel patches.

Woodcarvings from the cedar in their backyard: frog, ox, cardinal.

A watch, eyeglasses, a bandanna, their father’s wedding ring bestowed to the firstborn, a cigar holder, a zippo lighter, a rusted horseshoe—all of it was there.

He laughed. He laughed at his panic, at his simultaneous hatred and obsession with the box, at the idea that he was going to heave the box over the rail like some bad rendition of the final scene in Titanic. He laughed until the tears had no discernible source, as memories wafted out from the items like freed spirits and drifted away on the salty breeze. He wiped his eyes and faced the ocean once more. That great beyond.

But Nowhere was unavailable. Not here. Not elsewhere. Not anywhere in the cosmos’s voids where light itself failed to fill the space fast enough to spindle together a vision of reality.

And so he gathered the scattered contents, packed them neatly into the box, and took the box to the van to find a place to stay. Somewhere. Maybe the box could even help decorate.