The New Endeavor Begins!

Just days ago, I posted here about a great new story idea that I was thinking of starting to write. Those of you who know me well probably took that with the requisite grain of salt, thinking they wouldn't see this thing emerge for quite some time.

And yet, not so much. Today was my first set of office hours, but being the first day of class, I was not surprised to find that no students showed up. Which left me sitting in my dark, unhappy cube for an hour and a half with a choice: read my textbook (woo hoo) or write out the idea that was swimming through my head. I opted, as you are about to see, with number two.

I've got a pretty good idea about where I want the story to go, but I felt the best opening would be to start in media res, even if that means, as it does in this case, that not much is going on. I plan on having the story develop in two concurrent (but not perfectly parallel) storylines: from the conception of the trip to the episode below, and from the episode below to the end of the trip. In my mind, it makes sense.

For now, I give you the opening scene. Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated!

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THE SKY HAD A PURPOSE, and I was insanely jealous. Looking upward from the ground there was so much to see and take in. Its brilliant cerulean hue reminded me of the vast sea, and how the sky held the ocean’s identity for those landlocked souls who would never smell the semi-putridity of waves as they crashed along the seaweed-drenched shore. It was a protector, too, trapping us to our mother planet despite aeronautics, clamoring like a grounded child against his bedroom door, constantly fighting to let us out. It was the curio of the heavens, holding the sun and the moon and the planets and the stars on display for us to see. And through that display we could see ourselves, as if the sky became a microscope, miniaturizing our world into the kind of infinitesimal cosmic significance that puts perfectly sane but overly analytical humans, like me, on their backs staring upward wondering why the hell they would even consider that their problems ever truly meant anything.

My skyward contemplation, like so many other well-meaning schemes I’d concocted over the past two months, failed wholly and completely. I had accumulated these failures like a rampant consumer of misery, hoping perhaps to justify them all by clinging to them until I could find one great success to wipe the whole slate clean. But their burden became too great, and when I found myself staring down a long, narrow highway, somewhere (I think) in Tennessee, the endlessness of the road and my incarceration in the driver’s seat suddenly turned into a paradox too incomprehensible to keep ignoring. I pulled over, killed the engine, and dragged myself to a flat piece of ground whereupon I rested and lay facing the sky. I’d hoped that, in staring down the throat of the truly infinite, it, and not my tortured psyche, would swallow me whole and I could emancipate myself from the need to have something, anything, go according to plan.

So much for that idea. As soon it became apparent to my limitless imagination that no one gave a cosmic crap about my problems, my environs reinvaded my senses again. I was, for all intents and purposes, lost on a highway whose name I couldn’t remember, in a state I couldn’t identify for sure. I had, in the great cinematic tradition of the overly melodramatic, laid to face the sky in contemplation, but I hadn’t even had the decency to find a long, flat stretch of hot desert road to rest upon, but rather some indiscriminate grassy plot in the thick of a nondescript deciduous forest. Cars growled as they raced past the spot where I’d parked, and again I knew I had it all wrong because in the movies, in this scene, you’re supposed to be the only car for miles. Wrong biome, wrong road, wrong motivation. It was all wrong again, and with that I gave up the game.

I sat myself up and looked at my dusty left forearm, upon which sat a tiny black ant scurrying towards my elbow. I looked at the industrious insect for nary a second before bringing my right thumb and forefinger together into an OK sign, setting it in brief approval next to the ant, and flicked my finger against the tiny creature, sending it careening off me and back into the grass. I sat momentarily with pride at regaining some kind of control over things, until the bravado of the fuck-you blow I’d dealt the arthropod began to feel like the shallow swagger of a fifth-grade bully pummeling a kindergartener. I felt awful, and suddenly had no more desire to be in this place, on the side of the wrong road, as susceptible to the whims of a growing psychosis as I was to the breeze left behind by the interminable stream of cars driving past — looking, no doubt, to see why some idiot kid was laying in the grass next to his car while a girl sat in the passenger seat crying into her shirt sleeve.

She was still crying, as she had been for miles before I’d finally stopped. I had first pulled over because I thought maybe she needed air, but when the car came to a halt, she instead buried her head in her hands and bawled, sniffled, said not a word. Each fresh tear weighed upon my head until the atmosphere in the car became so heavy, so stifling, that I needed to escape. I left the car, probably faster than I should have, communicating not the urgency I’d intended but rather impatience bordering on anger. That was why she was still crying, because I’d left mad (so she perceived) and hadn’t returned to comfort or reassure her. I spent far too long figuring out how I should return to the car — too slowly, I thought, and she’d think I really didn’t care; too quickly, and she would be so confused by my actions that she would be inconsolable from the moment the engine turned over.

I settled on what I thought was a reasonable gait, but it wasn’t until my hand was on the door that I realized that I had no clue what to do next. The situation was far too volatile to reenter cold, but rather than think my way through how to make the next stretch of highway tolerable, I’d stared into the cosmos, killed an ant, and felt viciously guilty about the whole episode. I didn’t have the time to stand there and contemplate my next move — inaction suggests uncertainty, uncertainty breeds confusion, confusion creates chaos, round and round we go — so I opened the door, sat down, buckled my seat belt, and stared straight ahead as if down the barrel of a pistol.

Staring quickly became unsettling, and worse yet proved to be a horrible way to assess the situation. Gathering my courage, and with the most tender look my aching eyes could must, I turned my head to face her. She’d been staring at me the whole time, her eyes red and moist, two parallel rivulets descending southward to the precipice of her chin. No new tears had traveled the trail for at least a short time, and I could sense in her stare not only sadness but desperation. I returned her gaze, actively trying to soften my look, hoping to become less threatening, but I feared I was making no progress. In frustration, I sighed deeply and gulped down the saliva gathering in my mouth, felt it line my throat and relinquish the grip of dryness.

It was the most I could manage but it felt like enough. She sniffled once and blinked quickly, and I saw no new tears drip from her blurry, hazel eyes. Her face barely changed, but the subtle change in her look registered to me as a strange new contortion that at best pled for resolution and at least offered a plaintive stalemate.

I could meet those terms for now. I bit the insides of my top and bottom lips with my teeth, pursing my mouth slightly before turning back to the road. There was still a great, unsettled weight in the car, but some of it would be left, like it or not, at the side of the highway, never to be returned to again.

It was in that finality that I found enough solace to will my left foot to depress the clutch, and with a fluidity of motion that felt completely incompatible with the awkward acrobatics going on in my head, I started the car and slipped it into gear. I revved the engine loudly, amateurishly, anything to avoid a stall-out, and with an empty road ahead and a cinematically clear rear view mirror, released the clutch and raced forward. Violently I worked my way through the gears, each shift sending the car into a brief, spasmodic shudder, until the spot where I’d stopped was little more than a speck of dust in the side mirror. I left behind the stink of burnt rubber, a blast of wind and combustion vapors, and more than one victim of my murderous, guilty conscience, and to pay the penance for my sins, I resolved to drive until I saw a highway sign that told me for certain where I was at, or until the road swallowed the car whole — whichever came first.