“Yeah,” I say. “I was just thinking that.” And I can’t help but feel that Whitman, for all his blustering beauty, might have been just a bit too optimistic. We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system like so many leaves of grass—but the game makes me wonder whether we can really ever fully
become
another.
Hour Seven
We finally pass
a jackknifed truck and get back up to speed, but Radar calculates in his head that we’ll need to average seventy-seven from here to Agloe. It has been one entire hour since Ben announced that he needed to pee, and the reason for this is simple: he is sleeping. At six o’clock exactly, he took NyQuil. He lay down in the wayback, and then Lacey and I strapped both seat belts around him. This made him even more uncomfortable, but 1. It was for his own good, and 2. We all knew that in twenty minutes, no discomfort would matter to him at all, because he would be dead asleep. And so he is now. He will be awoken at midnight. I have just put Lacey to bed now, at 9 P.M., in the same position in the backseat. We will wake her at 2 A.M. The idea is that everybody sleeps for a shift so we won’t be taping our eyelids open by tomorrow morning, when we come rolling into Agloe.
The minivan has become a kind of very small house: I am sitting in the passenger seat, which is the den. This is, I think, the best room in the house: there is plenty of space, and the chair is quite comfortable.
Scattered about the carpet beneath the passenger seat is the office, which contains a map of the United States Ben got at the BP, the directions I printed out, and the scrap paper onto which Radar has scrawled his calculations about speed and distance.
Radar sits in the driver’s seat. The living room. It is a lot like the den, only you can’t be as relaxed when you’re there. Also, it’s cleaner.
Between the living room and the den, we have the center console, or kitchen. Here we keep a plentiful supply of beef jerky and GoFast bars and this magical energy drink called Bluefin, which Lacey put on the shopping list. Bluefin comes in small, fancily contoured glass bottles, and it tastes like blue cotton candy. It also keeps you awake better than anything in all of human history, although it makes you a bit twitchy. Radar and I have agreed to keep drinking it until two hours before our rest periods. Mine starts at midnight, when Ben gets up.
This first bench seat is the first bedroom. It’s the less desirable bedroom, because it is close to the kitchen and the living room, where people are awake and talking, and sometimes there is music on the radio.
Behind that is the second bedroom, which is darker and quieter and altogether superior to the first bedroom.
And behind that is the refrigerator, or cooler, which currently contains the 210 beers that Ben has not yet peed into, the turkey-that-looks-like-ham sandwiches, and some Coke.
There is much to recommend this house. It is carpeted throughout. It has central air-conditioning and heating. The whole place is wired for surround sound. Admittedly, it contains only fifty-five square feet of living space. But you can’t beat the open floor plan.
Hour Eight
Just after we pass
into South Carolina, I catch Radar yawning and insist upon a driver switch. I like driving, anyway—this vehicle may be a minivan, but it’s
my
minivan. Radar scoots out of his seat and into the first bedroom, while I grab the steering wheel and hold it steady, quickly stepping over the kitchen and into the driver’s seat.
Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour—but in fact I am that kind of person. Also, I never previously knew that if you mix a lot of pee with a little Bluefin energy drink, the result is this amazing incandescent turquoise color. It looks so pretty that I want to put the cap on the bottle and leave it in the cup holder so Lacey and Ben can see it when they wake up.
But Radar feels differently. “If you don’t throw that shit out the window right now, I’m ending our eleven-year friendship,” he says.
“It’s not
shit
,” I say. “It’s
pee
.”
“Out,” he says. And so I litter. In the side-view mirror, I can see the bottle hit the asphalt and burst open like a water balloon. Radar sees it, too.
“Oh, my God,” Radar says. “I hope that’s like one of those traumatic events that is so damaging to my psyche that I just forget it ever happened.”
Hour Nine
I never previously knew
that it is possible to become tired of eating GoFast nutrition bars. But it
is
possible. I’m only two bites into my fourth of the day when my stomach turns. I pull open the center console and stick it back inside. We refer to this part of the kitchen as the pantry.
“I wish we had some apples,” Radar said. “God, wouldn’t an apple taste good right now?”
I sigh. Stupid fourth food group. Also, even though I stopped drinking Bluefin a few hours ago, I still feel exceedingly twitchy.
“I still feel kinda twitchy,” I say.
“Yeah,” Radar says. “I can’t stop tapping my fingers.” I look down. He is drumming his fingers silently against his knees. “I mean,” he says, “I actually cannot stop.”
“Okay, yeah I’m not tired, so we’ll stay up till four and then we’ll get them up and we’ll sleep till eight.”
“Okay,” he says. There is a pause. The road has emptied out now; there is only me and the semitrucks, and I feel like my brain is processing information at eleven thousand times its usual pace, and it occurs to me that what I’m doing is very easy, that driving on the interstate is the easiest and most pleasant thing in the world: all I have to do is stay in between the lines and make sure that no one is too close to me and I am not too close to anyone and keep leaving. Maybe it felt like this for her, too, but I could never feel like this alone.
Radar breaks the silence. “Well, if we’re not going to sleep until four . . .”
I finish his sentence. “Yeah, then we should probably just open another bottle of Bluefin.”
And so we do.
Hour Ten
It is time for our second stop.
It is 12:13 in the morning. My fingers do not feel like they are made of fingers; they feel like they are made of motion. I am tickling the steering wheel as I drive.
After Radar finds the nearest BP on his handheld, we decide to wake up Lacey and Ben.
I say, “Hey, guys, we’re about to stop.” No reaction.
Radar turns around and puts a hand on Lacey’s shoulder. “Lace, time to get up.” Nothing.
I turn on the radio. I find an oldies station. It’s the Beatles. The song is “Good Morning.” I turn it up some. No response. So Radar turns it up more. And then more. And then the chorus comes, and he starts singing along. And then I start singing along. I think it is finally my atonal screeching that awakes them.
“MAKE IT STOP!” Ben shouts. We turn down the music.
“Ben, we’re stopping. Do you have to pee?”
He pauses, and there’s a kerfuffle in the darkness back there, and I wonder if he has some physical strategy for checking the fullness of his bladder. “I think I’m okay, actually,” he says.
“Okay, then you’re on gas.”
“As the only boy who has not yet peed inside this car, I call first bathroom,” says Radar.
“Shhh,” mumbles Lacey. “Shhh. Everybody stop talking.”
“Lacey, you have to get up and pee,” Radar says. “We’re stopping.”
“You can buy apples,” I tell her.
“Apples,” she mumbles happily in a cute little girl voice. “I likey the apples.”
“And then after that you get to
drive
,” Radar says. “So you really gotta wake up.”
She sits up, and in her regular Lacey voice, she says, “I don’t so much likey that.”
We take the exit and it’s .9 miles to the BP, which doesn’t seem like much but Radar says that it’s probably going to cost us four minutes, and the South Carolina traffic hurt us, so it could be real trouble with the construction Radar says is an hour ahead of us. But I am not allowed to worry. Lacey and Ben have now shaken off their sleep well enough to line up together by the sliding door, just like last time, and when we come to a stop in front of the pump, everybody flies out, and I flip the keys to Ben, who catches them in midair.
As Radar and I walk briskly past the white man behind the counter, Radar stops when he notices the guy is staring. “Yes,” Radar says without embarrassment. “I’m wearing a HERITAGE NOT HATE shirt over my graduation gown,” he says. “By the way, do you sell pants here?”
The guy looks nonplussed. “We got some camo pants over by the motor oil.”
“Excellent,” Radar says. And then he turns to me and says, “Be a dear and pick me out some camo pants. And maybe a better T-shirt?”
“Done and done,” I answer. Camo pants, it turns out, do not come in regular numbered sizes. They come in medium and large. I grab a pair of medium pants, and then a large pink T-SHIRT that reads WORLD’S BEST GRANDMA. I also grab three bottles of Bluefin.
I hand everything to Lacey when she comes out of the bathroom and then walk into the girls’ room, since Radar is still in the guys’. I don’t know that I’ve ever been inside a girls’ bathroom in a gas station before.
Differences:
No condom machine
Less graffiti
No urinal
The smell is more or less the same, which is rather disappointing.
When I come out, Lacey is paying and Ben is honking the horn, and after a moment of confusion, I jog toward the car.
“We lost a minute,” Ben says from the passenger seat. Lacey is turning onto the road that will take us back to the interstate.
“Sorry,” Radar answers from the back, where he is sitting next to me, wiggling into his new camo pants beneath his robe. “On the upside, I got pants. And a new T-shirt. Where’s the shirt, Q?” Lacey hands it to him. “Very funny.” He pulls off the robe and replaces it with the grandma shirt while Ben complains that no one got
him
any pants. His ass itches, he says. And on second thought, he kind of does need to pee.
Hour Eleven
We hit the construction.
The highway narrows to one lane, and we’re stuck behind a tractor-trailer driving the
precise
road-work speed limit of thirty-five mph. Lacey is the right driver for the situation; I’d be pounding the steering wheel, but she’s just amiably chatting with Ben until she turns half around and says, “Q, I really need to go to the bathroom, and we’re losing time behind this truck anyway.”
I just nod. I can’t blame her. I would have forced us to stop long ago had it been impossible for me to pee in a bottle. It was heroic of her to make it as long as she did.
She pulls into an all-night gas station, and I get out to stretch my rubbery legs. When Lacey comes racing back to the minivan, I’m sitting in the driver’s seat. I don’t even really know how I came to be sitting in the driver’s seat, why I end up there and not Lacey. She comes around to the front door, and she sees me there, and the window is open, and I say to her, “I can drive.” It’s my car, after all, and my mission. And she says, “Really, you’re sure?” and I say, “Yeah, yeah, I’m good to go,” and she just throws open the sliding door and lies down in the first row.
Hour Twelve
It is 2:40 in the morning.
Lacey is sleeping. Radar is sleeping. I drive. The road is deserted. Even most of the truck drivers have gone to bed. We go minutes without seeing headlights coming in the opposite direction. Ben keeps me awake, chattering next to me. We are talking about Margo.
“Have you given any thought to how we will actually, like,
find
Agloe?” he asks me.
“Uh, I have an approximate idea of the intersection,” I say. “And it’s nothing but an intersection.”
“And she’s just gonna be sitting at the corner on the trunk of her car, chin in her hands, waiting for you?”
“That would certainly be helpful,” I answered.
“Bro, I gotta say I’m a little worried that you might, like—if it doesn’t go as you’re planning it—you might be really disappointed.”
“I just want to find her,” I say, because I do. I want her to be safe, alive, found. The string played out. The rest is secondary.
“Yeah, but—I don’t know,” Ben says. I can feel him looking over at me, being Serious Ben. “Just—Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are. Like, I always thought Lacey was so hot and so awesome and so cool, but now when it actually comes to being with her . . . it’s not the exact same. People are different when you can smell them and see them up close, you know?”
“I know that,” I say. I know how long, and how badly, I wrongly imagined her.
“I’m just saying that it was easy for me to like Lacey before. It’s easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who’s kinda bossy—then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.”
I can feel my cheeks warming. “You’re saying I don’t
really
like Margo? After all this—I’m twelve hours inside this car already and you don’t think I care about her because I don’t—” I cut myself off. “You think that since you have a girlfriend you can stand atop the lofty mountain and lecture me? You can be such a—”
I stop talking because I see in the outer reaches of the headlights the thing that will shortly kill me.
Two cows stand oblivious in the highway. They come into view all at once, a spotted cow in the left lane, and in our lane an immense creature, the entire width of our car, standing stock-still, her head turned back as she appraises us with blank eyes. The cow is flawlessly white, a great white wall of cow that cannot be climbed or ducked or dodged. It can only be hit. I know that Ben sees it, too, because I hear his breath stop.