Microfiction to Fiction, Part 4 – Conclusion

Driving Shades, Part 4 (Part 1 click here)

What happens next is another scene from the movie.

I’m stalking around the house, sloshing gas. I soak the porch, the sides, I head back toward the cab. I pause halfway to swing around, fire up one of the flares with a Bic. The white magnesium glow makes a lazy arc in the night. Then a clatter from the porch, followed by a massive whomp, and it’s done.

Some things are just flat out mysterious. Shades are so much weirder than you’d ever imagine. They don’t share each other’s world any more than they share yours or mine. Like, if I had a shade in my cab and we passed another shade, they wouldn’t even look at each other. Or if they did, they wouldn’t care, because every shade is the single lone citizen of an infinitely huge universe, population one. Some of the shades I drove, I had known them in life. They had known me. They knew my sister, too, but do you think there was a hint of recognition? Not one of them ever showed the slightest recognition of me. And Sis, not a mention. Weird, right?

But even weirder is this: since the fire, I haven’t seen one shade. Not one. How do you explain that?

The Clarion said this town had never seen a such a fire. I believe it, because I got a full dose of it before I left. You wouldn’t think a rickety old Victorian could burn like that, but it was throwing up fireballs like a dying planet. People always rush to the scene. I heard the streets coming alive, but nobody saw those first minutes—the blinding white fireball, the pyro show that blew up in its wake. Nobody but me. The house was drowning in fire. I heard one last blast as I drove away. It ripped through what was left of the decrepit framing, then came nothing.

I once heard a fatal car crash, and the sudden silence that followed it––no bird sounds, no insect noises, no traffic––as we waited for the horror of the world to surge back. You always wonder who was driving, what the hurry was, and what it means that they’ll never get wherever it was they thought they were going. It was like that, hanging suspended in the silence after that last crash. And then the world came back, like in reverse, and there was a lot of freaked out chatter from Gabe, cars were starting up, lights popping on in houses. The old air raid siren cranked up, that unholy wail that never sounds unless something has gone really wrong.

Mom and Dad were awake in their room when I came in. I could hear whispering, speculating, as they tried to figure out what the hell had just happened out there. They didn’t notice me on the stairs, so I was able to slip by and get to my room. It was dark, a good dark, a comforting, protective dark. I didn’t turn on the lights. I just fell on my bed and was unconscious almost before I hit the sheets.

Next day, I was up at noon after the best night’s sleep ever. By then, the whole town knew I’d done it. Somebody saw my cab, and there were other clues. I didn’t care. I wasn’t trying to get away with something. I was about to turn myself in when a local cop, Hunter, a guy I went to high school with, played basketball with, drove up in his cruiser to talk to me. He was in uniform, but he made sure I knew it was for the record only.

“Okay, then,” he said, after a few softball questions. He slapped his knees and got up to go. “We’re done.”

“That’s it?”

He looked hard into my eyes and nodded.

Outside the house, halfway back to the cruiser, he turned back toward me, and raised a fist. “Hang in there, buddy, you hear?”

Hang in there, buddy.

So I wasn’t going to be led off in an orange suit. The earth didn’t rip open. I wasn’t carried off in a UFO. Nobody in town stopped talking to me. If anything, folks have been friendlier since the fire than before. Father Mackey stopped by the house and gave me a big grin as if I’d done a good thing. Maybe I had. But if it was such a good thing, why was it I didn’t feel so good?

Nowadays, I drive past the site all the time, and don’t feel a thing. I hear it’s going to be a Stop ‘n’ Shop, but nothing’s happened yet. Once, before they leveled it and laid on the gravel, I even got out of the cab and took a walk through the ashes and cinders. The remains. I was trying to see the whole thing again in my mind, but nothing came up. A blank screen. I sat down on a black chunk of concrete let my mind drift into the way things might have been. I pretended I saw Sis standing in those ruins, reaching out to me with hot little tears of relief running down her face. The ruins would be gone soon and it would be just a patch of emptiness. If this story was a Hollywood movie, it would be over. Maybe one last scene where the guy and girl patch it up and decide to love each other forever. He’d pull out a ring. She’d say, “It’s beautiful,” and cry. Let’s pretend that’s the way it would be. Let’s pretend I gave Sis what she needed. Let’s pretend I don’t know why the months have dragged on without a trace of her. Let’s pretend I’m going to see her tonight, tomorrow night. I mean, who’s to say? I’m still young. There’s a lot of water left to flow under my bridge. It could happen someday. Let’s pretend it will.

I don’t pretend things so much anymore, but for a while, I was pretending all the time. One time I even pretended Sis wasn’t my sister, and we were making out, but that was just too weird. I stopped and never did that again. The smart part of my brain knows that pretending is a dead end. If you have to pretend, there are good reasons why it’s never going to happen, so you shouldn’t be wasting your time. I do have some basic good sense at times.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Lazarus, the guy from the Bible who Jesus brought back from the dead. What’s life like for you after you’ve been dead for a while? You rejoin the living, you’re back in the world again, but how can life ever be like it was? I’d ask a shade if I ever saw one anymore––I haven’t had a shade in my cab since the fire. Something happened. But anyway, that would be pointless because I wouldn’t get an answer. You can’t have a real conversation with a shade. Even if you could, what would it be worth? No offense, but to a shade, the question wouldn’t even make sense.

What it’s like to be alive again? Shades aren’t even alive, so how would they know? Sis had come back, not like Lazarus. As much as I loved her in those moments, I knew what I was seeing wasn’t my sister. That thing in the back seat of my cab was something else, maybe even something in my own head, I don’t know. Truth is, much as it hurts to say this, every second she was riding in the backseat of my cab, the real Sis was rotting in a box under six feet of graveyard dirt. There’s no way back from that. She’s dead, no future, forever and ever dead.

A couple of months ago, I started dating a girl, Joanne, a classmate. She’s one of the so-called night-angels who called in a request for me once, but unlike the others, she came back for more. I don’t remember her from school. She’s a sweet girl, practical, a librarian. Real smart, but romantic, kind of naïve. She’s easy on me. She told me one time she loved me—she’d always loved me, she said, just like she was saying she loved chocolate.

One time she said to me, kind of joking, “Sometimes I wonder if you really do live in this world like everybody else, or are you some kind of weird tourist.”

She seems to sense I’ve got one foot in this world and the other in another one. Sometimes, when she looks at me in a warm, admiring way, I want to ask her who she thinks it is she sees? Or what? It’s a fair question. I want to say, “Joanne, I have to tell you something. There’s a huge number of things I could never, ever share with you because they’re things that, if I ever told, you’d run screaming down the street.” But of course I don’t. In the long run, I guess we probably don’t have a chance, but she makes me feel good when I’m with her, and there are even some days when I think we could make a life out of it. Is that love?

For a while, I figured if I was going to have a girlfriend, I’d better inch my expectations for life up the scale a little. Before Joanne, every morning I’d looked at myself in the mirror and say, no future, no future, no future… Do that enough and you start to realize something: it’s bullshit. Alive is alive. Dead is dead. Day after day you prove it’s bullshit. New days dawn and there you are, saying the same stupid words to yourself, when in fact, if you’re alive, there’s always a future. Sometimes it just has to wait while you’re otherwise engaged.

Gabe asked me the other day if I was okay with some day shift, and the idea didn’t seem half bad. Nights have gotten pretty bleak, anyway. I haven’t seen a shade in more than three months—not one. I said, “Sure, I can try it.” Something in Gabe’s face relaxed and he clapped me on the shoulder with one of his big hands. It’s moments like that, thinking about driving the day shift and Joanne at home with meal for me, where life seems to be moving again, slowly, very slowly, in a more-or-less forward direction. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, that’s big.

Then comes one of those murky, slow nights, moonless, full of fog, and I’m back cruising the Ridge Road again. Something just gets hold of me, and I can’t stop thinking about her. I’m out there again, in the dark and the fog, hoping maybe I’ll catch sight of her in my headlights, her little shoulders pumping up and down as she strides up the rise. And the the pain rises up into my chest, that hopeless ache, and I want to stop the cab and walk out into some field, fall face down in the grass and never get up. Here I am, straddling the other world again, a living shade who can’t get over his dead sister. I scan the road ahead and she’s just over the next hill, around the next curve, and I’ll pull up slowly beside her and pop the door like I always used to. My lips saying “Eloise…” over and over, and I’m thinking that this time, maybe, just maybe, because it’s all past now, maybe this time she’ll be like she was before, all perky and beautiful, laughing at me, teasing me. And we’ll be free. She’ll lean forward, hanging on the seat, like she did one time, and give me a kiss on the neck and we can take a ride somewhere else now, somewhere nice. Just a ride. Maybe out to the shore to watch the sun come up. Then back to Mom and Dad’s. Ice cream. Home.

The End