Fair Copy
by Daniel I. Clark
He is a teacher, writer, and musician. Somehow he mixed up the papers, and his wife and three children are at home, or they have gone out, and he is running behind; but when he is not reading, he is writing; and when not speaking, singing. His work has appeared, or will soon, in Black Petals and Planet Scumm. He puts messages into bottles @danielclark3rd@zirk.us.
I.
We made an inventory of the car after admitting to ourselves that we were lost.
In the trunk I found an emergency blanket and an ice scraper. Underneath the seats were a road atlas and two pens. One was already dried up. The other I’m still using.
I found this notebook in the glovebox, tucked in with the manual—blue cover, spiral bound, a little larger than my hand—forgotten property of the car’s prior owner, I assumed. Only the first page had been written on. The names of towns and cities were listed there, alongside strings of numbers that looked like distances in miles or odometer readings.
You won’t talk to me anymore, so I carry on a one-sided conversation here. It gives scant satisfaction, but it’s better than nothing.
The plan was to take the ten-hour drive in shifts. You had to work late the day of our departure, so I said sleep, I’ll drive first. I might even be able to get us all the way to the city.
Don’t overdo it, you said.
We hit the road around nine. You fell asleep after we got on the interstate.
What waited for you in the city? I was headed there for a job interview. Is that why we ended up taking my car? I can’t recall, and I haven’t wanted to ask you since it might be taken as shifting the blame.
Your car was newer, it would probably have been more comfortable, but no matter.
I’ve always enjoyed driving on the highway at night. Darkness simplifies the picture framed by the windshield, reducing billboards to floating shapes and colors that glide over trees and empty fields; the road rushes to meet you, and the red tail lights on cars and trucks, flatbeds and trailers, are like eyes in different configurations, the inscrutable faces of a strange menagerie racing forward, turned back to ask—are you coming? will you join us?
Every car is headed in the same direction, making continuous progress via clearly delineated channels.
All of the lights are blinking hello and goodbye.
All together and all apart.
All at rest and all in motion.
Each driver the nucleus of a cell.
I drove along that dark road beneath a cloudy, moonlit sky, feeling an almost perfect contentment. I found the ideal speed, at an ideal distance from cars ahead and behind, and stayed in the pocket as hours passed in minutes.
Fog rolled in just as early morning began to sharpen contours and color the scenery. I slowed to sixty, fifty-five, fifty. The other cars on the road steadily pulled away from us. The thought entered my mind, watching them go, that I would never see those particular lights again. Then came the thought that I had stayed at the wheel long enough. At the next exit I pulled off and found a gas station.
I got out to stretch my legs, and the air was cool and damp. Each of the station’s arc lights was caught by the fog in an egg of glowing mist. Except for their electrical hum, it was very quiet. Nothing moved.
You were still sleeping.
The register was unattended when I walked inside. An empty drink cooler buzzed in a corner. The shelves were flimsy and understocked: no racks of sunglasses or magazines, no travel-sized medical products; soap and motor oil, but hardly any snack food.
The bathroom smelled strongly of cleaning agents, but the usual stains were present on floor and walls.
When I came out a couple minutes later, there was still no one around, but I decided against calling for the attendant. We still had a fair amount of gas in the tank, and you had slept the whole time, so I figured hell we’re almost there, I’ll just keep driving.
(Should I have woken you to take your turn? Would that have made any difference?)
Back on the highway, the fog had gotten heavier. Soon I was straining my eyes to make sure we stayed in our lane. That’s when I finally woke you. I said it might be best to pull off and find a truck stop or a fast-food place where we could wait for the fog to lift. You agreed.
An exit ramp appeared on the left and we nearly missed it—and the ramp made a curve that was long, too long—but we were nervous and taking it very slowly.
The ramp came to an end at a road running perpendicular to it. We weren’t sure which way to turn and neither of us could get any kind of signal.
I put the car in park and turned on the blinkers. You were upset.
Why didn’t I wake you at the gas station?
I said it didn’t seem necessary.
You’re certain we were on the right road?
Yes, I said. Yes. Which way should we turn?
That way, you said, pointing left.
We were in a rural area, though I had assumed we couldn’t be far from our destination in the city. There wasn’t much visible from the road: driveways to ranch homes, ruts left by tractors, dirt and gravel piled near half-finished housing developments.
Then the road took us alongside a lake. Its surface was perfectly black, without any sheen, as though the water had been replaced with tar. We were past and away before I could say anything to you.
I rolled down my window.
The air was thick. There was a sour chemical reek to it, faint but insistent.
Close the window, you said.
The clock read 6:00 am. It wasn’t very bright, but that could be attributed to the fog. We concluded after minimal discussion that since our road was larger than those connected to it, somewhere ahead would be an even larger road, or a highway, or a town where we could stop and get our bearings.
So we drove on.
6:30 am, not much brighter.
7:00 am, the light was unchanged.
The road forked, and I took us left without consulting you. I drove on, obstinately—all the more so because you said nothing—I drove on, flanked by trees that in the fog seemed a single bristling mass.
Is the clock broken? you asked. It still says 7:00 am.
We tried watching the clock to see if something was wrong with the display, but inevitably the fog and the road would demand our attention.
I.
Your turn to drive, you said.
I pulled over onto the shoulder. There were fields on either side of us. Spread over the fields was the fog.
A ditch ran next to the road. As I walked to the passenger door, I heard a sound like something small splashing around in shallow water, but I kept my eyes on the car, away from the ditch.
Strapping myself in again, I commented on the absence of other vehicles. You may not have heard me. The road was plunging into the fog ahead of us; we were going over the falls.
Now and then I thought I could see the sun glowing behind the fog; but the glimpses were so brief that they may have been tricks of the eye; and the position of the dimly apprehended circle varied every time I saw it, appearing first closer to the horizon, then higher in the sky; and once I thought I saw it over the other side of the road.
We were moving fast. It felt like we were adrift. I said hang on, have we gone off the road? But you didn’t slow down.
I raised my voice, which I regret, and at last you put on the brakes, straightening out the wheel but still not speaking.
Then a shape appeared in the headlights, low to the ground, the fog swirling in eddies around it: what looked, incongruously, like a rooftop ventilator unit.
You shut off the engine. After a minute you opened the door. I followed your example.
Walking over with a show of fearlessness, I put my ear up to the opening, careful to avoid touching it. No air moved through the duct. The metal was in rough condition—pitted and uneven, like the skin of a rhinoceros.
Maybe it’s defunct? I said.
You shook your head, saying it must be connected to someplace nearby even if it wasn’t currently in use.
I looked around.
We appeared to be in a dilapidated parking lot, except that there were no barriers of any kind and no lines anywhere.
You stood furthest away from the car at that moment. I was holding on to the open passenger door, looking at you, wondering if I should volunteer to search for a building while you stayed with the car.
I’ll drive, you said. We’ll find something.
We determined to keep the ventilator in the rear-view mirror and to drive straight ahead. If we found nothing, we would put the car in reverse and backtrack.
Somehow this didn’t work. After we drove out twenty yards or so, there was still nothing ahead of us; and backing up, we couldn’t find the ventilator. It ought to have been directly behind us, but it wasn’t.
I wanted to keep looking for it and insisted this was the only thing to do.
But you said there had to be an edge to the lot, even if it were attached to an enormous chain store or athletic complex. You said we should head in one direction till we hit an edge, then follow the edge till we hit a corner, and so on, until we found an entrance or an exit.
The road crackled beneath our tires as you took us forward. It wasn’t a paved surface any longer, more like a gravel-strewn lot extending without limit in every direction. Slowly, we picked up speed.
Ten miles an hour became twenty. Twenty became thirty. Forty, fifty.
Sixty. We cut through the fog faster and faster.
It parted and reformed behind us so that all evidence of our passage was blotted out, and still nothing came.
You kept your foot to the floor. Finally, as we were getting close to ninety, you eased off the gas.
I watched the odometer turn over as the car coasted to a halt. We had driven over two miles in the fog without hitting anything.
What is this? I said. Where are we?
What is this? Where are we?
What is this? Where are we?
It was your idea to inventory the car. You know how that turned out.
Though we hadn’t eaten since the previous day, neither of us was hungry: a nonissue, since there was nothing to eat in the car when we entered the fog, and nothing to drink. (Would it have changed things if there had been? A different input yielding a different output?) You suggested we try to get some sleep. Very matter of fact. Then you took the emergency blanket and turned to face the window.
I made do with clothing I’d packed: a button-up shirt spread out to cover my legs, a jacket draped over my upper body, with a wide strip between them frustratingly exposed no matter how I arranged myself.
What is this? I asked again. Are we hallucinating?
I don’t think that’s what this is, you said.
What, then? A secret military experiment or something?
No, you said. I hope not.
What does that mean? I asked, raising my voice again, which I regret.
No point in speculating, you replied. Let’s wait. See what happens.
And that was it. You didn’t want to talk anymore.
You were trying to sleep, you said, but I could see your open eyes reflected in the window.
The seat backs reclined far enough that we were almost lying flat. Staring up at the unlit dome light, I tried on theories like they were different hats.
(I never thought I would wander into another dimension.)
(I never thought I would fall under a spell.)
(I never thought I would become a ghost.)
I wore all the hats, putting them on and taking them off, sometimes wearing two or three at a time.
Until finally I slept.
I woke with a start. So did you, and at exactly the same moment. Both of us were upright in our seats and alert in a matter of seconds.
A new landmark had appeared. Impossibly close, no more than four feet in front of the bumper, was a mailbox.
You started up the car and put it in reverse.
What are you doing? I demanded.
That’s not a mailbox, you said.
You drove backwards into the fog until the mailbox disappeared from view, then hit the brakes, put the car in drive and rolled forward.
The mailbox, of course, was gone.
I’m driving now, I shouted, all but pushing you out of the driver’s seat. Without saying a word, you climbed into the back and lay down with your eyes closed.
I.
It’s your turn to drive again. I’m in the backseat trying to write neatly with the notebook on my lap.
Whenever we stop for long, the fog assumes a solidity that we must defeat with speed. Practically speaking, this means we wake to drive through the fog, over an unending gravel sea, stopping only to sleep. Our days are measured by this routine.
You like to turn the car off when we’re parked. I like to leave it running. It doesn’t make any difference. The car never needs gas. The tires don’t lose air.
We fall asleep together, and we wake up together, without exception. We are apart, if at all, only in dreams, which we never remember.
In the morning, we pick a direction, more or less at random, and drive, hour after hour, day after day, but the expected collision never comes.
No matter how wildly we turn the wheel, how far down we push the pedal: it never comes.
So we keep driving.
Whenever it’s your turn, you change directions frequently, as though you were still searching for an off-ramp.
(You still check your phone, even though it never needs charging and never gets a signal; and you glance at your reflection whenever you think I won’t notice, even though it always looks the same.)
I prefer to drive straight ahead with my arm out the window. Rolling forward, like a boat under low power, I can always find pockets where monuments hold back the fog. They only surface when we slow the car down, and they’re single-use packets; there is no remainder, no balance.
The mailbox was a monument. (Not the first, that was probably the ventilator unit, or maybe the gas station.)
The next was a single trash can.
Then there was a set table.
An umbrella; a threadbare carpet; a length of hose; a statuette of a rider on horseback.
Garbage bags full of laundry; plastic packaging; boardgames in ragged boxes; jars of nails and screws; cables in a variety of gauges.
They continued in this vein for a long time—weeks, it seems, or months—but so slowly that no single monument stands out from the sequence, they acquired a more deliberate, meditative quality. This fascinated me. You even started to show some interest, squinting at each discovery as though considering what to do with it.
A shelf, tipped at a sharp angle and half-sunk in the gravel.
Yards and yards of magnetic tape, unspooled in drifts.
A dozen mirrors, face down on the ground, but still intact.
(Why didn’t we ever take one of the monuments with us? It could be that you wouldn’t allow it, or that I assumed you wouldn’t. That would fit.)
Around this time I started writing everything down in accordance with what I call the First Principle:
Each new monument modifies the others. In the correct order, they will impart some lesson. At present their proper alignment or sequence is obscured by the fog. From this I derive a Second Principle:
Since the fog cannot be dispelled, it must be charted.
I offered to let you write in the notebook, but you didn’t even say no, just looked at me wearily, or contemptuously, I couldn’t say which.
(Now I begin to understand why you might have felt that there’s no point in trying to preserve any of this—that it’s an endless series of non sequiturs, discontiguous islands. But the mark of a poor craftsman? You reached this conclusion too quickly, I think. We have to be special. It wants to tell us something, but either it doesn’t know how, or we lack the ability—at present!—to understand.)
What does? you asked.
I was surprised to hear you speak—how long had it been, by then?—and surprised too because it meant that either I had been talking out loud or you had been reading this notebook.
Whatever it is that brought us here, I answered. Whatever made this place.
The surface of the road expands endlessly, and no signs come, only sights, one after another.
A wooden fence around an empty pot.
A spring mattress the size of a sail.
A highchair covered in mossy gray fur.
A stone hand with fingers like chimneys.
I.
The last term in the sequence was a house we found in the fog.
(We’ll live here for ten years together, counting the days. I’ll have time to write, to fix some of the errors that inevitably creep in. The fog will grow thick as snow. We’ll scoop it up in our fingers.)
I’ve gone back to the beginning of the notebook. It reads like an old tale too often retold, everything distinctive worn away or slightly out of focus: a memory of a memory, words about words about words, words all the way down.
The house—I almost wrote ‘our house’—has a door in the basement that opens into the attic. I rise from my bed in an upstairs room and walk down to the kitchen. I hear the sound of your footsteps through the ceiling. (When I am awake, you are awake.)
Then I walk down the narrow flight of stairs leading to the basement and open the door at the back of the tool room and emerge in the cramped attic space.
It is not precisely the same house I was in before, but you’re still in your bedroom. I walk past you, standing at the door, on my way to the stairs, to the kitchen, to the basement. You’re still there, in your bedroom, when I descend from the attic and walk past again, but now your door is closed.
Ten years.
In one version of the house, there was no furniture at all.
In another, there were so many lamps that moving from room to room was like pushing through a crowd passively resisting my efforts.
All these houses were stacked one on top of the other.
A house with walls that gave slightly when I pushed on them.
A house with floors buried under countless knives and forks and spoons.
A house with every window broken out to admit the fog.
What other conclusion could I have reached, but that the formulation of a new set of principles was required? Clearly, the time of monuments had passed; this was something else.
I was a fool, wasn’t I? You stayed in your bedroom, shrewdly, while I hurried from house to house, noting each variation as it appeared.
A house with one additional room—a house with one fewer.
A house that smelled precisely—precisely!—like the house I grew up in.
A house creaking and groaning as though buffeted by a strong wind.
One day, sitting on the porch and working on revisions, I saw a diamond of harsh white light hanging in the sky. It seemed to rest on a plane not quite parallel to our own, like a face tilted slightly forward, looking down on us.
All around it, piercing the fog with a purity scarcely less agonizing than that of their master shape, were pinpricks of light that writhed and looped as though trying to orbit themselves. Each itself, purely; each a blister of light.
I rushed inside to tell you. It was a pointless gesture. Your door was closed. You were almost gone.
Writing that now, I feel an unutterable sadness. Many other feelings are muted, dull and distant. But the diamond is still there in my eyes, searing and severe.
I.
I’ve reread again from the beginning of the notebook.
This time a more skilled editor has made changes. Subtraction, mostly. It reads better, but there are some parts I wish had been kept in.
Ten years was too long, I admitted as much to you before we got back in the car and drove on—but the house was ours every time. Don’t forget that.
Don’t forget—we rode on the hood—we even slept there sometimes—with the gas pedal rigged to keep the car in motion.
I no longer sleep at all, now that you’re gone. Why is that?
Parts of how you left have been removed as well. Was there no hint of it? Did we never discuss it?
(You will point out that we never discussed anything.)
I remember we had stopped the car and were sitting on the hood, looking at the fog rolling and twisting. Past four or five yards all was lost to the eye.
You stood and picked up a fragment of the road, hefted it in your hand, and threw it into the fog. Then you walked off in the same direction, as though you were simply going to retrieve it.
Did I call out, running after you, only to find nothing?
Did I stand by the car, unmoving?
Why did you leave?
One guess: you had held on to a fear I’ve now lost, and tired of waiting, you dove in.
Alternatively: it just didn’t hold your interest. You didn’t want to know anymore. I still do. I do. But wherever you are, I think you can still read this. I’m right, aren’t I? And if I keep driving, you’ll keep reading?
I.
I’m far out on a wave. It’s gone wrong again, in certain ways, in my opinion. A few errors have been especially persistent, requiring multiple fixes before the alterations would hold.
The world is an empty driveway of porous stone, a breathing sponge.
The road is a cross-legged mountain.
It is still trying to get my attention, but now it uses rougher methods.
There are too many shoes in the car, I have to keep throwing them away. The upholstery comes off in patches that adhere to my skin. Little hairs grow everywhere on everything.
Under the hood, it doesn’t look how I remember. There are lots of tubes connecting different elements but no belts and nothing that resembles an engine. There are reservoirs filled with fluids of dull, urinous yellow, tarnished orange, scabrous purple.
Here, now, a ladder rises out of the ground as though it were a vine climbing into the sky. But how could I climb that ladder? What would be the point?
I lost you before seeing the diamond. There were eyes in different configurations. Only when I’m writing are the pages apart.
There aren’t any blank pages left. I’ve had to erase earlier drafts to free up space for writing. (Many times, I suspect.)
A final guess, then: this was your notebook.
You left it in the glovebox for me. You’re helping me. We take turns.
Alternatively: you abandoned the notebook, that’s all. It never added up, never came to anything—so let me try.
I’m trying. I’ll keep trying.
© Fair Copy by Daniel I. Clark. 2023. All rights reserved.
