1 #11
Traffic was slow until after the first checkpoint.
It was a more elaborate checkpoint than Ari had seen in a while.
Young men and women with bandannas over their faces and mismatched guns peered into the car and shone lights in Ari’s and Felix’s faces for an agonizingly long time before they were allowed to drive away.
It wasn’t clear who the people at the checkpoint were looking for, but they waved half the cars into a Target parking lot where makeshift cages had been set up in the darkness.
Ari breathed very slowly as she drove past. She preferred driving cars to vans, and the armaments behind Ari’s and Felix’s seats were not particularly well disguised.
In the parking lot there were more militia fighters than Ari had ever seen in one place, shadows moving between the cars.
Her window was open, and there was a trace of chemical smoke in the cold air.
“That’s going to explode any moment,” Felix said, talking about the parking lot.
“Don’t look,” Ari said. “It doesn’t concern us.”
“You think it was random? The cars they pulled?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” The checkpoint felt like a border, but it wasn’t a border that existed on any map, just some new demarcation between shifting territories.
Ari drove at a medium speed. Hands at ten and two, nothing to see here, trying to be invisible.
Just another displaced couple travelling with our worldly belongings, she thought, calm because we’ve done nothing wrong, absolutely not carrying a small fortune’s worth of weaponry, and she hoped the thought reflected on her face, in her demeanour, in the speed at which she drove.
They were headed for a northern district of Phoenix, where Felix had a friend.
They took turns driving through days and nights of checkpoints and expressways, overlapping with the migration patterns of the people around them.
Sometimes everyone seemed to be driving in the opposite direction, suitcases and mattresses and bins strapped to the tops of cars, then they’d pass through an eerily empty area where the only people they saw were hitchhikers in a line down both sides of the expressway, everyone trying to get out, and then after some interminable stretch everyone was travelling with them, so they were absorbed into a convoy that seemed miles long.
Ari liked the anonymity of driving in a crowd.
Somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma the skeletal trees of the Midwest disappeared and the land became perfectly flat.
They pulled over at a former rest stop where someone had rigged a makeshift shower, where they paid $10 each for five minutes of lukewarm water.
Afterward, Ari felt shockingly clean. She found Felix talking with another driver.
“He says to avoid Tulsa,” Felix said, when they were back in the van. “Apparently it’s a death trap.”
“I’m in favour of avoiding death traps,” Ari said.
Avoiding Tulsa took them a day out of their way.
There were few signs of life on the periphery of the city, just abandoned farms and abandoned businesses, fast-food places with broken signs and smashed windows.
There were wind farms out here, turbines spinning silently in the dark, then the plains subsided to desert, to plateaus and sandy buttes.
The expressway was full but few people seemed to live out here.
There were places where stopping felt like death and other places where stopping seemed reasonable.
The dirt was orange now, and the air was warmer.
As they neared Phoenix, checkpoints started appearing more often.
In the distance there were massive tracts of housing, patrolled by armed guards.
“Keep moving,” the men at the checkpoints told them, “keep moving, you’re not welcome here, you cannot stop. ”
They arrived at two in the morning in a territory of big box stores and strip malls, and found Felix’s friend and his wife waiting for them at the designated meeting point—the parking lot of an office supply store—with bottled water that tasted like plastic.
“Felix Washington,” Drew said, and performed an elaborate handshake/pull-in/half-hug choreography that Ari had only ever seen between men. Drew had a body like a wire and dark hair that flopped over one eye.
“Drew,” Felix said. “And you must be Cali.”
Cali was Drew’s new wife, a small woman who wore her hair spiked short and dyed the colour of a pomegranate, eyes a little wild in a way that made Ari nervous.
“You didn’t have to get up at this hour, Cali,” Felix said, apologetic.
“We never leave each other’s side,” Cali said, “and that way we can’t lose each other.”
“Do people live here?” Ari was looking at the office supply store.
The doors were open, and people were passing in and out, but the lighting was strange.
It wasn’t the glaring overhead lighting she remembered from the big box stores of the past, in other places.
It was bright little lights strung up inside, Christmas lights disappearing down the aisles.
“Staplestown,” Drew said. “We’ve lived here for a year. It’s not a bad place.”
“Busy for this hour, isn’t it?” A family was coming out, with children, headed for a taco stand near the doors. One of the children, a little girl, turned a quick cartwheel on her way to the tacos.
“It’s too hot during the day in summer,” Cali said. “It’s dangerous. If that kid did that cartwheel in daylight, in August, she’d have third-degree burns on both hands. So a lot of people sleep all day and stay up all night in summer here, and then some never switch back when the seasons change.”
“Stay here long enough, you’ll turn into a night creature,” Drew said.
Drew knew the owner of a motel nearby. He called ahead, then they drove a few more minutes and Ari and Felix unloaded the merchandise while Drew and Cali talked to the owner, and a short time later Ari found herself sitting in the new motel room with a sense of déjà vu.
Days of travel to come to a place almost identical to the place she’d left.
Only the details varied. There was a generic painting of a meadow hanging above the bed.
She’d brought her record player from the old place, and she set it up carefully on a fake-wood dresser.
Felix was lying on one of the beds, too tired for sleep.
“Do you mind music?” she asked.
“Please,” he said. “I wondered what you listened to on that.”
She put on the Bach cello suites again, for continuity.
“We did it,” Felix said quietly. “We made it.”
“Made it to where? I don’t mean to be negative.
” Ari went to the window. The parking lot seemed benign to her.
There were vendors set up nearby, two groups of teenagers selling groceries and odds and ends, bright packages that might have been headphones and socks.
There were flickers of light in the hills across the expressway.
A firefight, she realized, too distant for sound.
“Isn’t this almost identical to the place we just left? ”
“Yeah, but no one from Ohio knows where we are. I trust Drew,” Felix said. “We can do business here. Listen, what happened back in Ohio, whatever that was, it wasn’t personal. They just wanted the merchandise.”
“I guess it’s almost never personal,” Ari said, but the thought was exhausting.
It isn’t personal because it’s chaos. She wished she could return to Los Angeles, but when she thought of those months after prison when she lived in Echo Park, the time of trees exploding into purple blossoms and the party at Kareem’s place, it was like remembering a lost world.
What she’d liked about talking with Nico, she realized, back in Ohio, was that Nico made her time in Los Angeles feel real.
They’d been to the same party, and that wasn’t much but it was something.
If you don’t have a witness, your past starts to feel fictional.
“Maybe you should sleep,” Felix said.
“I could try.” Sleep felt far away, but nevertheless she lay on the other bed, staring at the ceiling. Thinking of Nico, whom now she would probably never see again, which led to thoughts of the party, of James. When she turned her head, Felix was looking at her. “Come here,” she said.
Business was good in the outer suburbs, because Phoenix was trying to become a city-state and the boundaries were unclear.
They think their wealth gives them the right to the Colorado River, the customers said, and bought weaponry to carry to the downtown core.
There was a dance party every night in front of the mall across the street, dancers backlit against bonfires and battery strobe lights, an atmosphere of desperate joy.
By now Felix and Ari were low on stock. Felix needed to meet his contact who brought the weapons in by sea, which meant driving to the Port of Houston.
“I’d invite you to come with me,” Felix said, “but I’m afraid you might die.”