1. Ryan #3
Adrenaline has me shaking so hard I have to grip the wheel with both hands just to keep from veering out of the lane.
My vision keeps fracturing—one second the road is crisp in the high beams, the next it’s a prismatic mess, the white lines ghosting in triplicate.
The dashboard strobes between orange and blue, the instrument panel warning lights blinking—check engine, low oil, tire pressure, and the little outline of a man in his seatbelt and airbag.
I stare at the red-lit speedometer needle, rising and rising, sixty, seventy, climbing in increments I can’t remember deciding on.
Behind me, the city thins into exurban wasteland, then true dark.
There are only the occasional headlights, whiter and newer than mine, passing at improbable speed and disappearing into the wet black distance.
I keep checking the rearview despite myself, expecting to see headlights close behind, a car closing in, a pursuit that never comes because Paul is probably still in the apartment.
It doesn’t stop the urge. Every quarter mile I glance up, heart seizing, waiting for the impossible.
I drive. I don’t know which direction. I tell myself it’s east, toward the river, but I lose track of the exits almost immediately. The highway signs are an abstract blur of green and reflective white.
I force the memories down, one after another, stuffing them into the passenger footwell with my duffel bag, telling myself when I get far enough I’ll pull over and sort them out.
The heater is a joke, a sad relic that Paul once promised to fix but never did.
I turn the dial anyway, desperate for some tactile comfort, and get only a tepid gust that smells like mold and burnt dust. I punch the gas harder, wanting only to put as much distance as possible between me and what just happened. As if speed could purge the feeling.
The dashboard clock stutters—2:44, then 2:59, then 3:31.
Time stretches out, elastic. I can’t remember the last time I blinked or exhaled.
I drive past endless dark, the occasional barn lit by security lamps, the green glow of a Sheetz gas station in the distance that looks like a hallucination.
The world outside is wet and empty, the kind of emptiness that feels planned, as if everyone else in the state got the message and found somewhere safe to hide.
At some point, the interstate narrows into a nameless two-lane street, the painted lines barely visible.
I pass a shuttered fireworks store, a family dental office with a cartoon tooth on the sign, a dead mall whose only remaining light is the flicker of a vacancy neon.
It feels like driving through a world after its ending.
My hands are numb, and I keep flicking them off the wheel, trying to shake feeling back into the fingertips.
It doesn’t work. The only warmth is the afterimage of Paul’s hand pressed to my stomach, and I want to tear it off, peel back my own skin and scrub it clean.
I drive. I keep driving.
Eventually, the world starts to blue at the edges with pre-dawn, a faint smudge of light beyond the trees.
I have no idea how many miles I’ve covered or what state I’m in.
Everything outside the windshield is foreign, unfamiliar, which is the point—I could have been aiming for this, some blank newness where nothing can find me.
The gas gauge is spearing down toward E, and I realize I haven’t eaten in at least a day.
My stomach knots, but it’s the kind of hunger that comes from the inside out, a hollowness that can’t be filled by food.
There’s a sign for lodging—next right, 0.
2 mi, extended stay rates. The kind of place with bullet-proof glass at the check-in desk and a cartoon sun for a mascot.
I take the exit on impulse, nearly missing it, and the car slews again before coming to a lurching stop in the cracked, weed-choked lot of a rundown SunView Inn.
The building is a faded palette of sickly yellows and ochres, as if the entire place had once been dipped in nicotine.
The lot is nearly empty, just a battered Ford pickup and a minivan with its windows fogged over.
I kill the engine and just sit there, hands still wrapped around the wheel, not trusting my own muscles to let go.
The silence in the car is absolute. The world outside is even quieter, the only sound the ticking of the cooling engine and the pounding of my pulse in my throat.
I wait. I wait a long time. I think about turning the car back on and going further—just driving until the entire past is so far behind it can’t catch up—but the exhaustion hits all at once, like someone pressing down on my shoulders.
My body refuses to move. I stare at my reflection in the rearview and see my hair plastered to my forehead, my eyes rimmed in red.
There’s a cut on my cheekbone I don’t remember getting.
There’s something dried and dark at the corner of my mouth.
When I finally get out, the cold stabs through me, and I almost collapse against the side of the car.
My legs cramp, and I hobble the short distance to the motel office in a daze.
The lobby is locked; I have to ring a grimy bell, and the night clerk appears behind a pane of scratched plexiglass, blinking at me with suspicion.
I hand over my ID and my emergency credit card, never meeting his eyes.
I’m barely aware of what I say, only that he gives me a room key and points to a door at the far end of the lot, close to the dumpsters.
It’s okay, I tell myself.
You’re okay.