An Aversion to Ladders 13

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE, Part One

Michael purchased a bottle of beer on his way home. With the last of it consumed, the calming effects of the alcohol did not afford enough courage to brave another night in a house with only bad dreams for company. There was one place he believed he could safely bed down for the evening, and this thought soon had him behind the wheel of his car and heading for the highway. Before he knew it, the lights of Stonesthrow had slipped away in his rearview mirror. The darkness had swallowed everything, including any momentary regret in leaving.

The solitary painter always felt like he was living out of an overnight case, and there was no real place in the world he could or wanted to call home. He was never able to escape the suspicion everything he did in his life was purely arbitrary: whether he settled here or there, whether he fell in love with this woman or that one. There was never a good enough reason why he was anywhere. He desired so little in the world, so little in a materialistic way that would tie him irreversibly, even bitterly, to a place. Stonesthrow was no more home than Chicago, but Chicago was his present destination.

Too many stretches of highway in his small world were too familiar to him; and this route was sure to become one of them. In no time he would mark off the insignificant landmarks like notches in a long string of lights, and a point would come where he would convince himself he was traveling nowhere: It was not he who was passing through a landscape but a landscape passing through him. Rural roads and water tanks would swim through a dark current in his mind, but like the rest of his life there would be few people to cross his path. Michael was admittedly the church janitor at every wedding and the gravedigger at every funeral, yet he never felt his isolation so keenly as when he traveled alone. Where, for others, a sense of place was bound to memories of loved ones, for him a place was more about the place itself. It was sentiment, imposed by so much solitary reflection, that saw not so much what was personal about a place as impersonal: not so much what was changing as unchanging: not so much what was particular as universal.

Michael stayed focused on the highway, even as his eyes kept being drawn to the view out the back window. If the police were tailing him, then they were staying well back on the disserted road. No sooner had he formulated this objectionable possibility than flashing red lights were spotted gaining on him. He shriveled with dread and shaved speed off the car in anticipation of being pulled over, but the lights instantly vanished. The vehicle probably turned off a side road, and though this merited a sigh with relief, the rearview mirror continued to be a preoccupation. Hypnotically, the red-tinged white line spooled out from under his rear tires like blood spilling into dark, dangerous waters. Leaves of greenish-yellow and vermillion were dropping onto the funneling pavement well back, yet with no breeze to pluck them from their branches. Something, it seemed, was muscling its way through the low limbs—something, it seemed, was keeping pace. Cornstalks on either side of the car resembled curtains swaying against the black sky, placing the horizon too close for comfort. Just as the nervous motorist began fiddling with the knob on the radio, an ambulance—a classic Cadillac red-and-white ambulance—materialized out of the pitch behind him. Its lights were off up to the very moment it roared by with blaring siren and shrieking screams. Ghoulishly clad Halloween revelers were hanging out of every window to savor their prank. Before the vehicle completely disappeared from view, a terrified Michael thought he saw a drunken woman fall out of the passenger window. He swerved to keep from hitting her and stuttered to a stop on the gravel shoulder. The rural darkness was visceral on climbing out of his car, but the taillights burned away enough to reveal only a tattered white dress lying in the middle of the road. The driver knelt over the garment with equal parts confusion and consternation. It was wet and covered with grass, and most probably run over and tossed up by the ambulance’s tire. He folded its frayed corners and pushed it off the highway in a make-do burial, then hurriedly returned to the idling vehicle.

Several miles up the road he saw a large mega-plex gas station, one of those catering to truck drivers getting on and off the interstate. A scratchy AM radio greeted him at the door, but the attendant was nowhere to be seen. Cognizant of his beer, Michael negotiated a bright aisle of souvenir mugs and automotive air fresheners marking the path to the restroom. All the urinals were taped-over with plastic bags, so he stepped into one of the dilapidated stalls. He tried to zone-out the abysmal surroundings, but it was difficult. Cheap pink hand soap could not mask the stench of decades-old urine wafting up off the floor, and heaps of tissue paper coagulated in puddles around his commode’s leaky gasket seal. A squeak bounced around inside the echoing restroom. With his back up, Michael peeked out the door gap to spy the mirror running parallel to the toilets. Wind was punching through a narrow window high on the cinderblock wall to spit leaves down among peeled-away paint in the floor; the adjacent stall door was yielding to the same current. The jittery man barely washed his hands at the drabbled sink, and, on lingering over the ineffectual hand blower, was obliged to read graffiti carved into it with a car key:

“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” Philippians, 2:12 Call 251-6333

It was not unusual to find Bible verses and phone numbers in public bathrooms, but odd to find them paired. Whether intended as a sadomasochist come-on, or words of prophecy, the point of the advertisement was unclear.

Michael returned to the front of the station anticipating something more. The security monitor above the cigarette rack looked out over grainy aisles converging on a freezer at the rear of the store, although it was the drama playing out in the upper corner of the screen that merited attention. Two lovers, seen through the plate glass door, were squabbling in a car on the parking lot. The young woman had just jumped out of the passenger side. Completely nude, she screamed in through the rolled-down window as her apparent boyfriend threw the car into reverse and squealed away; the furious girl was left to hop around on the pebbly pavement. On turning back to the door with a scowl, Michael flinched to think she could see him through the camera.

The attendant materialized at the counter. “Did you want some gas?”

The startled man mumbled, “No.”

Moving to the door, he saw no woman standing at it. He went outside and warily scanned the shrubbery along the lot, but no one, clothed or unclothed, was about. The traveler peeked in his backseat of his car as a precaution. Abruptly, a motion detector light switched on and drew his gaze to the far side of the building. The glare uncovered only rain-stressed boxes and an overflowing dumpster; the sensor was probably activated by the mischief of more leaves. A low concrete structure lay just beyond the lot line in front of a field of clattering corn. Guywires were embedded in it, and from what little was visible of them they appeared to stretch up into the darkness without end. Given the angle of the cables, and their substantial gauge, the aerial tower must have been dizzyingly tall, yet no beacon was seen anywhere against the stars.

The moment harkened back to his earlier reading of Daedalus Monet’s unfinished book, where the writer made mention of the world’s tallest structure, a television tower just outside Fargo, North Dakota. He described it from a distance as “an ethereal blade,” and close up as “too much in the sky and too little connected to earth.” In the capacity of a receiver, Monet speculated that an even taller antenna might be able to achieve Marconi’s quest of recovering ancient sound waves, including Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount.” The professor went so far as to propose that a similarly scaled space-based telescope might be able to see as far back as God’s Creation of the Universe. The idea of such means and ends made Michael tremble, and he could not help but think that he, more than most, appreciated the profound improbability of world, if only because, at its extremities, the palpable fear it instilled in him engendered a different kind of respect and wonder.

The motorist did not queue up immediately for the interstate but backtracked down the country road at a crawl. His high beams pushed out along the short-cropped grassy shoulders, yet with no success in locating the woman. After a half mile, it was obvious she made an escape by some unaccounted-for means, so the would-be Good Samaritan turned around at a mailbox and aimed for the escape of the I-80 onramp. As he was about to merge into traffic, he glanced in the rearview mirror to finally see a buzzing sign for adult movies atop the dark tower. He was late connecting it:

He had only witnessed a segment of pornographic film back at the station.