WRONG WAY

Greg was not a man who went back over the past. He'd sworn it to himself. Since prison, he had learned to live off-center.

He had held.

And then, one morning, it no longer held.

An ordinary morning. No anniversary, no date, no sign. Just the ordinary: the bathroom, the mirror, the toothbrush.

It had started in the mouth.

An acid taste.

On the ceramic of the sink, the night guard waited: a piece of pale plastic, molded to his teeth, to the exact shape of what his jaw clenched at night without knowing. A smile that had been ripped from him and set there to dry.

The dentist had said: stress.

He'd said the word without looking up, checking a box. Greg had nodded. In his pocket, the blue case made a small click. A toy click. A sound too light, almost ridiculous.

His wife was standing by the sink, back turned. Her hair tied up fast, without vanity. She didn't turn around.

— You okay?

Greg looked at the coffee in his cup. The coffee didn't help.

— I'm here.

— That's not what I asked.

— It's what I've got.

— You grind your teeth at night. We can hear it. Like you're chewing on something.

Four night guards now. He wore them down. At night, his jaw worked alone. A mechanics of nothing, applied. It did its shift while the rest of him tried to sleep.

Four identical prescriptions. Same paper. Same ink. Same signature set down without a glance.

In the morning, he woke with his teeth welded shut. The rest followed.

And that night, he found himself sitting in the wet grass at the edge of a county road, four in the morning, pants soaked. No valid reason to be there.

He couldn't have said at what point he had stopped being a man who doesn't go back over the past. It hadn't snapped all at once. It had slid. And he was outside, in the dark, without knowing when he'd crossed the door.

The dampness climbed slowly along the fabric. The earth took its time. The cold descended through his spine, vertebra by vertebra, and he felt the bones under the meat.

He had bourbon in a Mountain Dew bottle. Jim Beam poured into green plastic. A sweet smell, chemical, stuck to the neck. A sweetness that had never met a fruit. The whiskey passed through his throat like a blade. He swallowed. No pleasure. There was a throat; something had to pass through it.

The bottle was warm in his palm: his own heat coming back to him. He drank again.

Fifty yards past the curve, there was the square.

You could pass without seeing it. Most passed without seeing it. The asphalt had been redone there: a darker rectangle, smoother, like a new patch sewn onto an old garment.

The county had sent men, tar, a machine. They had poured, they had left. Nothing else.

No plaque. No cross. No flowers tied to a post. Nothing that said: here.

Greg squeezed the bottle. The plastic squealed.

To the left, the sign.

WRONG WAY.

Red circle, white bar, planted in the embankment like a knife. Rust was eating the edges. The red was flaking, revealing gray, then rust again. The post leaned toward the ditch. Here, things don't fall: they lean for a long time.

A streak of rust drew a smile on the face of the sign.

Greg straightened up.

The evening of the promotion, there had been eight of them around the table. Greg had known immediately where each one stood in relation to Kevin. He had sensed that geography from the moment he entered the restaurant, the way you spot the exits.

The restaurant was downtown. One of those places where prices don't appear on the menu. The glasses were crystal.

Greg took his. He drank. The wine was good, maybe excellent.

Kevin made a joke, something about the Knights of the Round Table. Greg forgot the joke immediately. What he retained was the interval. The half-second left open after the punchline, offered to silence. Kevin wasn't afraid of that void. He knew when it would close. The laugh arrived exactly when he decided it would.

Everyone laughed. Greg laughed too. At the right moment. At the right volume. He had learned.

Kevin placed his hand on his shoulder. Brief pressure. Sure. Warm. Greg felt it travel through the fabric, the shirt, the skin. It wasn't the hand of a friend. A friend's hand hesitates now and then. This one had always known where to land.

Kevin said very low:

— We made it, bro.

Then he snapped his fingers for the waiter without turning his head. The waiter came.

On paper, Greg and Kevin were the same thing: same title, same floor, two doors apart. But eyes went to Kevin first. Always. In every room, the mechanics repeated: a fraction of a second, a chin that turns. Toward Kevin. Then, after, toward Greg. And in that after, Greg felt an immense distance.

Kevin chewed the inside of his cheek when he was thinking. A minuscule twitch, barely visible, and he did it smiling. The smile was the lit room. The corner of the mouth moved in shadow, behind it.

He ordered a bottle. Then another. The alcohol went down and caught on nothing. The crystal rang pure when he set the glass down. That sound bore no relation to what was happening inside him.

After, there was no blur.

Blur, at least, is a substance. Something you can confess: I drank, I forgot.

Here, there was nothing. A slab.

On one side: the restaurant, the crystal, the wine, Kevin, the laugh at the right volume, Greg in a suit in the light of others.

On the other: the iron bar, the rough sheet, the neon, Greg on concrete, dried blood under his nails.

From restaurant to cell. From suit to sheet. From one Greg to the other.

Between the two: the night of March 14th.

He had searched. In the dark of the cell, he had closed his eyes and asked what remained of him: an image. Just one. Even a false one. A steering wheel. A bend. A headlight. Sheet metal. A gesture.

Nothing.

The first night. The second. The tenth. The hundredth. Always the same request, always the same return: the slab, without grip.

And that nothing worked.

It worked at night when the jaw closed on the void.

The jaw clenched. The nothing didn't yield. So it clenched harder.

Then Kevin had testified.

Gray suit. New. Tailored cut.

He entered the courtroom. The bailiff took a half-step. The clerk looked up. The prosecutor didn't even look up.

Greg stared at the shirt collar: perfect. From the other side, in his gray sheet that had been white once, he watched that collar the way you watch a thing from another world.

Kevin placed his left hand on the bar. The right hand rose. He swore. The words came out clean.

When he spoke about the children, his thumb trembled. Once. A dry spasm, swallowed immediately by the hand, taken back by the wrist, erased. Nobody saw it. Greg saw it.

Kevin said: he insisted on driving.

Kevin said: I told him to take a cab.

Kevin said: he took the keys.

Kevin said: I couldn't stop him.

Kevin said: he went the wrong way.

Five sentences. Laid one on top of the other. A wall.

The prosecutor nodded. The defense attorney didn't stand. He stayed seated, motionless, while another man built the wall brick by brick.

In his belly, something moved.

He nodded.

There.

A man says five sentences. Another man nods. Eight years fall.

Eight years. They had taken his belt, his laces, his notebook.

The tray arrived at six-eleven. Not ten. Not twelve. Eleven.

Breakfast. Greg chewed. He didn't eat out of hunger. He chewed because if the jaw was working on something, it wasn't working on the nothing. Powdered eggs. Yellow. A yellow that had nothing to do with yellow. A tired yellow, a yellow that had given up, a yellow that had been yellow, once, in another life.

Five steps from the bunk to the wall. Five steps from the wall to the bunk. Ten steps. The world: eight feet by ten. His feet knew these dimensions.

One day, a man hanged himself in the cell at the end. Greg didn't hear the body. He heard the fabric: the sheet going taut, the slow friction against the metal, then the steady creaking.

Steady, until silence.

The next day, same tray. Six-eleven.

And then one evening. An evening like every other evening. An evening without adjective. In the showers. Greg was in the showers and something was happening and that something was not a story. That something would never be a story.

The next day, the tray came back. Six-eleven.

One morning in November, he got out.

The sky was gray, administrative.

The reentry counselor was behind a metal desk. Gray desk. Gray wall. The same shade as the sky. On the table, a rubber stamp with violet ink. The only color in the room.

He stamped a form. Soft thud. Another. Same thud.

Without looking up, between two stamps:

— Your former partner is deceased. Pancreatic cancer. If you need to talk about it.

The stamp rose. The sentence came out. The stamp fell.

They returned his notebook: a small notebook stained with coffee, covered in numbers and addresses. Eight years had swollen the paper. The pages stuck. The ink had migrated, printing mirror images of numbers onto other numbers. Everything had mixed while he stayed still.

He put it in his pocket. A gesture without thought.

And now he was here.

He unzipped his fly and pissed. Red traces in the urine. Blood. A color too dark. Too thick. And the heavy, muffled sound.

A shit sound.

He looked. He wasn't afraid. He zipped back up.

He threw the Mountain Dew bottle into the ditch. It described a soft, tired arc, then the dark took it.

The ditch itself was full: crushed cans, plastic bags caught on the weeds, a flattened animal, raccoon or opossum, pressed flat to the point of becoming a stain of fur stuck to the earth.

And there, in the thick grass: a garbage bag.

Black.

The plastic was split on the side. Not a clean tear: a slow opening, like a wound that took its time.

From the split came an arm.

Greg stopped breathing.

A doll's arm.

Dirty pink, faded pink. The pink of after love. A fine dew laid a cold skin on the plastic. You could make out a scratch on the forearm.

The hand was open, palm to the sky, fingers spread. Mud in the joints. The hand wasn't asking for anything. It was that way because the mold had made it that way.

He thought of the girls.

Their hands. The way a child's hand opens in sleep. The way it opens in fear. The same gesture.

He looked at the doll. The doll looked at nothing. And yet the scene had the stillness of a standoff.

That's when it rose.

A pressure in the throat. Old. Like a hand that has been squeezing so long it has become the throat. And, for the first time in eight years, the hand moved.

The body had kept this through the six-eleven trays, through the ten steps, through the plastic nights, through the gray of offices and the violet of stamps.

Leather.

Cold leather against his right cheek.

Not an idea of leather. The exact texture. The grain. The temperature. The way a dead material sticks to warm skin. A back seat.

His cheek knew.

The head didn't. The head had its slab. The cheek had kept the imprint like a stubborn witness.

He was lying down.

Lying on the back seat.

This fact passed through Greg: legs bent because the seat was too short, knees against the backrest, body weight on his right side, cheek crushed.

He was not at the wheel.

He was not at the wheel.

You don't drive from the back seat. You fall there. You collapse there. And someone else takes the keys.

Then the impact.

Greg heard it in his bones, not in his ears. And the sound came from the side. From the left. From the driver's side.

From Kevin's side.

Greg doubled over. What came out didn't come only from the stomach. It came from an older place. The acid burned the throat, climbed into the sinuses.

His hands found the grass. His knees found the mud. He was on all fours, and the earth received him the way it receives everything: without comment.

He knew then that it would hold up in no courtroom. A cheek, leather, an angle. Nothing to set on a table. Nothing to number. And yet, the certainty was there. Total.

Kevin was dead. The pancreas had eaten him from inside. Greg felt neither justice nor consolation.

He would not call the widow.

He would not speak the girls' names. He knew them. He had heard them at the trial. Kevin had said: the children. The way you say the damages. Greg had taken those names and kept them. They were his now.

He stayed a while on his knees in the mud. There was no clock here, only the gray of dawn and the black of earth, and between the two a man who no longer knew what to do with the truth.

His hand went into his pocket. Found the notebook. The paper, swollen with prison dampness, folded under his fingers. He opened it. The pages stuck. He pulled gently. The paper resisted, then gave way with that small tearing sound.

Greg stared at the page. He wanted to write a word. Just one. A word that would finally unclench what he carried at night.

He found nothing.

He closed the notebook. Put it back in his pocket. The notebook found the fabric again.

On the other side of the road, a man was sitting on the opposite embankment.

Greg had not seen him arrive. He was there, set in the dark.

Thin. A jacket too large. A beanie pulled low. At his feet, one shoe had its toe split open, showing a strip of gray sock. Between his fingers, a copper wire he rolled, twisted, untwisted. The copper caught the moon in brief flashes, then disappeared.

— You got something to drink?

— No.

— Me neither.

The man blew a dry, short laugh.

The copper wire kept turning. The sentence fell into the dark.

— My daughter-in-law took a shotgun from me. A Remington. My father's Remington. It was in the ceiling. The drop ceiling in the back bedroom. You got to stand on a chair and push the panel and it's there. I don't know what she's going to do with it.

He looked up. Two flat eyes, without pity, without sadness.

— And you? What brings you here?

Greg looked at him. The man waited.

Greg spoke. He didn't choose to speak. Speech came out. The Remington had been given, and something demanded in return.

— Eight years ago. One evening. A dinner. The best wine I ever drank.

The copper wire.

— After that… nothing. A hole.

— Hm.

— An accident. Two little girls. Dead.

The man spat. The spit hit the gravel.

— My colleague testified. Five sentences. He said I was the one driving.

— Five sentences.

— Eight years.

— Eight years.

— My colleague is dead. The pancreas. And tonight I pissed blood. Right there. In the gravel.

Greg didn't speak of the leather. The leather stayed his. The cheek stayed his.

The man looked at the gravel between Greg's feet. Then he raised his eyes.

— That's it?

— That's it, Greg said.

The man spat again, slowly, a long thin thread in the damp air.

— That's it, the man said in the dark.

Greg searched for irony, the blade behind the words. He found nothing. The man's gaze stayed flat: two eyes in a thin face under a beanie, at the edge of a road.

That's it.

And that's when the laugh came.

A dirty laugh. A shapeless laugh. Not a laugh at the right volume. An animal made of breath and muscle and everything that had been compressed, dried, stacked, for eight years of locked jaw.

Greg doubled over. Hands in the grass. Forehead near the mud. His shoulders shook and he didn't stop them.

He felt the jaw. That jaw molded four times in pale plastic, in the shape of a dead smile. It opened.

And Greg felt the air come out. An acid air.

Across from him, the man with the copper didn't move. He twisted the wire. From a place he hadn't used in a long time.

The jaw muscles still trembled. But from fatigue. A fatigue that promises nothing.

The WRONG WAY sign still stared at him. The rust still drew the smile.

Greg looked at it a long time. Then he looked at the man with the copper. The man twisted his wire one last time. The copper caught the moon, a brief flash, and went out.

The road, the earth, the sky.