The Color of Nowhere

A jet-black Miata tore down a lonesome road that rolled itself like a carpet over the Mojave. The man at the wheel pressed his left hand against the sun kissed paint until it was too hot to bear. He lazily brought that hand to the wheel and raised his right to the sky, letting the wind that rolled over the top of the windshield blow against it, jerking it backwards, contorting the man in careless compliance. His eyes were like that of a doll’s, fixed a hundred yards down the empty road before him as though they were severed from his mind entirely. He dropped his hand and let it crash into the jagged edge of the license plate he’d removed from the rear of the car, ripping a crude row of slashes into the skin of his hand. Even to this sharp pain, his reaction was morosely delayed as if he were sleepwalking, his spirit segmented, only present in flashes. The man looked over to see that he had smeared the bottom of the plate with blood. The phrase 10,000 Lakes was enveloped in the deep red film, which worked like a highlighter on the numbers and letters beneath. He thought briefly of his home up north and was met with a familiar and striking pain. In an instant, he snatched the plate from the seat beside him and hurled it straight into the air, splattering dots of blood across the windshield and rearview mirror. At 90 miles per hour, the wind blaring, he never heard it crash into the asphalt behind him.

He turned promptly back to the road and let his gaze turn soft once more. It was his only home to speak of. The only strip of the Earth where he was safe from the reach of Hell.

Time passed in untraceable strands as he covered more of the desert. His head, loose on his neck, rocked at each bump and irregularity the little car passed over. He caught himself humming an old country song and fumbled through his memories for a title, which did not come to him. He continued to hum, working to find the words that went with the tune. He mumbled to himself incoherently in this search, and when he found a line he knew immediately that it was an old country song he hadn’t listened to for forty years or more. He thought back to his friend’s old basement, where they used to sing it on karaoke when they were ten. He wondered what his old friend Joey was up to now. It occurred to the man that Joey’s birthday was the day before last and laughed a little to himself. That meant the old bastard was fifty. He wondered if old Joey had any kids, if people called him Joe these days. He wondered if old Joe was a family man walking a straight line to salvation or another type of man entirely, since all the days between the two of them and now can mold a child of any sort into a figure as strange or as perfectly regular as their passing means to affect. And lastly, he asked himself a question to leave there hanging in the air unanswered, which was whether or not old Joe, when they ran wild as boys, ever saw him for a killer.

He shook himself from this absent pondering and took a sweeping look out across the desert, where the sun was working its way towards the horizon. Even in his dazed state, the beauty of the place was enough to touch him. The Miata slowed. The man looked towards the sun.

He had perhaps twenty minutes left to appreciate it, and he figured he might as well. Some birds circled in the distance, too far to identify, black dots in the open sky. He turned to his right and scanned the equal expanse of land and sky to his right. With a deep breath, he let the smell of dry Earth and minerals wash over him and wondered why, in over five decades of life, he had never before come to this part of the country. He was accustomed to forests and lakes, and many times in his life took great joy in being among them. Now, though, he could not imagine being anywhere but here, with the beige leather of the Miata’s driver seat warming his back in this place, where the space was so vast and free. There was something forgiving about the desert, where the sky could swallow you whole and you could fly down the road like you were the only man left on the planet for long stretches of time and feel like you were coming from and heading to nowhere.

Finally, he let the Miata roll to a stop.

His mind began to race and he fought himself to quiet it, to wrestle it into submission like a dog loose from its leash. It was too late. The burden of introspection was already upon him. The dam was already broken, and the terrible predicament of humanity washed over him. There was no escape from thinking and feeling and the pain that inevitably was therein.

The car was still, the air around him stagnant. His face was red like the petal of a rose but he did not cry. His right hand, still seeping in a conspicuous stream, came up to his cover his face as he leaned forward into the steering wheel. With his eyes closed, the smell of iron and the warmth on his back were the only sensations there to meet him.

There, standing before him in the dark, was his daughter in a long, purple dress— the first dress she had ever picked out for herself. There was the image of her twirling in the front yard of the little cut of the north that once held so much upon its surface, with trees and tall grass filling out the frame. Despite the shade, she glowed bittersweetly. He watched as she bent to pick up a clover just as she had months before, when his world was intact. He allowed the image to linger as long as his broken mind could facilitate. As it began to fade, he turned his eyes, now puffy and wet, back to the road. He cared not for the warmth or freedom of the desert. He longed once more for the verdant landscape of Minnesota and the life he once had clasped between his palms. He’d have burned down every inch of foliage and turned the land to a desert in its own right if it were to bring back the one thing he never fathomed he may have to live without.

The man sat like this for several minutes. Finally, his grief turned to rage, and he lifted the revolver from under the seat where it was hidden in futility. As he found its handle, he rubbed the cut against it and covered bits of dried blood with a new layer that itself would dry quickly in the scorching heat.

Like an inept monk, he was losing control. Another image flashed before him, that of the man whose blood now traced the revolver. There was presumably still a pool of the stuff in room 472 of Caesar’s Palace, with the donor there beside it awaiting the coroner’s scrutiny.

With that, his eyes were blank again, stuck to the road that was no longer in motion. He glared unthinkingly at a slash of yellow paint and began to tremble, his knuckles turning white from the crushing pressure with which he squeezed the handle of the gun. A brutish impulse came over him and he brought the sturdy metal of the barrel swinging down into the rearview mirror, shattering the corner of the glass and detaching it from the windshield. In an instant, he raised the gun up at an angle that cut into the sky, facing it towards the congregation of birds in the distance, the only semblance of life that was present around him. But something in him declined to catalyze the taking of another life, no matter how inconsequential. His arm rotated so the gun was facing straight above him. He fired twice and squeezed the trigger three more times to no avail. He wailed involuntarily as the hammer clicked like a whisper. It was a belligerent sound, like that of a dying animal. And when the noise cut off, he became aware of the sound that was piercing through the land from one of its far corners: the wailing of a siren. It grew nearer.

He looked to the spot where his rearview mirror had hung moments ago before correcting himself and turning to see with his own eyes that which approached. There were lights in the distance. He watched them fly down the road behind him like a bored kid peering through the screen of a television, the siren growing louder, the red and blue lights fighting through the light of the sun with increasing volition.

In an instant, he understood that the coming moment was itself the point of his cross-country undertaking. Not revenge, not the dispensing of raw justice. The killing itself was a means to an end. It was true that the man relished in the sight of the beast lying there, blood soaking through the white collar of his shirt, but it was little more than a novelty in his desperate pursuit of release from the torment it is to see the precious bits of your life washed clean like a child’s sandcastle to the sea. The exoneration of his spirit for failing to protect his family from the sinister, serrated edges of his fellow man. There was no way but this.

The man stood and exited the Miata, leaving the door to hang open. The heat washed over him and his mind was still. As the siren grew louder, he swore he could hear the blood pushing smoothly through his veins like white noise— like the rhythmic pattering of a waterfall.

He stood and watched as the light grew closer, almost near enough now to make out faces under the tinted glass. He bent into the passenger seat and felt the warm touch of black paint once more. Turning back to face the lights, he shut the car door behind him and started to lumber forward. A few voices yelled out something he did not understand. The man lifted the revolver so the barrel was parallel to the street, and a cacophony of smoke filled the air from a dozen different points.

The man lay dying and whispered his daughter’s name, holding onto the image of her face for as long as he could manage. It wasn’t thirty seconds before he was gone, and his daughter was there the whole time, spinning around with the edges of her sundress gliding over the grass. As his vision started to fade, he was certain he could see, just off to either side of him, a rustling bunch of green maple leaves and the shimmering of light across the surface of a pond.

The highway patrolmen approached the man, their hearts still racing, and someone from the front of the pack remarked that he had never in his life seen a smile so wide on anyone dead or living.