The Drive E-Book

Tyler Keevil

• Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A single call from his Czech girlfriend catapults Trevor into a serious crisis. Desperate to get his mojo back, he blazes down Highway 99 in a rented Dodge Neon. But soon his journey to California is fraught with peril, and all he has for protection are a semi-automatic pistol, his trusty plastic visor and a flea-ridden cat. As the drugs and the heartbreak kick in, the question is no longer whether Trevor will get over his girlfriend's infidelity, but whether he'll get out alive. A fast-paced and hilarious contemporary odyssey, told with a searing clarity reminiscent of Willy Vlautin or Patrick de Witt, The Drive has all the adventure and surrealism of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - but overlaid with heartfelt yearning and hope.

Leseprobe

For her

‘A fast moving car is the only place where you’re legally allowed to not deal with your problems.’

Douglas Coupland

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART I

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

chapter 15

chapter 16

chapter 17

chapter 18

chapter 19

chapter 20

chapter 21

chapter 22

chapter 23

chapter 24

PART II

chapter 25

chapter 26

chapter 27

chapter 28

chapter 29

chapter 30

chapter 31

chapter 32

chapter 33

chapter 34

chapter 35

chapter 36

chapter 37

chapter 38

chapter 39

chapter 40

chapter 41

chapter 42

chapter 43

chapter 44

chapter 45

chapter 46

chapter 47

chapter 48

chapter 49

chapter 50

chapter 51

chapter 52

chapter 53

chapter 54

chapter 55

chapter 56

PART III

chapter 57

chapter 58

chapter 59

chapter 60

chapter 61

chapter 62

chapter 63

chapter 64

chapter 65

chapter 66

chapter 67

chapter 68

chapter 69

chapter 70

chapter 71

chapter 72

chapter 73

chapter 74

chapter 75

chapter 76

chapter 77

Acknowledgements

Copyright

PART I

chapter 1

I wandered into the rental car agency on a Monday morning, carrying a backpack filled with supplies: socks, boxer shorts, T-shirts, my sleeping bag, and six beers. Originally it had been eight beers but I’d drunk a couple of road pops on the bus ride over. The agency was out at the airport. It was called Budget or Thrifty or something like that. I’d found it on the net. They were the only company in the Lower Mainland that offered unlimited mileage, as a kind of sales gimmick. I guess they expected you to pay your money and putter around the city for a few days. That was obviously a huge mistake on their part.

The office was a dimly lit cubicle with four glass walls, like an aquarium, built into the airport’s underground parkade. As I approached the counter, the clerk on duty looked up and smiled. He was an Asian guy wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a gold hoop earring. His hair was gelled into this retro quiff that stuck up stiffly at the front.

He said, ‘How are you this morning, sir?’

I hadn’t really slept for two weeks. Or eaten much. Eating was hard.

‘Peachy.’

I gave him my driver’s licence and reservation number. He started tapping the keys on his computer. His fingers were long and elegant, like spider legs. One had a ring on it.

‘You married?’ I asked.

He stopped typing.

‘I’m engaged.’

‘I didn’t know men wore engagement rings.’

‘It’s fairly common, these days.’

He began typing again, keeping one eye on me – as if he already suspected I was going to be a problem. ‘Today’s your lucky day,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the car you reserved, but for the same price we can offer you an upgrade.’

He rattled off a list of vehicles I could choose from: different makes, different models, different manufacturers. The names floated in the air around us, meaningless as vapour. I’d never owned a car and didn’t know much about them.

‘Are you interested in any of those, sir?’

‘Sorry – what was that last one?’

‘A Ford Expedition.’

He said it like it should mean something.

‘Great,’ I told him.

He handed me a bunch of forms to fill out. As I did this, he received a text on his cellphone. He read it, smiled, and began texting back. I tried to peek at the screen without him noticing, but he caught me.

‘Is that your fiancée?’ I asked, still scribbling.

He frowned. ‘Why?’

‘No reason. It’s just nice to see other people happy.’

He turned his phone face-down, hiding the display from me. When I’d finished filling out the forms, he swiped my credit card and handed me the key, being careful not to actually touch me in any way.

‘That’s five hundred and eighty dollars and sixty-three cents.’

‘My reservation said it was three hundred-something.’

He blinked. ‘I asked if you wanted our Loss Damage Waiver Plan and you said yes.’

‘Did I?’

‘I can remove it, if you like.’

‘No. I might as well keep it. There’s a fairly good chance I’ll crash this thing.’

He didn’t smile. He pointed to the lot and told me where the car was parked.

‘Thanks – and say hi to the fiancée for me.’

As I left, I could tell he was still watching me.

The underground parkade was lit by cheap fluorescent tubes that flickered and hummed like lightsabers. My vehicle sat in the corner of the lot. It was a monster SUV with tyres as high as my waist, running-boards, and a crash bar jutting out from the grille. I ran my palm across the hood, feeling that smooth-metal sweetness, and imagined rumbling along the American highways. I would be wearing Ray-Bans, and listening to Springsteen. I’d have my windows rolled down and my sleeves rolled up. My forearms would be tanned, my hair tousled by the wind. I’d have a cigarette tucked behind one ear.

I climbed up into the driver’s seat to see how it felt. I sat gripping the wheel for about thirty seconds. Then I got out and walked back to the office. The Asian guy was talking on his phone. As soon as he saw me, he hung up and stuffed the phone in his pocket.

‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

I explained that the Expedition was too big, and too fancy. He looked at me in a way that would become familiar in the following weeks: with a certain wariness, as if I were a dog that seemed friendly but might snap given provocation.

‘I’m driving it a long way,’ I said, ‘and through some fairly shitty areas.’

‘I see.’

‘I need something that’s good on gas, and won’t get ripped off.’ I pointed out the window. ‘That thing wouldn’t last two minutes where I’m going.’

I said it theatrically, and it worked. He took the key back from me and gave me new forms to fill out. I signed my name in all the same places and ticked all the same boxes.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘To the States,’ I said. ‘I need to get away. It’s pretty hard to explain.’

‘Right.’

He took the form from me, pinching it carefully, as if it was a piece of evidence.

‘Have a good trip,’ he told me.

The new car was a Dodge Neon, cheap and sleek, with pizza-cutter wheels and a lame little spoiler on the trunk. It was the kind of sedan my stepmom would drive. Actually, it was the kind of sedan my stepmom had driven. A few years back, she’d owned an earlier version of this same model. That car had been green. This one was maroon red. There were glittering flecks and sparkles ingrained in the paint job. It had been freshly waxed, and I could see a distorted version of myself reflected in the panelling.

I walked around the car, checking it out. I kicked the tyres a couple of times, just to feel as if I was giving it a proper going-over. I also popped the hood and examined the engine – a gleaming tangle of hoses and wiring and machinery. It looked good to me. The clerk was watching all this through the glass wall of his office. I gave him the thumbs-up, but he didn’t respond.

I figured I’d better get going.

I put my backpack in the trunk and got in the driver’s seat. It was an automatic, with only seven thousand kilometres on the clock. The interior still had that new-car smell of upholstery, plastic and glass cleaner. I eased the key into the ignition, feeling that satisfying click, and started the engine. It shivered to life. I bent forward to kiss the wheel.

‘This is it,’ I said, to my car and myself. ‘The start of our epic journey.’

I put her in gear and backed out. The tyres squeaked on the concrete as we circled the parkade. I was so excited that I kept missing the exit, but eventually I found it. Then my car and I emerged from underground into a world full of heat and light and noise and fury.

The terminals at Vancouver International are laid out in a horseshoe formation, with the parkade in the centre. The parkade is encircled by a one-way traffic system that forms a kind of crescent. I slid on to the crescent and accelerated around it, leaning into the curves. Other vehicles were pulling in and out, making drop-offs or pick-ups. The windows of the Arrivals lounge flicker-flared in the sunlight. I left all that behind, and at the airport exit the road flung me out like a stone from a sling, unleashing me on to Highway 99.

chapter 2

Two weeks before, I’d been working on an independent film. By coincidence, we were shooting out at the same airport, Vancouver International. We’d set up on an access road near the landing field. There were planes all over the place: lumbering around on the ground, roaring down the runways, banking and circling overhead. The sky was coated in swirls of cirrus cloud, creating a blue-marble effect.

‘Can you use a longer lens for this scene?’ the director asked me. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He was a scrawny guy who wore skinny jeans and always drank soy shakes on set. A total hipster.

‘You got it.’

Officially I was the camera operator, but he’d only hired me because of my camera. Six months before, on my twenty-first birthday, I’d bought a five-thousand-dollar video camera with money I’d saved up cutting lawns. I’d been hiring myself out with it, as a way of gaining experience. To start with, it had mostly been on spec. This was my first paid job, at a hundred bucks a day. The director didn’t have much faith in me, though. Neither did the DP. He hovered at my shoulder, checking every shot and constantly adjusting the frame.

‘All right, people!’ the director called, striding on to set. He’d parked the car we’d been using for the shoot – a cherry-red ’57 Chevy – at the side of the access road. ‘In this scene, our leads are lying on the hood, watching the planes land.’

There were two main actors. One was an ex-hockey player who did push-ups between takes and liked changing his shirt in front of everybody. The other was this girl with white skin and green hair. She never talked to me or any of the crew, unless we were in her way. Their characters were supposed to be on a road trip together to break her heroin habit. I think that was the idea, anyway.

‘Trevor, let’s shoot this from the front. A medium two-shot.’

I got in position, still fiddling with my lens. The actors were already sprawled on the hood, sharing a cigarette. The director made sure they were good to go, then nodded at me.

‘Rolling,’ I said.

‘And… action!’

Right away, the sound guy put up his hand, signalling that something was wrong. He was a teenage volunteer who wore sweatpants and had moustache fuzz, like a patch of mould growing on his upper lip. ‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘I got a blip.’

‘What’s a blip?’ the director asked.

The sound guy gave him the headphones, so he could listen for himself.

‘Shit,’ the director said. ‘That’s weird.’

After that the DP wanted to hear, and everybody else. They all took turns trying on the headphones. I went last. I pressed one headphone to my ear and listened. You could hear the drone of plane engines, which the director had expected. But behind it, every three or four seconds, there was a little blip in the audio – almost as if somebody had tapped the microphone.

The sound guy was already fiddling with his wires, and checking his connections.

‘Maybe it’s low on batteries,’ the jock said.

The sound guy shook his head. ‘This mic doesn’t use batteries, okay?’

You could tell he was panicking a little, since it was his equipment. The rest of us milled in a herd, looking around and trying to figure out what could be making the blip. I noticed a radar tower near the runways. The antenna dish on the top was slowly rotating.

‘Hey,’ I said, pointing. ‘It could be that radar tower.’

They all looked. The antenna went around, and around, and around, every three or four seconds. The rhythm was the same as the blip. We couldn’t hear it – you can’t hear radar, obviously – but somehow the microphone was picking it up.

The director grabbed the headphones to listen again, while studying the antenna.

‘He’s right,’ he said. ‘Good job, Trevor.’

The sound guy came over and gave me a high-five. People congratulated me. Not that it made any difference to the shoot. It wasn’t as if we could stop the radar tower. Our sound would still be screwed, and the editor would have to fix it in post-production. But at least we knew what was causing it now.

‘Positions, people,’ the director called out. ‘Let’s shoot this fucker.’

He loved saying stuff like that.

During our coffee break I was eating a stale jelly doughnut when the director came over to join me, which he’d never done before. He squatted down on my camera case and thanked me again for solving the riddle of the radar tower. He said he was stoked on the shots we’d got so far, and told me he was going to use this short to apply for a grant from the National Film Board. If he got it, they would be making a feature in the fall.

‘How’d you like in on it?’ he asked.

‘That would be awesome, man.’

He grabbed a doughnut from the tray, took a bite, and kept talking with his mouth full. ‘None of this indie bullshit. I’m talking union wages, real equipment. I’m even planning a few helicopter shots. Imagine that. You could shoot that scene for me.’

‘I’m great at helicopter shots.’

‘I know. I know you are.’

We talked like that a little more, daydreaming about our make-believe future together. He wanted to take his film on the festival circuit: Sundance and Toronto and Venice and South by Southwest. Then he’d get a distribution deal, and it would blow up huge.

‘What’s your feature going to be about?’ I asked him.

‘Like this – only longer.’

‘Oh.’

The director popped the last bite into his mouth and licked his fingers, as if it was the greatest thing he’d ever tasted. He had icing sugar all over his lips. ‘Another road movie, I mean,’ he said. ‘Like Easy Rider crossed with David Lynch. It’ll be about one character’s journey. A personal odyssey. But with all these trippy and surreal elements thrown in.’

‘Road movies are tough to do. They’re so episodic.’

‘You can get around that. I’ll give him some companions.’

I told him it was a great idea. It would have been fairly awkward if I’d told him how uninspired it sounded. Also, I thought he might get mad and fire me.

As it turned out, it didn’t matter either way.

chapter 3

From the airport I drove south on Highway 99, past grain silos and wheat fields and a Sikh temple decorated with big yellow spires, like onion bulbs. I dropped through the George Massey tunnel, then shot out into Ladner. At the junction with Highway 17, I passed the turnoff for Delta and Tsawwassen. The sign above the road showed a little pictogram of a ferryboat floating on water. Until then I hadn’t considered how many memories lay along this route. It was riddled with them, like sinkholes, ready to draw me down.

Tsawwassen was one of the places I’d been with her. On her first visit to Vancouver, I took her to Saltspring Island, and to reach it you have to go via Tsawwassen. When we arrived, we’d just missed a ferry. The next one departed an hour later, and while we waited we wandered down one of the wharves that runs alongside the berths. People were fishing out there. A dozen or so men stood in a row, making casts and cranking their reels. The lines, strung from the rods to the surface, glistened in the sun like spun silk. She got talking to this Chinese guy and somehow convinced him to lend her his rod. That was just like her.

‘Five minutes,’ the guy said, holding up five fingers. ‘You fish five minutes.’

You could tell he didn’t expect her to catch anything, but she did – on the first cast. The rod bent right to the handle and she got yanked towards the edge of the wharf. There was no railing, so me and the guy grabbed her. We held her by the waist and she braced herself and let the line whizz out, slowing it every so often with the reel. It must have surprised the guy to see her handle it so expertly, but her father had taught her. He was an ex-factory worker with a mangled hand who fished every morning off a jetty in the Vltava.

‘Good, good!’ the Chinese guy cried. ‘Let it run!’

From up and down the dock, the other fishermen flocked towards us and gathered around. They shouted encouragement and advice, shoving each other and jostling to stay at the front. Directly opposite us, in the adjacent berth, was the ferry to Nanaimo. It had begun loading and the first few passengers stood on deck. They were watching, too. Tourists were pointing, taking pictures, calling out. One of the straps of her dress had slipped off her shoulder, exposing the tan-line of her breast. She didn’t notice. She was totally focused.

‘Sakra,’ she kept saying, swearing to herself in Czech. ‘Sakra!’

The fish cut back and forth, tugging hard on the line. She moved with it, following the rod like a diviner, and the whole crowd moved with her. Whenever the fish relented, she took in a bit of line. She fought it like that for maybe fifteen minutes. When the fish finally breached the surface, everybody gasped in unison. It was a huge salmon, a Chinook, and it was going crazy – twisting and convulsing on the hook. From the wharf to the water it was about a ten-foot drop. She reeled the fish up slowly, and when it cleared the edge of the dock it was still flapping, scattering water and scales everywhere. All the fishermen whooped and applauded and moved in closer.

She lowered the salmon to the dock, and looked at me.

‘I caught it,’ she said, panting, ‘so you have to kill it.’

‘I do?’

The Chinese guy nodded gravely, as if he understood the logic of this. Among his gear he had a wooden club, like a child’s baseball bat. He handed it to me. The other fishermen stood in a semi-circle and watched. We knelt together. She pinned the flopping fish in place and I brought the bat down on the back of its head, hard. It quivered and went still. One of its eyes had popped out and blood began leaking from its gills. We stood up, holding the fish between us, and the fishermen cheered again. Even the foot passengers cheered. It was as if we’d sealed something, or signed a pact. Then the boat horn sounded, the ferry pulled away and the fishermen dispersed. We thanked the Chinese man and carried our catch back to the loading area.

We didn’t have a cooler to store it in but we had our camping gear, so we decided to cook the salmon, on the beach next to the terminal. Zuzska knew all about cleaning fish. She hacked off its head first, then slit open its belly. Its heart and kidneys spilled out, glistening like gems. While she scraped away the rest of the guts I got the camping stove going. We cracked open a couple of Kokanees, sat down in the sand, and fried up chunks of salmon.

‘It’s just like Christmas,’ she said.

‘Nobody has fish at Christmas.’

‘We do.’

Instead of turkey, apparently her family always had carp. They would keep a carp in the bathtub in the weeks leading up to Christmas. They’d feed it and name it and treat it like a pet. Then, on Christmas Day, they would kill it to eat.

‘Poor fish.’

She shrugged. ‘Fish are stupid.’

She plucked a piece of salmon from the pan, popped it in her mouth, and licked the oil off her fingers. We stayed there, eating and drinking, until the ferry arrived, then had to pack up and go get in line with the other foot passengers. The people around us kept staring at her. She’d washed her hands but her forearms still shimmered with slime and water. Blood streaks stained the front of her dress, and fish scales sparkled on her cheeks, her neck, her chest. She stank of the sea, and she looked like a beautiful and particularly brutal mermaid.

That was Zuzska for you.

Somebody was honking at me. I checked the rear-view. There was an SUV behind me, riding my ass and flashing its lights. Without meaning to, I’d slowed down to forty klicks. I could see the driver hunched over his wheel, snarling at me. He was a bald guy wearing tinted glasses and a flat cap. Instead of speeding up I tapped the brakes – just to mess with him.

He swung into the other lane, pulled alongside me, and started screaming through his open window.

‘What do you think you’re doing, asshole?’

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ I shouted back. ‘Driving!’

‘You mean daydreaming!’

‘Yeah – I’m daydreaming about your sister!’

We argued like that for a while, shouting and swearing and swerving erratically in our lanes. Partly I was pissed off because I knew he was right. I’d come on this trip to forget about her, to get away from her, to get over her, and I was already sinking into sentimentality.

‘Pull your head out of your ass!’

‘I hear you, okay?’ I screamed. ‘Now fuck off!’

I hit the gas, leaving him and Tsawwassen behind.

chapter 4

We filmed at the airport until dusk. The sky melted into marmalade and the planes continued crawling around in it. The director said, ‘That’s a wrap,’ and handed out call sheets for the next morning. The actors were allowed to go. The crew stayed behind to pack up the gear. Afterwards the DP dropped me off at a bus station on Marine Drive, and I caught the No.10 up Granville. The bus was crammed with commuters – all of them shuffling, rustling, shifting – but I found a seat near the back. I sat and cradled my camera case and gazed out the window.

I remember I was still thinking about those blips, transmitted from the radar tower. I tried to imagine the way they pulsed through the air – wave after wave of them, washing over the planes, mapping their locations on traffic control screens. If those same signals had been hitting our microphone, maybe they carried on even further, lapping at cars, trees, buildings, streets, people, everything. And, if you had some kind of ultra-sensitive detector, you might even be able to create a radar map of the entire city – a glowing green grid that charted the progress of day-to-day life in Vancouver.

Then my phone rang. It was Zuzska, calling from Prague. We normally talked a bit later because of the time difference, but I didn’t think that meant anything.

I answered. ‘Hey, kočka.’

She was crying. She told me that she’d slept with somebody, or been sleeping with somebody. It was hard to hear – she kept choking on her words – but the meaning trickled through to me. I felt around for a cord or button to stop the bus, and accidentally pulled the emergency lever instead. An alarm went off – this steady droning, like a shotclock buzzer. The bus lurched. The driver was pulling over. I stood up, with the phone still mashed to my ear. All the passengers were looking at me. I walked down the aisle between them, stunned and helpless, like a groom going to the altar. The driver didn’t get mad, or demand to know what was going on. He just opened the automatic doors for me. I’ll always appreciate that.

I stumbled past him and stepped off the bus.

‘Say something,’ Zuzska said. ‘Say anything.’

But I couldn’t. My larynx had seized up. I made an odd, pathetic noise, like a cat mewling, and ended the call. The bus was pulling away. It had left me next to a chain-link fence, and a field full of weeds. I threw the phone into the field, flinging it as far as I could. Then I bent over and put my hands on my knees, feeling sick. I didn’t actually think I was going to puke, but I did. I puked in the gravel at the roadside. All those jelly doughnuts came back up, along with the ravioli we’d had for lunch. The puke was thick, red and slimy – my blood and guts, lying there for all the world to see.

I sat down on my camera case. Cars hummed past, zipping about the city’s grid, still being mapped by the blips. They carried on and I stayed there, in a kind of catatonic stupor, until the sun went down and the sky grew dark and I started to shiver. Then I remembered something: my phone. It was still out in that field. I climbed the fence and thrashed around among the nettles and dandelions, hunting blindly for it, crying like a child.

chapter 5

On my left the big white arch rose up, looming over traffic and straddling the centre of the boulevard like the legs of an albino colossus. I’d arrived at the Peace Arch Border Crossing. There were seven lanes open. Going into the States, choosing a good lane is crucial. If you get the wrong border guard, you can end up being hassled, interrogated or searched – all the things I wanted to avoid. I’d drunk a couple of beers and I had some weed on me – enough for maybe three joints. I’d packed it all into the straw of a slurpee. This way, if they searched me, I could suck the weed up through the straw and swallow it – there’d be no trace. But I preferred not to have to do that, for obvious reasons, and it all depended on the line I chose.

‘Left is always right,’ I said, and turned that way.

My whole life, I’ve put faith in that nonsensical motto. I sat in the left lane, tapping the steering wheel, and inched along behind a station wagon. The sky sagged down, heavy with cloud, and there was a mugginess to the summer air. I opened my window. The other drivers were listening to their stereos, and the mixture of tinny pop tunes drifted between the vehicles. My rental car had a stereo, too, but I left it off. I didn’t feel like playing music.

The line shifted. I moved forward.

I’d been over this border countless times – first with my old man when I was a kid, and later with my friends, as teenagers. Cross-border shopping trips were a great Canadian tradition. I knew all the tricks: smile and nod, hand over your passport, address the guard as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’, politely answer his or her questions. Be specific, but not too specific. It had always worked when I’d gone down to pick up Zuzska. Sometimes, for her visits, she would fly into Seattle, since flights were cheaper to the US than to Canada, and I would drive down to meet her. It was two and a half hours one-way, and by the time I reached Sea-Tac airport I would be sickened, shaky, quaking with lust and anticipation. I developed my own set of rituals to calm down. I would drink two beers at the airport bar, brush my teeth in the bathroom, and win a stuffed animal for her from one of those grabbing-claw games. After her flight landed, I’d stand and count the passengers emerging from Customs, telling myself that before I reached a certain number she would appear. When she finally did, it was like being jolted with a defibrillator.

The line shifted. I moved forward.

Our ride home from the airport had its own rituals. En route we’d be kissing and touching, laughing and chatting. I’d struggle to keep the car straight, to stay on course. At the border we would have to explain what I was doing, bringing a foreign body back into my country. We would smile and tell them our story: how I’d gone to live in Prague, how she’d been my Czech language teacher, how we’d fallen in bilingual love. The guards always smiled back, won over. Ah, you could see them thinking, young love. They would stamp both our passports, as if confirming the validity of our relationship. A few weeks later, on the way back down, we’d go through the whole process again with the American guards.

The line shifted. It was my turn.

I rolled down my window. As I pulled up at the booth I could see the guard inside, watching me. I smiled and handed him my passport. He had pale, spotted cheeks and puffy sacs under his jaw, like a toad. He was sitting on a high stool.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

‘Just down to the States, sir.’

He stared at me as if I’d told him the sky was blue.

‘On a little road trip, I mean. Through Washington and Oregon.’ That sounded fairly specific. Was I being specific enough? ‘And maybe on to San Francisco.’

He leaned forward, peering at me. He had those crazy bubble-eyes that bulge out.

‘San Francisco?’ he said.

‘I have a friend who lives there.’

I could tell I shouldn’t have mentioned San Francisco. It was full of hippies and liberals and potheads and queers. In his mind, anyways.

‘This your car?’

‘No, sir. It’s a rental.’

He held my passport up to his nose. ‘You live in Vancouver but you rented a car?’

‘I don’t have my own. And I really wanted to go on this road trip.’

That clinched it. He handed me back my passport without stamping it. ‘Could you pull over beside the Customs office?’ he asked, pointing it out.

It was a white building just beyond the border. The windows were tinted and you couldn’t see inside. I parked next to it and turned off my car. I knew the drill because I’d been searched before, on one of those shopping trips with my old man, before my stepmom was on the scene. We’d gone down for the day and were smuggling goods back: toys and T-shirts and video games. A lot of families did the same, and occasionally the guards searched people, hoping to slap a customs charge on them. But we’d been ready for them. We had cut the tags off the clothes and opened the toys and gotten rid of all the receipts and boxes and packaging.

This time, I was ready for them too.

I reached for my slurpee. At first it seemed as if the straw was plugged. I couldn’t get any suction going. I sucked harder, and it all came up at once – a burst of cherry slurpee and weed that made me choke. I coughed and spluttered, trying to get it down. Bits of bud got stuck between my teeth. I had to rinse out my mouth with slurpee, working the slush around my gums, but managed to swallow most of it. I figured I had maybe half an hour before a devastating body-stone kicked in.

The door to the Customs office opened. A woman in a blue uniform came out with a dog. She was a small woman but her dog was very big. A German shepherd, I think. I got out of the car, still holding my slurpee.

‘We’re going to give the vehicle an inspection, sir,’ she said. ‘Would you mind opening the trunk for me?’

As I went to do that, her dog started sniffing around the hubcaps. Apparently the hubcaps were a hotspot. The woman held one hand low on the dog’s leash, near its collar. I’d left my door open, and the next place they checked was the front seat. The dog put its paws where I’d been sitting and snorted at the upholstery, getting closer to the cup-holder.

‘The trunk is open,’ I said, hopefully, ‘if you want to check there.’

The woman ignored me. Her dog now had its nose right inside the cup-holder, poking around like a pig snuffling for truffles.

‘What is it, Herbie?’ the woman asked. ‘What’s there?’

Herbie made a sound in his throat, uncertain. I’d walked around the side of the car to watch. Herbie glanced over his shoulder at me. He was obviously a smart fucking dog. For a few seconds we sort of had a staring contest. Then his ears went back, flat on his head.

He roared and jumped at me.

‘Holy shit!’ I cried.

His paws thumped my chest and I fell over backwards, screaming. But Herbie wasn’t going for me. He’d clamped on to my slurpee cup. He held it in his teeth and shook it back and forth, as if he’d caught a rabbit. Slurpee sprayed everywhere.

‘Easy, Herbie.’ The woman pulled hard on the lead. ‘Easy, boy.’

Herbie sat back and panted, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. Pink slurpee juice dripped from his jaws. The woman crouched down to examine the mess he’d made. She looked from the cup to me. I was still sprawled on the concrete.

‘Maybe he just really likes slurpee,’ I said.

chapter 6

The night she called was the night I stopped sleeping. I came home from the film shoot and slunk into my suite. I was living in my dad’s garage conversion and didn’t want to face him or Amanda, my stepmom.

I dropped my camera case and stood in the centre of the living room. The floor was covered in cinematic detritus: film canisters and video tapes and memory cards and lenses and filters and scrims and hard drives and scraps of paper filled with storyboards, character sketches, dialogue notes. I’d been cultivating this creative nest, a den full of story, but none of it could help me now. I was completely off-script. I just stood looking around, panicky and disorientated, like an actor trying to remember his lines.

I had three full-size movie posters on my walls. One showed Al Pacino in Carlito’s Way, holding a handgun. The other two were for Casino and The Godfather. The first time she’d visited, Zuzska had jumped all over me about them. ‘What is the point of this?’ she’d said, striking a Pacino pose. ‘You like guns? You want to be a gangster?’ Then she’d told me that guns were a phallic symbol and that I obviously had middle-class masculinity issues. She was taking these night courses in psychology and thought that made her an expert.

At the bottom of the Casino poster, the Las Vegas cityscape sparkled like a distant galaxy. The year before, Zuzska and I had driven down to Vegas, and almost gotten married in secret. We’d thought it would help sort out all the immigration difficulties if I ever moved to the Czech Republic, or she ever moved to Canada. I thought about that for a few minutes, and then went over and ripped that goddamn poster off the wall. I attacked it like a demented house cat: tearing it into strips, and tearing the strips into bits, and scattering the bits all over like confetti. Then I dropped to my knees and pounded the carpet with the soft underside of my fist – once, twice, three times – and clutched at my skull, as if it was about to burst open.

I whimpered.

Eventually I crawled over to my kitchen table. It was a lime-green laminate table that doubled as my work desk. I got out a pen and some paper and started writing: How could you do this to me, to us… Then I stopped. The words were too familiar. I tried again, and again, but it was always the same – lines I’d heard in films, or read in books. I had none of my own. I filled seven pages of loose-leaf paper and the best I could come up with was this: It’s as if you’ve reopened Pandora’s Box, and let all the evil in the world out again, but this time you shut the box on hope. Worse, you shut the box just as hope was trying to get out – so hope got caught between the lid and the edge of the box. Hope got crushed. Hope has broken ribs, a burst spleen, a shattered sternum. Hope’s back is broken. There is no hope for hope.

Even that was just a reference to something else. Also, it made me sound insane. So I didn’t send it. I didn’t send any of my letters. Most ended up on the floor as balls of paper. When the ink ran dry I put on some Miles Davis and got incredibly sentimental. I watched Cinema Paradiso, played solitaire, and drank half a mickey of absinthe. I read the first page of TheUnbearable Lightness of Being over and over, trying to get the words to make sense. She’d given it to me for our anniversary, and told me she’d always be my Tereza. At dawn, I made myself coffee and sat on the back porch, beneath the pine tree. I could smell the brine of the Cove. It was quiet out there. I trembled in the quiet, quivering like a leaf.

Finally I called her, but we didn’t really talk. I couldn’t talk. It was like the letters. Everything sounded second-hand. Regurgitated words. My tongue felt thick and useless. I remember asking her why. It just happened, she kept saying, it just happened. It was as if she was blaming it on a tornado, or a hurricane – a natural disaster that had blown us apart.

I hung up and broke my cellphone. I didn’t break it when I hung it up, but after. I broke it on the floor, deliberately, with a hammer. I’d decided it would be the last time I talked to her. Then I added absinthe to my coffee. It tasted bizarre. At one point I tried to masturbate but couldn’t. There was nothing happening down there. She’d cast some sort of spell on me, or a curse. I was paralysed from the balls down – a penis-plegic. I ran a bath and lay in it, fully dressed, until the water went cold. That didn’t help, either.

chapter 7

They made me wait in a whitewashed room with an American flag on the wall. I sat and stared at the flag until the stars began to spiral and the stripes seemed to ripple and bend. A body-stone was creeping over me, like a slow-growing fungus. They must have let me stew in there for nearly half an hour. The whole room reeked of perfume and body odour and fear.

Then an official came in and sat down in one of the chairs across from me. He had a sprinkling of pimples on his forehead. He asked to see my passport and driver’s licence, then opened my passport and thumbed through it. There was a form on the desk in front of him. He began copying my details into the form, frowning in concentration.

‘How long will I be in here?’ I asked.

He looked up, still frowning. ‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘If they find anything when they search your car.’

‘I thought they already searched it.’

‘This time they’re really searching it.’

That shut me up. I wasn’t worried about the car. I was worried about the slurpee. I thought there might be flakes of bud left inside the straw, or in the cup. When my friend had been searched at the border one time, they’d found resin on his Swiss Army knife. He’d been banned from going to the States for the rest of his life.

The guy finished copying down my details and slid my passport back to me.

‘What’s the purpose of your journey to the United States?’

He had his pen poised, ready to write.

‘I’m going on a road trip.’

He looked up. ‘By yourself?’

‘I’m trying to get my head together.’

He jotted something down in a box on his form. Then he scratched out what he’d written and stuck the end of his pen in his mouth. He gnawed on it for a while. He looked like a high-school kid who’d turned up for an exam totally unprepared.

Eventually he said, ‘Stay here.’

He left, taking the form with him. I waited. Directly above me hung an incandescent light bulb, dull and yellowish, blazing down like a heat-ray. I was getting hotter and hotter, sweltering, melting into my chair. I felt as soft and malleable as a chunk of clay. It was hard not to squirm and shift around. Mostly I was worried about my eyes. Pretty soon they would be bloodshot and cherried, from being so body-stoned, and that could easily give me away.

The door opened again and the guy came back. He had two people with him. One was the woman who had searched my car – the dog-handler. The other was a Latino guy in a pinstriped suit, who reminded me of a professor. He even wore little wire-rimmed spectacles. He peered at me over the lenses. He had my form on a clipboard in his hand.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ the first guy said to him. ‘It just seemed a bit odd.’

‘No worries, Shooter,’ the professor said. ‘We’ll take care of it.’

The guy’s nickname was Shooter, apparently. Shooter looked relieved.

The professor studied me. ‘So you’re the kid going on the road trip.’

‘Is that a problem?’

He glanced at the woman. ‘Search turn up anything?’

She shook her head. ‘Not yet. They’re running some tests.’

I knew she meant on the slurpee. I tried to look indifferent, and innocent. That wasn’t easy, since I wasn’t really either.

‘Let’s wait on that,’ the professor said.

He sat down opposite me, with Shooter and the woman on either side. All three of them had pens and pads of paper. The professor clicked the end of his pen and twirled it around his finger – first one way, then the other. It was obviously something he’d practised a lot.

‘What’s the purpose of your trip?’ he asked me.

‘Does a trip need to have a purpose?’

‘If it doesn’t,’ he said, ‘it looks suspicious.’

I rubbed my hand over my face. My cheeks felt sensitive, as if they were sunburnt.

‘I’m going through a tough time,’ I said. ‘It’s personal, okay?’

None of them wrote that down. They just looked at me. Dubiously.

‘What?’ I asked, holding out my hands, beseeching them. ‘Is that so unbelievable? Isn’t that what young guys do? We’ve been doing it for decades, ever since Easy Rider. Ever since Kerouac, actually. You know – traversing America, being free, finding yourself and all that shit. That’s the purpose of my trip. Except I’m doing it in a budget rental car, instead of on an awesome chopper.’

They were taking notes now. The three of them scribbled furiously, as if I’d given them some sort of solution, or equation, a breakthrough scientific formula: the new E=MC².

Then the professor said, ‘You taking any drugs on this road trip?’

He said it super-quick – as if he wanted to catch me by surprise.

‘No way, man.’

He frowned at that. I probably shouldn’t have called him ‘man’.

‘Nothing at all? Even for personal consumption?’

‘Nope. I’m not into that stuff. I’ll probably buy a few beers on the other side.’

He wrote down each of my answers. The other two weren’t writing any more. They were watching. The woman was, anyways. Shooter had started nibbling on a hangnail.

‘And where exactly are you going?’ the professor asked.

‘Nowhere in particular.’

He sat back, smiling. His glasses flashed once beneath the light, as if he’d taken a picture of me with his eyes.

‘Not San Francisco?’

I’d forgotten that I’d already mentioned it to the guard in the booth.

‘I might end up down there.’

‘So you are going somewhere.’

‘Maybe – but it’s not official or anything. I mean, I’m trying to keep my options open. Go with the flow. I have a friend down in San Francisco but haven’t told her when I’ll be arriving.’

Shooter had started doodling on his paper pad. I noticed he’d written ‘Gay’ at the bottom of the page, followed by a pair of question marks.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I’m not gay, okay?’

The other two looked at Shooter, who put his palm across the page, hiding it.

‘I’m not gay,’ I repeated, karate-chopping the table for emphasis. ‘I just can’t have sex at the moment. I can’t get it up or something. I’ve lost my libido, my sex drive. It’s a perfectly legitimate physical condition. Impotence. I’m impotent, okay?’

Shooter dutifully crossed out ‘Gay’ and wrote ‘Impotent’. I’d made my point, at a price. I’d started to sweat. My fingers felt stiff and I could no longer feel my feet. I was being baked in that kiln-hot room, slowly hardening like fired clay.

‘Are you all right?’ the professor asked, peering at me. ‘You’re white as a sheet.’

I licked my lips. If they decided to take a blood test, I was fucked.

‘Maybe you should tell us what this is all about.’

‘All right.’

I closed my eyes and bowed my head, as if in prayer. I figured I had to toss them a scrap of truth. People respond to authenticity.

‘It’s my girlfriend. She… died.’

I have no idea why I told them that. It just popped out, like a burp. Shooter was so surprised he dropped his pen. The three of them drew back and glanced at one another.

‘I’m sorry.’ That was Herbie’s handler. She seemed the most sympathetic – maybe because she felt guilty that her dog had busted me. ‘That must be incredibly hard for you.’

‘It is,’ I admitted. I’d started tearing up. I was really getting into it. Hopefully that would explain my red-eye. ‘It is, but I’m trying to cope.’

She pushed back her chair and said, ‘I’m going to check on those tests.’

When the door slammed behind her, I jumped. Seeing that, the professor smiled.

‘Take it easy. You’ve got nothing to worry about – so long as you’re clean.’

chapter 8

The next day we were shooting at a rest stop on the Sea to Sky Highway, near Squamish. My dad agreed to drop me off up there before work if I bought him a six-pack of beer. My dad’s great at cutting deals like that. He’ll do you a favour, so long as you pay him back – usually with a six-pack.

On the drive over, he asked me, ‘How’s the shoot going, boy-child?’

‘Oh, you know.’

We were both drinking coffee: him because he always drank it, me because I didn’t want him to smell the absinthe on my breath.

‘Script any good?’

I had the script in my lap, open to the scene we were shooting.

‘It’s a bit avant-garde.’

‘That’s the problem with these film school graduates.’ He gestured with his cup of coffee, slopping a few drops on his tie. He didn’t notice. ‘All they want to make is navel-gazing art-house flicks, without a real story.’

I hadn’t been allowed to go to film school – mostly because it was so expensive. A year at Vancouver Film School costs over twenty grand. That’s partly why I ended up going to Prague, and the language school, after graduation.

‘What’s it about, anyways?’ he asked.

‘A road trip.’

‘That’s it? A road trip?’

‘And relationships, I guess.’

He snorted. ‘I bet this director hasn’t even heard of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That’s a real road-trip story for you. What did you think of it, by the way?’

I had to admit I hadn’t read it yet. He’d given it to me for my birthday.

‘Jesus, Trevor.’ He slapped his forehead. ‘I’m telling you, you’d love it. It’s about the contrast between the romantic and the rationalist world view, the need to find a middle ground. It’s the real deal, a proper philosophical text. None of this flaky new-age garbage.’

He started rambling on about these things called gestalts and Chautauquas. I pressed my forehead to the window and felt the cool tingle of glass. Eventually my dad noticed I wasn’t listening.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

‘I should probably read this over before we get there.’

‘Whatever you say, boy-child.’

He turned up the radio. I pretended to study my script.

Most of the scenes in the film were the same. The jock and the junkie would pull over at a random location. They would get involved in some kind of incident, and then they would hop back in the car and keep going. That day, the incident was her throwing up. She was in withdrawal, and apparently junkies become nauseous when they’re in withdrawal. She was going to puke in the road and we were going to film it.

I was the first to arrive. My dad pulled over and popped the trunk so I could unload my camera gear. He didn’t help me. He was still mad that I’d ignored his road trip lecture.

‘Remember my beers,’ he said before he drove off.

Across from the rest stop was a little tourist shop and a gas station. I bought a pack of Player’s at the gas station and sat on my camera box to wait, and smoke, and be miserable. Inhaling made me cough, so I ended up puffing and faking it. I was so tired my vision had gone blurry. I was crying a bit, too. I closed my eyes and sat like that, resting my eyes.

The DP showed up next. He was a tall, gangly guy with shaggy brown hair. He loped over and perched next to me, drawing his knees up to his chin.

‘Hey, bro,’ he said. That was what he called me. ‘Can I see your camera?’

He loved my camera. He knew more about it than me. I got it out for him, and he fiddled around with the settings until the other crew members started to arrive. The director showed up last, with the actors. The rest of us sat around while he talked them through the scene. Then he swaggered over to me and the DP.

‘How’s my camera crew this morning?’

The DP said, ‘Wicked, bro.’

He called everybody ‘bro’, now that I think about it. I nodded at the director, took a drag, and let smoke slip out between my lips.

‘I didn’t know you smoked, Trevor.’

‘I’m trying to start.’

‘Great.’ He smiled like a ventriloquist’s dummy and shook a sheaf of storyboards at us. ‘Let me show you guys what I have in mind for this scene.’

He squatted down with us. He had half a dozen shots scheduled for that morning. The first was a long shot with a telephoto lens, of the jock and the junkie pulling over into the rest stop. As the car stopped, she stumbled out and puked. That was an easy one. We popped it off in under half an hour. The second one wasn’t so easy. It was from inside a moving car. The director thought it would be artistic if we swept by and filmed the actors at the roadside. We were going to use the DP’s car – this beat-up Volvo station wagon that steered erratically.

‘Okay, Trevor,’ the director told me. ‘I want you shooting from the back seat. As we pass, you swish-pan to the right, finding them in the frame. You get me?’

It seemed a tricky shot to pull off, especially on an absinthe hangover and no sleep, while doing sixty in an old beater.

‘I get you.’

We piled into the station wagon to try it out. With the DP driving, we headed up the highway and doubled back, but when I went for the swish-pan I missed the actors entirely.

‘Cut!’ the director cried.

He had a handheld monitor wired to the camera, so he could see what I was doing.

‘Sorry, man,’ I said.

‘No worries. We’ll do that again.’

We did. I screwed up the next take, too. My hands were jittery and I had no feel for the camera – it wouldn’t do what I wanted. After five or six takes, the DP offered to give it a try. I passed my camera to him, and the director took over at the wheel. He kept glancing at his watch. It was only the second shot of the day and we were already behind schedule.

‘Fuck,’ he said absently.

Somehow, the DP nailed the shot on the first take.

‘Finally,’ the director said. ‘We should have just done that in the first place.’

The DP handed the camera back to me. I started cleaning the lens and the director turned the car around. Nobody said anything as we drove back up to the rest stop.

We managed to squeeze off one more exterior shot before breaking for lunch. The catering lady – who was also the producer – popped the trunk of her car and handed out slices of pizza, with paper plates and President’s Choice cola. When she offered a piece to me, I shook my head. I felt too sick to eat.

‘Thanks anyway,’ I said.

The DP looked over. ‘Aren’t you having any, bro?’

‘I’m a vegetarian.’

‘It’s vegetarian pizza.’

‘Great.’

I took a slice. It was home-made pizza, with mushrooms and green peppers. She’d kept it in tinfoil and it was still warm. I gnawed on it for a bit but swallowing made me gag. I wandered away from the group. When I thought nobody was looking, I flung my pizza across the highway. I was aiming for the woods on the other side, but a gust of wind caught the slice and slapped it down in the middle of the far lane. Cars started running over it, smearing it out like a piece of roadkill. I looked back. The rest of the crew was staring at me. I waved at them. Then I ducked into the souvenir shop beside the gas station.

A Native guy with a crew cut stood behind the counter. He had a piece of wood in his hands, which he whittled as I wandered around. I studied his carvings and his dreamcatchers and his pewter jewellery. A set of wind chimes dangled above the door. I listened to them tinkle and breathed through my mouth until I stopped trembling. I still had no appetite, but I decided I no longer needed to eat. I’d become one of those people you hear about that exist only on water and sunlight, like plants. Except, in this case, I’d get by on booze and smokes. It would be like a fast. An extremely unhealthy fast.

On my way out, the Native guy nodded at me, as if in approval of my plan.

chapter 9

For a while we sat in silence, awaiting the results of the tests. By then the heat in that tiny room had baked me dry. My arms and legs had hardened, my joints had seized up, my body-stone had slowly solidified. Shooter started drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Then the professor looked at him, frowning, and he stopped.

The professor asked me, ‘Tell us about this friend of yours in San Francisco.’

I stared at him. I was so blasted, it took me a moment to digest the question.

I said, ‘She’s a lesbian.’

Shooter sat up straighter. He looked interested for the first time. ‘A lesbian?’ he asked.

‘An absurdly beautiful lesbian, with so much natural charisma she’s practically off the charts. She’s like an angelic femme fatale, and my one true friend. I love that woman.’

The professor was smirking now, as if he had me all figured out. Shooter just sat there with his mouth hanging open.

‘Not in a dirty way, though,’ I said. ‘In a platonic way.’

‘Of course,’ the professor said. ‘You want her pity.’

‘You’re hoping for a mercy lay,’ Shooter added.

It was no use trying to explain it. Not to these guys.

‘Even if I did – she’s got a girlfriend, okay?’

Shooter was taking notes again. At the bottom of his page he’d written ‘LESBIAN’ in capital letters. Now he changed it to ‘LESBIANS’ and circled it.

‘Is her girlfriend hot, too?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never met her.’

The door opened, and Herbie’s handler came back. The three of us started shifting around, like kids who’d been talking behind the teacher’s back. The professor picked up his papers and shuffled them together, acting all official. Then he cleared his throat.

‘What’s the verdict?’ he asked her.

She was looking at us, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

‘Five more minutes,’ she said.

The professor nodded and turned to me. ‘What else will you be doing on this trip?’

‘Well,’ I said. I had to think about it. ‘I’m going to Trevor, for one.’

He checked the form he’d been filling out. ‘But that’s your name.’

‘It’s also a town near Spokane. My dad took me there as a kid.’

He didn’t believe me. He made Shooter go get a map, and I had to point out Trevor for them. The fact that I wasn’t lying, that it existed, made them all a bit uncomfortable.

‘Fine,’ the professor said, folding up the map, ‘you’re going to Trevor. Where else?’

‘Reno, I think.’ I didn’t mention Winnemucca, or my intentions there, since I wasn’t sure if it was strictly legal. ‘And at some point I want to shoot a gun. You can do that, can’t you? In the States?’

‘With a licence, sure.’

‘What if you don’t have a licence?’

He looked at Herbie’s handler. She was the weapons expert, apparently. She said, ‘They’ll issue you a temporary one at the shooting range, if need be.’

I nodded. ‘I guess those are pretty common down here.’