Natural Bridge
© 2001 Devon Koren

        "We're driving into the sunset. How's that for a happy ending?" The palm of Michael's hand rested languidly against the knob of the gearshift, and he squinted against the flood of crimson light bleeding into every possible corner of his '87 Chevy Nova. The sunlight reflected off of the protruding telephone poles on either side of the highway like rows of warning lights lining an airstrip, welcoming its winged travelers home. Scott was curled up in the passenger seat, his over-sized hockey jersey summoning the deepest infrared wavelengths from the sunset's entourage. He didn't say anything. He might have been sleeping. Michael couldn't say for sure - he refused to take his eyes off of the road. It had been a rhetorical question. No response was sometimes a good thing.
        There was slight distance between his car and the train. Michael noticed that. Michael noticed that the mountains were more or less foothills here, not like the towering, majestic overhangs of the West, with its rocky avenues and its evergreen forests lined with pine-scented carpets yielding quietly to the tap of a foot, to the press of a body. Michael shifted uneasily and withdrew further into his ratted pullover, a snail hiding his horns, the sleeves cupped over his hands in the semblance of gloves. "The heat'll kick on any minute now," he had promised Scott when he discovered him at the side of the road in Tully, New York, like an unexpected find in a scavenger hunt. That had been over an hour ago, and the dust-brown interior still emanated all the frigidity of an icebox.
        Michael's scalp was still itchy where the hair had grown back after his short experimentation with baldness. Anything to get away from cute, from children's television, from talking inanimate objects and insanely loud rugby shirts. He wouldn't wear blue for over a year after finishing the show, and began to scratch absently at his left shoulder where a dark, cerulean shade concealed the tight-lipped unsmile of a tattoo. He listened to Scott's breathing intently, pretending to listen to the hushed drone of the radio instead. The monotone narration spit out scientific terminologies between loud crackles of static, interference from radio towers and 18-wheelers, trying to find a shortcut. Michael stifled a cough.
        It was enough. The rhythm was broken, the snoring stalled. Scott stretched for a moment, his fingers clawing towards the dashboard like an indecisive kitten, and made a soft, whimpering sound, rubbing at his eyes in an annoyed gesture.
        "Ughn. Bright light! Bright light!"
        "Does this mean I'm not supposed to feed you after midnight?"
        Scott's laugh got lost somewhere in the journey from his trachea to his lips. He twisted his torso to the left until his back popped. Michael winced.
        "How long was I out?"
        "Almost an hour."
        Scott nodded, and attacked his eyes again with balled fists. Michael stole a glance at him, his mussed brown hair, each dark lock subscribing to its own definition of gravity. Those intense blue orbs that betrayed his age before the laugh lines did.
        "This evening on Nature Sounds," droned a public radio commentator, "we will journey into the wild terrain of South Africa to take a look at the elaborate strata of its species of insects."
        Scott stared at Michael, and blinked. "You're not serious."
        Michael shrugged. "It's educational."
        It was hard to believe, Michael thought. Scott Terrence, here, in his car. That fucking band, five years ago, the one he had hated, and now. Two men, caught in the act, paralyzed by a past too big for both of them. The road, at least. They had the road, and it could lead them anywhere. It made promises. It could change their names for them, erase their very existences. The world had already turned and forgotten them, replaced their novelty stickers with new faces.
        "The South African tapping beetle," the radio cracked, "devotes its entire life to following vibrations, hoping to find others of its kind. This beetle is so rare that many of them live entire lifetimes without finding another of their species."
        Michael's eyes steered the road with a sort of detached precision. Moments passed between them, though they might as well have been hours, or lifetimes.
        "How old are you anyway, Michael?"
        "Thirty."
        "I'm twenty-seven."
        "Fucked up, isn't it?"

        The first night, they stopped at a liquor store right outside Killawog, New York, purchased a couple of cases of Mike's Hard Lemonade, snuck into a Little League baseball field, and dangled among the bleachers like shadows or sports nymphs.
        "So, uh. Michael," Scott fumbled through his thick and puffy lips for words, his tongue an envelope of cotton. "What's your sign, man?"
        "Huh?"
        "Y'know. Sun sign. Astrological thing."
        "Oh." Michael was silent for a moment, working calculations inside his head. He ran his finger along the bottle he was nursing, sending a high-pitched tone into the dead air between them. "Libra, I think. Why? You gonna predict my future? Tell me I'll be rich and famous." A dry, bitter laugh escaped from his throat.
        Scott took another swig of his lemonade. "Libra. Libra's a good sign. Air sign. Creative, artsy people. Spend a lot of time in your head. You play music?"
        Michael's eyes flashed some beacon of a hidden wound. "Yeah, a little. Never could really get off the ground with it."
        Scott shrugged, and clapped a heavy, drunken hand against Michael's shoulder. "Hey, man. Don't worry about it. It's all manufactured anyway. Plastic. None of it's real."
        "Yeah," mumbled Michael, his short tousled brown hair bobbing up and down in a clumsy, affirmative gesture. His eyes focused on a blurry landing light flashing on and off in a crimson pulse at the horizon. They shuffled their feet, and tried to maintain their balance. Michael coughed, and suddenly wished he had a cigarette - it would give him something to do with his hands. He began peeling at the label of his bottle. "Do you ever miss it?"
        "Miss what?"
        "The band. The fame. Throngs of teenage girls chasing your bus around or... Whatever. That."
        Scott considered, and furrowed the brows over his murky blue irises woven into a framework of laugh-lines and cheekbones. "Sometimes," he slurred. "I don't... I'm happy that I can walk into a convenience store now without getting my clothes ripped off, or whatever. But." He tapped his fingertips, at various intervals, against the metallic frame of the bleachers beneath them. It was almost like Morse code, and for a minute, within that cumulus collective of drunken logic, Michael thought he understood the message.
        "I don't know," continued Scott. "It's good to be loved, y'know?"
        "I wouldn't know," Michael smirked. "No one ever recognized me without the shirt." He leaned his head back against the steel seats, and let the stars swallow him whole.

        In the morning they were greeted with frost on their windshield and hangovers the gravity of cliffs. They poured themselves into a gritty diner and ordered sugar with their coffee and eggs prepared in every method imaginable. Michael fingered through a local newspaper, but the letters were fused together in an indiscernible muck, and he eventually surrendered it to Scott who peeled away the comic strips and spontaneously giggled out loud at any particular one that caught his attention. Scott bought a small compass in a general store with adhesive on one side and stuck it fast to Michael's dashboard. Michael cocked an eyebrow.
        "Don't sweat it, man," Scott grinned, shadows slanting from the morning sun across the slight purplish bruises of his eyes. "That just increased the value of this piece-of-shit you're driving."
        Michael laughed. "Hey, fuck off, man." But there was no real hostility in those words, nothing more threatening than affection. After all, he was quite a collector of oddities. Scott could have spent entire afternoons sorting through all of the junk in his car, and did, often, which made Michael a little nervous at times, but he let him anyway. There was the locket his ex-girlfriend gave him that had once dangled from his rearview mirror before he tore it mercilessly down. There was a used and ratted paperback copy of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and a copy of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the original Spanish that Michael had never learned to read. There were a couple of pairs of shoes - Doc Martins with scuffed up heels, white Adidas running shoes with blue stripes flaring from one side to the other, flip-flops with sand still stuck to the sole.
        "Hey, where you from, man?"
        Michael made a basic, unified gesture, assuming the landscape could speak for itself. "Not too far from here," he added in translation, giving Scott the vague impression that he was really speaking in subtitles. "In Boyertown."
        "Right, right." Scott paused for a minute, digging out some of the sand stuck in the crevices with a fingernail. "You like the beach, huh?"
        "Sure," Michael shrugged, loosening huge, invisible weights from his shoulders. "Doesn't everyone?"
        There were CDs - the Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Hum, the Crash Test Dummies - all totally useless, as the car sported no CD player. There were cassettes, most of them unlabeled mix tapes, which Scott would finger through and stick into the stereo from time to time. Some of the music he was familiar with, but most of it was alien, from another time, from ten years ago, as if all of the history which led from that point to this was, in the end, nothing but meaningless filler.
        From that detached, unspecified void from beneath the grate of second-hand speakers, the common noise of a clearing throat suddenly became a percussion instrument. An acoustic piece, a slide-whistle, the sound of a hand gently slapping the side of a guitar. A rugged, whispering voice pretending to be bigger than it actually was. Michael shrunk into his sweater, and glanced towards Scott in a nervous twitch.
        "This song's got a beat," Scott grinned, his head cocked to one side, his eyes focused on the dim glow between the two radio knobs. "I like it."
        "Hey."A flicker of long-discarded hope ignited somewhere in the void behind Michael's cornea. "Thanks."
        "You mean... this. This is you?"
        Michael grinned.
        "Get out of here!" Scott laughed, and let a noise escape that sounded a little too much like a squeal. "This totally rocks, man. Something about that slide-whistle just hooks me in and reels me up." Michael cocked a suspicious eyebrow. Scott was silent, listening intently until the song finished. "I'm surprised you never went anywhere with this."
        "Yeah. Well." Michael cleared his throat, as the expression of pride dripped off of his face and buried itself in his five o'clock shadow. "Maybe I just didn't have enough motivation."
        Scott shrugged, and tugged at a shoelace. From the floorboard, he excavated an old postcard of New York City, with two twin towers flashing unyieldingly against the sky. Michael stole a glance, and recognized the recovered artifact instantly.
        "I ate in that restaurant once," Michael stated flatly.
        "Yeah. Me too."
        The world had been full of heroes, then, for just a short while. Then, just as suddenly, the world was full of victims. Michael just wanted to escape. He tapped the accelerator harder.
        Scott reached in the back and shuffled through his bag, eventually uncovering a small, red yo-yo. He passed it from hand to hand aimlessly, occasionally looping the string around his fingers. He studied it, wearing a pensive look that seemed to Michael perfectly chiseled for that specific moment in time, as if every line his face had earned and every shadow highlighting his cheekbones had rehearsed for a thousand nights this one expression, this perfect moment of facial choreography.
        "Can you do any tricks with that?"
        Scott looked up for a moment, and then shrugged. "Nah. Not really. I read a book, once, but it just never really worked for me." He extended a hand in front of him, his palm facing the floorboard, his fingers spread out between four definite angles like peacock feathers. "I think my thumbs are too big."
        The corner of Michael's mouth twitched upward, and he found himself studying his own thumbs against his will. They were clumsy, and calloused, the nails discolored and chewed past the cuticles.
        "Your thumbs are fine," he said, as he tapped his own against the steering wheel. "There's just a trick to it." He looked at Scott, and smiled. "I'll show you."

        The radiator gave out somewhere across the border of Virginia, a flurry of water and mist in brilliant explosion, like a supernova. Scott managed to rig it enough to enable a crawl at the pace of a cartoon snail into one of the dozens of local automotive shops. Michael checked into a motel, getting a single and saving money. He leaned against the headboard, his arms thrown around a pillow, his chin resting against his knee. The news flickered statistics about the war, a body count, explosions inland possibly related to terrorist activity. Everything the same - repetitive, horrific. In the beginning, Michael had envisioned eventually becoming numb to such media onslaught, that another hundred or thousand of people would no longer matter so much. It didn't happen - there was something fundamentally human gnawing at the pit of Michael's stomach. It was the same basic instinct forcing him to survive, slowly pushing forward across every reluctant mile. It was the same basic instinct that broke out into a sweat listening to Scott in the shower and the thin wall between them.
        "It's all yours, man," Scott grinned, tossing a dry towel to Michael. His mussed hair fell about his temples in soft, damp curls, beads of water trickling down his bare chest. Michael swallowed hard and tried not to look up.
        "Thanks," he said, but the crack of his voice deceived him.
        "Hey." Scott sat down on the bed beside him, peering up into his face as if trying to extricate a clue from his expression. The smell of cheap shampoo and hotel soap was overpowering. "You okay?"
        "Yeah." Michael cleared his throat, ran a hand through his unwashed hair. "Just... well. I think I just need a shower." He reached out absently in front of him for a moment, and then paused, clapping his bare hand in a dull thud against his corduroy pants. He clutched the towel with his other fist, and stumbled towards the general vicinity of the bathroom, as if it offered some form of sanctuary.
        Scott lit a candle, grinned, unfastened the first button of his jeans, and nestled himself among the pillows. He tugged absentmindedly at the Leo pendant about his throat. A vague scent of sulfur and lilac filled the room. He turned off the television. He tapped his fingers lightly against the side-table, and waited.

        They slept late into the afternoon. They woke up drenched in each other's scent, a blending of identities for one small, soft moment. They emerged in muffled, incoherent voices, poking fun at each other's hair, pouring themselves into sweatshirts and corduroy. They giggled fanatically like children with flushed cheeks and throats stung by nests of hornets. They made a meal out of Ramen Noodles and water, like refugees. They doodled games of MASH on the back of hotel napkins, using the ancient teen idols of old for characters. They charged their automobile repairs on a credit card they would never pay for, and left the hotel with the bed unmade.
        By the end of the day, they were driving unashamed through the heart of Virginia. They were not afraid, for one small moment in a world where fear had become too common a denominator. For a brief moment, they could imagine what America was, in those frontier times with the world moving West before towers were even erected only to come crashing down again. It was freedom, pure and unrefined - or, at least, the illusion of freedom, which, arguably, might be all that America ever really had. They were drunk on that illusion, the air between them stinging with stories of their childhood choir practices and high school drama club shows. There was a loose, unhinged sort of laughter - banging fists against the dashboard, slapping thighs, tears leaking out due to the intensity. Giggles choked back and sucked in, sometimes making a mad dash for the nasal passages, resulting in an embellished snort. There was honesty in their laughter, and surrender, and the sort of trust that pirates and firemen forge, forced to battle the elements together.
        Scott began scribbling notes on a stray sheet of paper recovered from the holocaust of Michael's back seat, keeping a tally of other happy, light-hearted passengers in the cars on the highway around them.
        "Like that song," he explained. "The shiny happy people one. My mother and I, we traveled a lot - we'd make up songs, invent games, trying to pass the time and keep the rest of the kids busy." He studied the Alabama license plates in front of them, and made another note. "We started watching other cars, other people, to see if anyone else was having as much fun as we were. It was kinda sad, y'know - because not many people were."
        "I can dig that," Michael nodded, his arm draped across the steering wheel, relaxed - his hand only steady enough to smooth the car's treacherous alignment. He fished in the side-pocket for a carton of candy cigarettes, and offered one of the thin, powdery sticks to Scott, who hungrily accepted.
        "I need a light, though," he explained.
        "Here," Michael grinned, his cigarette dangling precariously from his lip. "Shotgun."
        They laughed as the ends of their candy-sticks touched, and the wheels of the Nova clipped the shoulder. Michael scrambled to steady the wheel.
        "See, you need to stay over there," he laughed. "You're just too damn distracting."
        "It's in the job description," Scott stated, as he fished out Don Quixote and opened the book to a random page. "Muy peligrosas," he read. "What's that? Many pelicans?"
        "Very dangerous," Michael translated, "which is, I should add, exactly what you're making my driving right now."
        "Whatever," Scott retorted, poking at Michael's rib and making him squirm. "Your driving's always dangerous."
        There was a pause. Michael made a move to turn up the stereo, as the clanging piano of a familiar childhood song made them both smile.
        "Movin' right along in search of good times and good news," Scott began, in an almost-perfect impression of Jim Henson. "With good friends you can't lose."
        "This could become a habit," Michael joined in, with his best Frank Oz voice. They might as well have been Kermit and Fozzy, in their aimless drive across the United States.
        "Movin' right along we found a life on the highway, and your way is my way."
        "So trust my navigation."
        Scott rolled the window down, even though the wind was icy and their teeth started chattering before the song had finished. Michael didn't complain.
        "What did you want to be when you were little, Scott?"
        "A carpenter."
        Michael's jaw went slack, and he held Scott with a steady gaze.
        "You're kidding."
        Scott shook his head. "I wanted to build things. Make stuff happen."
        Michael nodded. "I dig. I wanted to be an architect."
        "Oh, man!" Scott laughed, and started drumming the dashboard with his palms. "That so rocks! We're going to have to go into business together, when all this is over."
        When all this is over. Michael mulled the phrase around in his head, as if he were an oyster trying to give a grain of sand a pearlescent coat. He didn't say anything.

        "Oh, oh, oh!" Scott jumped suddenly, and thrust his arm out in front of Michael, pointing at a billboard. Michael swerved into the incoming lane, and was met with a flourish of honks and obscene gestures. He threw Scott a dark look. "There's a natural bridge on this road!"
        "They've been advertising it for miles already. Where've you been?"
        "Sleeping. Hey, it's only seven miles away!"
        "Holy hell," Michael cried incredulously. "They have a Natural Bridge Zoo?!"
        "Look!" Scott pointed. "It's a wax museum!"
        "Enchanted Castle," Michael read the sign slowly, letting the words roll off of his tongue.
        "Oh, wow - Superman!" Scott grinned.
        "Is that a flying hippopotamus," Michael asked, squinting, "or have I simply been awake too long?"

        Michael blinked. "Was that it?"
        "Surely not." Scott glanced over his shoulder. "Just keep driving."
        "I don't see any more signs, Scott. I think that was it."
        Scott craned his neck around, and the 'natural bridge' billboard slowly collapsed on itself and became a small dot on the road behind them. Michael started laughing.
        "My god!" he croaked. "That was it! Okay, wait. We have to turn around and drive back over it, just to make sure." He pulled the little Nova into the closest driveway and headed back towards the dim light of tourist attractions picking up momentum as the sun faded away to the west. Michael slowed down to a snail's pace after passing the sign loudly proclaiming the natural bridge to be a unmatched wonder, and they inspected the tall planks of wood that built high walls along either side of the guardrails. Scott pressed his lips together firmly, but eventually exploded in laughter as Michael crossed the bridge a third time.
        "Well, so much for visiting national landmarks in the dark," Michael said, and tentatively placed a hand on Scott's shoulder. "I'm sure it's much more impressive if you pay the ten bucks and walk under it."
        Scott nodded, and lightly brushed Michael's hand with the fingertips of his own. "We'll come back."

        The highway opened its mouth before Michael. It was speed. The dark, permafrost concrete beneath his wheels wove in and out beneath and above the interstate as the routes paralleled each other. Scott was sleeping again, his breathing coming in waves, sometimes stringing snores along with the tides, at other times a simple, soft rustle just beneath the surface. Michael silenced the radio, and he smiled. The inside of his car had begun to smell like Scott.
        It's beautiful, isn't it? he thought. Here. You. This. He could no longer think in complete sentences. The moment had grown beyond them, like the double-yellow line of the highway stretching towards infinity, a variable forever approaching the absolute limit of zero without ever really touching it. It was something at the horizon, something just beyond his reach, something he continued to drive towards. He thought of a story he had read as a child, with Jack the Hare running as fast as he could across a path of golden light on the ocean, just so he could deliver a gift to the sun. The moon settled itself in a persistent lunar wink within the boundaries of his rearview mirror. The railroad tracks to his left were intermittent, and he began thinking about the trail, about the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who made their way across these very mountains. What were they searching for? With their log cabins and their Middle English brogue, their patchwork and their untold secrets of distilling this very moonlight. It was a legacy, and Michael couldn't help to think there must be some sort of magic in it. It was easy to believe, suddenly, in absolutely everything.
        The black-and-white emblems of road markers signaled a split in the highway - to the East and to the West - though both branches seemed to head in the same general direction. Michael tossed a quarter, called heads, and stuck with the eastern route. There were old buildings, city lights, sidewalks decorated for the impending holiday season. The border between Virginia and Tennessee was murky and uncertain. There was a hotel, and a neon sign flickering 'Allison's Restaurant.' Michael pulled into a nearby gas station to fuel up.

        At the pay phone, Michael dug the yo-yo out of Scott's bag.
        "Have you ever been in love, Michael?" Scott asked, fingering quarters and nickels in his palm.
        "I... I don't know." Michael twirled the yo-yo around his head, and then palmed it again. "Sometimes I think I'm too much of a magician to fall in love."
        Scott dug through the back seat for loose change, but paused long enough to toss a confused look in Michael's general direction.
        "So much of love is done with smoke and mirrors, sleight-of-hand, tricks of the eye." Michael spun the yo-yo out diagonally as it barely touched the ground and started slowly creeping back towards him. "Illusions. I tend to see through them, and it ruins the magic."
        Scott nodded, fed quarters into the machine - two, three, four - and swallowed hard.
        "Hello... Mom? Hi. It's Scott. I'm all right. Everything's fine."
        Michael dropped the yo-yo. In a sudden flourish, the yo-yo slid out of his grasp, hit the pavement with a loud thud, and slowly rolled away from the car, past Scott's feet. Scott grinned, and his eyes rested on Michael's awkward silhouette. "Everything's just fine."