Part 1. Prologue.
- Where are you going now?
- We're not going
anywhere, we're just
running.
("Bonnie and Clyde")
The federal highway is straight as an arrow, it cuts the yellow plain in half and disappears beyond the horizon. But its straightforwardness is deceptive, it only looks like from afar. In fact, it's the highway in the middle - a continuous slide. It seems that the car should be able to fold in half to pass there.
You'll get confused with the roads. All my life I've done is walk on them, but I can't see the end. Maybe at least this one will lead me somewhere? On the edge of the world, for example.
What, that's where I need to go. In Portland, or rather in the Portland slums, nothing holds me back. Bob is dead. We buried him well, just as crazy as he lived. But that won't bring him back... unfortunately. Scott took his father's place at the head of the corporation. Now he probably doesn't think about me, he has a lot of other things to do. Everyone is wondering if he is going to start politics. Politics is exactly what he needs. Scott is the ideal future mayor: how strict and clean the outside is, just as dirty from the inside. I would never tell such a person what I confessed to at the fire when the two of us were on the road at night. On one of my eternal roads.
In fact, I seldom took anyone as a travel companion. Scott. Bob. That black dog. I don't even know her name, I called her Cass. He was hit by a truck when we almost got to town. I still feel like she's following me sometimes, and I reach out to stroke my clever forehead. That's Kasa I would take with me to the fire. And Bob would have taken it. And Scott would never do it again. Unless it was to push him straight into the fire and not to leave until the last spark had finished with his body. That would probably be beautiful. I can only imagine how everything would have turned grey and then black, crumpled and in a moment became earth.
Once I start to feel the humming in my head, everything is blurred before my eyes - a sure sign of a seizure. Recently they have become more frequent. Hell, if I pass out in the middle of the road, it'll suck. Eventually I'll be run over by a car.
I even imagine my curled corpse with traces of treads on my clothes.
I was just wondering if I could make it to the side of the road when I flew to the ground with my back of my head forward. I didn't have time. It's a shame.
It's a shame that during seizures of narcolepsy I sometimes have the opportunity to be blurred, but to be aware of the world around me, without any chance to move.
I hear a car stopping by, my shoes pulling down, and I just bought them on the road, good, sturdy shoes. They pull out a bag from under my elbow with all my simple belongings in it.
Thinking that now I have nothing to lose for sure, I pass out. The last spark of consciousness I see my favorite picture: an endless yellow field and a small house right in the middle of it. The boards are made roughly and carelessly, they never knew the paint. On the threshold there is a small thin woman with long, dark hair waving in the wind. She holds two children together, one of them is very young, the other is a lanky teenager. I look at her face, but the traits slip away from me, leaving only the warmest smile in the world.
"Have a nice day," I tell her, and suddenly, somewhere on the edge of her sleep, I hear men's voices:
- Dean, look, he's breathing, but he's shaking strangely. Open the front door.
- That's great, Sam, you just have to pick everybody up. He's not a puppy, by the way, not once.
- Come on, come on, help me get him in the car...
Big hands take me by the shoulders, and I'm completely out of it, thinking it's all a seizure nonsense, but it's a pity Scott wasn't in it.
Chapter 1: I'm SEM.
I wake up in the front seat of an unfamiliar car, the wind hits me right in the forehead and blows my bangs back. I open my eyes and see deserted roadsides and rare trees rushing past. The speed is decent. I like speed.
- Are you awake?
I turn my head. It's the same voice I noticed in my delirium that I'm not a puppy to pick me up, but now the owner is sitting behind the wheel, putting his elbow out the open window and watching the road in concentration. He's frowning and not looking at me. The guy looks a little over thirty. Leather jacket, black T-shirt and jeans, weathered hands. He didn't drive for a couple of hours to take a ride to the nearest store for bleach and chicken wings for dinner. The road is his life. Just like me.
Without looking in my direction, the driver is not happy with his shoulder, more annoyed by the fact that I am looking at him than by the fact that I am not answering the question. But if this guy turned out to be a reality, not my hallucinations, then there should be a second one? I turn around.
continued in the following articles