The Passenger Seat

The road, though!  Endless becoming, a colour palette always and somehow never changing, grey to green to brown to blue to other, occasionally red, very occasionally yellow, whoosh, repeat, repeat, something comes the other way with headlights on, the beauty of headlights in daylight, fence, field, these lane markings like perforations maybe, as if the road or the whole world could unzip any moment now, if there were such a thing as a moment when you’re driving, which Teddy realizes there isn’t. It’s just one long stretch. The road and its contradictions: boredom and excitement, you sit still but you’re moving, there’s a good kind of silence even with the engine noise and the German metal Adam has them listening to. Teddy’s mom used to call this sitting and thinking time. But all Teddy wants to think about is how the world keeps rushing toward them then dropping harmlessly into their wake. Adam is a good driver. He speeds often, especially to pass the empty logging trucks that must be on their way back to tree farms farther north. Adam tells Teddy the German metal is political, but it’s in fucking German so how can Adam know? The singer’s definitely angry, though. Teddy can’t decide if Adam’s tastes are more adult or more childish than his own. Is what Teddy likes, let’s say Arkells, more grown-up or just more boring? Funny that people call things middle of the road. That’s where they are now, as Adam passes another rig and swings back in before the line of oncoming traffic can snag them. Somebody beeps, and Teddy lets out a hum to match. Wasn’t that a bit close, he thinks but doesn’t say. He thinks about rhythm and speed, about the fact that they don’t know where they’re going.

At a gas station they buy energy drinks and for an hour they talk eagerly over the music, looking for ways to express how free they feel. Then comes the crash, spiralling silences in which the music speaks for them and Teddy nearly falls asleep. Towns go by, billboards, fruit trees, fences. The images don’t stop when he closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees something amazing. Two horses are standing nose to nose in a field, perfectly still, like somebody glued them together. They look like statues or oversized toys. One of them is wearing a halter around its head, the other isn’t. Somehow this makes Teddy think of the French they had done at school, how pointless it was because no one could remember anything by the time the next class came around. The recap would take more than half the time, the teacher getting more and more frustrated. But what did she expect? To Adam he says, over the music, Do you remember when you asked that French teacher if the word for cat also meant pussy? Adam laughs, then says, Wait, are you sure that was me? I don’t remember that. It was absolutely you, Teddy says. They hadn’t been proper friends back then, but he remembers it, his green pencil case, how the boys all laughed and the girls groaned and the teacher just went on as though Adam hadn’t said anything. She was telling them about two words that sounded almost the same, and you had to be careful or you’d end up telling somebody about your horses. She was showing off, trying to make the class laugh, but Adam stole her thunder with the pussy comment. Thinking about it now, years later, Teddy decides that Adam’s comment was actually pretty smart. It was really about how pointless the whole situation was, how they were all wasting their time, the teacher included.

They’re going too fast to have the windows open and the truck’s AC is broken. You only need it two weeks of the year anyway, Adam jokes. But surely these will be those weeks. It’s late afternoon and the sun is still well above the trees. On a long, mild hill the truck seems to struggle until Adam drops a gear. Teddy feels sweat on his neck and in his little pocket of chest hair. Away to the right are miles of quiet forest, places where nobody ever goes, probably full of bugs and bears. He hates himself for not being able to drive.

Stopping is glorious, a chance to move and to fart and to breathe. They both balance on shin-high posts beside a trash can, performing a laughing parody of martial art, for no reason other than the joy of controlling their bodies, of coordinating, synchronizing. Slowly the game becomes a competition, who can jump one-legged from post to post without falling. Knowing their phones will eventually fail them, they buy a map and unfurl it on the truck’s hood, captain and first mate. They can go anywhere they want. Teddy plants a finger at the tiny pink words HOT SPRINGS, feeling the engine’s heat through the waxy paper. Adam steers them north and east, away from the coast where they spent their boyhoods. Inward, toward what comes next. As the sun finally hits the treetops, Teddy tears open a softened chocolate block and passes it to Adam by the row. It leaves sweet muck on their hands, and later, as he stares out the window into the dusk, Teddy realizes he is sucking his thumb. The more the light goes, the more it is his own face he sees in the glass, lit by the blue stereo glow, already a ghost.

Each town they pass through is smaller than the last, recognizable brands slowing to a trickle. They stop for the night on the outskirts of one place, at a bend in the river that looks deserted enough. Adam says they’re far enough from the town that no one will bother them but close enough that they can walk back to that bar they passed. They’d probably get served in a town that small. He parks beside a low track that runs into a sea of pebbles and what looks like a ford through the black water. Teddy can imagine it flooding. Even with the driving done he remains a passenger, watching as Adam unfolds the tarpaulin and ties its ends to the truck’s raised trunk. There’s only one good tree, so Adam squats by the river and lets the water fill one of his new canisters. Then he lugs it back to use as an anchor. Teddy is impressed, and determined to make his own contributions. He doesn’t want to end up with the domestic jobs while Adam does the fun stuff, but with no other options he gets the camp stove out of its mesh sack and tries to remember how the pieces slot together. The burner hisses when he finally lights it, a memory of childhood, of hunger and the happiness of being somewhere other than home. This, he thinks, will be the summer his mother finally leaves his father and goes off with Ron; maybe he will arrive back to find everything dealt with, like how he avoids the kitchen until he knows the dishes are done. He hears the click of a bourbon bottle opening for the first time. Adam has scored three from his cousin, Teddy doesn’t know on what terms. Fuck, Teddy says. We don’t have a can opener. Yeah we do, Adam says, handing him his utility knife. Teddy repeatedly pushes its hook through the metal lid, making notch after notch until he has torn a jagged mouth. Probably he did it wrong, but Adam doesn’t say anything.

They sit with scalding cans between their knees, two mouths making plenty of noise. In brief moments of quiet Teddy hears other things, birds crying in the dark and the persistent river. They pass the bourbon back and forth, and Teddy is happy. He is part of a team. You think we can make it to the Arctic? asks Adam. You mean the ocean? Yeah, Adam says. Jesus, Teddy says, how far is that? Adam’s voice is defensive. It doesn’t take that long, maybe a week. A week there and a week back, Teddy says doubtfully. He doesn’t mention how much it would cost in gas because then Adam would try to buy half the rifle off him again, which would defeat the purpose of having it. Plus he wonders what happens if they get bored, have a fight, or just get sick of each other. He leans back and looks at the stars beyond the tarp, telling himself to relax and enjoy the ride. It’s a lot of driving to do on your own, he says eventually. Maybe, Adam says, not taking the bait. Adam suggests again that they walk to the bar, but this time it sounds more hypothetical. Both of them have taken root in their camping chairs, staring like old men at the darkness that must be the river. By the time the bourbon is a quarter gone, they’re both half-asleep. They lay their mats and sleeping bags side by side in what Adam calls the camper, a rigid bubble bolted to the rear part of the truck. When Teddy closes his eyes he sees the blue flame from the camp stove, then the blue light from the car stereo, then the horses. How weird they looked, how fake, but they were definitely real.

*

Teddy wakes first. He shimmies outside, clicking the tailgate closed so as not to rouse Adam, enjoying the sense of having the morning to himself. He walks barefoot through the dirt, locates his boots, puts the same socks back on. This river isn’t like the one in their town: it’s darker and more muscular, deeper too. He leans on the cold hood and looks at blistered beer cans and blackened rocks, the ashes of whomever camped here last. Sheep or maybe goats bleat from somewhere across the river, and Teddy smiles to himself. There is something reassuring about this place, the opposite of the country tourists come to see. No soaring firs or mountains or jewel-coloured lakes, just a trashed-up gravel track beside murky water, the tangled shrubs on the opposite bank dipping their lowest branches into the current.

He is slightly disappointed when sounds from the truck announce Adam. Teddy sits on one of the camping chairs in what he hopes is a posture of contemplation. The chair was left outside the tarpaulin’s shadow, though, and dew begins to soak into his jeans. When Adam emerges he is still in his underwear; without saying anything he walks to the river and pisses right into the current, an arc and a splash. Gross, Teddy shouts, but he’s smiling. Makes no difference, Adam calls back. It all gets to the sea eventually. Besides, how much sheep shit you think is already in that water? We need to get some proper food, Teddy says, like a bag of apples and some bread and some peanut butter. Adam walks back, wiping a hand on his boxers. Unscrewing the cap of yesterday’s energy drink, he says, I have to buy a toothbrush too, but first things first. He gives Teddy a look, and Teddy doesn’t have to ask what it means. Let’s do it, Teddy says, but not here. Let’s get away from the town and these farms, find some forest. From behind the shrubs across the river, the animals bleat their agreement.

*

Adam has been gaming so much he sees the screen when he closes his eyes. Ever since summer vacation began, if he wasn’t doing weights, hanging out with Teddy, or on shift at McDonald’s, he was on the couch in his room, playing Patriot. He and Teddy meet online sometimes, but Teddy is not exactly an asset; he spends too much time with Ceecee and never takes it seriously anyway. Adam has his others, his in-game friends, strangers he plays and chats with. He’s good, too, good enough to be invited to a group chat where a bunch of what seem like older guys talk shit and share links, which is how he first heard about the book. The chat is called Safe Space, which is both a joke and not a joke. Right now, being offline feels cleansing. He wants the game’s images to fade and give way to real ones. Otherwise, he will get complacent. Last night he even dreamt in the night-visiony green of a mission. Nothing happened in the dream, he was just walking dully along, the tip of his weapon arcing back and forth the way it does in first-person POV. Being on the road with Teddy makes him feel calmer, not so constantly pent up like when he’s bored at home and school. He hasn’t even felt like jerking off. Sometimes he’ll get an urge just from something in the game, like crawling commando toward an enemy in darkness or aiming at the back of some oblivious herder’s turbaned head. Who knows why. It’s not as though the thought of killing turns him on, it isn’t that, it’s more like crossed wires in his brain, one feeling reminding him of the other. Maybe it’s about having power over somebody, like what the guys in porn must feel when the girl goes crazy. One of his Patriot friends joked that you play better if you haven’t come for a while, that the aggression helps. But why should we have been made that way, Adam wonders, with morality crusted on top like a hasty paint job, and the truth seething below? Maybe it’s just him, maybe he’s a freak like everyone says. It isn’t the sort of thing he can talk about, to Teddy or anyone else. Anyway, Teddy is different because he’s fucking now, which is probably the way out of the conundrum, but it’s also a whole other trap. So much focus has been on the hazards of sex for women, and rightly so, that nobody, until now, has talked about what dangers it holds for men. He learned that from a streamer he follows, a guy who monologues while he plays and whose thinking seems sharpened by the mechanics of combat. There is something potent about hearing a persuasive talker discuss politics while watching his avatar progress relentlessly through the game world, killing whomever needs killing, operating with strength and skill and grace. The voice and the figure in fatigues are on completely different planes, yet they complement and enhance each other. Something in Adam understands that he must bring mind and body together in the real world, away from the safe space of Patriot, without phone reception, without even the book, which he decided at the last moment not to bring. He had hesitated when throwing things into his backpack: to let Teddy read it would be to let the curtain drop, to admit that a lot of what Adam says is not his own thinking at all, just stuff he has lifted from some smarter, older guy. On the other hand it calmed him, helped him feel in control of himself. In the end it stayed behind along with the forgotten toothbrush, and Adam wonders now what he’ll do with Teddy there all the time, with only the camper to sleep in and nowhere to be alone except the forest and gas station restrooms. It’s not as though he won’t get the urge eventually. Even the thought of what they’re about to do this morning makes him feel something, not turned on, but something. He should have dunked himself in that river, sheep shit or no. Teddy said it would be dangerous, that it was moving too fast. It sure looked black.

When they reach the other side of the sad, silent town, Adam drives more carefully. He slows to look down smaller roads and turnouts. They choose one that winds away uphill. It’s paved, or was, but it’s clear nobody uses it anymore. Adam drums the wheel between each turn. Over the hill the road gets even worse, with ruts and even saplings piercing the cracked asphalt. He pulls to the side and turns the engine off. For a moment he and Teddy both sit there, listening, as if to make sure they’re alone. There are great walls of firs on either side of them, a carpet of needles giving the hillside gentle curves, like brown snow. Adam climbs out of the cab.

In the camper he takes a mouthful of energy drink and gets new underwear from his backpack. He is halfway through changing when Teddy opens up the back. Adam feels the cold air on his skin even before either of them says anything. Oh, sorry man, says Teddy, but he doesn’t leave until he’s taken the boxed rifle and the ammo from beneath the folded tarpaulin. Then, as he turns away, Teddy says, Let’s head up the hill a bit. Adam finishes dressing and grabs last night’s spaghetti can to aim at, then changes his mind and throws it back into the truck. Surely they can find something better.

Teddy is already among the trees; Adam will have to jog to catch up. He didn’t put socks on, and his toes are beginning to slime up in his boots. They will have to wash today, or start to smell. The way Teddy holds the rifle reminds Adam of his dream. When he reaches Teddy’s position, they walk in silence between the trunks. It’s not quiet—there are loads of birds making a racket. He can’t remember the last time he heard so many. I thought the woods were supposed to be peaceful, he jokes. I guess we’re not usually awake this early, Teddy says. One of the birds has a call like a cartoon whip. Another is growlier, almost human. Let’s shoot them, Adam says, and Teddy seems game. They stop and stare into the trees, but neither of them can actually see the birds. We’re being too loud, Teddy says, an accusation. The firs have given way to something else, trunks that feel rough and good against Adam’s hands. When he looks up he sees warping snatches of sky between swaying crowns. He stops a minute and stares upwards, gets dizzy from it. Each treetop seems to reach for its neighbour then pull back just before it makes contact. He doesn’t know what kind of trees they are, but he decides he likes them. Shh, Teddy says, and Adam realizes he has been humming. He feels a little rush of anger at being scolded, but Teddy, after all, is holding a gun, which trumps everything. Teddy squats against a mossy log and loads the rifle. Adam tries to memorize each step, while trying not to seem like he is watching too closely. It makes Teddy look weirdly skilful; he’s a different person with the rifle against his chest. He even walks differently, with shoulders forward, a posture Adam recognizes from gaming and wants to make fun of, but they’ve agreed to be silent now. Teddy stops beside a thick trunk and says something very softly, just a breath. Adam reaches Teddy’s shoulder and looks past him at a creamy blur, an animal obscured by the trees. It’s maybe fifty metres away. A snowshoe. In fact, two of them. One is doing its undulating little hop, the other is stock still, ears erect. Teddy slowly raises the rifle to his shoulder, and Adam instinctively steps back. But they’re a long way off. Surely Teddy has to get closer. Adam wants to tell him but knows better than to make a sound. He has never seen anything die in real life. He hit a cat in the truck the first week he had it but didn’t stick around to see what happened. He can feel his heart as he watches Teddy’s shoulder and arm tense. Teddy’s hand is obscuring the trigger, meaning Adam doesn’t know when the shot will come. He waits for it, looking from the distant hares to the black barrel to his friend’s greasy hair. Teddy only started shaving last year and doesn’t get proper stubble like Adam does. The gun somehow makes him look even younger, Adam decides; it’s like watching a kid riding a too-big bike. For a moment, one of the animals is more clearly visible, its ridiculous ears sticking up like a dare. It’s oblivious, thinks Adam, it’s ignorant. These things do not equate to innocence in his mind. A rod for the fool’s back.

The shot makes him step back and bring his hands toward his ears, but he catches himself and drops them to his sides again. He will have to get used to that. He remembers rather than hears the little chime as the casing hits something, as the hares get magically swallowed by the shrubs. He is still trying to find himself, but Teddy has already lowered the gun and is walking toward the place. Adam follows dumbly, a few paces behind. When Teddy reaches the spot, he leans the rifle on a tree and kneels, pretending to be some expert tracker, the gun just propped beside him. Adam could easily pick it up himself, but doesn’t. He stands there, reverberating. No blood, Teddy says softly. Adam, coming back to himself, says: Sniper level zero. Teddy laughs and says, Come on, they were too far away. He stands, picks up the rifle, aims, and shoots again, either at a bird or at nothing. Then he turns and offers the weapon to Adam. You want a go? Teddy says it the way boys have always said it, right back to the earliest sharing of toys, with pride and reluctance. There’s a harmony to the gun’s weight, the way it pulls at Adam’s arms, asking his muscles to do the tiniest amount of work. Suddenly the way his toes slide inside his boots feels pleasant instead of gross, and he no longer wants to shower or eat or take a shit. He lets Teddy instruct him. He picks a spot, adjusts his posture. Don’t forget the safety’s still on, Teddy says respectfully. Adam lowers and clicks it off. Always use safety but never rely on safety, Teddy recites. I remember that from the course I did. We all had to—Adam shoots over his words. The stock jabs his shoulder, not as hard as he had expected. He hears the bullet whistle away. He swings as he aims again, looking for something specific, wanting to make more sound before Teddy has the chance to say anything else. More rabbits, please. Teddy moves as Adam does, always staying behind his shoulder. It’s all so much slower than it is in Patriot. It would be impossible if the target were moving, and yet so many men are experts at this. Because they practise, Adam tells himself. It’s like anything else. Teddy tells him to straighten a little, to bring the stock higher, to keep both eyes open. But there is nothing to aim at; it has all been scared away. Teddy takes hold of Adam’s shoulders and shapes him, saying, Try to hit that tree, the paler one dead ahead. Adam lowers the gun. No point, he says, shrugging Teddy’s hands off him. Let’s wait until there’s something worth shooting—we’ve got a long way to go. But Adam does keep hold of the rifle as they descend the hill, carrying it the way his avatar does, right hand curled beneath its centre of mass so he doesn’t even have to grip but just lets it balance in his sweaty palm. The birds are singing again, but more quietly now, cautiously.