The highway is burning, she said, and they watched the glow on the horizon. He imagined all the other highways catching, one by one, creating a flickering network across the country. He imagined what it might look like from space.
What do you think it means? he asked, though he didn’t really expect an answer. It had become so hard to fathom what anything meant anymore.
It means someone’s going to have to pay for all those repairs, she said.
In other words, he said, we’re not going anywhere.
In the back of the bar, he leaned forward to ask what she did, and he realized she smelled exactly like his fingers after he’d played guitar too long, her body heat mixing oily, metallic notes into something intoxicating.
I used to work on the Hill, she said. But that was before all of… She waved her free hand. I’ve been thinking about the Peace Corps, but that’ll probably get defunded, too. Besides, this isn’t a good time to be an American overseas.
Or maybe it’s the best time, he said. Maybe you should go while you still can.
All we asked for was everything others tell us is long gone. We believe, if we wait long enough, if we stretch our dollar far enough, our jobs will return, we will, again, stop asking the question of whether a few beers Friday night mean we’ll run out of food Thursday.
We were once the people about which songs were written. We were, of course, once the people writing the songs, singing the songs, up at the bar, ordering more bottles of High Life, talking about how great our lives were. We were once happy. We were once free.
This is the town where heavy metal weighs down the blood, clogs the brains of children. Mothers and fathers here wake daily to the knowledge that each glass of water served alongside pot roast, mac and cheese, salad with ranch dressing, dinner rolls, was as much poison as hydration. Here, twins no longer look alike, stunted in different ways by the tainted water in which they bathed, in which their food was cooked. Here, children forget what they’ve already learned, even as politicians just nine hours away wash their hands of the whole matter and forget they exist.
I meant what I said, she told him. I just meant it in a different way.
This baffled him. She had just clearly said she’d talked to the Russian minister. How else should he interpret that?
You just hear things differently than I say them, she said. I have one way of saying the truth, and you have another way of hearing it.
He left her office as confused as he’d ever been, his stomach twisted in anticipation of what could happen next.
I escaped traffic to a side street, and passed a man with a python draped around his neck. With his left hand, he held the snake’s undulating head away from him. Two open-mouthed children stood a few feet away, and a woman in a tight top backed toward the snake, angling her phone for the selfie.
For so long, so many of us drove main roads, comfortable with the usual scenery. We forgot different things were happening just blocks away. But these are days of detours, and we have no choice to see what we were missing all along.
Most mirrors, these days, reflect disillusionment. A slump-shouldered man wipes the steam from the glass above his sink. A woman with a turned-down mouth flips down the sunshade on the passenger side of a car, and pushes her hair behind her ears. On TV, a comedienne’s hilarious impression of a bumbling spokesperson signals the death of decorum.
How does one find the right pose in this time of dissatisfaction? Is there a lipstick that can disguise a frown? What tie is appropriate to wear to a party where every dish on the buffet has gone just a bit off?
100 Proof 