jd87: We started traveling west on I-70 (fragments of a journey)

by Josh Delman

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2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

We started traveling west on I-70 (fragments of a journey) FICTION

We started traveling west on I-70 and we didn’t stop until Ted fell asleep at the wheel. He was drinking quite heavily, if I recall correctly, but his driving shift was mostly a straight shoot (and we planned this accordingly, given Ted’s love for Mezcal) so his actual driving abilities weren’t the issue. It was that Ted was practically narcoleptic until I leaned over and pushed his leg into the break pedal while steering us off the road from the passenger seat. We’d traveled one thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight miles through Missouri and some of the more geometrically boring states, like Kansas and Colorado, finally exhausted by a full day of driving and fighting and a brutal fucking stop (that will be further expounded upon later) in Denver. We stayed at Motel 8 in Monroe, UT.

The conversation in the car had been manic, as the flat and featureless roads of the Midwest tend to pry at that mental door of insanity. Around 700 miles in, in the middle of my driving shift, Ted and Varun started thinking every word “just didn’t sound right” or something like that. Post, post, post, Varun was mumbling, repeating it like a mantra. He had written the word down on a piece of paper over and over again, with a blue felt-tip pen, in different sizes and shapes and all different lettering — did I mention Varun is the lead designer at some font company in Silicon Valley? — and the two of them just couldn’t understand how a word like post could be spelled like that. I think it’s something about the “st” that was getting to them. I just turned up the radio and tried not to let it get to me, because I knew if the madness spread we’d have to pull over and cut our day short.

The next day I woke up when my cell phone started vibrating. I burped out a raspy hello — the first utterances after waking always sound a bit like you’ve been smoking cigarettes all night, even if you haven’t been.

“Hey maaaaaaaaaaan,” the voice said. “Guess where I am?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Maaaaaaaaaary,” Maaaaaaaaaary said. “Guess where I am!”

“Wal-Mart?”

“No way,” Ma(10x)ry said. “I’m in Amsterdaaaaaaaaaaaam!”

I hung up the phone. Amsterdam? They were maybe six hours ahead of us. She had probably already had showered, had breakfast — and I was in no state to communicate with someone like that. I did need to get Ted and Varun out of bed soon; we had to hit the fucking road. Ted was sleeping on the floor, but as I wound up to kick him in the side, he sprung up and blurted out “we need to hit the fucking road, hard!” There was now a majority and quorum. Ted and I packed the car, then we both kicked Varun awake and we took off. Our vehicle was a semi-reliable, Clinton-era Nissan Maxima, a glossy black box with a custom sound system that was so powerful the subwoofer’s vibrations could induce severe nausea. It was useful when we had to blast music just to stay awake during long night stretches, or drink lots of coffee (though this route was often avoided because of its diuretic properties — we didn’t want to stop every 30 minutes for a tinkle), or else take some of Varun’s Adderall, which in case you didn’t know is usually prescribed for attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and is basically speed with some other potent psychostimulants thrown in.

Surely everyone has a different reaction to the drug, but they all fall in a similar class: your brain feels like it’s been shocked with 100,000 volts of pure focused electricity. Your efficiency increases; new neural connections form at a quicker rate. This drug brings you closer to the image of God than He could have ever hoped for. At least these are the things you are willing to claim when you are on a drug that makes your mind work like a Swiss watch, with all the gears in line with each other, everything in sync and spinning, each part unaware of what its neighbor does, but still churning away indefinitely for the greater good.

The sky that day was the most brilliant blue I had ever seen. I stuck my head out the window somewhere on I-15 — we had started going north towards Salt Lake City when I-70 just ended and we hit one of those serious road forks in the middle of nowhere with two big signs pointing in either direction where someone has to say, alright, which way do we go? And Ted and Varun and I collectively know the answer before the question is even asked, because without a definite goal in mind, the idea is push as far as you can before you hit your own limits. So we went north. ♦

March 30, 2009

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