Wheels by Mike Kay

He watched the lights crest the hill in his rear view mirror. Who said that mirrors lie? It was no apparition. The police cruiser pulled parallel and stopped, window to window. His left arm rested easily on the door molding, with his window all the way down he was enjoying the cool night air. He looked over casually to the cop, who had his interior light on.

“Is everything ok here?” The cop asked.

“Yeah”, he replied. “I’m just letting her cool down, then I’ll be on my way.”

The cop looked at him doubtfully.

He just grinned at the officer.

The cop knew quite well what went on out here, at night, on this desolate stretch of road. In the end, the officer had nothing to go on, so the cruiser drove away slowly, as if making a statement through a lack of speed.

An oppressive state creates a clever populace, says the Tao.

He understood the cop well enough, law and order, follow the rules more or less. It was one of a dwindling number of jobs that offered a future, unlike his …

“Why do you want to? Why do you have to? I mean, if there is a God, we’ll all find out”. Her ancestry was from Finland, and it showed in her blue blue eyes and high cheekbones.

She meant the world to him, and he wanted to tell her, to explain, to have her share in his longing. He wanted to explain the thirst to her-to really actually know. He didn’t have the words to explain those experiences, or the wisdom to tie them together. He tried to say something about the space between worlds, the place where this reality ended, and the compulsion to drive right through, but she just looked at him with a growing puzzlement, and a sadness that could have broken glass.

Hers was a belief and trust in the substance of this world. She had returned from the doorway of death brought on by Scarlet fever. The fever had left her damaged, wounded, but with a fierce desire to live here, now. She couldn’t understand anything else, to her any curiosity beyond this physical world was a waste of time. Life was better spent embracing the world with her arms. She wanted to share that with him, and that was about all that ever she did hope for.

Their eyes locked and for a moment there was no space between her femininity and his masculinity. They flowed easily together, winding in and out, a rolling current in a fresh cool stream eager to find its way down the mountain, until they reached the rapids.

“You gotta stop”, she said with so much heart that it felt like a push.” Racing isn’t the way”.

Another set of headlights broke his reverie. No cop this time, the lights were especially intense in the mirror. The car approached slowly, as if the driver had spotted him on the shoulder, yet was hesitating to drive up to him. It took a ridiculous amount of time for the new arrival to pull up beside him with the well tuned throaty mumble of a performance engine. In the drivers’ seat was Paul. He stared in anger out the passenger window where Lisa, his wife was buried in his rage. Paul now projected all of that over to him.

“So, you all alone then?” Paul stared through the dark.

“All alone as agreed, except for my co-pilot”.

Paul’s’ head jerked as he tried to stare into the passenger seat. Unable to give Paul a break, he lifted up his arm and shook a stuffed toy wolf at him, laughing.

“You always were fucking weird, man.” Paul climbed back into his seat.”I’ll see you at the strip”.

Paul’s Mustang roared and was off in a plume of exhaust fumes and burnt rubber.

He reached down and keyed the ignition. The supercharged hemi barked to life, snapping and ticking at idle due to its overcammed, over juiced tuning. The whine of the supercharger was barely audible at idle. It wasn’t even apparent, built as it was to sit underneath the shaker hood. The whole car was pretty much a sleeper, aside from the fancy Crager SS rims and the four hood pins.

The Hurst shifter fell precisely into his right hand as he slipped into first, released the clutch and drove away. In the light of his headlamps the white dashes in the center of the road blurred into a single white line. He honestly couldn’t remember what it was that made Paul turn so completely on him. All he could recall was that they were on pretty good terms, and then at one point they weren’t. It might have been that time Paul got busted for an open container of alcohol, but that was so long ago he wasn’t sure. In any case it all came down to this grudge match. They had both thrown in $500 to make it especially real, which was held by Kevin at Sadies bar and grill.

Heading to the strip, he had to admit she was right, and he needed to stop. Nobody stayed in the same place in this life for all that long, and although he was actually good-exceptional even, when it came to racing, he knew it was dangerous, illegal, and offered no future. His life was always like that, it seemed.

The street race scene was all things to all people. The dilettantes with daddy’s money could cruise around with their pretty girls mooning everyone, because they had it made. Wide eyed kids could get a load of what genuine racing machines were like. Street racing gave the cops something to do besides reducing the world’s supply of donuts. It gave young, savvy mechanics a test for their skills. It gave holier-than-thou types something to rage against. It gave girls who felt that wild streak within themselves the chance to be with the bad boys.

Then of course there were all those more serious things, lawyers making money, judges studying more law, jails justifying their budgets. Racing even threw work at the coroner.

He walked into racing the way he got into anything, by a series of events that he never intended or fully understood. Maybe it was that night he found himself at the strip after a day of too much of everything. The engines roared and the naked headers spit out nitrous boosted flames. He grinned like a fool then, something in his blood stirring.

Of course he got in at the end. Literally it was at the end. Despite society finding all forms of work and profit from racing, society was determined to give it the same fate as steam engines and slide rules. The cold tendrils of dead banality had found racing, and they were clamping down-hard.

New housing developments sprouted up like weird diseases in the forests and fields. More stoplights and more traffic and more taxes and more antennas and more TVs rotting brains and selling people a world they had no right to believe in…

“You are late! Do you know how late?” A hostile frown.

He looked into the hard, washed out eyes of the old woman. Her business suit more than hung off her frail figure. What wasn’t wizened away was her seething disapproval, and her harrumphing over his dirty hands, disheveled hair, and black t-shirt.

“I just had a death in my fam-“, he began honestly before being cut off.

“Save your sob stories” she glared at him.

It occurred to him that as usual, he didn’t really know why he was here. He already knew it was going to be a giant waste of time. She was fumbling for something, and he saw the pack of thin lady’s cigarettes, followed by a cheap lighter. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Yes’, he replied, more than a little vindictively.

The old woman looked genuinely surprised, and if possible, even more resentful towards him.

He could sense it all, a woman determined to win in a man’s world, who spent her life buddying up to the shallow business suit types she could out think without trying. She learned their jargon, and their mannerisms, and with that came the reason for the season, money money money. She traded in her femininity for the tough demeanor she believed she required to survive. She was her future now, with nothing more than gate keeping duties designed to keep the riff raff away. After an hour of pouring over his records, her analysis of his career prospects in the world of real jobs was unsurprisingly dim. He had none.

Top gear was always a balancing act. His car simply had too much power for the crude Detroit chassis, despite his improvements. It wasn’t that the car was skittish, or wandering, it was just that at top speed it was impossible to maneuver. The rear leaf springs hunched down with the posi-traction Dana axle. The front torsion bars, aided with a hefty anti-sway brace were only happy going forward. If any sudden defensive action had to be taken, it simply wouldn’t occur.

His ride was built for one thing, to get to top speed as fast as possible. He made it a personal rule to never check the rattling needle of the speedometer. The tach was all that mattered, watching the rpms curve upwards, and shifting to keep the mighty motor in the zone as the world slowed to a crawl even as it became a tunnel all around him. The sounds would fade, and it seemed that his corrections on the wheel happened in triple time. A million and one fateful things could happen in the tunnel, and if even one leaked in he was probably done.

Here, alone in the tunnel, with speed hurling him headlong into an unknown place he could almost taste the space between worlds. It was a feeling, beyond words, beyond even oblivion. He couldn’t picture it, but he could never dismiss that it was real.

Power down was always the time of abandonment, a return to earth, re-entry into standard time. It always seemed somewhat off, like it wasn’t truly solid, not exactly as it seemed, even as he bore the scars from it, the busted knuckles, the black grit in his pores.

From power down one arrived at the aftermath. This was when the talking returned, the aroma of the tunnel still strong, still singing the siren song. Slowly the banality would creep in, like the cold in a winter night. It would whisper about all the things it demanded from its slaves, and assure him that he was amongst the ranks of slaves.

The strip was several mile long arrow straight blacktop. The racing was mapped out along its length, in half mile sections in order to confuse the cops. The real course was a do-or–die quarter mile that ran some thirty feet above the surrounding fields, with no shoulder or turn off other than down below. It was no more than a mile from the primary staging area, and perhaps two miles from the T intersection at strips end. The road was easy to block off, and during major events it was tough for even competitors to get through. That was not going to be an issue tonight.

He slowed as he approached the strip, noting wryly that the authorities had preceded him. A mass of vehicles clogged the staging area, and no small number of them bore various types of flashing lights. Some cars were finding their way out of the mess, but he had no desire to run that gauntlet. Slowing to a crawl, he found what he was looking for, a little known and less used turn off that led to the slumping ruin of an old abandoned house.

He wove up the rough two-track, killed the lights, and shut the big motor down. Climbing out, it was only him under the stars. In ancient times, it is said, wise observers watched the stars. They stayed up all night, watching, and they learned the secrets of the destiny of mankind.

He played with his keys, tossing them high in the night air and letting them fall down into his scarred, dirty hands. It seemed then, that he faced a choice, and that choice was clear, open, yet with its own cost. He could leave it all, and return to his blue eyed babe. Kevin would keep his $500, Paul would call him a wuss and strut around with his ego on display…or he could wait it out and see if Paul was still around.

Laughing into the night he stretched out his arms, taking in a deep heady breath. Somehow the stars felt brighter, and he could see the cloudy trail of the Milky Way. The tyranny of standard time left him then, and there was no present, no future or past, there was only the flow, and the flow was everywhere and it was everything. He breathed and the flow passed through him. It felt like a near tickle, but with a force to it. He became that flow and for a moment or an hour or an eternity he was simply motion.

More than anyone else, it was the heir to Plato, Aristotle, who came up with a view on time that still has its hold on people today. Aristotle called his description a riddle, most likely because he couldn’t claim it was anything else. He said that the future, and the past didn’t exist, and that no one could describe the scope of the present, because in thinking about it, time became either future or past.

Looking to the stars, there was no riddle of time, there were only hungry wolves chasing one down, sometimes closer, sometimes farther, but never out of view. The grim cold terror of the wolves’ jaws clamping down upon his prey meant there was no past, and no future, and if there be a present at all it hangs upon gleaming canines hungry for dinner.

It was all just the flow, and some things surfaced and others sank but there was no stopping the immensity of it. And this immensity reached its shore line, and upon it he stood in silence, for the night was notable for what it suddenly lacked, the sound of vehicles.

There was the soft hissing of the breeze, upon which the subtle sounds of the night world drifted, but there were no vehicles.

The drive to the staging area was quiet, empty. Not a person, not one car was anywhere to be seen. He listened to the crackling idle of his motor. He was about to turn around, to leave it behind, when in the distance another car appeared moving extremely quickly. It was, he knew Paul rushing onwards to meet him. Just like earlier, the Mustang pulled up right beside him. Lisa rolled down her window and gave him her trademark toothy grin.

“Paul says he wants to beat your ass”. She was waving something in her hand, and he realized it was a ticket-or three. “The cops hit us with these, and now he’s mad”.

As if on cue, Paul stuck his head completely out the window, looking to all the world that he did indeed reach a new level of angry. “Get to the start weirdo, and I MEAN NOW!”

Start was a simple white stripe that bisected the road. It had been repainted dozens of times due to wear from the racing. Finish was an identical stripe, only in yellow, to alert the drivers to power down. Start was where all the action was. Whoever shaved the launch best had the advantage. If the cars were close in capability, the best start won, hands down.

Lisa was out on the road, standing at pole. Pole was right between the cars. She carefully coached the drivers to form up right at the plane of the white line. He really couldn’t believe she was going to flag start from this position. It was literally the most dangerous place for a non-racer to be. As she carefully untied the red scarf from around her neck, he realized she was putting herself there to force Paul and him to launch as cleanly, and as in control as possible. At that moment he found a new respect for her. Her courage was on the level.

If the start wasn’t perfect, if there was the slightest fishtail, or broken flywheel, or whatever there would be no more Lisa.

She raised her scarf over her head, fluttering in the night breeze, lit up by the glow of the headlights.

He knew exactly how to shave the launch. He knew the rpm threshold where the big paws would bite into the pavement without breaking loose. He knew exactly how much play was in the clutch pedal, and he took up the slack.

Lisa’s arm came down fast, and as the red scarf just brushed her knee he was gone. No fishtail, no parts flying. In the mirror he caught her image stand back up, the scarf still in her hand. She was watching them go, and for a moment she stood before vanishing into the night.

The roar of the motor was clean, the howl of the supercharger perfect. He knew Paul was behind, close behind him, that he had beaten Paul out of the hole. The tachometer tapped 6,5oo rpm, and he was into second gear and climbing. Still no view of Paul, although he felt the Mustang somewhere off his rear quarter panel, hungry, trying to sink its fangs into him.

The car hunkered down on her springs as the Hemi drove sheer horsepower down into the paws. Final gear was reached and he gave the wolf all of his legs to run to the end of the world and beyond. Ahead, in the tunnel, the glowing yellow line was in view.

In a flash he was past it. Having won, he felt the heavy change from fury to an incoming release he knew so well. He was waiting for it, as he eased off the throttle and the entire dynamic of the car began to change with it. He waited for the feeling to fully arrive, yet it never did.

Something had occurred which was outside of his experience. A brilliant multicolored yet overtly white light completely wiped out his vision. He could no longer feel his hands, or his feet, or his weight. He had no sense of speed, or of much of anything. Like the opening of a drain, a whirling disc of darkness appeared, at first small and then growing rapidly larger until it consumed him and all the light and erased him from existence.

As if suddenly, shockingly becoming aware he was rising from a great depth. The trauma of darkness released him, and he floated up, up, an air bubble in deep water effortlessly rising to breach the surface.

Where he stood, or actually hovered was between two great wheels, one above and one below. He had emerged from an endless darkness to be between them both. “Wow,” he suddenly thought,” the space between worlds.”

He saw her then, moving up through the fastness. He got the definite impression that this was no ordinary woman. She seemed at once to be gigantic and also of mortal stature in a way he couldn’t truly grasp. Her form was surrounded by a glowing darkness, scintillating. Her legs were long and beautiful, slightly revealed through her split side dark gown. She approached with a magnetic grace. The right side of her face was simply a black outline with her perfect white skull showing within. She waved her arm in a simple gesture and the mist of the wheels parted. He saw Lisa sobbing uncontrollably, and the smoking ruin of the Mustang, what had been Paul mangled within. It took him a moment to catch the scent, but he did know the aroma of his own car, and upon finding it he tracked it to discover the beautiful ruin. His own dead eyes stared at him, even as the great motor still ran, the mechanical spirit not going easily to the darkness. In a way he thought it was kind of a waste, but then it occurred to him that there probably was no other way it could have gone. It wasn’t like he ever spoke the language of this world.

‘You can stay here awhile, if you like, a lot of people do”. He felt the words inside him, and realized that it was Death herself speaking.

“Stay?”

“Yes”, the words were soft, magnetic, beautiful.”Some with spiritual gifts remain to act as protectors for those they love”.

He watched the wheels reform and he was longer next to himself, looking into the flow, he saw his blue eyed girl, how sad she was, for far too long, and how a simple yet strong man was turned into her stream, and how her sorrow became acceptance, and acceptance became love, and they moved together away.

“I feel so light”, he said.

“Um hum”, she replied. “Nothing is holding you down anymore”.

“So even here we choose?”

“Only some get to choose”.

He gathered himself then. “So, if I stay, will it be easier, or harder on those alive?”

She seemed to move closer. “You must decide”.

His hands opened and everything fell out of them. His expensive Snap-on sockets, his drill-and-tap set, his keys, his license, his electric bill, all the harassing letters from all the agencies, all the threatening messages, all the greedy fingers wanting to squeeze everything from him, and in the end his girl with the blue, blue eyes released her grip on his fingers, and let him go.

The darkness around beautiful death seemed to grow then, until it filled all vision, absorbing all things, all hopes and all fears and all lust and all hate. The press of nothingness came on, a cool dissolving, a falling as cool and as effortless as a great foaming wave.

Falling.

Into the flow falling.

His name was pulled from his lips, and like a fire it burned in geometric intensity before being absorbed. The very strands of his thought unraveled and became words in a language he could barely comprehend before whirling away and merging with great fountains of fire that seemingly just appeared. All that he was, from the pain of his mother who brought him forth with her joy and energy into this world to the blood running down his broken knuckles, to the final moment when his fragile form was torn asunder by speed and steel simply whirling into the great fire, feeding it wildly, almost exhaustively, before giving way to pure silence, pure space.

“You have chosen,” he felt her words, “to go onward”.

He expanded suddenly, a flash of invisible light. He was so much of everything, it could no longer be contained, a center of nothing, no identity. Into the vastness of the cosmos he had gone.

Cover Photo: Pinterest