No rain. The puddles showed fragments of sky in the gravel. As he crossed to the minivan, the girl wandered out from behind a Subaru Brat rusting along the door sills. A boy who appeared to be a couple of years younger trailed her, wearing a bandanna around his neck like a cowboy.
‘I bet I know how you can find your friend,’ the girl said.
‘Your mom didn’t know anything.’
‘I have a technique,’ she said.
‘Really.’ He looked for her to smirk, but she only nodded. He felt tired and drained of resistance and ideas. He shrugged.
They passed between rough rows of vehicles lying side by side, spaced just far enough apart to allow the doors to swing a few inches, cars and trucks caved, twisted, pierced, burned, or freed of doors, hood, wheels, trunk lid, roof or fenders. Like bodies gathered after battle. Like a sorting of things before the rendering of final judgement. Drops of rainwater clung to the sheet metal, puddled in the dents. The girl and the boy walked ahead, and the boy’s steps clicked oddly – he was wearing tap shoes. And Ellis heard occasional shrill voices calling in other parts of the junkyard, words he could not make out.
A pile of rusting wheels. A pile of drive shafts. Somewhere a train moved, pushing vibrations that caused the entire field of vehicles to shimmer. Ellis lagged behind. It was easy to imagine that in any slightly different life he would never have come here.
The girl slowed and spoke without looking: the back of her head speaking to him. ‘The thing is, dead people don’t just go away. Things don’t just disappear. Things leave an effect. Souls leave an effect. And here we have a bunch of things that have the traces of souls. They’re not
Ellis hardly knew where to begin with this.
‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘it can’t hurt.’
Ellis asked, ‘Are you talking about ghosts?’
She glanced back. ‘Boo!’ Then she turned into a cul-de-sac and stopped before a Monte Carlo – crimson paint, gold trim, the interior upholstered in beige. The paint gleamed, the tyres held air. But the passenger door had been forced deep into the vehicle, as if staved in by a battering ram. The girl opened the driver’s door. She looked at Ellis.
‘What?’ Ellis said.
‘You’ll have to sit here.’
Ellis looked at his watch. The day had advanced into mid-afternoon. Overhead, clouds still dominated. ‘Are you sure you haven’t seen a big guy with a beard?’ Ellis asked. ‘Whatever he paid you, I’ll pay double.’
‘Don’t you want to find your friend?’
He peered inside. Colourful paraphernalia covered the dashboard and the pale seat fabric was spattered with stains. He tried to remember – he seemed to have no instinctive sense of himself any more – if in the past this was the sort of situation he would have extracted himself from. The stains appeared to be blood. An enormous blotching covered the passenger seat, which was distorted by the impacted door. He waited for the girl to say something ridiculous that would spur him away. But she said nothing.
The driver’s seat held him as softly as a plush sofa. Gold braid and tassels ran around the windshield glass; cards printed with the images of saints hung from the ceiling; figurines of crudely painted plastic stood on the dash holding swords, sceptres or birds; faux leopard skin wrapped the steering wheel; a bust of a weeping Virgin dangled from the rear-view mirror. The sun had faded the colours of the cards and figurines. The leopard skin was soiled at three and nine o’clock. A small stain of, again, blood marked the chin of the Virgin.
‘What now?’ he asked.
She closed the door. ‘Put your hands on the wheel.’ She circled to the front and she looked at him down the length of the hood. ‘Ask your question.’
‘What?’
‘The one you want answered.’
‘Who’s going to answer it?’
‘That’s a stupid question. That’s not the question you want answered.’
He looked around the car once more.
‘Ask your question,’ she said.
‘Where is Boggs?’ he said. ‘How do I find him?’
‘One question. Repeat it one hundred and eleven times.’
He laughed. But she waited with a dark gaze. ‘How do I find Boggs?’ he said. He began to repeat it.
The boy with the bandanna had disappeared. The girl bent and came up with a rubber mallet. She swung it at the hood, and it bounced away with a crash that sent the entire steel body of the car into a short, resonating shriek. ‘Keep going!’ she yelled and lifted and swung, lifted and swung, in rhythm with the repeated question. Then, with a bang, an answering percussion began – in the mirror Ellis saw a boy, not the boy with the bandanna but a sleepy- eyed blond boy, swinging a pair of croquet mallets at the trunk. The noise was painfully loud. Then the boy with the bandanna reappeared, running up the hood, scrambling onto the roof, and the tap shoes began striking there like falling ball bearings. Ellis cringed. But the noise had begun to generate a rhythm of patterns within patterns, and the hanging cards jiggled and turned, the tinsel and the gold braid shimmered and sparked, the Virgin bobbled and the noise beat a rhythm in Ellis’s core. He could no longer hear himself chanting the question –
He had no idea how many times he had repeated his question when the girl yelled, ‘Shut your eyes!’ He did. Effects echoed and buzzed, waves of pressure moved in him. At some point he had stopped mumbling his question. The terrible splitting havoc went on and on. He had to admit, if anything could shift the substance of the world off its rational foundation, this might be it.
Then it stopped.
Silence.
‘Listen for it!’ the girl shouted.
He wondered, For?
For the voice of the person or persons who had been in this car? The voices from all the accidents he had studied and reconstructed? The voices from all the accidents everywhere, ever, from Bridget Driscoll at the Crystal Palace and onward? The accidents in this way became a mathematical progression past counting. Meanwhile a noise skimmed the edge of his awareness, a modulating of frequencies and a havoc of tempo, imagined, a fire in the ears. Before him hung shining pinwheels, depthless drifting auroras. He trembled. If time could fall away, if he could look in all directions, where would he look? But he could not even keep his thoughts focused on Boggs. Instead, he thought of Heather, with an aching.
Then he realised, with a dull internal settling, that he could not believe in this business of the traces of spirits and souls. Even after allowing himself to be brought this far, his mind shaken and emotional, some crucial part of him knew that this was nonsense. He experienced this knowledge as a flaw in himself. He seemed empty, lacking belief in a soul and therefore almost certainly without the possession of one.
A breeze hissed on the sharp edges of the car. There seemed a rhythm in it, too. Whisperings. A warble of metal ripping in the faint distance.
‘Human factors analysis.’
‘What?’
‘People don’t assess speed, it’s hard to assess speed. We assess the gap. The gap between vehicles, the gap available to cross or turn.’
Darkness. ‘Boggs?’
‘Are you happy?’
‘No. No, I’m not happy.’
‘Are you depressed, Ellis?’
‘I’m not happy.’
‘Are you sad?’
‘What is this?’
