She moved to touch him and her motion released him like a spring. This time she didn’t stop him. She resigned herself to his numbness. He said everything he could with his body.
They lay quietly.
“Do you feel O.K.?” he said, and suddenly he was talking his head off.
He rehearsed all his plans for obscure glory and they laughed. He told her poems and they decided he was going to be great. She pitied him for his courage as he described the demons on his shoulders.
“Get away, you dirty old things.” She kissed his neck.
“Some on my stomach, too.”
After a while Tamara fell asleep. That was what he had been talking against. Her sleeping seemed like a desertion. It always happened when he felt most awake. He was ready to make immortal declarations.
Her hand rested on his arm like snow on a leaf, ready to slip off when he moved.
He lay beside her, an insomniac with visions of vastness. He thought of desert stretches so huge no Chosen People could cross them. He counted grains of sand like sheep and he knew his job would last forever. He thought of aeroplane views of wheatlands so high he couldn’t see which way the wind was bending the stalks. Arctic territories and sled-track distances.
Miles he would never cover because he could never abandon this bed.
12
Still Breavman and Krantz often used to drive through the whole night. They’d listen to pop tunes on the local stations or classics from the United States. They’d head north to the Laurentians or east to the Townships.
Breavman imagined the car they were in as seen from above. A small black pellet hurtling across the face of the earth. Free as a meteor and maybe as doomed.
They fled past fields of blue snow. The icy crust kept a stroke of moonlight the way rippled water does. The heater was going full blast. They had nowhere to be in the morning, only lectures and that didn’t count. Everything above the snow was black — trees, shacks, whole villages.
Moving at that speed they were not bound to anything. They could sample all the possibilities. They flashed by trees that took a hundred years to grow. They tore through towns where men lived their whole lives. They knew the land was old, the mountains the most ancient on earth. They covered it all at eighty miles an hour.
There was something disdainful in their speed, disdainful of the eons it took the mountains to smooth out, of the generations of muscle which had cleared the fields, of the labour which had gone into the modern road they rolled on. They were aware of the disdain. The barbarians must have ridden Roman highways with the same feeling. We have the power now. Who cares what went before?
And there was something frightened in their speed. Back in the city their families were growing like vines. Mistresses were teaching a sadness no longer lyrical but claustrophobic. The adult community was insisting that they choose an ugly particular from the range of beautiful generalities. They were flying from their majority, from the real bar mitzvah, the real initiation, the real and vicious circumcision which society was hovering to inflict through limits and dull routine.
They spoke gently to the French girls in the diners where they stopped. They were so pathetic, false-toothed and frail. They’d forget them in the next twenty miles. What were they doing behind the Arborite counters? Dreaming of Montreal neon?
The highway was empty. They were the only two in flight and that knowledge made them deeper friends than ever. It elated Breavman. He’d say, “Krantz, all they’ll ever find of us is a streak of oil on the garage floor without even rainbows in it.” Lately Krantz had been very silent, but Breavman was certain he was thinking the same things. Everyone they knew or who loved them was sleeping miles behind the exhaust. If the radio music was rock-and-roll, they understood the longing of it; if it was Handel, they understood the majesty.
At some point in these rides Breavman would proposition himself like this: Breavman, you’re eligible for many diverse experiences in this best of all possible worlds. There are many beautiful poems which you will write and be praised for, many desolate days when you won’t be able to lay pen to paper. There will be many lovely cunts to lie in, different colours of skin to kiss, various orgasms to encounter, and many nights you will walk out your lust, bitter and alone. There will be many heights of emotion, intense sunsets, exalting insights, creative pain, and many murderous plateaux of indifference where you won’t even own your personal despair. There will be many good hands of power you can play with ruthlessness or benevolence, many vast skies to lie under and congratulate yourself on humility, many galley rides of suffocating slavery. This is what waits for you. Now, Breavman, here is the proposition. Let us suppose that you could spend the rest of your life exactly as you are at this very minute, in this car hurtling towards brush country, at this precise stop on the road beside a row of white guide posts, always going past these posts at eighty, this juke-box song of rejection pumping, this particular sky of clouds and stars, your mind including this immediate cross-section of memory — which would you choose? Fifty-more years of this car ride, or fifty more of achievement and failure?
And Breavman never hesitated in his choice.
Let it go on as it is right now. Let the speed never diminish. Let the snow remain. Let me never be removed from this partnership with my friend. Let us never find different things to do. Let us never evaluate one another. Let the moon stay on one side of the
