I’d been some sixty or so hours on the road since leaving Tulsa. This was known by the fact that I’d listened through Human Action on cassette in its entirety, and the greatest rock and roll album of all time, Dire Strait’s 1982 classic, Love Over Gold, thirteen times- driving by night and sleeping out in the back seat of the car, parked in vacant lots by day, rereading Mises that I’d listened to the night before and making notes before falling asleep. In the evening, when I woke, I made cups of coffee on the Jetboil. I drove nights because I hoped to catch sight of owls swooping down across the road or sitting in the grass by the shoulders, and on a few precious occasions I did see them.
This habit, of taking extraordinary measures to meet my peculiar desire, to meet some eccentric aesthetic need or other, is nothing new for me. Once, in fact, I had rented a home on 36th Street solely on account of a sign there which warned “Caution: Low Flying Owls.” Nights I would sit on the porch tinkering at various projects, few of which amounted to anything- excepting, obviously, The Firm- and none of which I have abandoned, as such cannot be given up, but must be pursued, even if in fits and starts, until brought into the last state of perfection; or, when unable to focus on my work, reading some old tome or other that had taken my fancy. Yet after eighteen months of such living, I saw nary a low-flying owl, despite even the various schemes I had employed in order to attract them. That was all some time ago. In my nighttime drives I had met with more success. Perhaps nature is healing, or perhaps owls prefer empty country highways to city streets. Or, perhaps, owls do not take kindly to being cautioned against.
I am certain that it is this nocturnal habit of mine, the loneliness of the roads I travel, and the single-minded fixity on my prepossessions- my books, my owls- that lead to the sudden strange change in the world escaping my notice completely.
True, some early mornings as I looked for a place to sleep, I passed a lonely vehicle and noted that some of these drivers wore odd coverings over their faces, and that in the roadside trash that I cleaned while on my walks after waking, more and more I found blue or white paper facemasks, crumpled and dingy. But I confess that I merely suspected that there were in this part of the country many more Asians than I had previously assumed.
True, too, that none of the businesses I passed in the evenings as I started out on my drives appeared open. But as I had never any intention of stopping anywhere, I did not look too closely, and when I thought about this at all I believed it nothing but the consequence of the continual hollowing-out of the heartlands to be sold piecemeal to the coasts or beyond. Sad, yes, but no indication of the deeper madness that had in fact lain hold, no sign of the terrible frenzied suppression of all human activity that had overcome a world caught in the bloodless, wrinkled grip of a million bony, frightened hands.
I’d spoken to no one on that drive.
My gas I purchased with Visa giftcards, bought with cash earned from The Firm before leaving Tulsa. I’d learned my lesson on this account some years ago, when traveling cross-country with a friend into the high desert, using a mason jar full of sea monkeys, his theory of the effect of the moon’s rays on the evolutionary process. Somewhere on the border between California and Nevada, we had pulled into the lone gas station and found it closed for the night. We loitered around, thinking of waiting until morning- an unattractive option, we both had to return to work in two days and had some two thousand miles of driving left to do- when a car pulled up to the only stop sign. We ran to the car, a little blue sportscar of some kind full of Chinese exchange students on a midweek run to Las Vegas. For some reason they did not speed off. Maybe they did not see us coming. We talked them into letting us use their parent’s credit cards to fill our tank, in return for cash.
For food, I had The Firm. A handful of organic waste, taken from trashcans behind gas stations, or even humus from the forest floor, fed into the Input; a turn of a few dials; and whatever meal I wished appeared from the Output. The whole contraption was the size and shape of an EzBake Oven, because I’d made it from an EzBake Oven and covered it in black electrical tape; because it was a black box with Inputs and Outputs the name came naturally enough.
Do not ask me to explain how it worked. I could not possibly do so. I could show you how to build it, and with a proper workshop and a team of apprentices I am certain I could scale it up as large as you like, could rebuild it the size of a warehouse, of a city block, of a small city even, could drive in truckloads of trash, turn it all into whatever you liked, could feed a nation on its own refuse. Sustenance and waste are the same stuff, generally, differing only in arrangement, one being agreeable to our tastes and digestive systems, one repulsive. All it takes is a careful rearranging to turn it from one state to the other. Everyone knows this and accepts it but assumes it must take an inconvenient amount of time and an unwieldy number of intermediaries- worms, bacterium, grass, mushrooms, trees, ruminants and squirrels and whathaveyou- to pass through the cycle. All I did was speed the process up a little and bring all the factors together into one place.
But no one gives charge over a small city, nor even a warehouse, to someone merely for doing a necessary task miraculously well.
The capital? One needs a bank, and banks need to see cashflow, meaning not the inflow of pure cash on a regular basis, but signed pieces of paper, properly accounted for and double accounted for and taxable at each change of hand.
Perhaps a grant, then? Foundations give grants, and foundations need to see proper paperwork showing the right sorts of people with the right sorts of titles typing out the right sorts of emails.
Perhaps show another how to do the work, a skilled apprentice? Apprentices must be found, and to be found they must be advertised for, and advertising for them will bring all sorts of questions from all sorts of guardians over human rights about the hiring processes, the guarantees made about equal treatment, the protections allowed for days off sick, and so on.
And all of these, of course, checked and double checked by the right sorts of lawyers.
All this tedium for a mere product of nights spent tinkering on my porch, all this that I would have given for the low cost of a place to sleep, good work to do, and interesting people to do it with. In every city in the nation I would have replicated The Firm at scale and asked for no more. I’m a man of simple asks. I have my solitary eccentricities and neither demand nor ask for more. I would simply prefer not to.
What cash I now had on hand I’d made turning scraps of tacos into cilantro, leftover falafel into saffron, for some few old friends, owners of some few small places who I already knew well and who would listen to me when I told them of my marvelous invention. Then I took to the road. As I lay, after my reading, falling asleep in my car each morning, I wondered what, after all, I was to do with the thing, and had some vague hope that, like the inspiration for the invention itself, some method of employing it would present itself to me unbidden, a gift of the Muse.
In this way I’d come half across the country and found myself nearly to the Atlantic, when I decided it might be nice, as I was neither a beast nor a god, to speak again to another person, to order two eggs and sausage and hashbrowns and pay for it cash and sit and drink burnt black coffee and talk about the weather.
As luck would have it I was near upon the Isle of Chincoteague, and, thinking I should also very much like to see for myself these flocks of horses on their saltgrass prairie, I elected to change my habit, to sleep a night in the car, wake with the dawn and cross over into town.
That next morning I turned on my music and headed east to the world-historic sweep of Telegraph Road- truly the closest in spirit to the Archaeology of Thucydides as anything ever put to music- and I could see ahead of me dark clouds piling up one upon another, some storm there looming toward me. Coming through Assawoman I passed homes that looked empty though cars sat in the driveways, then some time after rounded a bend in the highway and came upon a wide, open, fenced area, and an airfield.
Just then a plane, large, with two rotary engines and a radar dish- a Grumman E-2 Hawkeye, if my eye did not fail me- swooped low over me, as if to land, before lifting back up again. It was followed by another, then three more, all swooping low, low enough that I felt I could reach out and touch them, then lifting off again in a tight spiral, low and up again over and over. They must surely have been practicing touch-and-goes or monitoring the gathering storm, but I felt, quite irrationally, that they were monitoring the roadway, watching me specifically, tracking my every move and transmitting it back to some substation or subsubstation where little men in grey uniforms with weak coffee steaming in styrofoam cups were logging everything, every emission from my exhaust, every change in my speed, even the expressions on my face, the movements of my eyes as they flicked from the road to those unaccountable circling planes back to the road again.
Then I was past them and they did not follow and before me was the bridge to the islands, to the little town of Chincoteague, the highway low, just above the tops of the saltgrass and the heads of the herons, so low that it would surely be swamped by this coming storm and all other storms that were to come or had come before.
My eyes were peeled for those flocks of horses and I soon forgot the planes. Surely they but monitored the weather.
I drove through town. All storefronts closed save one.
Odd, for a tourist town. But it was early in the morning yet.
The open storefront, I saw as I drove past it again, was not a store or a restaurant at all but a foodbank, with a cafe attached, and I could see as I passed figures milling about inside the cafe.
I parked and sat and listened through to the end of “Private Investigations” and stepped out and started walking toward it, thinking that, though they should probably not do a hot breakfast they would at least have coffee, and some pastries, and there I should enjoy some fine company, and leave them a donation, when it all came to me in one unexplainable unbidden flash, inspired from some place I could not find if I tried, as all great ideas are, as The Firm has been, the solution to my problem. It was obvious.
Here I could provide them what they wanted- food to fill this bank and any other bank- and all I would ask was a spot in the back, perhaps, to lay out a cot, or a hammock, and I would spend my time making all the food they needed and going to the festivals and seeing those flying ponies and chatting with the tourists and doing some little fishing from the dock. Here at last some charitable persons that could accept my gift and give what little I asked in return.
I turned around and ran back to my car, opened the trunk, and proudly took out The Firm. With head high I marched back toward the foodbank.
With a smile I pushed open the door, the black box in my arms. It swung to and bounced with a friendly jangle of bells.
The sign said Seat Yourself so I did.
Then with a deep breath and beneficent gesture prepared I turned around, thinking of how I would not finish my cherry danish, though I did love cherry danishes, how confused they would be as I demonstrated my wonderful device by shoving the uneaten food into the Input, the lobster roll or macaron or chiles en nogada I would produce, their delight as I explained the miracle, the solution to all these troubles that they had taken upon themselves.
There were four of them, five, standing in a wide semicircle in the back of the diningroom, all standing awkwardly far apart, too far apart even to shake hands, their eyes fixed on me and the bottoms halves of their faces covered, and in those eight or ten eyes some unspeakable alarm and penetrating horror. I whirled about to find the source of this horror, saw only my own reflection in the window behind me.
Turning back to the figures I saw it was me that their eyes had fixed upon and mixed in with the alarm and the horror I saw now some malice, some malignant triumph in those eyes and that their faces were hidden by masks of blue paper or brightly colored cloth with little pictures of unicorns or rainbows and beneath these, swallowed in these masks, were coming inarticulate sobs and gibberings, their bony fingers one and all pointing from me to the door and to the other signs that I had missed, signs that said SAVE a LIFE wear a MASK and All Customers Must Stand Six Feet Apart and all screeching in one voice one word again and again OUT!
I whirled from one to the other to the other addressing in sputtering half starts one then the other in questioning what’s? and I don’t understands? but they were closing in on me now, hesitatingly at first but then as they came closer to me and the circle tightened they came faster and faster and they moved as one body held together by invisible six-foot poles and I confess that though there was some unbridgeable strangeness, some quality in them, something palpable insisting that between them and I there could be no comport nor agreement nor exchange of words, that we were not even out of time or of language with each other but not even of the same species, that despite this that terror I saw in their eyes, terror which supersedes the bounds of species and which I have sensed even in a salamander or a vole, leapt from their eyes into mine and entered my breast and I turned and fled, stopping only to turn once at the door and look back.
From some hidden folds in their plastic aprons they had produced aerosol cans and spray bottles and rags and they were furiously spraying and wiping The Firm. One or all of them in their nervous frenzy knocked it to the floor. It shattered, the pieces that I could not name though I had built every one myself by hand skittering across the linoleum and the women squealing, leaping away from these pieces as if they were hot embers.
Not waiting to see what they would do to me should take me in their bloodless gripe, I ran to my car.
I drove to the wildlife refuge but the gates were closed and locked. I drove back across to the mainland, the watchful planes still buzzing, and kept driving until I made it to West Virginia. There, I thought, I might eat a pepperoni roll, see some more owls, and try again to find someone to visit with.