The Long Walk

I thought I was dead. I meant to be dead, not walking the ragged edge of asphalt wondering where I was and where I was going. I had planned my death. I selected the spot with some care: an unfamiliar mountain road so far from home that nobody would recognize me and wonder why I was driving up there, and a vertiginous slope with a flimsy aluminum guardrail already distorted by previous impacts. It was so far down that your eyes fooled you into thinking the bottom half of the trunks of the skinny pines were reflections in a phantom pool. I had waited until the sun grew huge and red on the horizon, then maneuvered the red Mirage around so that it pointed directly at the guardrail. I pulled the parking brake up, released the clutch and revved. The Mirage lunged like a junkyard dog, but the brake held. I smiled and let it go, and the Mirage flew out into the air, into the tops of the pines like a red metallic bird on a mission of self-destruction. You were a good car, Mitsubishi. Too bad it had to end this way.

Only somehow, it hadn’t ended.

I should be dead. Why was I still here? Why was I walking along the same road, worrying whether a car was going to come zooming around the curve and kill me, when I should already be dead?

Was that the spot up ahead? I could see something red, something metallic. It couldn’t be, I told myself. This absolutely could not be.

But it was. The Mirage was sitting crosswise, facing the ragged gap in the guardrail. Her windshield was the milky color of shattered safety glass, and her front end... I could have cried. I didn’t want to think of my only friend ending up like that. I laid a hand on the mangled metal, thinking. Why was the car messed up, when I didn’t seem to have a scratch on me?

I jumped when I saw it: movement reflected in what was left of the car’s hood. I looked up and saw a man in a black suit standing near the driver’s door.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“You tell me,” he said.

I looked at him carefully.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“What don’t you get?”

“Why am I still here, and why is my car...?”

“Where else would you be?”

“I don’t know. I expected someplace... different.”

“Why?”

“I beg your pardon? I expected to be dead!”

“And you thought that would be different? Why?”

“Because... well....”

“Doesn’t that smack of wishful thinking? If this life is so horrible that you have to get out of it over a cliff, what would hell be but more of the same?”

I peered at him. Were his eyes reflecting the cherry red of the car, or the crimson of the sunset?

“So this is hell? I died and went to hell?”

“Did you? Or were you in hell all along?”

“So you’re telling me that this is going to be eternity, me getting in my car and running it off the cliff again and again and again?”

“Is that what you’re going to do?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“You tell me.”

I glared at him, but he didn’t give. Then I marched around to the driver’s door, got inside and started the engine. I couldn’t see out the windshield, so I lowered the door window. It came down a couple of inches, and then fell out on the ground. Never mind, I thought. I put the car in first and steered it back down the hill.

There was a flash of light, and suddenly I was looking at an empty road, looking through the intact windshield at an undamaged guardrail. Well, at least I hadn’t damaged it. Was this how it worked? Would all the damage undo itself each time, so that I could experience death afresh each time? Would I think I could escape, only to be forced into endless iterations of suicide?

I didn’t hear his voice, but I knew what he would say: “Is that what you’re going to do?”

No, I told myself. That may be what I’m supposed to do, but I’m going to fight it every inch of the way. I put the car in gear and drove back down the road, seeing how far I could get back toward life.

Once again I saw movement reflected in the finish of the car, only this time it was light. It was pure and brilliant light, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn I saw the flutter of enormous white wings.