The Furious Spinner

We didn't sleep well. I woke up at 4:00, then tried to sleep some more, until about 5:00 a.m. Mario and I stayed curled up under the covers together for a while. I said, "This is all I need in the world." But we had a five week trip to take. So we got up, cooked breakfast, packed our stuff in the car and were off. The day was cold, but it looked like it might get sunny.

After about an hour of driving, we saw a silver car off the side of the road in flames. Black smoke poured out of the vehicle. We were all stopped now, all four lanes of both sides of the highway. The passenger door was open and the fire had consumed nearly all it could, leaving behind a skeleton of a door, reminding me of those movie shots of people turning to bones from fire. I wanted to look away but was mesmerized. Soon the fire truck came. Whatever they put on the car turned the smoke to white. Then gradually the smoke disappeared and we were all on our way.

"If I believed in portents," I said, "I'd think this was a bad sign."

I was determined on this trip to be relaxed, not to worry, to meditate and have a healing attitude. When I wasn't driving, I meditated. I felt peaceful. I felt as though a new world was opening up to us, finally. Things were turning around. Fog curled up from the fields we passed, looking like fat white fingers reaching for the toy cars going by. Then the fog came in all around us. Moving more like clouds, than fog. Making it all seem beautiful. Magical.

We stopped in Eugene and had lunch at the Morning Glory Cafe. We always stop here when we're in Eugene. They have a peace sign next to the name of the cafe on the building. We know we are dining with like-minded people. Inside was the great vegetarian and organic food we love, served to us by an eclectic group of people. On a light switch was a sticker that read: Mean people are in the White House. Today I ordered sesame noodle stir-fry and Mario had vegetarian quesadilla. Delicious.

On the road again. Highway 5.. Red-tailed hawks watched the road from perches on fences along the way.

I got twitches—something I ate, I guessed. So I tried to meditate. I closed my eyes. Then I heard the wheels running over that rough pavement—whatever that is that's supposed to wake you up if you fall asleep. I started to open my eyes and say, "I think you're drifting," but we were already in a spin. I started screaming. I had no idea what was happening. Things were hitting the car. I put my hand up against the window. All I could hear were my screams. In my head, I was thinking what's happening, what's happening. And the car seemed to be knocking against so many things and it would have to flip over soon and we would be dead.

Then the car stopped. I looked over. Mario was fine. We weren't turned over. We were in the grassy median, closer to the traffic going in the other direction.

Mario said, "I don't know what happened."

"Didn't you fall asleep?"

"I wasn't sleepy. I don't know what happened."

Then, nothing else mattered. Once Mario said he didn't think he'd fallen asleep, I feared the worst. We both got out of the car. The passenger side was badly damaged; my door would barely open. Two men ran down the embankment.

"You are a lucky guy!" one of them said.

Wouldn't it have been luckier if we hadn't gotten in an accident?

Hands shaking I looked for the cell phone we had just gotten yesterday. I called 911. She kept me on the phone asking all these stupid questions. "Where do you live?" Who cares where I live can't you send someone out here!

The men left. Mario and I got back into the car, shaking. We held hands and cried.

"All I care about is that you're all right," I said.

"All I kept thinking is Kim all right."

The wind shook the car, and we sat shivering, wondering where the sheriff was. Mario called the insurance agent. There wasn't anything they could do on a weekend, but we got a claim number. The sheriff finally pulled up. He got out of the car with some effort and walked toward us, his pot-belly pushing on a button near his navel so hard we could see his undershirt. Mario told him what happened.

"Yep, we see it here all the time. This stretch of road just hypnotizes people."

"But I wasn't sleepy."

"People say that all the time. It's this stretch of road."

He didn't take a report—said they didn't have the budget to do that kind of thing any more. But he did call a tow truck. The sheriff left. I called the place we were going to be staying at tonight and told her we couldn't make it. She was nice enough not to charge us.

We got back into our wrecked car and waited. About 10 minutes later a big old flatbed tow truck pulled up. A teenager and a man got out. I stared at the truck as they figured out how to get the car up onto it and realized I was going to have to ride in this thing for forty miles.

While they were trying to figure out what to do with the car, I got into the car and drove it around so they could access it easier. Soon the boy got into the space behind the front seats in the truck, and I got in the seat next to the driver. Mario sat next to me. The truck was, of course, filthy. (Lucky I can't smell.) The driver was just helping out for the weekend while the boy's parents moved his grandmother. The boy was the boss. The man talked animatedly with his hands while driving and often looked over at Mario. I kept thinking, I don't want to be in a second accident. I also kept watching Mario to see if he was OK.

The drive was interesting. I wish I could remember more and be witty and entertaining. But it's hard. The teenager said he had been in this area only two months.

"Are the kids in school nice to you?" I asked.

"Oh, someone said I was talking trash about someone else," he said. "But it wasn't true and I convinced everyone it wasn't. I'm friends with about half the class."

The driver asked us what we did for fun. I told him we were writers. I was completely unanimated. A little zombie hoping the driver didn't crash us and Mario didn't pass out.

"When I was in college, I really admired writers," he said, using his right hand to air-scribble, as if he had pen in hand. "Because you can tell a story, give information, show people how to do stuff. So many things."

"I hated to read," the boy said, "so they put me in a communications class where we don't read. When I was younger I really liked Gary Paulsen."

"Yes, Gary Paulsen is great," I said. "My sister didn't like reading when she was younger until she was about eighteen and she read Jane Eyre and then everything changed. After she read that book, she said she understood what people liked, and she read a lot. That's what a story can do for you. It lets you see worlds you might never see. It gives you a perspective beyond where you live."

"Your imagination can take you away from reality," the driver said.

We stopped at their towing place to call the Honda dealer in Eugene. The towing place looked like you would expect. Sad, junky, tired. Rusty metal and old gasoline pumps. A tiny trailer in the back.

The teenager took me in his truck down to the park to use the restroom.

"Do you have to drive down here every time you have to pee?"

"No," he said, "but I take showers over there. They're really nice showers."

It was foggy and dark by the time we reached Eugene. The tow truck driver drove us around looking for Sacred Heart hospital, which took forever. They were very kind to us, though. Finally we had them drop us at a convenience store, and we walked into emergency. The waiting room was filled with people. One of them kept throwing up; another one screamed off and on. Eventually they took Mario inside.

I held his hand while he was on the gurney and got down close to his face. We looked into each other's eyes and whispered those things that lovers say. While the doctor was giving him tests to find out if he had fallen to sleep or passed out, I tried to get a rental car. I finally found one at the airport. I called a taxi, and a young man in a van took me. He had several tats. One of them was of a spider. We talked about literature as he drove. He loved Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky. I said that I liked Hemingway's simple use of the language. I had always admired that. Although I liked some of Faulkner, I also thought he needed to spend some time with women—some of his stories were a bit odd when it concerned women. The taxi driver talked about Hemingway's life more than his work. Yet it was clear he had read his work and admired it.

"Crime and Punishment is my favorite book," he said.

"Russian literature is not very upbeat," I said, "but then you look at their history. One despot after another. I've read books by Russians who were imprisoned or sent to the Gulag, and all of them could recite long poems or passages from books. Literature is very important to them. Not many of us could do that. I couldn't do that. Of course, maybe under those kinds of circumstances you remember those kinds of things, to keep you sane."

"Yeah, I think so," he said.

I hadn't taken a cab in a long time, so I asked him how much to tip.

"It's like when you go to a restaurant," he said.

Good answer. I paid him, said good-bye, and went on my way. It was as if I were on another planet—or in another world. Hardly anything was visible. Street lights dimmed by fog hung here and there, their poles invisible, circles of semi-brightness, like brand new imported moons. Red lights glowed here and there when an unseen car put on its brakes. The whole world had become a ghost.

They didn't have my car at the Hertz desk at the airport, but she quickly found me another one. Soon I was driving a silver car through the fog in a strange city, not sure how to get back to town or the hospital. I thought, this is what my life would be like without Mario: gray and foggy. And the world without Mario would be lessened, without color. He is such a unique person. No one looks at the world the way he does.

I found my way back to the hospital. Mario was just coming back from the CAT scan.

His nurse, a thin 30-something man in green scrubs, said, "He's going to come stick you and take some blood."

"I'm just having a great Saturday night in Eugene," Mario said. They all laughed.

A man in glasses came to take his blood.

Mario said, "I better not look."

"He passes out at the sight of blood," I said.

The Phlebotomist said, "I won't look either."

The doctor came and said they didn't find anything on the CAT scan.

"Not even that marble I lost when I was five?" Mario said.

"Nope, keep looking," the doctor said.

They didn't find anything. They checked his heart, blood, brain, reflexes, etc., but the doctor still thought it was odd that he wasn't sleepy before he "checked out." He wanted him to have an MRI to make certain he doesn't have a brain tumor. He also said Mario couldn't drive until he went to a doctor on Monday.

We somehow found our way back to where the tow truck had taken the car. We took all our stuff out of the wrecked car and put it into the rented car. I liked being next to Mario, seeing him in his jeans, green dragonfly t-shirt, black jacket, moving things in and out of the car. Moving like an ordinary person. Stopping once in a while, he'd open his jacket and smile, and I'd go to him, into that space between his jacket and the t-shirt, and we'd hold each other, like we always do.

I got back onto the expressway. After several hits and misses, we were going in the right direction. It was 9:00 p.m. The fog was thicker than I had ever seen it. I wondered if we should be on the road. At the first rest stop, we pulled off. In the car, we made a picnic. We had cold wild Alaska salmon, quinoa with peas, cabbage, carrots, celery, and a boiled egg. (Mario said it was our dinner at Chez Rest Stop.) It was the first time we’d eaten anything since lunch. Sitting in this car with Mario, surrounded by cold, darkness, and fog, eating and breathing, I thought that I wanted to be like this forever: safe, alive, with my beloved.

It was the finest dinner I had ever had.

Mario stayed awake the entire trip back home as the fog got thicker, then cleared, then enveloped us again. Each car was its own little world. We talked about our lives.

“You know, they say when something like this happens you learn what is really important to you. But we already knew.”

“We were just saying that this morning.”

Then we spoke of things lovers speak of.

When we reached our town, the fog had lifted.

“What a perfect day,” Mario said. “I started it with you, and I ended it with you.” 0 comments

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