At the Bottom of Everything(20)

The transition, as I saw it afterward, came on a night (this would have been in July, because the Pells were just back from Maine) when I said that I wanted to act out a scene from Terminator 2. Thomas hadn’t seen Terminator 2, of course, so I had to describe to him the part I meant: T-1000, with one arm transformed into some sort of bar or hook, leaps onto the windshield of the Terminator’s car and hangs there, blocking his view, as the Terminator tries to shake him off. We would do this, I explained/argued, at all of three miles an hour, but still Thomas took some convincing. Finally he agreed, on the condition that if he so much as touched the horn I had to jump off to the side. So I lay there on the windshield a couple of feet from Thomas’s concentrating face for what must have been twenty or thirty feet, hanging by my fingertips from the little rim by the roof, enjoying the weird sensation of the car creeping along under me. Then he tooted his horn and we were moving so slowly that I was able to hop off and land on both feet. Thomas tried it too (I started to do some of the subtlest possible swerving, not to shake him off but to imitate it, and he pounded the windshield with his fist). Nothing happened and no one saw us, and we put the car back in the driveway having spent another night feeling better about each other than if we’d just sat in his house waiting for Letterman to come on, complaining halfheartedly about my stepdad or about people at school.

But the jumping on the hood, I’m convinced, was what put the possibility in our minds—the trouble with mischief, like the trouble with drugs, is that you need more and more to feel what you felt before. So the next time we took out the car (and this was just after midnight on August 7, 1997, which for a long time glowed in my mind with a kind of black-light fluorescence), Thomas was driving and I was jogging along on the passenger’s side with the idea that I was going to dive in through the open window: that was going to be the stunt. But Thomas must have had another idea, or he must have misunderstood me, because just as I was timing myself to make my jump, he unclicked his seat belt, opened his door, and leaped out with a flourish, like someone leaping from a canoe as it approached a waterfall. He tried to say afterward that he’d thought that the plan was for me to dive in through the window and take over the driving, but I didn’t believe him; he would have known that a thing like that could never have worked, and even if it might have worked, it would have taken much better timing than we had. What I think happened is that he thought he was shifting the car into park when he was actually shifting it into neutral—he thought that for once, by leaping from a car he was driving, he’d be the one to take us both by surprise: see how impulsive and dumb he could be?

Well the car kept going. There was a moment when both of us stood there registering what was happening, in which all the sound seemed to go out of the world except for the paint-roller noise the tires made on the road: Oh my fucking God, the car is still moving. And if we hadn’t stood there for that moment, if we’d saved our disbelief for afterward … But maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, because the moment was just a moment, and we caught up with the car well before the intersection. But by that time it was rolling a little faster, since this was where the hill got steeper, and the fucking passenger door was locked and I couldn’t have, or wouldn’t have, thought of diving in through the passenger window now, when there was a good chance that I’d just get stuck with my legs hanging out into the air and then where would we be? But why couldn’t Thomas get his door open and get back into the driver’s seat? Afterward he said the door handle stuck but I didn’t and don’t believe him: it was animal panic, it was fumbling, it was the kind of physical idiocy that was never far from the surface in him.

Connecticut Avenue, even at midnight on a Wednesday, is never completely empty. And on that particular stretch, where it intersected with Thomas’s street, there wasn’t a stoplight for a couple of hundred yards, so the cars tended to speed, as long as there weren’t any cops around. So there’s every reason to think the SUV was speeding as it approached Macomb. And, so long as I’m speculating, it seems likely that the woman crossing Connecticut, who’d been at a friend’s house on Lowell and who was already halfway across the street, might not have looked for cars, since in the middle of the night walkers tended to be more reckless. These things, I think, aren’t just possible but maybe even likely. Anyway, even if he hadn’t been speeding, the man driving the SUV wouldn’t have had time to decide what to do about the Volvo; it was black and the headlights were off; its nose would have appeared in his view and his hands would have turned the wheel before he’d even have had time to make a sound.