NOVEL
Drive up Into the Mountains
The Last Human in the Milky Way — Chapter 24
One day it dawned on him that great changes had taken place in the neighbourhood and in the wider world. He decided to try to find out what had happened, packed things into his car and started driving.
Somewhere on the road he sees a woman standing on the side of the road, and he stops next to her. They are two strangers who set out on a journey to rediscover the world, a world where great changes have taken place that they are only guessing the consequences of.
24
When they arrived at the car, he had made up his mind.
“I think we should try to drive up into the mountains,” he said. “It’s probably going to be a bit of a hike, bad roads up there, but it’s only this way how we can get east.”
“Okay,” she said.
He waited for more, but there was no more. He got behind the wheel, but did not start the engine. Searched for the mobile phone from the jacket pocket, saw that there was a 14% battery, and tried to open the browser. Got the usual error message, ‘No Internet connection.’
“No! But I must have a map! A map of the area, otherwise it will not work!”
He spoke half-loudly, mostly to himself, for she was crouched, squatting, some distance from the car, behind a bush, with her trousers down. He threw his cell phone in the back seat. Felt he was annoyed. Started looking for the map of the mountain area in the glove compartment. He knew it was there, had had it last there a couple of years ago, but had not needed it later, but he was sure it was there.
At first, he did not find it, but he did not give up and rummaged through all the contents from the glove compartment. It was a map he had bought about a hundred years ago, when he and Sara were driving around the area here. They used for a period to camp up here; it was before they had the kids, it was before almost everything, it was before it started to go completely awry.
He unfolded the map and placed it over the steering wheel and panel. Sat for a while and studied the part of the area they had to cross. Memorized the most important details, folded the map and left it in the glove compartment.
He got up from the driver’s seat, walked around the car and checked that there were no things left behind the car. And he took an extra check of the tires. Had to be sure that the wheels were tight, because it was far to the nearest service station.
He returned to the driver’s side. He nodded to her.
“Then we’re driving,” he said. “A couple of days, at least, out in the wilderness. We have to try to figure it out.”
“Yeah, we have to,” she replied.
He looked at her, smiled, and started the engine. To begin with, it was a pretty good road, straight ahead a few kilometers, then some turns. Then they came to a mountain pass. There he turned off, and began to drive at a snail’s pace upwards. It was some of the steepest he had driven with the car, a very winding road, narrow and bumpy.
They both sat and were silent. He noticed that she looked around at the landscape and at the road that rolled out in front of the windshield. She looked alternately at the landscape and at him. — Was she insecure? Was she not confident in him?
He felt he had to talk, so he just busted out with it.
“Yes, it was here — “
The car shook violently as he drove the right front wheel down into a hole, and he poured inside.
“- yes, that was where we traveled a lot on trips. She was not so fond of lying outside, in tents, it turned out, but I did not understand that time.”
“Well,” she said, “how was it?”
“It was — fine.”
He stopped, overwhelmed by a memory, an image that suddenly appeared to him. He did not like to think about it.
“Yes,” he said, “it was her — her name was Sara by the way.”
“Sahra —”. She said the name a little dreamily, as if she tasted the word.
“Yes, Sara — without an h, Sara,” he repeated. “Yes, it was she and I — the woman I was married to.”
He stopped, suddenly feeling infinitely clumsy and trivial. — Why did he sit here and tell this emerging person sitting in the passenger seat of his car about this? About Sara and him?
He noticed that she quickly looked at him. He felt that she was waiting for him to say more. But she turned her face and looked ahead. He waited. Thought she was going to say something, but she was completely silent.
“Yes,” he said, “it was she who — well, we were together, and we traveled a lot in that time — the first time we were together, that was before we had children, then.”
He thought: She will probably ask how many children they had, or how old they are, or what their names are. — Or where they live, if they live with their mother, or something like that.
But she did not ask. She did not ask for anything else either. She did not ask one thing or the other.
He began to relax a little more. He concentrated on steering around the worst holes, and when they came over to a slightly straighter part of the road, he felt he had to talk again, if not for something else, just so that it would not be so deafeningly quiet between them.
“It was a big misunderstanding, that whole relationship,” he said. “It was so that we — that we played a game, yes, we played a game; we played that we fit so perfectly into each other, that we were twin souls.”
She leaned forward and turned her face towards him.
He interpreted it so that she was interested. He thought, “Should I say more? Or is it better to just let it go?” He could tell how they had felt. In the time before it tipped over, the time when they struggled to figure it out. The time when he still had faith in the relationship. He felt an intense, a dark reluctance to think about the time and what had happened, what they had done to each other. He thought it was not good. — Why should he talk about this, here in the car, today?
He looked ahead on the road and concentrated to steer as far away from the holes in the road as possible, so that they could get up fairly safely and comfortably.
And he thought of her, Sara. It had been so difficult emotionally. He felt worn out and felt drawn between two outer edges. On the one hand, he had felt he had to show her understanding. On the other hand, he was completely exhausted by what was happening, this game, which he eventually began to think of as, for himself. — A game she played. She could be happy in the morning when he came into the kitchen and had to have a cup of coffee and a slice of bread before he went to work. Everything seemed normal, everything looked so good.
But in the afternoon, when he returned home, he experienced the opposite. It was completely quiet in the house, until he came up the stairs and heard muffled noises from the bedroom. He went in and saw that she was lying on the bed and that she was shaking with tears. He walked over to her and tried to put his hand on her shoulder, make her stop crying. He asked what it was, what had happened. But he never got an answer, neither then nor all the other times later, when the same thing happened. She was dissolved in tears, she sobbed, shook. And she told him to get out of the room, he should leave her alone.
He did not understand anything, she said, choked with tears. While he was driving and was far away in his mind, he snapped abruptly when she suddenly spoke. The woman in the passenger seat said something, and he did not understand at first. It sounded like a question. “What did you say?” he asked. “Did not hear.”
“Depressed?” she asked. “Was she depressed, your wife?”
“Do not know.”
“I mean, when she could be so down, so sorry.”
“We talked about it. But I do not know, other times she seemed perfectly fine. Was happy in the life we had, she too.”
“But did she change as you said?”
“Yes, but it’s normal to be a little upset sometimes, isn’t it?”
He did not want to talk more about this now. It was almost as if she was looking right through him, he thought. She asked questions that he felt were difficult to answer. If Sara felt this way and that way, if she was aware of it herself, that she changed her mood like this. If she was aware of it when she was “difficult” to him. “Did she turn the other way around?”
He looked at her. “Turned to the opposite — what do you mean?”
“Yes, think about whether she shifted alliances. If she suddenly became an enemy with some people, she was formerly friends with, for example.”
“No, I really do not know,” he said. “ — Have not thought about it like that. There were so many things that happened, especially for a period.”
He was going to say more, but stopped. They approached the top of the mountain pass. It was steep down on both sides of the road, and he began to see parts of the plateau unfolding far down there. He stopped the car, turned off the engine and applied the brakes. “It is best,” he said, “that we be a little careful, for here we may become abruptly visible to people who should rather not see that we are here.”
“Why that?” she asked. “What can be dangerous for us here?”
“No, not easy to know, maybe people from the Clan. Or some from other armed groups.”
“Armed groups?” She seemed a little anxious. “You mean here? Out here in the wilderness?”
“Yes, one never knows for sure, but -.”
He kept going, looking for the right words. “A lot has changed, you know.”
This is chapter 24 of the novel The Last Human in the Milky Way. The novel is written and published ‘live’ chapter by chapter in ILLUMINATION Book Chapters.
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To see all published chapters, go here.
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Chapter 25: The Denial