Torque

You are a writer of critically-acclaimed novels no one has read. You have spent the past month driving across America, reading excerpts to handfuls of onlookers in bookstore back rooms and echoing college auditoriums. You spent your twenties doing exotic and expensive drugs and you’ve spent your thirties sweating them out onto the page. You have moved less books than you’d like. Once you traded one to a crust punk half your age outside a gas station for a handful of cigarettes.

Three days ago you realized that the path between your readings intersected with your old hometown. You briefly considered taking an alternate route to go around but gas is expensive nowadays and maybe some morbid curiosity compels you, the impulse that draws people to footage of industrial accidents. You imagine your hometown will return to stand before you many times, the way demons in stories have to be rebuked three times before they’ll leave.

You send a Facebook message to a man you knew when you were a teenager. You had sex once and in the intervening years have built a surprisingly durable friendship out of pretending it did not happen. He’d love to have you, he says. Introduce his kids to the big-shot writer. You go out onto the motel balcony and smoke three cigarettes one after another until your hands stop shaking.

You pass a sign that says Welcome To and then rows and rows and rows of houses. Right away you have a headache. You pull over to the shoulder of the road to pop an Advil. You’re mostly sober now which means that all the drugs you take are prescribed. Sometimes when you’ve driven for long enough you get flashbacks, the road turning into a white cord piercing your body, the stars dancing little quadrilles. Once you’re pretty sure you saw an angel plummet through the dark.

You’re too much of a coward to go to his house right off so you just drive back to your old high school, staring through the chain-link fence, watching the phantoms mill. You used to argue about nothing. The two of you would pick sides at random, your stances no less fervent for the fact you had assumed them minutes prior. There were screaming matches. Things were thrown. Inevitably you’d reconcile days later. It was fun. Nowadays every fight you have is subdued and meaningful and akin to pulling teeth.

You feel shaky, nauseous, as if each of your intestines is being pulled in opposing directions. You get out of the car and take deep gulps of the air. It’s sour on your tongue. In the car you have another cigarette and decide some food would be a good idea.

At the diner you get a black coffee and an omelet with sausages. The lady who serves you is named Diane and her blonde hair is in curly ringlets and her fingernails twist like drill bits. You idly stir some sugar into your coffee and the whirlpool lasts forever. When you stare at it you get the impression that something is looking at you through the center, the black nadir at its heart. You don’t eat very much.

Once you did acid with him in your parent’s house. He put two tabs on his tongue and pressed one into yours. You put on The Breakfast Club and watched the ceiling crawl and shift. You pawed at his body and were surprised it still had form. He traced your ribs with his fingernails and drew blood a little, which was hot. You got to the scene where Molly Ringwald gives Ally Sheedy a makeover and suddenly she’s all bridal-pink, compliant. You stood up real fast and the world was spinning around you, and there was another spin happening inside your body, and you felt as if your bones were about to crack and your muscles rip and tear and your skin stretch and your eyes roll over and over and over, everything cohering to that spiral.

He asked where you were going as you stumbled into the bathroom. Your vomit was Technicolor. You heaved a couple more times. When you flushed everything whirlpooled away, colors blending and then disappearing. He stood in the doorframe. He asked if you wanted him to suck your cock but you didn’t say anything.

You drive up to his house and knock on the door. He answers it. Big smile. His legs curl around themselves like springs. ‘Come in,’ he says. He doesn’t sound anything like you remember. You find yourself bending halfway in his dining room, head slumped to one side. The roof hangs calamitously low. His wife is cooking in the kitchen. When she brings the food in she’s wrapped around herself, head facing backwards, arms twisted like she’s giving herself a hug. You are filled with the conviction that everyone is speaking a language that sounds exactly like English but is not. When he asks her to pass the potatoes you imagine they’re discussing how to kill you, the proper manner in which to dispose of your body.

After dinner he asks you if you want a beer and you say no. Then they bring the kids downstairs. They stand ramrod-straight, like soldiers awaiting inspection. The younger one, the daughter, is almost fully unaltered. The son is already starting to bend. When he turns away from you, you can see the curl of his spine, the nascent loop-de-loops. You feel like saying something but you can’t, not with the husband and wife watching you. When they go back upstairs you feel as if you’ve committed a betrayal.

You don’t sleep that night. You leave early in the morning, saying nothing to anyone. You drive five miles over the speed limit until the houses end and you’re back amongst anonymous forest. Once the road leaps and climbs above the treeline and you see the whole town laid out, presented like a survey map. Up until now, you’ve never noticed the curvature.