After a few moments of crawling through the shaft, I saw a light, so I kept on in the only direction available to me. Turning around at that point would have been more difficult than pressing on. I reached the end of the shaft a little while later, and while I was aware that time had passed, everything so far had passed by me like a blur. I had the strange thought that my dream was causing time itself to become skewed.
I emerged into an empty room where the walls were painted white and perfectly matched the ceiling and the floor. It was as if I had entered into a large cube, where any side could serve as the floor or the ceiling should the room be rotated. I'm not sure why that idea occurred to me, either, but it seemed to be important. I knew that I was there to meet someone but I wasn't sure why I was the only person there if that was the case.
I felt something brush against my ankle, so I looked down, finding a skinny orange cat beside me, looking up at me with wide eyes.
"Do not be afraid," it said to me, and I remembered hearing those words somewhere else before, but I couldn't recall where.
"I'm not," I answered with total conviction. I had no questions whatsoever about why a cat would be speaking to me in English.
"It's a fact," the cat began, "that there are three fearless types that exist. The first is a warrior. The second, a fool." The cat paused, licking a paw.
I noticed that the walls were fading away around us, and that we were in the middle of the sea, floating on the surface as if we were on a raft. The waves lapped up against the sides of the now invisible cube.
"The third, my friend," and he paused again, I think mostly for effect, because it was a dream like that. "The third type of person who has no fear is a professional thief, as he plans his crime meticulously and knows that he will never be apprehended. That is, as long as he never makes a mistake."
I tried to speak, but could not.
"Who's making a mistake?" the cat asked me. "Who's never made a mistake?"
I woke up when my face hit the floor of the RV. Random objects were flying all around me and all I could really focus on was the way that the carpet looked. I heard Janine repeating the word "concentrate" under her breath and I tried to get a handle on what was happening all around me. I was still groggy from sleeping so heavily, but I forgot about the dream shortly after that, instead focusing on the more immediate and pressing matters at hand.
I looked up and saw Janine leaning against the cabin wall, one hand helping her to balance as the RV rocked around, bucking as if it were trying to throw us out of it, the other hand pressed against her head. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be doing a pretty good job concentrating on whatever it was that she was trying to focus on, because she didn't react at all to the swiveling captain's chair that kept banging into her leg in rhythm with the vehicle's chaotic motions.
Hunter, safely buckled into the driver's seat, was wrestling with the steering wheel, craning his head to check the mirrors. He wasn't doing as good of a job watching the road ahead of us as he was watching whatever it was that was behind us, obviously, which had led to my fall from the reclining chair in the first place. I'm not sure how I slept through the chaos leading up to that moment, but I remember thinking that it was already becoming a bad habit that I needed to break: sleeping through disaster after disaster. While it seemed to be keeping me alive, it was also keeping me dangerously misinformed about what was going on.
"What's going on?" I yelled across the RV.
"You're not going to believe it until you see it!" Hunter exclaimed, still concentrating most of his attention on the mysterious events transpiring behind us.
"TREE!" I yelled back at him, watching the road ahead of us, since he was doing a piss-poor job of it. He swerved the truck, hard, setting it into another wave of bounces and rocking while new items were dislodged from wherever he'd had them stowed away. At least none of the stuff getting trashed from all of his terrible driving was ours, since we left in such a hurry and so impulsively that we didn't pack anything to bring with us. It was a good thing that we didn't have any pets on board, too. I always had thoughts like that in the weirdest moments.
"This damned rig is too damned slow!" Hunter yelled in frustration, punching the steering wheel.
Unsure of what I could do that would be helpful, I made my way towards the front of the truck, climbing over the various shifting piles of bouncing and rattling junk, ultimately landing in the copilot's chair beside Hunter.
"Watch out!" he yelled at me, reaching over with his right arm, trying to grab something that I hadn't noticed before, but it was too late. A laptop computer bounced out of the seat at about the same time as I landed in it, and because he was trying to catch it, he jerked the steering wheel too hard, causing the computer to fly into the door beside me. Over all the rest of the noise, I heard a loud crack, and then the laptop tumbled towards to the floorboard at my feet.
"Damn it," he said, putting both hands back on the steering wheel.
I didn't say anything, wondering why the laptop was just sitting in the chair in the first place, and why it hadn't fallen to the floor before I decided to occupy the chair. It didn't matter; I knew that we'd figure out a way to repair it if it was broken, which was probably all that Hunter was concerned about anyway. Never mind that his vehicle, more expensive than a small house, was being trashed by his terrible driving while we fled from something behind us that I still hadn't seen. Never mind that I was still confused about what was going on, while Janine stood behind us, chanting, concentrating. I figured that I would be most useful as a spotter and copilot for Hunter by moving up to the front seat, since he seemed to be having issues focusing on the road ahead of us.
"Don't wrap us around any phone poles, okay?" I asked him, trying to grab the seat belt.
Before he had a chance to respond, he hit the brakes a little too late as we entered a turn, and a series of billboard support beams came into view just as we were falling off of the road onto the outside shoulder, skidding the sides of the RV against a guardrail. I looked out of the window beside me and saw sparks and piece of both the truck and the guardrail breaking off and flying into the air behind us.
"There's a ledge!" I informed him. "A ledge!"
We inched closer towards the precipice, the guardrail becoming weaker and weaker. At least we were noticeably slowing down as the friction from our extended grinding on the metal rail created drag. I looked into the mirror, trying to see what was behind us, just in time to see bright flashes of light. I heard the gunshots a split second later, as I realized that there was a car pursuing us.
"Shit!" I exclaimed, startled.
"Exactly," Hunter answered. I turned to face him.
"They're shooting at us AND driving without their headlights?" I asked.
His glasses had started to fall off of his nose. He pushed them back up to a more reasonable position.
"Seems like the long and the short of it," he said, biting his lip.
"This is insane."
He didn't respond to that for a second, concentrating on navigating through another turn.
"You guys have some explaining to do, man. People are chasing you with guns! You like felons or something?" he asked, jerking the wheel hard to the left to get us around the turn.
"We must be," I said to myself as Janine continued chanting.
"How long is she going to keep trying to pray us out of here?" he asked.
My question followed immediately after his.
"Who the hell is shooting at us?"
"Shutting up would be more useful than praying, because whatever it is she's doing back there isn't helping us at all," he continued. He spared a moment of his attention to give me an incredulous look. "Turn around and see if we've lost 'em," he said, swerving to avoid another guardrail as we went around another turn.
"Things are about to get really choppy," he advised.
I instinctively ducked down when another series of gunshots rang out, although, judging by their inaccuracy, the
most immediate danger seemed to be Hunter's driving. I turned towards Janine, making sure that she was okay. She had stopped chanting/praying/mumbling, but she still had her eyes closed. She gripped the seat so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. There was a loud bang followed by the entire truck tilting to the right. Everything seemed to move in slow motion after that.
"We just lost a tire!" Hunter informed us.
I started to ask if it was because the people behind us had shot it, but then decided that it didn't really matter what the reason was, just that something bad was going to happen because of it.
Everything continued to tilt. Cargo doors flew open, spilling clothing, boxes of food, cans of soup, circuit boards, and other strange paraphernalia out into the cabin of the RV.
"Hold on," Hunter said, as if we needed to be told to do so.
Then we fell off of the road. We were tossed around inside of the cabin as if a gigantic, angry child had taken hold of the RV and given it a mighty shake, and then thrown it to the side. Hours later, everything stopped moving.
"Janine?" I called out, smelling smoke. "Hunter?'
Janine mumbled something in response.
"I think something is on fire in here," I said, dislodging my leg from underneath the seat it had somehow gotten stuck beneath.
"There's a fire extinguisher inside of one of the pantries," Hunter told me.
I opened one eye, examining the pantries, noting the fire extinguisher lying on the floor beside me. I realized that my head was throbbing.
"There WAS a fire extinguisher inside of the pantry," I said, "until it smashed into my head."
"Knock some sense into you," Janine muttered. I wasn't sure if she intended it as a question or as an observation. At least she was okay.
"Dude, can you pass it up to me?" Hunter asked. "Just in case there really is a fire, you know. It might be important to put it out."
I grabbed the base of the extinguisher and shoved it towards the front of the truck, where Hunter's voice was coming from.
We were sitting beside each other at a corner cafe beneath our hotel room, a parade of faces streaming by around us, the sounds of commerce rising up in the hours before noon. This was Rome as we'd like to remember it, summertime, coffee and fresh juice for breakfast, with things like croissants and cheeses and fruit salads spread out on the table before us. The cobblestone streets were still wet from a brief thunderstorm the night before, but the humidity wasn't so bad that the museums were an appealing escape. We'd visited all of them twice, anyway.
She still had makeup on from the night before; mascara was streaked down her cheeks, leaving black marks where she'd been crying about something that had made her happy, some moment when there fireworks and light show made her recall something poignant and then it was the moon and stars, and maybe it had a little bit to do with the wine, which culminated in an emotional peak, some moment that I was both excited and frightened to share with her, another in the many that have permanently etched themselves into my memories. Most of her amber colored eye shadow had been rubbed away through sleep; sleep that, the night before, I had hoped would never arrive at the end of a day that I never wanted to end, as my leg fell off the side of the bed, a bed too small for any couple not in the mood for sharing with each other, but: we were far from that couple. We were incapable of being that couple in those days of Paris and Rome and London and St. Petersburg.
She was looking at her nails, as she often did, and I knew that she wanted to bite them, even though she'd already chewed them down to the quick. We were young and traveling abroad and she was nervous about something, and I loved her more than I could vocalize.
"Time's treated this city well," she said, and I lit a cigarette, spinning the metal lighter around in my hand a few times, partially because I liked the way that it felt and partially for the effect.
I stared out into the streets around us, remembering the Eiffel Tower, where just days before we'd climbed all the way to the top, stopping at the different observation decks for photos. My legs were tired and I blamed them when my knees buckled on the uppermost level, when really all that I was hiding was an irrational fear of falling. We're always falling, you know, she'd said to me. Life's a series of rises and falls, of crests and peaks, but that's all philosophical stuff; it's all in your head, simple figurative images to describe complicated relationships and situations. When you're really faced with the potential for free fall, no matter how irrational it may be, something stupid happens, like your knees buckling and you end up making an embarrassing drop that you hope people will interpret as awe, as wonder, that you've been taken with the beauty of the city around you.
Of course, she knew the truth, right as it happened. She could always tell when I was covering something up and what was going on inside of my head, especially when it really mattered, insisting that the connection we had was more than just the shared link we'd discovered, that first day, which seemed so far away then, back in the apartment. I wasn't sure then, at the beginning, and I never really could be, but you have to trust people sometimes, and she'd never given me a reason not to trust her completely. If I didn't take a chance with my heart, then what was the point?
"Do you like Rome?" I asked her, gesturing towards the street outside and the rest of the old city.
"It's much warmer than home, here," she said, and I knew that she wasn't referring to the temperature. "Wherever you're at is warm, anyway. The coffee's not bad, either."
"You can feel that there's a history here, you know?" I asked. "I mean to say that this city is old, a lot older than New York or any other city back in the states."
"It's a lot better than Paris was, too," she said. "Paris is such a beautiful city, but it's so hard to deal with the French! They're too caught up with being… French! Rome's is like the perfect city, it's got a lot of history, but it's also got a lot of life to it, a certain vitality that's missing in a lot of towns. A good city for being in love. Paris was like being trapped in an old movie. Everything was mothballed and preserved, like it was trying to remain in the modernist era or something."
"I'll drink to that," I said, raising my glass of orange juice. She tapped her glass against mine, and then turned the bottom up, draining it empty. She belched loudly enough that a nearby waiter stopped cleaning a table for a moment and looked at her, raising a bemused eyebrow.
"Seven," I rated her.
"Only seven? That was at least an eight," she argued.
"Five or six, probably. You get a point or two for location and cuteness," I shot back.
"Psh," she said, dismissing my generous rating.
The waiter resumed wiping off tables.
"But the French!" she resumed her rant. "The French, they had their heyday competing with Spain's little bullfighting thing, back at the turn of the 20th century, right? It's like they never got over it, like they can fool everyone into thinking that they're still the most romantic country on earth and that Paris is like some fairy tale magical place where all loves blossom and grow!"
"They drink a lot of wine there," I pointed out. "They've all got a permanent buzz going on. I think they live longer than everyone else, too."
"God knows you'd have to get drunk every day if you had to live there," she answered, reaching for my glass of juice. "Are you going to finish that?"
"It's all yours," I said. She'd already started drinking it, anyway.
"Want to go see the Vatican today?" she asked.
"Jesus Christ, superstar," I answered, finishing my cappuccino.
Chapter 10
We gathered in a circle around the little kitchenette table inside of the RV as the tiny, overworked ventilation fan in the roof dutifully assisted the removal of smoke from the air. We'd opened the doors, and most of the windows were broken, so the smoke was clearing out quickly. Despite all of the damage sustained during the road race that led us to the bottom of the ravine, the microwave oven and gas range inside were still functional enough for everyone to hea
t some food up.
Hunter attempted to crank the RV's motor so that we could run the air conditioner and cycle the air faster, but we'd ruined something inside of the engine for good when we crashed. The motor wouldn't even turn over.
"Once the batteries die and the natural gas tank runs out, we're out of power for good," Hunter told us, arriving back at the table with a concerned look in his eyes. "We're going to need a tow truck to get this rig out of here, anyway, and it's so late we should probably just camp out until the morning."
"I was going to say," Janine interjected, "that we're already pretty close to the main gates of the research center, at least according to where we marked it on the map." She looked at me for confirmation. "We could probably walk there in the morning after taking a little nap here while we wait for the sun to come up. I see that you've got some sleeping bags already out of storage," she added, pointing to the bundled bags that had shaken loose during our crash.
We moved outside of the partially overturned vehicle, setting up a little camping area nearby.
"Curiouser and curiouser," Hunter said, in an effort to bring some humor to the situation. I appreciated his reference to Alice's trip deeper and deeper into Wonderland on the other side of the looking glass. Though we'd only known each other for a few short hours, I already felt at ease around him; I felt that I could trust him. There was some warmth to his character that wasn't present in a lot of people that you meet in your day-to-day life. He was the kind of person that everyone looked at and instantly felt comfortable with, the kind of person you'd tell your deepest and darkest secrets to and they'd never get mentioned to anyone else, even though he'd probably heard it all before from the guy or girl before you. He seemed like someone who would be surprised be very little.