He started out to the street through the pines. He would have to walk a couple of miles before he left the residential neighborhood and got to any semblance of collective civilization. But to get his car keys, he would have to go through the kitchen where Tim was sitting and slurping down his orange juice with an idiot grin. Was this cowardice? No, it was practicality. Nothing could be gained by another infusion of well-intended positive-minded blabbering. He needed to be alone with his irony.
****
He arrived at the strip mall.
****
He looked at the odd-shaped chicken parts, rough with gray-brown breading and oozing some kind of grease. He had eaten this as a child. How could he ever have found it appealing? The smell of the place had sickened him even before he had opened the door.
****
Susan's eye traveled along the side of the street as her car sped forward. Gas stations, motels, fast-food franchises, the ugly and mediocre landscape of suburban America. Still imagining it as one long traveling shot, imagining these burger signs and stoplights dissolving out of their meaning and into a play of forms in the noon sunlight, it wasn't hard for her to see a kind of beauty here. A harsh beauty, even frightening, but true and close to her. She made a mental note to come back to this very street and to film it. Surely it could be spliced into some project or other. A bit of footage that somehow seems to mean something once divorced from mundane familiarity. Cityscapes and objects, the motion of trucks and doorways, these things made themselves at home most easily inside her filmmaker's eye. Characters were different. Another matter completely.
The sound of a car horn blasted her out of her cinematic contemplation. She realized that she was driving 25 m.p.h. in the fast lane of the two-lane street and, with the aid of a cement truck that lumbered on beside her, had successfully managed to cut off the way to faster traffic. Hence the honk from the Lincoln Continental behind her. Agitated and embarrassed, she placed her cigarette in her mouth to free her left hand for the stick shift. She got the car into third and roared in front of the cement truck to clear the way for the impatient Lincoln, but the smoke from the cigarette drifted into her eyes, which teared, blurring her vision, and the ash fell down onto her black skirt, leaving a gray smudge when she tried to brush it away. Overwhelmed, she pulled without signaling into a Wendy's parking lot. As a reward, she was honked at again, this time by a deep, imposing foghorn blast from the cement truck. Good, she thought. If there even had been a nerve in her body that had not yet begun to quiver, that booming horn had achieved a total unity of emotional distress across her response system. Shit.
She reached for her bag. Nerve candy. Yes. No. No, she was trying to cut down on the nerve candy. And smoking. And coffee. Plus, no more hard alcohol during the week or film editing after 1:00 a.m. Yes, she had to discipline herself even with filmmaking, because if she was editing past one, she could easily continue until ten the next morning, and then be a wreck for four days, incapable of anything but writing, shooting, and editing. And there was more to life than film, wasn't there?
Just past the parking lot there was an overpass that cut the sunlight into shadow beneath it. The afternoon brilliance that brought out the yellow brown of the earthen embankment and the pale gray of the cement supports became cool and muted underneath it, and the overpass would consume the shadows of the cars and trucks that sped down the street beneath it. She loved shadows of moving vehicles, somehow faster than the vehicles themselves, jumping up and down over curves and parked cars, so rapidly mutable, so active and alive. Then they would be so easily swallowed in the shade of the overpass and restored just as quickly on the other side. A constant and infinitely varied dance that would go unnoticed until she projected it on a screen--a more purposeful shadowplay. Even the less romantic format of video was nothing but light particles that moved according to her choreography to represent the vision she hand experienced looking through a camera viewfinder.
But there was more to life than film. Work, taxes, insurance, shopping, cleaning, family... Even this afternoon she had a list of errands, practical matters that she had to get out of the way before she could get back to her camera or even her filmmaker's reverie. She had to get her Toyota's oil leak looked at before something really bad happened, she had to call the plumber about the bathroom sink, and then there was...
She snatched the bag savagely and pulled out the pill bottle. What? Empty? Impossible. Could she have taken the last one without immediately filling the prescription? Oh, shit. She remembered how she had taken the last one the day before while in line to renew her lapsed driver's license. She had promised herself she would go three days without buying any more nerve candy. To hell with that. But that meant she'd have to drive back to her neighborhood pharmacy and waste another twenty minutes. Just trying to decide made her need the nerve candy even more.