Out Here Where Things Make Sense

by Alex Goetz

My headphones had broken at some point between the end of my flight and when I arrived at the intercity shuttle stop. I realized this a few minutes after the trip had begun, and it became clear that I would have to engage with this experience in a way I hadn’t been prepared for. I looked out the window at the medium-density airport-adjacent urban-suburban cityscape for a while until it started to fade into the kind of desert that almost makes you want to laugh with how perfectly it conforms to your mind’s eye, the saguaro cacti against the blue sky like a cartoon. As I looked ahead, my focus shifted for a moment to the interior of the shuttle. Two men in the front seats—they drove back and forth and back and forth apparently, every day, according to the big decal on the side of the vehicle, switching off maybe?, and while they got paid to move the shuttle back and forth their real job was to be pleasant to the passengers, which is really what every job is when you think about it. The two men were talking idly to the only other passenger on the shuttle, the older woman with whom I had made eye contact and some small talk before the shuttle had arrived, waiting on the thin island of pavement between swathes of a different kind of pavement, water dripping down from the seams in the bridge above even though it looked like it hadn’t rained in days, and both of us sort of wondering whether the shuttle was ever actually coming, because we had each booked it far in advance and had nothing to go on but a receipt promising a particular pickup time. She mentioned something about visiting her daughter and I probably mentioned something about being there for a work thing but I’m sure I didn’t elaborate because I wasn’t particularly interested in talking about it. The shuttle did arrive though and the driver, or maybe the copilot, said two names, and one of them was mine so I indicated that and the woman indicated that the other one was hers, and she went around the back with the man to drop off her suitcase, and then we both got on and I immediately took a seat toward the back of the shuttle even though I’m always prone to carsickness. Pulling out my headphones, putting them on, realizing they didn’t work, putting them back in my backpack, which I hadn’t given to the man to load in the trunk because I knew I was going to be taking things out of it during the drive and maybe putting them back in, and I had planned on putting it by my feet but now there was enough room that I could put it on the seat next to me, and I remembered that the older woman now sitting a few seats in front of me had mentioned more than once that she had bought the last seat on this shuttle, which was odd.

About halfway along the trip we stopped at a gas station and I got out for a bit and got back on and we kept going. I was tired now, or maybe just bored, so I pressed my forehead against the window and looked straight down at the road in the way that makes it feel somehow like you might fall out, and I had now been overhearing enough pieces of conversation from up front through the road noise and the air currents jostled by rough patches in the road that kicked syllables around at random that I could piece together that there was maybe some tension or pain in the woman’s voice when she talked about her daughter and the visit. By this point we were far out of the city and far into the desert and long stretches of the area of the road looked the same as each other but for some reason the clouds were all completely different from mile to mile. Nothing hides out here. The two men were still being pleasant and conversational up there, the woman was talking about gas prices and grinning and I looked forward at the light grey curls on the back of her head and I knew the smile was insincere, she was getting nervous and wanted to talk about the estrangement and then she was, it came from nowhere really but she was hinting at it and wanting someone to pry, “I’m visiting my daughter there, I’ll call her when I get into town, I didn’t tell her I was coming” (trailing off, small sigh, eyes probably drifting down, smile fading but it was never real to begin with). The sun wasn’t really going down yet but it suggested that it would soon and it was starting to cast strange light over the wide cloud that looked to me like an upside-down shallow ocean wave frozen for a moment. “We had a fight” the road, light grey, soft under the tires “oh, money I suppose” the ground, indistinct green shapes getting clearer as they faded from sight along the horizon “well...” the cloud already looked different than the last time I saw it “I shouldn’t...” the sun approaching the horizon “we had a fight” and then I could see it like I was there, seeing from her eyes, the low angle of the late morning sun on the white kitchen floor, the white kitchen counter glowing from the illumination, the argument, the sliver of green backyard visible through the open door, all the sounds so loud and the baby in its mesh cage on the marble floor, hissing and snarling, white everywhere, and me turning, the hot dry comfort of pain across the side of my head. I stared forward at the grey curls and saw through them, there was nothing there when my eyes relaxed, I saw through her skull and through the backs of her dark brown eyes, the cruel curving smile of rounded-over grey teeth, and I knew then that the pain was real, and I knew then with certainty that she was heading west through the desert to kill her daughter, there was a gun in her purse that she had kept with her and held onto the entire time, she hadn’t come from a plane, she parked at the airport and no one ever checked her bag and the shuttle company had just asked for names, no ID, she bought the ticket at the airport with cash and used a fake name and she would arrive in town and shoot her daughter and leave on a different shuttle to a different city with a different pair of professionally conversational men and throw the gun out at a different gas station on the way and eventually she’d be back and she’d drive home and go on living the same life. And it was just as obvious when I thought about it that there was nothing I could do or say, the men would look at me like there was something wrong with me and maybe laugh or maybe act offended on her behalf and she would act like it was a joke and indulge me by opening her purse and showing that there was no gun because of course not it’s in her suitcase in the back of the shuttle, they wouldn’t stop and get out for her to open it up, that would be ridiculous, there’s a schedule to keep, and even still that wouldn’t mean at all that she was planning to kill anyone, weapons were prohibited in the vehicle but they would let it slide, and in a few weeks neither of those men would see the news story from a city they don’t live in, weird anecdote, “shocking”, no leads, and the pair of boarding passes, one departing and one returning, in her name, bought with her credit card, matching the number of days her car spent in the airport parking garage, and the week-long Miami hotel reservation. She had thought of everything and I was trapped, laughing under my breath at the horribly cliched, hackneyed saguaro cacti against the orange rocks. And so we proceeded down the darkening highway.

Alex Goetz is a PhD student in ecology who writes non-scientific things for fun sometimes. He lives in Denver, Colorado.