2020 (10 page)

* * *

We crossed the Mississippi, gliding over a silver arch, and entered Illinois.

I’d put myself in the front seat beside Acura again, determined to part with her on good terms.

“So it’ll be good-bye,” I said.

“And good riddance.”

“Look,” I said. “I’ve apologized as best I can for what happened to your husband. I don’t know what else I can do. I didn’t make the world the way it is. Give me a break, O.K.?”

“We’re just different,” she said. “I mean Nomads and Residents. We’re different kinds of people.”

“I’m not sure that’s what I’ve been seeing.”

“Then you haven’t seen straight. Nomads don’t turn people away and Nomads don’t collect so much baggage in their lives they can’t even move—like lead-walled holo rooms just to play satellite-link teledildonics. We don’t leave scars on the earth wherever we go. We don’t leave anything.”

“Maybe some people need less transience in their lives. They need to produce something enduring.”

“Human compassion can be enduring. What did you say your profession was?”

“I’m an architect,” I said.

“That’s not exactly what you told Mack.”

“All right. I design parking structures. Portable, elevated parking structures.”

“That’s a permanent contribution to life?” she asked.

My ears burned and I found myself focusing on her beadwork vest. In L.A., people always told me they were grateful for what I did. “Nomads are a bit primitive, you know,” I said.

Now she laughed. “That’s what they’ve been saying since the beginning of civilization. The Romans defined nomads legally as animals. But cities are violent at a rate twenty times that of nomadic life. The violence goes back to Cain and Abel. Cain was the settler, remember. The Resident. Abel was the shepherd, the Nomad.”

Could she be right? I asked myself. Cain the first land developer? Cain the architect of the first parking lot? Now I wanted to make her ears burn. “You people still use fossil fuels,” I countered, even though I knew by now that the diesels were only used during storms. “Anyway, you’re exaggerating the hostility.”

She looked at me with measured skepticism. “What
about
Kill a Nomad Day? September first this year, right?”

“That’s just sort of a drive-by thing,” I said uneasily. “It could have happened to me, before Mack picked me up. I’ll grant you this,” I admitted, remembering the relief with which I left the shoulder of the freeway for even the strange rig, “Nomads have more compassion.” I took a deep breath. “At least I can still get out of your way. Mack said we’d make Hubbard’s Cave tomorrow. I’ll be gone. Back to my job, my neurotic fiancée, a Rotweiler who pees on my tires. I’m sorry we couldn’t get along.”

She looked at me. Something else irritated her now. “I’m sorry too,” she said, and looked away.

* * *

The sunrise was blinding red, all toxic haze. The complex swirl of looping wide ramps we were descending from the west culminated in a phantasmagoria of cloverleafs and delicate concrete columns supporting roads on a dozen levels. Traffic glinted in the sun, stretching east and south as far as I could see. A huge billboard under the signature of Mayor Richard Daley XXIII welcomed travelers to the Kennedy-TriState Interface at Chicago, “the largest intersection in the world.”

There was something festive about the place, the carnival lettering of the sign, the red and blue flags of the moving Nomad markets. The legendary break in the membrane, Hubbard’s Cave, turned out to be a wide tunnel where an expressway passed beneath Hubbard Street, so deep into the city it would take us all day to drive there. Mack described for me a set of service doors in the tunnel wall I’d be looking for, and I practiced stepping out of the cab as far down as the footplate.

The dry run turned into a close call. A gust pulled Ryder’s cap from his head and he nearly tumbled off the rig snatching it. I grabbed a handful of his jacket and held on until he steadied himself, a dicey piece of footwork, it turned out, for me too. Acura gave me a grateful smile, then said she was embarrassed that she’d been so unfriendly the day before. So it looked like we’d be parting on good terms after all.

We made a turn southeast through the Jefferson Park district in late morning: the traffic of Chicago lay beside us, undulating like a sea. At Edens Junction, Ryder and I watched lane surfers jumping the median fence to run their ATV’s back upstream, then downstream again at high speed, in elegant cuts across eight or ten lanes of waves of vehicles, touching bumpers as they slid by.

I was exhilarated and frightened by turns that day. We sighted the tunnel entrance first at four, an ugly wide maw in the distance swallowing traffic like Charybdis swallowing the sea. Ryder had been chattering away about how excited I must be going back to HoloGolf and BumperBusses in L.A., but even he fell silent when we drove through the dim green lights surrounding the tunnel mouth and into the dark heart of it. It was a wild place, all roar and the whine of gears. The high-pitched scream of roller bearings wailed against some deep thumping in the guts of it all, like a slow evil heartbeat. Dust in the air intensified the darkness.

“It’s up there,” Mack said, squinting through the windshield at a faint glow ahead. “In that strip of yellow light on the right.” We all squinted, trying to make sense of dark shapes moving ominously in dirty air. Mack interrupted my distracted good-byes. “Something’s wrong. I can’t . . .”

We all saw the problem at once: down the ramp of a merging tunnel on our right rolled a fleet of four-by-fours, black pickups and vans with enormous soft tires. Sounding airhorns they were surging forward, bumping the traffic ahead, rising over it, gyrating, crushing their way forward in purple light.

They were replicas of the truck I’d seen in L.A., the one with the hood with the wolfish snout that had risen above the gridlock. The whole of the wide tunnel began to fill with the glistening black shapes as the fleet swept across the lanes on Nomads’ roofs. The coppery tang of fear in my mouth turned bitter now.

Yet some part of me marveled at what I saw: what traffic! what a nightmare!

“How are you going to get out?” Ryder cried.

Two lanes over a Nomad work crew was crushed before our eyes as one of the monster trucks descended on a canvas-topped Omar. One of the four-by-fours took on a big articulated loadcarrier just ahead; a figure leaped down from the passenger’s side of the truck with a chain saw.

“They’re hijackers,” Mack shouted.

Mack was driving for his life. A four-by-four started bouncing on us. Mack fended it off with a thick aluminum pole with a shotgun shell at its end, a bang stick, which he extended out of his window and fired against one of the monster truck’s fat tires. The truck tumbled away into accumulating wreckage.

“The right lane’s blocked,” Ryder cried.

Through the twisted metal I could see peds fighting around the service doors in the membrane. I thought I saw one make it through. “Just get me close,” I said.

“No,” Acura said. “Don’t go. It’s too dangerous.”

“A promise is a promise,” I told her. “I can’t ask for more from you good people. Good-bye.”

A yellow van crashed on the left and burst into flame. I thought of just falling to the pavement and accepting my fate, but I resolved anew not to die in traffic without a fight. I took a deep breath and opened the door. Noise and bad air flooded the cabin. We were bumped again, from above, as I swung out. A monster truck’s fat tire, near enough for me to feel its black heat on my face, bulged and quivered; in the din I heard a chainsaw start up.

Mack and Ryder and Acura were goners if the chainsaw cut through their roof. I saw an opening to the right but yelled for Mack’s bang stick instead. I swung it up and blew the truck’s tire, taking a scrape as the entire black shape slid between me and what had been my path to the service doors. They were already behind us. I thought about running back on the roofs of the slower vehicles and timed a leap for a wrecked trash hauler dead in its lane just as a diesel tanker rammed the wall and burst into flame.

“No,” three voices screamed in the din. And as I jumped someone grabbed me, someone sweet-smelling and strong enough to pull me back through the door with a grunt.

“We’ll try New York,” Mack said as I slumped against the dash. “There’s a place, the Core. . . . You’ll have a better shot. This is crazy.”

“. . . even if we have to drive back to L.A.,” Acura said.

Ryder shouted that he saw the end of the tunnel, a white ring of daylight in the distance.

I was shivering with cold and fear. I felt Acura slipping something over my shoulders—the burgundy leather jacket Mack had let me wear days before.

The strange thing was how, when we were leaving the tunnel, another Nomad survivor waved in companionship, waved with the four raised fingers of the Nomad salute, waved directly at me. It felt pretty good to wave back.

* * *

We looped through Detroit. Mack had arranged for repairs and alterations to his rig, and we docked with an enormous moving custom shop.

We hadn’t realized until Indiana how badly his left arm had been crushed fending off the first four-by-four. Acura became exhausted pulling extra shifts driving, and circling the freeways of Detroit in the gray air before we docked, I’d started driving shifts too. The rig seemed alive to me then, a huge powerful animal beneath my hands, a wounded animal, but one that would stay the course.

While they worked on the damage, I took in a number of Nomad Campfires—in Detroit, they burned scrap lumber—and listened to stories of pirates and Road Runners and feuds and radical rigs, threads in the fabric of Nomad lore. An old transmission specialist recreated tales of historic traffic jams so convincingly I forgot where I was.

“I dunno,” Mack grumbled, a swath of bandages around his shoulder, his spirits low. “How the hell can you forget you’re living on a conveyor belt?”

“But sometimes it’s wonderful,” I insisted. “Being a Nomad is like being one of those birds who are only really alive when they’re in motion, like a tern, or an albatross. There’s a poetic side.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Acura said. And then she kissed me, a soft kiss on the cheek.

“I might even miss you when you’re gone,” she said.

Ryder rolled his eyes.

* * *

We drove through Ontario, an idyll of flat land and small caravans. We crossed the Niagara into thick freight moving through Buffalo and made the turn downstate when we hit the Hudson River.

Four days out of Detroit, New York City traffic appeared in the distance as a tight Byzantine mosaic simmering under the late afternoon sun. The Nomad Way went underground, merged with the Interface they called The Core, then ascended into steep-walled canyons of glass and steel buildings whose only exits seemed gridlocked streets leading to gridlocked Avenues whose vestigial traffic signals served as standards for the electronic membrane, like buoys marking channels. The Nomads kept in motion somehow, backing and turning, creeping click by click downtown toward The Core’s center with glacial inexorability.

Day turned to siren-filled night turned to bleak daylight once again. Residents on cross-streets and in storefronts watched us with indifference, watched the Nomad rigs streaked with road dirt from around the country as if they were all just loads of freight shifting through the lowest form of transport. Yet down the sidestreets we could see traffic that had been frozen in place for days, Residents making camp on the spot like Nomads, trucks, even busses, that had been abandoned, festive street markets, packs of derelicts around fires in drums, even silver-suited Residents fighting over cabs that were not likely to move until nightfall.

Although we knew they’d be coming, we all went pale when we saw the black pickups, the monster trucks, again on the third day. A fleet even bigger than the one that had swept through Hubbard’s Cave rose on a cross-street and poured through a break in the electronic membrane so huge it seemed the four-bys had official sanction to harass and hijack Nomads.

This time drivers like Mack were ready. He hit a switch and his own newly installed, hyperextendable tires began to inflate and the rig began to rise and shift into sixteen-wheel drive. Using a pile of street rubble as a ramp we surged up over the back of a transfer cab onto the roofs of ordinary traffic, joining a second level bright in the sunlight between high-rises, our weight so broadly distributed we rode over the mass of Nomad rigs without crushing them. Then the big rigs like Mack’s proceeded to scatter the lighter pickups of the hijackers and smear a few into the membrane. Even through the noise of chainsaws and gunshots and the gnashing of gears you could hear the Nomad cheers. We headed south toward Washington Square, our eventual destination, right down the famous Interface at Fifth Avenue, the new fleet of upper-level Nomad vehicles turning back two more attacks by swarms of black trucks.

I thought I was heading home to Denise that day. I played a last game of license plate poker with Ryder, sketched a shelf design to reorganize Acura’s closet (parking lot architects do have some transferable skills), and tried to come to terms with my regrets. I volunteered for a last shift at the wheel so my friends would be rested when they turned to exit the Core.

So I was the first one to spot the trouble. We’d been prepared for the second level of traffic on lower Fifth (indeed, we were part of it); we’d been prepared for the gridlock in Washington Square; we’d even been prepared for the sight of the mangled bodies of those who didn’t quite make it to the service door in the base of the Arch which led to a subway station and escape from Nomad territory.

But none of us were prepared for the sight and sound of a third generation of black trucks which rose above the second tier of traffic. These were huge sixty-four wheelers, big as houses, powered by gas turbines so loud their roar shook the city for blocks. They came from the lower east side, their enormous tires proceeding to crush even the bigger Nomad rigs on the second level beneath their treads. Heading toward the Arch was like accepting a fate as filling in a traffic sandwich, rigs above, rigs below.