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I drove slowly down Main Street in the late-afternoon winter sun and my eyes caught the bakery sign. I looked above to the upstairs apartment. The windows were dark. There was nobody home.
I sped out of that depressing strip. Back on the Interstate, the frozen Midwestern landscape rushed past me in the dying light; gray depressing farmhouses, the sunset glinting back at me in the reflection of their windows, smoke issuing from every chimney, dead cornfields under layers of dirty snow, occasional leafless trees. All the while I was smoking and thinking about Wes.
How had he ended up in that state? Was he mean? Boring?
Deformed? Stupid? What was he? Who was he? Nobody in the world of the living would ever know. He surely had parents, but had he ever had a life of his own? Did he read books, or even the newspaper? Had he ever been in love, felt the freedom of flying down a Western highway, smelled the hair of his girl first thing in the morning? And worst of all—was I in danger of turning into the guy?
“Nowhere Man” was playing on my stereo. I turned it up and listened deeply, really understood the lyrics this time. I was stuck in traffic at a toll booth, smoking like crazy, looking around at all the poor saps in the cars around me. There was a woman in a white Lincoln next to me, shouting into her cell phone. She gave me the finger when she saw me staring at her and hit the gas as the traffic in her lane inched forward. It almost made me cry.
I drove the rest of the way like a robot, parked my car in the basement and rode an empty elevator up to my apartment on the 10th floor. I trudged down the hallway to 1017 and opened my door to the semi-dark apartment. First thing I did was run around and turn on every light in the place. Then I walked from empty room to empty room for a good ten minutes. I flopped down on my favorite leather recliner, lit up yet another cigarette, threw my head back and stared at the ceiling. I sighed, coughed, put out the disgusting smoke and flipped open the top of the box—there were only four left in the pack. I set it on the end-table, picked up the phone, took a deep breath, and dialed Vanessa’s number.
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