She squints up at me, suspicious. “Out where? It’s barely morning.”
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t love when you say that. The last time you said something like that, I ended up somebody’s expensive girlfriend in front of forty people.”
“Twenty minutes.” I walk off before she can argue, because if I stand there and let her look at me with those eyes I’ll talk myself out of it. Behind me I hear her mutter that she was promised coffee in this life. By the time I have the car out she’s at the garage door in jeans and sneakers with her hair in a knot, fast for a woman, suspiciously fast, like some part of her was already dressed for an exit.
Of course it was. Some part of her is always dressed for an exit. I intend to outdrive it. And I’ve decided, against every instinct I own, that I don’t want to talk myself out of it.
The garage under the ranch holds a dozen cars. Most of them are mine the way a bulletproof vest is mine, functional, dark, built to keep me breathing. But at the end of the row, under the gray cover she asked about, there’s one that isn’t about staying alive at all. I strip the cover off.
It stopped being tonight an hour ago. Matte black, low and obscene, a machine I bought for a single reason. The first time I drove it, I forgot, for ninety entire seconds, every last thingthat’s wrong with my life. It cost what a building costs and does nothing practical at all, which is the point.
Everything else I own works for me. This one only plays. I wax it myself. I don’t let the men touch it. In all the years I’ve owned it, I’ve never once put another person in the passenger seat. I notice that I’m doing it now only after I’ve already opened the door and held it for her, which is becoming a theme with this woman, my hands deciding things a beat ahead of my judgment.
“Okay, this is a different energy,” she says, sliding in, running her hand over the dash. She knows exactly what she’s touching, too. Her grin when the engine turns over and the whole machine snarls awake is the most honest thing I’ve seen on her face since the desert. “Oh. This is a bad-decision car.”
“It’s the best-decision car. People confuse the two.”
“How fast does it go?”
“I’ve never found out. The road always ends first.”
She pulls the seatbelt across like she’s arming herself, eyes already bright. “Find out today.”
We clear the gate, the guard, the long private drive. Then there’s nothing in front of us but the dead-straight ranch road and forty miles of empty Mojave, so I open it up.
The desert detonates past the windows. The acceleration shoves us both back into the seats, the engine climbing into a scream, the dunes, the creosote, the bleached morning sky all smearing into pure motion. The engine’s scream comes up through the seats, through the spine, a noise you stop hearing with your ears.
The road ahead pulls thin as a blade. Beside me Cynthia makes a sound that starts as a gasp, then turns halfway through intoa laugh. A real one, nothing like the bright professional thing she runs on a room. A whoop, an actual whoop, her head going back, her hands coming up off the dash to grab at nothing, pure helpless delight pouring out of a woman who has spent every minute I’ve known her braced for the next blow.
Something happens to me that hasn’t happened in longer than I can say.
I feel free.
It moves through me the way the speed does, fast, total, dangerous. For the length of one straightaway, the needle climbing into triple digits and a woman laughing like that beside me, I’m not the pakhan. Not the man who buries people in this sand. Not the throne, the war, the grave I built my whole life on top of.
I’m just a man in a fast car with a beautiful woman, alive in a way I forgot was on offer to me. I catch myself grinning into the windshield like the boy I was before everything, and I cannot remember the last time my own face did that without me ordering it to. Kostya used to make this face at me from passenger seats, egging me on past sense.More, faster, come on, Seva.For once the memory arrives without teeth. It just sits in the seat behind us and grins.
This is the man I might have been. The thought comes unwanted, a sharp edge under all the joy. If my life had gone another way. If there were no grave. That loose, laughing, ordinary man got buried out here too, years ago, and I haven’t seen his face in the mirror since. The only thing that’s called him up is the woman in my passenger seat.
That frightens me worse than Morozov ever has.
I drive faster anyway. Both things are true in the car at once, the fear, the foot on the floor. The foot is winning. I let it.
Because I know what I do to things I want this much. I know the shape of that story. I’ve lived the worst of it. And yet here I am, flooring a car across a desert to chase a feeling I have no right to, one I fully intend to chase again. Which is exactly how a careful man stops being careful. It’s how a kept thing gets buried.
I don’t slow down. I should. I don’t.
“Faster,” she says, breathless, reading the hesitation in me. God help me, I give it to her. The needle climbs past every number a sane man respects. Her hand finds the dash. Mine go light on the wheel, the old calm coming up from wherever I buried it. The car stops being a machine and turns into one long black thought we’re having together. She laughs again, and for one more straightaway I let myself be the man who gets to make her laugh like that.
“You’re enjoying this,” she accuses, grinning, shouting it over the engine, her hair whipping across her face.
“I’m evaluating an asset.”
“You named the car, didn’t you? Don’t lie.”
“I did not name the car.”
