He checked the slip of paper Amarelle had given him with travel directions; he didn't
really need to; it seemed easier to read the green signs at night, follow the stream of
red lights, the public holiday traffic making its weary way back to the city. He settled
in behind a Volvo moving sedately along, a family of four, each head stiff with self-
importance on the headrest.
And suddenly, the sign pointing to the Cross Bronx Expressway!
What was it about highways that made you drive fearfully when you set out, then
return with a little trepidation as if guided by some unerring computer chip in the car?
The Cross Bronx Expressway…tire grooves in its surface from heavy truck traffic…
which could throw you wobbling dangerously out of lane if you weren't careful…but
there it was, the gateway home.
The warning light on his gas gauge came on. Though it was long past midnight he
thought, what the heck, might as well fill up now; there was bound to be a gas station
open.
He came down the ramp and there he was – that man slumped in a ripped-out car
seat beneath the overpass, his day's scavengings of soda bottles in black trash bags
piled high in a shopping cart. They couldn't just dump people, build an expressway over
their damaged lives, and hope they'd stay out of sight forever.
There he was – invisible man! – using anything he could salvage to resist inconse-
quence; refusing to crawl away and die; fighting back against extinction, the great
human experiment gone badly wrong, foundering now in Moscow, but huddled in defiance
under a highway here in New York city.
And just across the street from the traffic lights, a gas station.
(from "Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 