Sprebas

Stas comes to my funeral, after that he helps me steal a car and drives me out into the desert. Right now, where we are, it´s the end of the road. That´s not a figure of speech.

 

This place, the long black road, it´s not on any map. Someone, somewhere, thought it would be a good idea to build a road straight through the desert.

 

"There", they would say. "Why don´t we build something there?", pointing at the great piece of brown nothing on the map.

 

But somewhere down the line the funds ran out. Or maybe some paper got lost in the shuffle in some city planning office.

 

Me and Stas, we didn´t have enough juice to drive the car back. This was always supposed to be a one way trip.

 

"It´s like being born", Stas would say. After we get pushed out of our mothers birth canal, there is no going back.

 

"This", Stas says while doing a ziggity zag and a boggiewoggie and a bit of cha cha cha.

 

"This is the end of civilization. Right here!"

 

On the other side of the road, ending in a sudden stop like the drop of a cliff, is only nature. Out there by the horizon, the sun is penetrating the clouds, drawing patterns in the sky. It´s pretty the way you´d think of heaven as beautiful.

 

Without this road, the car, me and Stas, you would think this was some other planet. Pictures taken by some suicide spacerobot on Mars or some bombed out leftover from a nuclear holocaust. Planet Armageddon.

 

Stas, doing his balancing act on the edge of the road, holds his arms out Jesus-style, and I ask him, did he bring the water?

 

I´ve heard you can survive without water for three days.

 

Three weeks without food.

 

Stas, with a smoke in his smile, shakes his head. No.

 

After that first week without food in a place like this and you begin to wish you could stop surviving.

 

Getting to where we are right now, we had to pass the signs. Every now and then, all the way from that last turn right down to here, we passed the signs. Saying something like;

 

You now have five miles back.

 

You now have ten miles back.

 

Up until this last sign, the one I´m looking at right now, telling us we´re halfway there. Whatever that means.

 

This is a dead end if there ever was one. Meaning if your car runs out of juice or breaks down out here, you are dead. Sure as a roadkill.

 

"You sure about this?", Stas asks.

 

I gaze across the horizon and the burning desert that goes on forever. If I don´t have any second thoughts now, I know they´ll come around soon enough.

 

I tell Stas, "Even a bird that escapes the cage sometimes long back."

 

And suddenly, I remembered what Stas told me as I picked him up outside the state correction facility. That´s what they call prisons nowadays. I guess that´s what you´d call an euphemism.

 

Anyway.

 

He was standing outside the fence with a bag tossed across his shoulder. No shoes. Stas had stopped using shoes long before I ever meet him. He explained at one time that he knew a guy who loved shoes. And one day, this guy, as he came out of a shoe store with his brand new shoes all wrapped up in a box under his arm, got run over by a speeding car.

 

Now get this. His girlfriend asked the hospital staff to give her his clothes, all cut open by the doctors that tried to save his life. In his wallet was the receipt, and she returned the shoes later that day, for a full refund.

 

That´s people, Stas would say. Always planning ahead. Buying shoes that last. But what if we did not have a future?

 

Everything leading up to this moment, me and Stas, ready to begin our crossing, had something to do with a story.

 

I´ll tell you everything.

 

It began with an editor. And a climax.