The Soul Contraption
Cruising down the highway, here was a man
in no hurry, simply traveling from here to there in late July. The
mid-afternoon sun beat down on his 93’ pine green Honda Civic, an airtight
metal box which allowed for Robby to be in complete meditation on his drives. Robby
drove with the windows up, air conditioning on low and radio mute, so that his
ears could be tuned to the noises that his vehicle put out. Sweat dripped down
behind his ear lobe and along the crest of his brow. He swigged the remaining
coffee in his mug, now room temperature and tasting quite cool to Robby’s
overheated body. Ever since he was of driving age, Robby kept the radio and the
noise outside at bay, because he felt it would only distract him from the
goings on inside his vehicle. The engine or carburetor or spark plug or
alternator were in constant revolution around Robby’s brain. They churned and
heated inside his car the way they churned and heated inside his head. If any part
of the car malfunctioned Robby felt it deep down. A corroded car battery to him
was enough to make a man feel suicidal.
Robby’s ears were finely tuned to the job
of monitoring the synchronicity at which his vehicle operated smoothly. He was
vigilant in this way, allowing only dead silence in the cabin of his vehicle.
One time he caught himself whistling while driving and pulled over and shamed
himself for fifteen minutes straight. If anything in that old Honda Civic of
his were to pop or squeak out a note audible enough for Robby’s ears, he would have
been out and fixing it faster than you could tell him you heard a funny noise
too. It was Robby’s eyes that were not as crucial maintenance of his vehicles
functionality. So, he looked out on the road before him with dull eyes, glazed
over with insensitivity.
Today was an unusual day. For Robby was
noticing things outside his vehicle for once. He saw that the trees were in
full summer swing, with their kaleidoscopic green figures swaying in the
breeze, and he saw the circling turkey vultures above that didn’t seem bothered
by the summer heat. He even noticed some of the others driving by in their
vehicles. Robby saw his high school gym teacher drive by in one car, and waved
to him. Robby was going slow today, for a reason he could not quite grasp. It
was good, this day. Today was an easy day, somehow.
Nodding along for most of the drive to the
beat of his own pistons, Robby was in a trance. The rhythmic hum
of the engine and the repetitive drone of rubber tires rotating on pavement was
the only music he cared to listen to. Most people were made anxious by the lack
of auditory stimuli. Robby was the opposite of most people. Except for, once in
a blue moon, at home on his stereo system he would put on a Limp Bizkit CD and
crank it real loud when he was in that sort of mood. But otherwise, Robby was a
quiet-loving man. Driving on the highway, the day seemed to be just soaring
along.
Nothing could interrupt his peace, until
suddenly there was an aberration in the rhythm. A screeching noise came careening
painfully into his conscious awareness with every rotation of the left front
tire. “What the… Well it can’t be the alignment, or the shocks. I just got
those tuned...” Robby muttered to himself. “Ah, I know.” He said, assuring
himself with a wave of his finger. This, he could fix in under 10 minutes,
Robby thought. Robby pulled his car over to the shoulder and hopped out to work
on the tire with precise and calloused hands. The quick movements in the summer
heat made Robby fatigue quickly, but the job was over before he could complain.
This issue took Robby exactly nine minutes and thirty-two seconds to resolve,
less than the original ten he had estimated.
Feeling quite relieved when he had
successfully repaired his Honda Civic, Robby drove on. There had never been a
time when he was unprepared for disaster.
On
that same day, less than a mile down the road from where Robby had stopped, he
noticed a mother and her two children standing outside a smoking Chevy caravan.
The car was pluming smoke from under the hood. Oh, boy, Robby thought. I can’t
let that poor baby go down like that. Robby hopped out of his vehicle as he put
it in park, made four swift steps to the engine without even so much as glancing
at the children and their mother, and knew that he could not repair this
tragedy. The mother of the children was very pretty and very pregnant, looking
almost like she would burst any day now. She was nervously biting her nails, in
shock, no doubt. She put down her fingers from her mouth when she noticed that
a man was pulling over to help. Her children looked on with drowsy, curious
eyes. They were simply passive observers in this situation, looking to the
adults for answers to why their afternoon nap had been so suddenly and
violently interrupted.
“I don’t know what happened. It just
started smoking out of nowhere.” The pregnant woman said, approaching the man
under the hood. “We appreciate the help mister.” She said, rubbing the hair on
her son’s head.
“It’s alright, baby. Everything’s gonna be
just fine.” Robby said, remaining under the hood and patting the front bumper
with one hand.
“What
did you just say to me?” The pregnant woman said, obviously taken aback by the
crudeness of Robby’s words.
“Look Miss, I didn’t mean nothing by it.
All I was trying to do was get acquainted with your vehicle here.” Robby said,
turning for the first time to face the pregnant woman, innocent and unsure of
what he was being accused for. That was just Robby’s way of speaking to cars,
referring to them as baby or sweetness or dolly or girl. Robby wasn’t the type
to address a woman, let alone another human-being with such endearing terms.
“How longs she been on the road?” Robby
said, looking at the woman who was now seriously puzzled.
The woman looked confused and still
slightly offended, for Robby’s last words hadn’t registered in her brain yet.
Robby turned back to his work on the van, shaking his head, perplexed by the
woman’s rudeness.
“Well, I hate to say it. Looks like your
engines toast, Miss.” Robby said, straightening up out from under the hood of
the car, giving the woman a good clear look at him for the first time. He was
attractive, she must have thought, or at least was once attractive. Because she
too straightened her posture just ever so slightly, and flipped her hair at the
full sight of Robby. Now middle-aged and soured a little bit by the roughness
of life, he had all the signs of a burnout alcoholic, appearing as a mere shell
of his former youth.
“You gonna need a lift? Cause you ain’t
gettin’ anywhere in that thing.” Robby said, starting towards his Honda Civic,
leaving the woman staring into space.
“Uh, yes if that’s alright with you. Is
there room for us?” the woman said, peering in at the mounds of Dunkin donuts
coffee cups and McDonalds bags that engulfed the entire backseat of Robby’s car.
There was room enough. Except, Robby never
done such a thing before. Never had he stopped to help a fellow driver, let
alone give a random stranger a lift.
“Hey mister, do these windows roll down?” the
woman’s youngest son asked politely from the backseat.
“No and don’t even think about opening
them.” Robby replied. The truth was that the windows did open, but Robby hated
the windows being open. It was too much exposure, too much noise from outside
for his mechanically centered brain to handle.
“But, please sir, it’s awful stuffy in
here.” The boy said pleadingly.
“Please, can’t we at least open one
window? I’m burning up, too.” The woman said from the passenger seat, rubbing
her basketball of a stomach.
“Alright, alright. Open a window, but only
a crack.” Robby said, complying painfully with the request. The look on Robby’s
face was one of complete distance from the situation. He was afraid of what the
open window might do to his concentration on the workings of his vehicle.
Despite the bitter man he was on the
outside, Robby did best in all his relationships, even with strangers. Because
deep down, Robby felt a connection with most people, even if it was a weak one.
He felt that connection in everyone with the exception salesmen. Robby felt a
longing to reunite, sort of like a family separated at birth. His heart though,
still lied in the known realm of the mechanical, in the nuts and bolts of reality.
It was eating away at him. The wind was whistling through the window at these
high speeds and the woman sitting next to him was beautiful. The roar of an
eighteen-wheeler driving adjacent was making Robby’s ears burn. And the sound
of the traffic outside shook his brain. How could he hear what was going on
with his vehicle, if there was all this noise distracting him? Robby thought.
These people weren’t so bad though, Robby
felt. He enjoyed their silent company for the few minutes they rode with him.
The two kids had to have been 8 and 10, and the mother was maybe in her
mid-20’s. He dropped them at the local tow truck service without many words in
exchange. Robby gave each child a quarter to buy a gumball inside, and waved
bye to the mother the way a father does to a daughter on the first day of
kindergarten. He started to drive away, but burned in his memory was the last glimpse
of her smiling face, framed by scarlet hair and with wide and warm green eyes.
As soon as he got on the main road again Robby cried. His tears fell over his
lack of companionship and over the beauty of the woman and her children. A
squall of emotion came over him that he didn’t even know he possessed within
himself. This is what true loneliness must feel like, Robby thought and felt.
Robby was quite relieved when he had
successfully repaired his Honda Civic. There had never been a time where he was
unprepared. And on that same day, less than two miles down the road from where
he had stopped, Robby noticed a mother and her two children standing outside a
smoking Chevy caravan parked on the shoulder. The car was puffing smoke from
under the hood. Look at that poor baby, thought Robby. He saw the woman was
beautiful, and made brief eye contact with her, as he drove by, lifting his
foot off the gas. The woman had eyes that burned a luminescent green straight
into Robby’s soul. Though brief was the glance they shared, he understood
entirely how she felt at that moment. The eyes of a body give away the current
wave of emotion without any hassle. The woman’s eyes gave away every secret.
Everything that words and gestures fall short in conveying, the eyes made up
for as a window of intimacy and understanding into anothers soul. Strangely
enough, Robby felt a spontaneous love for the woman. But, he was too late to
stop and help her. For she was already visible in his rearview mirror. Robby
drove towards home, distraught.
The intimacy Robby shared with machines
wasn’t unreasonable or even out of the ordinary. After all, a machine had never
cussed him out or spit in his waffle fries or woke him up in the middle of the
night or stole his money from his wallet. He was on good terms with the machines.
It was the others that had given him reason to turn his back on society. They
had been cruel to Robby. He served their vehicles in the mechanic shop, not
their owners. Anyway, he wasn’t the only one who had a passion for the
mechanized. There were hundreds and hundreds of careers modeled around working
on machines. It was only getting more and more commonplace to live a life
tending to machines. The pay in these jobs was usually alright, and the bonus
was that your line of work didn’t talk back to you.
Robby
could pick out the ones who worked in mechanical careers out of love from the
ones who did it out of mere tradition, those that feared deviation from their
feudal past. His boss at the shop was one of them. A decently skilled man, but a
man who was invested in the mechanic business solely because his father was a
mechanic, and because his father was before that was as well. Besides
mechanics, there were others riding the wave of technology for love or for pay.
The train engineer was someone Robby would sometimes think of. A pioneer of
true mechanical work. He would marvel at the connection that might be shared
between a man and a train, where not much guidance was required to do the job.
Train engineers had just simple protocols and intuition to listen to. The train
was always on a linear path. The engineer was merely there to make sure it continued
without deviation and tend to its beastly, mechanical needs. Another one was
the computer engineer, a noble and more recent breed of man who joined in on
the eating of the technologically modified fruit. He was more sedentary than
the others though, seldom standing for his computer work. What they all had in
common was an intimate relationship with technology. Of course, there was a
benevolence in all of this, a sort of calmness that came with the presence of the
machines.
Robby had had a way with machines since he
was a boy. There existed in Robby a close connection to anything that was
mechanical in nature. Anything that could possibly supersede the constraints of
human ability through cogs and gears and mechanical advantage was kin to Robby.
Where others felt there was a blurry boundary between man and machine, Robby
was the emissary, the junction between flesh and steel.
Technology was safe to him. In a universe
where certainties are seldom ever tangible, here was one that he could clutch
to. It was moving forward at an exponential rate, evolving faster than any life
had ever dared to mutate. Cancer could hardly even keep up with it. It was
productive too, making the lives of others easier and less strenuous. When Robby
was at home or in the car shop or in his vehicle he felt fine, but everywhere
else he felt vulnerable.
Upon arriving at his little town, Seven
Devils, North Carolina. Robby felt a pang of hunger. What better to quench that
pit in his stomach than an easy meal at the local McDonalds fast food
restaurant? Everything was going smoothly as Robby rolled up to the drive thru
window at the McDonalds. He had figured that he would only need his window down
for approximately 6 minutes to receive his food, before he could roll it back
up again and drive away. Having the window down was a rare and always brief
occurrence for Robby. A window down meant a breach in Robby’s security.
At the drive-thru window, Robby had just
received his food when he began rolling up the window furiously and without any
progress. The glass window stayed in its well inside the door. Robby cranked
and cranked the knob on the door, around and around with no effect. The window
would simply not roll back up. Robby began to sweat nervously, and so he pulled
over to the parking space closest to him to take a closer inspection. He got
out of the vehicle, anxiously searching his trunk for a tool to let him solve
this mystery. Goddammit, Robby thought. Here he has the right tool, but the
bolt is sheared straight off on the cranking mechanism. That’s not good, he
thought, not good at all. Nauseous and feeling not so hungry anymore Robby sat
back in his vehicle, defeated, and in a panicked state.
Sitting in his Honda Civic, Robby stared
blankly ahead at the nearby gas station and the humdrum of people and cars. Doors
swung open, windows rolled up, people entered and people exited. It was making
him queasy, watching the merry-go-round of the gas station and breathing in the
second-hand cigarette smoke. Robby shut his eyes and listened, paralyzed by the
sound of the outside world. He was hearing all the noises of the outside world
that he never wished to hear on ordinary occasion. The screech of brake pads at
the nearby stoplight, the squawk of seagulls at the McDonalds dumpster, the
laugh of children chasing each other in the parking lot; it all made him very
nauseous and he had not a clue why. Sensory overload was occurring in Robby’s
mind, never had his soul been exposed to so real and raw a world before. These
external happenings seemed so real that they appeared dream-like.
Starting his vehicle took great courage
and it took a great deal of strength out of him to turn the key. He felt sick
and drained by all the chaotic noise seeping in through the car window. He felt
nearly dead. Ok, here we go, Robby thought, putting the car in reverse and
traversing his way out of the parking lot. He felt disconnected from his body.
Robby was crawling out of his skin at the stoplight when four college-age girls
in a door-less Jeep stopped next to him, all laughing hysterically, pop music
blaring. He was dripping with sweat at this point, gripping the wheel tighter
and tighter. It wasn’t even that hot out, only 67 degrees. He sped from the
light towards the back road that would lead him home, to a quiet, controlled
space he could recoup in. What bothered him most was not the harshness of the
external world, but the inability of himself to monitor his own vehicles inner
workings. The noise from outside had prevented any chances of him hearing a
malfunction in his car. It was as though his vehicle was a black hole, sucking
light and sound out of the atmosphere at a rate of fifty-five miles per hour.
The country fields along County Road 14
buzzed with life. The grass on either side of the road looked ablaze by the
setting of the sun. A car bumped along the straight and narrow pavement of
County Road 14. It was Robby in his Honda Civic. Almost home, thought Robby.
Order the parts from AutoZone and fix the car window, Robby nodded to himself, considering
his plans for redemption. Then suddenly, Robby began to hear more than just the
blood beating through his ears. The chaos of the window vortex that had caused all
this pain and anxiety was no longer erupting with malevolent sound. So subtly,
the window was transformed into a fountain, a stream, that it poured out
wonderful sounds from the surrounding farmland. He was only a mile from home
when this happened, a miracle you might call it.
In
the cool summer evening the country fields buzzed, alight with the symphonies
of crickets who lived happily in the tall grass there. The crickets were
congregating in what must have been hundreds, thousands of little cricket
orchestras. For they pumped their joyous cricket energy into a beautiful and
harmonious sound. Robby heard the crickets chirping louder than his own thought,
and for a moment was reluctant to listen to their plight. Before he knew it he
was entranced by their rhythm, charmed by the soothing melody of it all. These
were not any old crickets. They were angels singing to him; he could have sworn
it. Yes, that’s what they were, tiny chirping angels, Robby thought. He shifted
comfortably in his sweat-soaked seat and loosened his grip on the wheel and
shivered. The leathery wrinkles on his face faded and Robby felt the most awake
he had ever felt before.
There
was nowhere for him to go other than here. Robby was truly at one. He felt no
need to think any longer of his car or of himself. He had all that he had
wanted in the world and everything was in its right place it seemed. The
crickets chirped on, releasing their rhythm into the cool evening and into
Robby’s car and soul. He had not felt this way since he had kissed his first
wife on their wedding day. There had not been such a sweet letting go of the
self for a very long time for Robby. Robby felt his car breathing as he
breathed. Here he was in the evening of the eve of summer, forgetting himself.
As if by fate, Robby’s vehicle sputtered
and clanked. The car wasn’t breathing, it was malfunctioning. Something had
gone awry inside the engine. A steel connector piece that was thrice welded had
given way to the laws of physics, not surprisingly at all. Jolted from his
reverie, Robby’s eyes widened at the realization that he was driving a car down
a pitch-black road. His headlights weren’t on and he could hardly see the road
in front of him. It was too late to turn the head lights on. Robby’s Honda
Civic was sent spinning into a ditch.
Robby was dripping with a warm feeling. A
warm feeling that stretched across his belly diagonally down to his thigh and along
his buttocks. The crickets chirped on, not at all fazed by Robby’s violent
crash. The warmth Robby felt was red and trickling down into his boot. Someone on
the road shouted at him asking if he needed help, but it sounded unhelpful in
his ears and a vaguely like his first wife nagging him, so he croaked “No,
thank you. I’ll bleed out in peace.” Robby hadn’t the ability to stand,
lacerated and bruised. The paramedics arrived within minutes. By the time they
arrived, Robby couldn’t distinguish between the ambulances repetitive drone and
that of the crickets. Despite all the lacerations and bruises he sustained on
his body, he felt as though he was healed of an ill. He smiled deliriously at
the medics as they lifted him onto the stretcher. “Thank you, crickets,” said
Robby.
Robby felt reborn upon release from the
hospital that following Monday. There were no more troubles to ponder. Past or
future, his peace was made. He was concerned solely with what happens right
now, with his recovery. He sold his wrecked Civic to the junkyard for a
careless sum of money. With that money, he bought himself a rusty old mountain bike
that had all its gears but was missing front brakes. He was content with riding
the bike because there were no complexities he needed to worry about. When
Robby rode the bike, him and the world moved as one, with no boundaries or limitations
in view.
The crickets died with the end of the
summer season, As the nights grew colder their chirping waned. That was ok to Robby,
though. He knew it was the cycle of things. There was no way of holding on to
anything in this life. The secret was in riding with a loose grip or the
best way Robby figured out, was not using any hands at all, simply letting go.
It allowed for all the uncertainty and seeming chaos of the world to click into
one not-so-scary reality where real beauty existed. The clicking of gears was
music to Robby ears. He clicked his gears down or up with the rising and
falling of elevation. Now, it was not machines that were his chief concern. Robby’s
chief priority was in himself, the world and the immediate present. When any
youngster in town would ask Robby how he rode that rusty old bike miles at a
time without using his hands, he would say, “I just listen to my gears.”
