Darker roads

It was because they didn’t salt the roads frequently that the asphalt looked so freshly dark. That’s what I thought at least. I remembered reading a description of Berwyn, Chicago on Reddit from someone who’d loved living there—gray, gritty, brown and like bombed to bits—telltale remnants of old industry. At 3 pm when I’d set off from Baltimore, it had seemed a smart move to leave behind the main highway and save 20 bucks on tolls. Now I was going through pitch black forest and hemmed in on all sides. I was incredibly tense but not enough to stop going 5 miles over the speed limit. I kept fantasizing about hitting a deer.

There was the matter of openness, or why I feel so comforted driving through nowhere Midwest, hundreds of miles and miles with nothing but cold, bare fields and sweeping winds. They push the side of the car and I go woah and feel the wheels drifting off toward one side of the lane in a fantastic kind of way. Then suburban Chicagoland like all the cookie cutter suburbs for peaceful, boring driving, wide lanes and shoulder lanes, no bike lanes, straightforward intersections without roundabouts, trees standing in a bit of grass, nothing so much like forest. I wanted transformers, water towers, the sudden incoherent blaze of strip malls, steam fluting off power plants, blinking lights, exposed brick and graffiti. All I got here and there was a mailbox yawing out like from the abyss. In the end, I did see a deer—a doe—it was going off into the trees from the road reluctantly. I wondered where the hell it was going, why it had chosen to disappear that way, if it was lonely.

I parked my car at the garage of the train station in New Jersey. I went up to the platform, bought my ticket, and asked the conductor if the train pulled in on the tracks was going to New York. As if on cue, over the PA came the announcement that all service had been suspended into Penn Station because of signal issues on the track. The conductor stepped onto the train, I watched it leave. The only other person there then was a homeless man standing in front of the glass waiting area with an empty soda cup, holding it limply at his side.

I went back outside the station and stood at the curb. I called Michelle and told her that I was going to have to get an Uber and don’t know why I was so relieved when it was that hour lost on some dark forest road that had caused me this bad luck. The driver I matched with turned out to be sitting just ten feet away from me at the curb in a sedan. He was a gregarious man from the Dominican Republic who didn’t speak much English. Maybe in his early 30s, he was wearing a baseball cap and kept saying something about it being Valentine’s Day.

We crossed a bridge, New York City unfolding cleanly before me, tugs and the harbor, a million lights, all those magnificent buildings, the promise of people.

Welcome to New York! he said. He pointed out a closed up shop. I love New York!

Cuando anos? I said. Estados unidos?

Three! he said.

As we entered a tunnel, I explained I was there to visit an amiga. He said valentines! and gave me a big smile and thumbs up. I laughed and tried to explain but he couldn’t understand what I was saying. When he pulled up at my stop, I gave him 20 bucks and said thanks my friend. He smiled again and wished me another happy valentines.

I hurried down the block in the direction of the bus stop. I met the bus there just in time, and ten minutes later I was in the cozy lobby of a lovely apartment building, stepping to meet Michelle’s hug. Like that, I was a little surprised to see Joey crossing through the side of my vision. I hadn’t expected him to be still there, a tall, gangly figure in a dark coat. He said nothing, I couldn’t get a proper word out in time, I turned and watched him disappear wordlessly into the night without a look back.