Tea with Madeleine

3797…
It started off like any other day. I know . . . That’s what everyone always says. Anyway, I’m grabbin’ all my shit, stuffin’ it into the new leather briefcase my wife got me for my birthday, crunchin’ my last bacon strip and headin’ out the door — Kisses for Penny and Tommy and . . . Don’t forget the wife!
Hop into the car, start her up and set the driver’s seat back from the wheel. Far back. I got a lot of work to finish up before I get to the office.

“Good morning, Robert! Work?”

“Work”

“Work it is. Seat belt?”

“Oh, yea. Right”

Thank you, Robert!”

Somewhere on the turnpike I must’ve nodded off. Been doin’ a lot of that these days. My wife says I’m workin’ too hard, and I’m not as young as I used to be. She’s right, of course. But what am I supposed to do? I got a mortgage, two kids, a dog and a cat I gotta keep in Honey Nut Cheerios, Alpo and
Meow-Mix — And a pertinacious millennial . . . Gen X . . . Or Y . . . Or pick a letter at the end of the alphabet, with his nose squirrelling up my asshole just waitin’ for me to cough and drop the ball. I should walk into my boss’s office and tell him I’m starin’ down the business end of a mid-life shotgun? That I’m tired of missin’ my kids’ dance recitals and basketball games and date night with the wonderfully ditzy cheerleader I fell in love with back in college? That I need a personal day?

How long was I out? How long was I sleeping in the parking lot. Did anyone see me? Better get out and ‘punch in’ —What the — Where am I? It was a rhetorical question, you know, ‘Where am I?’ Like in the movies, but at the same time, a real, right now, I need to know question. So I asked it.
“Where am I?”
‘Recalculating’
“What?”
‘Recalculating’

The car’s still on? Must be. It’s talking to me. But the screen’s dark and the dash . . . No clock . . . Odometer . . . Temperature . . . And the gauges . . . I didn’t turn it off. If you own a car these days, there are two things you still have to do —And just about the only things — Turn it on, and turn it off.
“What time is it?”
‘Recalculating’

The sun’s pretty high up in the sky. It’s not early morning anymore. Noon . . . Ish? I push the start button. Nothing. I push it again. Nothing again.
“Take me home!”
‘Recalculating’

I must’ve pushed the damn thing a — I wasn’t counting.
“What time is it?
‘Recalculating’
“Take me home!”
‘Recalculating’

Must be some kind of . . . Technical . . . Electrical glitch or . . . That might explain a lot. Like how I ended up here instead of — Gremlins’ll chow down on a plate of computer chips just as soon as an old fashioned bowl of nuts and bolts — North Star! That’s supposed to work no matter what. Now, where is that thing? I think it’s somewhere on the dash — No, up on the rearview mirror.
“Ehh . . . North Star? North . . . Star? Calling North . . .” Alas, the Car Valkyries do not descend from the heavens to sweep me up and deliver me to the nearest Valhalla dealership — Phone! Of course, same thing, only better. Time. GPS. Radio. And it’s a phone for Christ’s sake! I can call someone! I whip it out, my two kids staring back at me, my favorite picture of those two knuckleheads, swipe my tongue with the tip of my thumb like cowboys do in old movies and swipe up — Swipe up! Swipe . . . I’m still lookin’ at my kids . . .
Shake it. Yea, that’ll do it. Turn it off. Sometimes y’ gotta . . . Y’ know . . . The magic unplug it and plug
it . . . It’s a techie thing. I seen the IT kid do it a hundred times in the office . . . Nothin’. Battery? Says
it’s juiced. Doesn’t make any sense. First the car and now . . .
“What’s goin’ on here?”
‘Recalcul —‘

“Oh shut up, Hal! You’re behind all this. And you!” I cast a suspicious, disdainful eye down at my
phone. “I see the way you two hook up whenever I get in and — You’re both fuckin’ with me!” I open the door — It was getting hot in there — The sun straight up and beating down of the roof — I slam the door. Kick the tire! That’s right — Well, I shouldn’t’ve done that. Think I might’ve broken my big toe. Walk it off . . . Walk it . . . Off . . . Yea . . . I broke it.
The man in me simply cannot resist. Open the door, reach under the dash and pop the hood. But when I lift the thing up, what I’m staring down into doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen under any hood I’ve looked under before. Certainly not under the hoods of any of the cars me and my dad used to spend our weekends under, tinkering around— Trusty rachet set and Phillips head screwdriver at the ready, and quart after quart of 10W-40. Jammed, grill to firewall, not a space generous enough to welcome the tip of my pinky and not a fixed or moving part I could recognize.
Now, I don’t know how a lot of things work . . . From that particle collider thing in Switzerland to the Clapper that works the light in my bedroom . . . But I do know that there’s got to be someone in my room, palms at the ready, or standing by the light switch in Geneva to turn that damn thing on — or
off — The last bastion of control over our spiraling ingenuity. Ask Mary Shelley. Victor Frankenstein didn’t make the monster — He was the monster. Not an evil man. Not a greedy man. Just a man. A man blinded by his own genius. A man who just didn’t know when to stop.

Only thing to do now? Start walking. I look back to the dirt road I — We must’ve come in by. I’d have to follow that back to . . . The main road? And then back to the turnpike? Maybe there’s a house along the way. Someone walking their dog? Or maybe just far enough away to break the conspiratorial connection between my kidnapper and my traitorous phone.
I close the hood, gently pressing it down till I hear, and feel, the reassuring click . . . And for the first time since I woke up and found myself in this place, look around the place I had found myself in. The car had pulled off the dirt road, over the brush and the rocks and stopped under a massive, billowing Catalpa tree, heavy with long, thin, curly seed pods. ‘Johnny Smokers’, we used to call them. We actually used to smoke them like cigars— Or tried to anyway. They looked like cigars — Didn’t taste very much like cigars, but what did we know? We were kids. Never smoked a real cigar.
There’s a field . . . A meadow . . . Glade . . . Wildflowers take my eyes and run with them towards the hills in the distance. I climb up onto the hood and rest my back against the windshield. I don’t know how long I sat there . . . Staring . . . I don’t know where I am . . . Where this place is. It’s a nice place. And for the first time in a very long time I feel . . . Comfortable . . . At peace with where I am, even though I don’t know exactly where that place is.
“Where am I?” Barely a breath. Call it a whisper. Call it a silent cry in the wilderness. It was the same question I’d asked when I woke up from this curious trip, but that sense of urgency — The latitude, the longitude, the . . . GPSness of it all seemed to be evaporating, rising upward and upward into the aither, mingling with the clouds, and soon the stars. The Google Maps crew have yet to triangulate those coordinates.

‘Recalculating’

The stolid Catalpa stands over me. I take comfort in my protector, it’s shimmering leaves and long curly ‘Johnny Smokers’ swaying in the gentle breeze — I jump. Something hit the hood. I pick the seed pod up and caress it in my fingers, run it back and forth under my nose. It smells of youth, my youth, and my time and times that only live when stirred by the senses — The most vivid and profound times, unlocked, released — Escaped! There’s nothing more exciting, more alive than a prisoner on the run. Or dangerous.
I’m tempted to light the thing up, for old time’s sake, but these days . . . Nobody carries matches, or a lighter — Even cars — There’s a hole in the bottom of the dash that looks like it’s missing something, but cars don’t come with what used to fit into that hole any more. It’s just a hole. Oh, they might cover it over with a patch or stick something else in there that’ll make your driving “experience” even more mindlessly insouciant. These days your car can do almost everything for you — Just don’t ask it for a light your Jonny Smoker.

After a while, I forget I had ever asked the question. The sun is starting to torch those far away hills.
The stars are making their entrances onto the red carpet — ‘Red sky at night’ . . . If there’s any truth to that old chestnut, it’s going to be a beautiful morning!

‘You have reached your destination’

ob

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