Cage Rider

There’s something about being inside a car that speaks of what it is to be.

He thinks this to himself as the ribbon of tarmac unfurls before him. He wonders why this has never struck him before now. Encased in the car, he sees the world outside in a way that it cannot see him. From the outside he is sleek, shiny and smooth. Inside he is so very different. Inside he knows different. Inside the car, he is no longer naked, nor is he weak. The car makes him dare to believe that he could be forever.

He’s always loved cars. Not liked. Loved. His first word wasn’t mummy or daddy, it was car. When he couldn’t sleep, his folks would put him on the back seat of their car and drive around the block. He’d be flat out and smiling before they were half way through the journey. He never asked them how it was that they had known to do that. Now he will never know.

Glancing in his mirror, he looks back into his past for an answer, knowing that it is not there. Not anymore.

The mirror distorts his view, but he uses it all the same. He uses them all. Three mirrors looking back. Clear right now. Nothing of value to see, but he knows that in the next instant there may be danger lurking at his shoulder. Three paranoid eyes teaching him wariness and anxiety. Urging him to take his eyes off the road to attend to what might be. 

He’s aware enough to know that were he to do that, he would be leaving the present moment and risking all of his futures. 

Driving is living.

Driving is being in the present moment. 

Driving is life.

There is nothing else, only interruptions and noise.

So why is it that his mind wanders and explores and takes him to places far from this spot on the road?

He does his best thinking inside a car. There’s something out of whack with that, he knows. This isn’t thinking. Not really it isn’t. What it is, is the result of all the thinking he did before he pulled on his seatbelt and fired the big old V8 up. Inside the car, all he can attend to is the journey. There can be nothing else. But while he’s busy at the wheel, all the buffering in his mind comes to an end and the answers pop out along a sporadic and staccato ticker tape. Long periods of driving, his music drifting through the cabin space, then an answer trots out of his mind and presents itself to him, whispering of alchemy and magic.

Here in his car, he is safe. This is his space. He fits in. He belongs. Cocooned in the metal shell, he is held apart from a cruel and hostile world and the struggle of living slips away. The real becomes unreal via the filter of the windscreen and ever watchful mirrors. There is a paradox here. He is aware of that paradox and he makes an effort not to be seduced by the unreal. He’s not foolish. He knows it seeps into him all the same. 

The trick is to drive well and remain focused. It’s all too easy to lapse. He sees it all the time. Drivers with their head bowed as though in prayer. He supposes they are praying in a way, worshipping the gods that reside behind the screen of their phones. Sending messages into the unreal and pining for responses from those fickle and callous gods. Tuning out and dropping off whilst at the wheel of a two ton chariot. Willing to make random sacrifices if it will please the gods of a world they will never understand and never be a valid part of.

He passed one a mile or so back. The signs were there. Cars have body language. It doesn’t take much skill to read them. A car shaping up to make a turn without indicating its intentions. He usually sees that. Unless of course the driver is elsewhere and the car is out of control. The car he passed was drifting over the lines in the road and then it drifted back in the direction of the grass verge. The driver glancing up from their phone to make last minute adjustments to the steering wheel in order to continue their time elsewhere and elsewhen. 

He has a creed. A few words he lives by on the open road. 

Put the danger behind him.

He overtook the veering car as it charted a course for the ditch at the side of the road. Dropped down a gear and revelled in the rumble of the V8 as it made easy work of accelerating alongside the car that had begun to annoy and unsight him. That is a problem with these drivers. They demand too much attention, and in the aftermath of the noise they create, he knows he is clumsy and distracted. This angers him all the more. These people have no business to be on the road if the road is not their business. Every so often, he will read a news article on a fatal car crash. Nine times out of ten, the driver who caused the crash, and the death of others, walks away. This is the risk profile and this is the consequence of bad driving, or in the case of the phone worshipers, non-existent driving. They will kill others, and then they will walk away without a backward glance, their eyes already back on the screen, wishing their lives away in the most painless and ignorant of ways. Death by apathy.

He always glances across out of control car as he overtakes. He wants to know who it is that he needs to avoid. This time, he is alongside the car and looking over at a twenty something woman. Something happened in the world a decade or so ago. There’s a new breed of driver and they are hyper aggressive, rivalling even the spam hued middle aged men who seem intent on self-inducing a heart attack at the wheel. 

The woman is startled at the presence of his car. That is how out of it she has been. Her peripheral vision has alerted her to a potential danger and she awakens violently from her online slumber. He sees her phone describe an upward arc, hitting the windscreen then spiralling away from her. She has lost her lover and as she experiences this unwanted separation her mood changes. Her serene and spaced out face is terribly transformed by the demon of her anger. The mask she wears frightens him and he has the presence of mind to act decisively. He presses his foot down on the accelerator, more by instinct than thought. A primaeval reaction to a predator on the attack. How her car misses his, he will never know. His eye is drawn to the side mirror and he witnesses her attempt to ram him. She has twisted the wheel in a harsh and irrational response to his existence. Her car seems to twist out of shape, the suspension pushed down hard on the front left corner, the opposite side lifting as though the car will leap in the very next instant, and it damn near does. There is an accompanying cry of anguish as she pushes her balled fist into the steering wheel. The horn sounds like a dinosaur robbed of its meal, and she is screaming her rage in accompaniment to that song of rage-filled disappointment.

He pulls back onto his side of the road, his eyes on the mirror hanging from the top of the windscreen. Her car has travelled right across the road to the other side. Just before it leaves the road she twists the wheel in the opposite direction and the car twists again, doing its dangerous waggle dance. Dancing in a display, showing all the other cars where the danger is. She’s overcorrected and doesn’t seem to be scrubbing any speed off. He watches and toys with the pending dilemma of stopping to assist the homicidal woman. He knows it’s the right thing to do and would continue to be the right thing to do, right up until the moment she is thrusting a knife between his ribs. His answer to this dilemma resides in his right foot. It stays exactly where it is. He feels very little relief as he sees her car eventually slow and stop at the side of the road. No doubt she is already ferreting around under the passenger seat to retrieve her lost lover. Her overwhelming addiction making her tremble with panic and withdrawal. There is no justice here. She has learnt very little. Instead she has reinforced her mistaken belief that it is not her fault. She is an exception. She is special. Any fault lies beyond the castle walls of her car. 

Their fault.

Always their fault.

He is glad that he has survived that encounter and he is glad that she is behind him. He knows there will be others, but for now he has the open road and the chances are that he will encounter good and fair drivers for a while yet. He’ll still overtake them, but they won’t scream at him, nor will they wave at him with sexual hand gestures that they wouldn’t dare make without the protection of all that armour, let alone fulfil. Outside their car they are impotent, soft and vulnerable and all of the bravado leaks from them, a few pitiful tears and they shrink away from the raging fires of the world that dwarfs them.

You have to take the rough with the smooth, he reminds himself. He’s calm again now. The surge of adrenaline that the attack caused has now leached from his body. Back to levels that don’t cause his body to tremble, buck and kick. Normal service is resuming and with it comes his smile. There is a harmony now. The music sooths him and the journey lifts him. He brakes before the corner and prepares to turn in. Corners are highlights of the journey. He’s on the gas and powering out of the corner and entering a new vista. Corners bring change. They deliver new challenges. 

The tarmac snakes and rolls ahead of him and he begins to hum to himself. Accompanying this is the low base rumble of the V8, a sound he could never tire of. The beating heart of his car. The roar of defiance against a world that no longer wants it. He does though. He was meant for this and it means everything to him. This is where it all makes sense. This is where he makes sense. He presses his foot down on the accelerator and the roar of the V8 washes over him like the sea. His eyes glaze over as he abandons himself in the moment and to the moment.

Cancer, he hears the word as it rises up unbidden from the depths of his mind. The doc delivered the news earlier today. He sat in the too bright surgery, numb to the news of his pending demise. The doc kept talking, but he was no longer listening. Not anymore. What was the point? Those words weren’t for him. They were just the doc doing his job and fulfilling his obligations. Not long, was all he needed to know. He filled the rest in himself. The quality of his life was on a downward curve and there would never be an upswing, not even a temporary spike. Nothing to look forward to, except for the end of his days and a finale of pain and suffering to remind him what it was really all about.

He knows that he should have thought about his loved ones. Maybe he did. Maybe he is. One thing was clear to him and it was all that he saw. Soon enough he would reach a point in his life when he’d never drive again. Everything would be taken from him, piece by piece and bit by bit. Everything dismantled and removed. A regression to nothingness. In the end, he’d lay in a bed and wish for death, laughing at himself. Laughing at the joke he had become, laughing as he saw the punchline, because by then, he was already dead. Devoid of utility. Useless and purposeless and redundant. So redundant and so badly designed that there was no easy way to switch himself off. Death would have to do that for him. He’d be robbed of choice at the very end.

Well, he’d found a way. He did have a choice after all. Time to retire the thirsty old V8 and him both. Time to climb into the saddle, knowing he was already dead, but still capable of one last act of rebellion. Thing was, no one else was to know that he was dead. And so he’d ride out one last time, ride along the beach and drive his foe back into the sea.

One last ride in this cage of his. 

All things must end.

The bright red motor vehicle left the road and surged through the air, chrome wheels spinning as though they were propelling it through the sky. No one saw the smile on the driver’s face, nor the single tear that rolled down his cheek. The tear encapsulated everything in that moment from sadness to joy, and if you took a closer look there were myriad images flickering inside it, a matinee showing of a life well lived.

The car swooped down from the skies and came to rest on the surface of the water, and for a moment, it looked for all the world like it belonged there, adrift on a river, making its way out to sea, destined for a port in a land, far, far away. The car paused and took in its new surroundings, then it knew what it must do. Dropping its nose it pushed down into the murky waters and seeing its final destination it slipped from view never to be found.