Detour

Ava has been driving for hours—days? She can’t be sure. Passively obeying highway signs without being forced to make a decision is oddly sedative, almost hypnotic. She considers the possibility that she has been driving for so long the car may actually be an extension of her body by now. Abandoning it now would be an act of deliberate self-dismemberment. The inability to navigate would relegate her to lying immobile on the side of the road, flailing like a turtle flipped on its back. Scavengers would begin picking at her flesh as the sun broiled her soft underside. They would leave nothing behind but a dark, ambiguous stain on the pavement.

Ava understands she must keep driving. She cannot stop and allow herself to be captured. Her existence depends on the uninterrupted passing of billboards, the ceaseless periphery of cement guardrails, and orange construction barrels. She will keep driving until something forces her to relinquish her sovereignty. She will divest herself of sanity and the implications of being considered sane before conceding defeat. She will be reborn, an aberration in search of another identity. She may even go missing, disappear from the threat of   After all, freedom isn’t achievable without a standoff and somebody has to lose.

Ava packs a suitcase and hides it under the back porch.  She intends to leave Justin the next time he is out of town on business. She has decided she would rather be homeless than live with him any longer. The idea of wandering the streets of a city blighted by urban decay exhilarates her. She would shed her identity like snakes shed their skin, littering sidewalks with the transparent slough that was named “Ava”. She would be liberated and unrepentant, no longer immobilized by her adoration of Justin. She would be solitary and immune to the infection of others.

Traffic is slowing down now. A small mountain of smashed cars appears like an island of twisted metal in a sea of interstate concrete. The wreckage exhales tendrils of smoke from unseen places. Ava has no choice but to drive past the accident, past the wreckage that appeared to involve three, maybe four cars? A door has been ripped off one of the cars, allowing anybody to peer into the front seat. Ava glimpses a body slumped over the steering wheel. She knows instantly the body is dead because its neck is bent at a 90-degree angle. People holding cell phones high in the air encroach on the wreckage. They have no hesitation in transforming opened-eyed corpses into celebrities.  It then occurs to Ava these same people may have already taken pictures of her dead husband Justin. She can’t remember if his eyes were open when she left him lying at the bottom of the stairs.

She learned during her marriage of two years to Justin that preserving her sanity was a matter of willpower and blending in with the wallpaper. Ava’s memories of her life after marrying Justin have a hallucinogenic intensity. Something demonic began festering inside Justin after Ava displayed several of her paintings at an exhibition and sold them for thousands of dollars each.  Justin began claiming their marriage was” a brutal disaster, a marriage created on the periphery of a world war”. Justin spoke a language of espionage and conmen. He excelled at concealment. When she discovered he was being accused of embezzlement, she screamed at him: “What happened to you”? Justin’s face melted into a clownish smile that terrified her. “Don’t bother trying to interpret my action”, he replied. “Some things simply defy interpretation."  

A cop waves her to the left. She obeys and drives onto a one-lane ramp. Soon, she passes a sign made of what looks like pieces of wood and painted with white letters—DETOUR. The road becomes narrower as she drives mile after mile after mile, barely more than a tar-covered driveway with no edges, no lines, and no other cars. Shouldn’t a detour be filled with cars and aggravated drivers? But the road remains absent of vehicles, stop signs and speed limit signs. All around her are fields of grass stretching to the horizon. There are no houses, no trees, no utility poles, nothing. Ava makes note of the time—4:16 pm. At 6:16 pm, she is still driving on the same road and the gas gauge has not moved.  

Justin appeared to be sleeping at the foot of the stairs. He was lying on his back, with his left hand on his chest. His hand was not moving up and down like it did when she would watch him sleep and consider her escape options.  She stared at Justin’s motionless body from the top of the stairs and clutched her head so it wouldn’t roll off her shoulders. The seams holding her skull together were unraveling. Then, she is in the car, driving away from a murder scene, feeling euphoric, electrified.  The sky is in a final state of decomposition. She can smell the fetid odor of rotting clouds. Rain falling from such a sky could euthanize the passage of time. The moment at which she placed her hands on Justin’s shoulder blades and pushed him would be erased from the continuity. Time’s itinerary would no longer contain destinations, just departure and arrival times that have been permanently delayed.

Ava decides the detour is fallacious and inadmissible. To suppress the volcanic eruption of panic within her, Ava convinces herself that she is simply navigating the melodramatic borderland between sanity and insanity. It’s the only explanation for this aberration, this…detour.  Ava stops the car on the one-lane road and rolls down the windows. She waits for something to happen while listening to the silence to crystallize.  Fireflies glow like radioactive particles in the twilight. The silence is passive and nonjudgmental but the breeze carries prophecies Ava doesn’t understand. Time unfolds itself like an extinction event. Continuity is no longer detectable. A sense of insubstantiality spreads within her, a lightness of being she has only experienced in dreams. Ava gets out of the car and stands on the road called Detour. A flash of light as bright as a million burning candles implodes like a dying star in her mind, leaving room for nothing else.