“What’s it like to die?” she said.
“Do you want to find out?” he said.
He had met her at a roadside diner, on his way to Yuma. A little further down the road was a motor lodge, one of those family set-ups, with a pool and a laundry room, only it looked like there hadn’t been any families there in a while. They got to talking there in the diner. She was a little thing, tan skin, brown eyes, young. He didn’t know if her hair color would be called light brown or dirty blond. The paint job on her nails was chipping, and she wore too much make-up. She had lots to say without really saying anything. When she asked him that question, he suggested they head over to the motel.
They were sitting in a booth at a diner. She had started talking to him from the counter and had joined him not long into their conversation. He guessed she needed someone to pay for her lunch. When she asked him that question, he suggested they head over to the motel. She tapped her nails on the linoleum tabletop. “I don’t know…” she said. “Does it hurt?” The waitress, a fortyish woman with red hair, came and warmed up their cups of coffee. He thought she gave him some kind of look. The girl had a newspaper stuffed under her plate. One headline poked out: Three perish in fire. A little later, Two police, one bystander killed in shootout, then, New civics center to go up.
“I’m always amazed by what will change and what stays the same,” he said, smiling a little.
“Huh?” she said.
They had met at a roadside diner, off a dusty highway in the Southwest. Two people with nowhere to go, and in a hurry to get there, he’d thought, a line from a hack novel he had read years ago. She didn’t have a car; God knew how she ended up in the middle of nowhere. They had started traveling together. She was young, maybe young enough to get him in trouble, but it never came to that. He started to think of her as a kid sister or a little cousin. He almost forgot at times that he hadn’t known her all her life. About a day ago, she asked him that question. He suggested they find a motel.
The place was a little run down but okay. The place was a dump. The place was a palace compared to the car, where they usually slept. He paid the man at the counter, and got a couple of Harv’s Cream Sodas from the machine on the way out of the lobby. She was waiting for him with the car door open. In case we have to make a quick getaway, he thought. He dangled the room key in front of her, and she pulled her bag from the car and slammed the door.
Inside, he pulled the curtains closed and turned on the air-conditioning. It sputtered for a moment, and for a few seconds there was a sweet smell to the air it blew on his face. He turned away from it and looked at her. She was putting her hair up in a ponytail. She had her back to him. They sat on the bed and drank soda and watched TV for a while. It was hard to hear with the air-conditioner going, but neither of them wanted to turn the volume up. They were all of a sudden nervous with each other, as though they were about to do something illicit.
“Have you ever done it?” she asked.
“A few times.”
“How is it?”
“It’s…” He fiddled with the lighter he never used anymore. “…something.”
“Do you remember it afterward?”
He looked at her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed watching him with these enormous eyes. She looked so young. “Yeah, sometimes, you know?”
She looked away now. “I think I’d like that. To remember it.”
“What do you remember now? About other times?” she asked stretching her legs out in front of her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Too many things to say.”
“Do you ever wish you could remember everything?” she asked.
“No. I think it would make things…hard.”
She said, “I think I’d like to. Remember.”
They had met about three months ago. He figured that was about as long as you needed to really know anybody. Any longer than that and they’ll change on you anyway, or you’ll change on them. He’d never really been close to anybody before. He’d had a few friends when he was in high school, but he’d lost track of them all. She didn’t have anybody either. They spent most of their time in the car, driving from one gas station to another. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they rode in silence, staring at the unending desert around them. Sometimes it seemed peaceful, sometimes it seemed heartbreaking.
He remembered one day when she was telling him about her past, she said, “You wait. One of these times, I’ll live in a big house with a backyard, and I’ll have dance recitals, and my parents will come to them, and I’ll have big birthday parties with lots of friends and a big cake with pink frosting, I just know it.” Then she got this fierce look on her face like she was trying not to cry. She didn’t. She never did.
He didn’t say anything to her, but he hoped none of that happened. He hoped they’d always be traveling together. He said, “I bet you’re right.”
They had met only an hour ago, but he guessed he had her pretty well figured out. An hour was all you really needed to know somebody. Any longer than that and…
“Is it true that things used to be different?” she asked without taking her eyes from the TV. “That they haven’t always been this way?”
“Things have always been different. Don’t you see?”
“I mean, is it true,” she asked, while a cartoon flashed a variance of lights across her face, “that sometimes things only happen one way?”
He took a swig from his bottle of coke. “I don’t believe that,” he said.
“Do you think,” she said, and now she thumbed a ragged edge on one of her nails, “that there’s a variation where we’ll never meet?”
“I don’t believe that, either.”
She looked up at him and, after a moment, smiled. For some reason, he felt sick.
She looked up at him, bewildered. He felt sick in his stomach.
He asked if she wanted something to eat. She said no, they just ate, remember? She said sure. So he went out and got a couple of sandwiches to go: a turkey on rye for her and a baloney on white for himself. As he was standing at the register, waiting to pay, he noticed the waitress’s nametag. Dora. The name reminded him of something. He suddenly wanted to go, to tell the waitress, forget the sandwiches, go, get in his car and drive away, just go.
He was going to ask her if she wanted something to eat, but she stood up at that moment and went into the bathroom, locking the door.
“I suppose it’s time now,” she said. She was sitting next to him, watching him, chewing her lip.
“I suppose so,” he agreed. He went to his bag and pulled out a hunting knife. “How do you want it?”
“Use this,” she said, holding up a stocking. For a while, he stood still, trying to figure out where she had gotten a stocking. She never wore them. Then he took it from her hand.
“Should I take off my shirt? I don’t want it to get bloody.”
“It won’t matter,” he said.
“Oh, right.”
He laid her down on the bed and bent over her with the knife. He wound the stocking around both hands while she watched him. On the TV was an ad for a movie. A man’s deep voice intoned, Imagine a world where things never change…
He waited for her to come out of the bathroom, thinking maybe she’d call the whole thing off. That was fine with him. If he could just get some sleep…. He lay back on the bed and rubbed his eyes.
“What do you think of a world like that? Where anything you do sticks. Where you can die for real and forever.” She looked out the window and got this look on her face.
He wrapped the stocking around her neck and pulled it tight. She struggled for a minute, then let him do it. She held his hand, not tight, not like she was fighting. After a while, her hand fell onto the bed. She lay still, not breathing now, her eyes glassy and fixed. He sat up and wiped the sweat from his face. He looked down at her.
She lay still, next to him. Her eyes were open, looking at him. She put her hand on his arm. “Kill me again,” she said.
She lay on the bed next to him, looking up at the ceiling. A couple of tears rolled out of the corners of her eyes.
“Sorry,” he said, looking away. He took a deep breath, let it go. “It’s best with someone you love.”
She shut her eyes and shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. She put her hand on his arm.
When he looked down at her, she was smiling this sad smile.
He drove down the highway about fifteen miles over the speed limit. That girl in the diner, the one who kept looking over at him, he should have gone and talked to her.
He was hungry. He pulled off the exit and parked in front of an old diner. He went inside and wiped the sweat from his face. It was cool inside. The air-conditioner was going. He looked around. There was one waitress, a fortyish woman with a nametag that read Dora. “You can sit anywhere you like,” Dora said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” He took a seat in the booth. He looked around again. Apart from a burly man in a plaid shirt and Dora and the cook, he was the only one there.