Jacob Hibbard

Forward

Here is Perez, driving a just-washed Chrysler 300 with the radio off and the windows up, staying in the lines like coloring a coloring book. He inflated the tires too, post-wash, so they grip good to sharp curves…like now, alongside a flattened corn field, where droplets still run lines across the windshield.

Here’s Perez’s mom smiling, laughing, covering her mouth.

“It’s a car,” she says.

“It is,” Perez says too.

“A sedan actually,” his dad then corrected. “Eggshell white.”

Here they are staring at the front of the hood.

Here’s Perez in a gray, hooded sweatshirt with sunglasses retrieved from the bottom of a swimming pool. He puckers his lips over a blunt rolled in a wet mango cigar wrap, slouching in his seat, forgetting for a moment why he’s on these back roads in the first place. All he knows is that one hand is on the steering wheel, the other on the emergency stick, but wonders now for what purpose? He has no use for the stick other than its optimal gripping shape, though begins to think he might like the look. Likes that at any moment he could crank the stick and make the car do something incredible, if need be.

Here, in the hazy car interior, Perez sings to himself, “You can’t see me, but I’m out here.” He removes the sunglasses, tosses them over to an empty passenger seat, and notices the vibrancy of a Saturday sun—more vibrant on Saturdays—and the expanse of golden fields undulating, and how way out near the tree-line, on the edge to another landscape, orange vested construction men roll heavy ramps into trees, through trees, over trees, and back again.

These men, Perez thinks, making two landscapes into one.

But where am I going? He stares in the rearview mirror at pool water eyes, and asks aloud, “Where am I going? Where am I going?”

That’s right, he thinks: Jordan’s.

Here’s Perez last evening examining Jordan in a picture she sent him–her body dimly lit by a plug-in-the-wall volcano. Here are his parents below in the kitchen. A conversation over broken pipes taking a louder turn.

“It’s always something,” he hears his dad. “First the floors, then the gutters, then the furnace. What’s next? The roof? Our lives?”

“Just call the guy,” his mom says back.

There is a pause.

“But I can fix it.”

Another pause.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Just call the guy.”

Here is Perez shutting his bedroom door. Through air vents, dishes clank off-beat with footsteps. A faucet bursts, followed by a slammed drawer and the neighbor’s lawn mower turning over. Perez entombs himself in a green spotted comforter. He brings Jordan close to his face. Here, an empty room forms in his head.

Here is Perez in the empty room in his head where Jordan drifts forward like a cinematic, slow motion fade-in, closer and closer, encapsulating his entire brain-vision. Pink blurs slink by as he moves into her, through her, past her, back into the empty room, where she emerges again, drifting, as a car would, toward a mountain that slowly gets bigger and bigger.

Here is Perez opening his eyes, standing quickly into an evening light slipping through a bedroom curtain. Black dots slant across Perez’s vision and fall like dead flies that disappear into the floor.

His dad to his mom says, “This business of laundry appliances needs an ending.”

Here is Perez on a couch among a few friends. The table is a pile of blunt guts and empty beer cans and someone’s head band. They talk in inquisitive tones. The war, the crisis, school time politics…the strange, tragic ways of dying, of other people in town, dreams dealing with their fathers, and a lot about the ways in which they will be different adults then the ones they all know now. Somewhere, amidst the chatter, Carlyle says with utmost seriousness, “who am I going to be.”

“Carlyle,” Perez says, “You’ll be Carlyle.”

Here’s Perez in baby pictures, fistfuls of chocolate cake smeared across his face. Here’s Perez in the fourth grade, atop the jungle gym, pronouncing himself king of the mulch. Here he is in the passenger seat, as his dad slows down the car and hits the hazards.

“If you’re ever in trouble,” his dad says. “You can always do this.”  

Here he is now, easing off the pedal at the top of a hill, allowing momentum to carry him past a farm, a church, a barn painted burgundy and gold, seeing cows chaw moist grass, passing Tom and Rays, where burly bikers lean over handlebars, white smokes lodged between thick fingers. He follows along a rusty barbed wire fence, and thinks, if I reach out, I’ll be hooked like that.

Here he is atop a lake deck, strapping water skis to his feet. His mom on a lawn chair taking his picture. Perez—flooring up another hill—lurches into a sun that hits his face with a shaft of orange light. Orange like orange peels, he thinks, like inside eyelids, like Jordan’s socks as she sprints down a lacrosse field, cradling a white ball.

Here’s Perez squinting. A small smile stretching into a bigger one. Rolling the window down, he holds the blunt in the air like a beacon, like the front man to a charging cavalry. In his head are two conflicting ideas. One: nothing matters, and two: he doesn’t want to die. Velocity unhinges the cherry. It swirls leaf-like before breaking apart into sparks and ash. In him comes an impulse to scream. It aches in his pelvis, bubbles, moves to his chest. There, Perez hammer fists his heart, flattening the impulse until it thins throughout his body.

Here’s Perez, losing his virginity despite his primary interest in holding breasts, or squeezing them, or doing something to breasts that generates a reaction in Jordan. Mid thrust, the condom tears, and Jordan retrieves a fresh one. In the time between ripping the wrapper with his teeth and uncurling onto his penis, Perez hears a distant sound—like a pulse—and believes any moment someone will burst in. Not just anybody, but parents, his, Jordan’s—all of them—holding video cameras.

Here’s Perez with Carlyle. Outside on the back patio, leaning over the railing, fingertips sticky with blunt residue. Carlyle puffs once, puffs twice, and reveals he gets nervous, and that it’s a good deal of pressure. That he too makes humiliating faces, or finishes too soon, but at least he’s doing it, because when he’s not, he feels like he should be.

Here’s Perez on a straightaway that splits a green field in two. He can’t tell where his foot ends and the pedal begins. He checks his face in the mirror, combs his bangs to form a wave. The engine clicks like minute hands as the Chrysler charges. Water on the windshield dries into a series of gray streaks.

Here’s Perez wiping cigar guts off his thigh.

Here is Perez when his dad hands him a beer, and says, “It’s about time we tie one on together, don’t you think?” Perez, never considering tying one on with his dad, drinks dark, rich beer, packaged in translucent, green bottles with a rainbow label that states: brewed by life and spice, that to Perez—his first sip becoming something of a revelation—tastes like autumn. Beers they clink together as footage of an invasion airs in crisp, colorful definition. Beers his dad slugs with great intensity, watching the orange flashes sweep along a dark horizon, coming forth through a giant, mounted television, where explosions blare from speakers drilled to ceiling corners, sounding like metal crunching metal.

Here’s Perez watching his dad fist pump, and say, “We’re getting them good. And good. After all they did to us.” Here’s Perez with his head on a pillow trying to formulate real things they had done to him, though only remembers walking out the front door, onto his quiet suburban street, where the sky, in that moment, seemed to have its limits—that somewhere up there was an end point, a clear barrier, and by standing barefoot on the front porch could be the same as standing inside a glass globe. One that would eventually be flipped over and shook.

Here…trees replace open fields. Fields replace trees. Trees turn to houses. Houses turn to trees. The sunlight is quite bright. Pavement below Perez passes easily as he moves off his own understanding of trajectory. The open windows bring wind gusts and speeding observations, and then expansive fields reaching outward, which suddenly makes Perez see his mom hold his dad, and him hold her, before the buzz of the dryer in the basement pulls them apart.

Here is the stop sign he doesn’t see, to an intersection somewhat busy, and in split second progression, Perez realizes its presence, realizes it’s too late to yank the stick, or, not too late, but what could yanking the stick actually achieve? Could it spin him around? Send him back the other way? To think means Perez has picked a path, has made his bed, and all that can be done is hope no car moves over the intersecting road at the time that he crosses.

Here’s the emergency stick Perez white knuckles. And here’s the collision of his foot with the pedal—and the collision with the pedal with the floor mat. Here is the engine that is loud. And the speed that blurs surroundings into a stream of color. Here is that stream of color. Here it comes through Perez’s pool water eyes, with the time, and the space, when the only thought crossing his brain is a question of making it, or not.

Kimiko Hahn