Perfect From Afar

“Let’s just try it,” Mark said, looking again at the old car up ahead. ‘Old’ and ‘car’ didn’t quite capture the wreck of it. A 1940’s Chevy 2 door, the kind of hotrod you saw in surf movies twenty years after and sixty years ago. This one even had 2 surfboards on the roof, fins up, like a fancy haircut. Time and the sun, salt and humidity, had not been kind. Technically a car was for moving; this one had served as a billboard for the Crayfish Diner until it closed.

At least Penny had come on the walk this evening, so there was that. “I don't know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Like, why?”

Honestly, he didn’t have an answer. Ask something enough times and a question becomes its own refusal. But sitting in the thing had stuck in his head some time back when walking the dog.

Part of it was how the rusted body, sunken tires, salt-caked windshield, baked away logo, at this hour of some evenings, with sun behind just so, looked brand new.

It was startling, unreal. The rust in the car’s paint at dusk’s slant of light seemed to catch some fresh coppery ion so that flecks sparkled underneath a shine, like a new car on display in a showroom. Shadows gave the illusion of full whitewashed tires resting on asphalt and not half-buried, half flat in dirt and weeds. The years of coral dust and sea salt caked on the windshield, from the mangrove flats nearby, glowed a bright white as if caught in some California surfer’s dream and not mired under Floridian humidity.

The vision wasn’t consistent, and Penny rarely (okay, never these days) went with him when he walked the dog, and when it did happen she was never ready to listen when he tried to describe it upon return.

He pointed. “That’s why.”

“An iguana?” she said.

There was an iguana, nearly as long as the dog, halfway to the car, but Mark hadn’t noticed. There were always iguanas and now the dog would be all excited. “Don’t even think about it,” Mark told him. “Hodor. Sit.” Hodor sat, tail windshield-wiping the dirt, looked back at Mark, then back to the iguana. Didn’t matter how many times the dog obeyed, Mark always felt a bit of pleasure when he did. Such joy, such eager, guileless desire the dog had, not an ounce of bitterness or resentment, not even at being held back from his greatest of joys: chasing, sometimes even catching, one of the lizards.

“I meant the car,” he told Penny. “Crayfish Diner car, look! See? It looks brand new, like I’ve tried to tell you. I mean, look at it.”

She tilted her head, as if she needed a different angle, squinted. “I guess.”

“You guess? C’mon. Look!”

“Okay,” she said, almost reluctant, as if she wanted to give him nothing. “Yes. I see it. That’s kind of weird.”

“I know, right?”

Hodor was intent on the iguana. Now eying them warily, it’d been doing that sideways grass munching thing, chewing at a clump of weeds alongside the unpaved road. “What do you think?” Mark asked the dog. His tail wagged harder. “Ok. You can go. Go get ‘em. Go!”

Hodor took off so fast and hard he left a cloud of dust cartoon-like at the start and Mark barked out a little laugh.

“Really?” Penny said, deflating the moment. “If we have to spend the evening…well, it’s on you. I’m busy.” She was indiscriminate in her affection for animals, would not listen to Mark’s arguments about the iguana’s invasive character, destruction of habitat, eating of eggs. It was a myth that they were vegetarian and he hated the damned things. Possibly losing Hodor in his attempt to kill one only fueled her bitterness.

The iguana shot up and beelined the old car, its crazy pinwheeled run a kind of flight, tail and body straight back, Hodor right behind. Mark tried to lighten Penny’s mood. “Damn they run funny, don’t they?” he said. She didn’t answer. “He’s not going anywhere. They live under there, Hodor tries every time, we won’t have to chase him.” He held off calendaring the only other time they’d lost the dog, years ago.

The iguana made it to some little cavern at the car’s rear and vanished with a whiplash of tail but Hodor nearly caught it. The dog dug furiously for a moment, then gave up and lay down, nose at the hole, tail sweeping the ground.

All the time-shedding light pulled away as they neared the old car and before they were a dozen steps off it was back to a rusted wreck. This whole neighborhood had followed it into abandonment, though. Crazy Crayfish Diner had closed at least a decade ago, not long after the mangroves were declared a protected species and new construction ended. New everything, really. Mark hated it, all the new, all the old dying. The irony was not entirely lost on him, how an attempt to preserve the Keys destroyed it.

“Damn I miss that place,” he said wistfully.

“The diner? That place was shit. You hated it. Hated the traffic. You celebrated when they closed, remember? Said it was about time.”

“I never said that.”

“You never said a lot of things you said.”

“Well I miss it now!” he barked angrily.

Penny said, “You want to sit in this car now?”

Her resistance; it was as if her pull was his push, the more she fought his attempts the easier it was for him to go that way, as if both were swimming in the current of what they fought. “I’m not sure the doors even open. Probably rusted shut. Just seemed, I don’t know, something to do when the light hits it all magic like that.” He yanked the door but it was stuck fast. He could feel the color of rust on the handle staining his palm. His thumb blindly searched for a button, as on any modern car, before his hand realized it was like a regular door lever. Mark pushed down and felt something snap, that unmistakable sense a guy learns over hard experience of breaking a machine deep within.

After that there was no tension at all and the handle hung in a way that could only be described as flaccid.

None-the-less, Mark pulled, going so far as to put his foot on the side panel.

“Jesus, Mark, you’re gonna break it off,” Penny said.

He was aware, but also felt the door open just a tease, heard it confirmed with a thin, tiny, deep squeal of complaint..

“It’s…working,” he grunted, really putting his back into it now.

A light came on inside. Breath still caught in strain, he managed to say to Penny, “Check that out. A…light.”

“There can’t possibly still be a working battery,” she said, genuinely puzzled.

He had to agree. The door was only open an inch or so and the light was weird. Bright, bright as day. As he pulled, his mind flipped through possibilities. Refraction from the windshield? Hardly; the sun had just set. Some forgotten advertising attempt from way back, a spare battery or something inside? Unlikely. Aliens? Ha. Fire? He paused on that one.

The door let loose with a sudden thunk and a shriek and another thunk and Mark fell back on his ass. Penny laughed. The dog barked.

When he let go and fell, the door swung shut, and even though he was flat on his back staring up at a happy dog and fading sky above, hearing a mocking wife, he felt the unnatural action of the car door’s closing. He’d spent the last decades repairing and installing HVAC systems, mostly a/c here in south Florida, condensers and compressors, and so knew a machine’s internal workings without seeing them. All manner of hinge and spring, lever and sprocket, thread and coil, were broken in this car, That door should not have swung shut that smoothly. It was ghostly.

He pushed the dog away and got up, dusting his palms on his jeans. He stared at the Chevy, took a deep ‘don’t be a pussy’ breath, and grabbed the handle.

He’d a slight fear, kept from Penny, that the interior would be filled with iguanas, that they’d flood out like some nightmare. A different unease now waited.

He was already pulling it open when he realized the mechanism was no longer broken; it’d clicked and resisted as one would expect. But then he was nervously marvelling at the car’s interior, brand new red vinyl seats, puffy as if never sat upon. Slick thin silver steering wheel. A dial-across AM radio above a chrome pull-out ashtray. No dust, no rust, all new shine.

“Oh my god,” he said. “This is…”

“Magic?”

“Yeah, magic. Time travel?” He turned and stared hard at the road and mangroves behind them, the empty lots and low scrub, cabbage and saw palmetto, none more than shoulder high, expecting grinning faces, cameras. “It’s a joke, right? We’re being filmed?” He checked the empty sky. Two pelicans swooping past, a gull. Hodor had laid himself down, completely uninterested.

Mark swung his shoulders back to the car, still holding the door open. Outside, rusted wreck. Inside, brand freakin’ new. “Okay, this is crazy. Right?”

“Maybe it was always sealed up so it never got old,” Penny offered. She bent down, looked around, gasped and pulled back so suddenly she thumped shoulders with Mark.

“What?! What is it?”

“The windows! The windshield!”

The evening had dimmed enough to shadow the landscape and he hadn’t even looked out the window yet.

He peered in. Outside the windshield was not the same place they stood. Not the same outside. The palms were higher, hundreds of coconut trees overhead and to the horizon. A dozen pelican came sweeping low over the trees then what looked like flamingos. A mile or so up the way, some house or business cast an early evening glow.

“This is…” Penny said. “We gotta get out of here.”

He recoiled at the idea, the idea of leaving now. This was no curse; it was a gift, some magic gift, for them. A chance, a chance he had to leap at, to go back, to return to who they were, what they were, the good times. When she loved him. He felt the certainty with the same conviction he believed in the magic before them, through that windshield. A second chance. Not just the two of them. To go back to what the Keys once were, wild and cheap. No tourists, no cruise ships, no fifty hours a week fixing a/c in the heat. To what they were when they left the mainland, fled it, young and careless.

“It called me,” he said, boyish wonder in his voice. “Don’t you get it? That’s why I had the idea, why I pushed it. Destiny, Penny. A new life, or the old life, but better, no mistakes. I feel it. I know it. Let’s get in.”

They had both leaned down to peer inside, Penny slightly ahead, and he steered her shoulders and nudged her in past the steering wheel. It wasn’t violent but maybe, predictably, careless: he was helping her over to the passenger side, across the wide seat, so roomy the steering wheel wasn’t even in the way. It wasn’t violent, but she stiffened and pushed back so hard it was as if he’d struck her.

He muttered a ‘Sorry” to her startled “Hey!?” but kept pushing with his hips until they both were in the car.

Mark settled himself behind the steering wheel, bouncing in the seat like a kid - just short of making ‘vroom vroom’ sounds - then grinned over at Penny. She was already over on the other side, legs pulled away, angry trapped horror in her eyes. “What the hell Mark?!” she cried. “What are you doing? Let me out.”

“Penny, it’s magic!” he said. “Like real magic.” Behind her through the window a breeze rustled coconut and palm and a gang of white ibis nosed a shallow grassy pool. Behind him the air was flat and lifeless.

“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “It’s not right. I don’t like it.”

“I get it,” Mark said. “This is freakin scary. I get it. But it’s magic. It’s real magic.”

“I’m not scared,” Penny said.

“You’re not?”

“No.”

“Hell, I’m scared. So why not try if you’re not scared?”

“I don't want this Mark. I don't want to go back. I’m not…” She went silent and they both stared out the magical front window, at some 1940’s or 50’s or maybe even completely different America, another world.

“What?” he cried into her silence. “What? This is a chance to go back.”

“I just…don’t. I don’t want to go back. With you. You want some spell to make things the way they were, but they never were what they were. It’s only magic because it’s not real.”

“But..” he sputtered.

“Some things are bigger than magic, Mark,” she said, then turned to her door and found the handle.

“Wait, just wait. Maybe, maybe…” He reached outside the car and grabbed at the open door, found the knob and pulled.

She opened her door as he closed his. Outside her door was their world, her world. The one without mystery. She stepped out and into it then looked back over her shoulder. An iguana ran past, then Hodor mouth open and tongue flapping. Her hand was already on the door’s window, palming it shut, but from his side it didn’t exist, wasn’t at the glass at all.

He pulled his door shut, felt all that machine gear and latch connect deep within. Then he waited for hers to close.