If I wasn’t looking directly at it, the sky took on a blue-olive tone. This was not a normal colour for a sky, and the strangeness drew my focus. When I looked more directly, it would instantly present itself as the light blue of a nice, normal day.

The road we were on was empty; two lanes, divided by a double yellow line, flat, smooth, unrelenting. I remembered that we had driven through forest, through mountains, following the path through carved stone, but I can’t remember when. The images were there, but they were divorced from time. Whenever I traced time backwards in my mind, followed the thread from this thought to the previous and the one before that, the scenery around was always green plains of short indistinct vegetation. The mountains must have existed. I could see them along the horizon both in front and behind me, paled by the layers of atmosphere between us. They never seemed to get further away, and never closer.

We came up on a road sign, an awkward indigo square with an orange circle in it. I was too focused on what it was trying to tell me that I missed the exit sign above.

“What exit was that?” I asked.

“Thirty-seven.”

Ken was stretched out in the passenger seat, with his seat deeply reclined and his feet resting on the dash, crossed left to right. I think his eyes were closed; it’s strange how you can tell even through the darkest sunglasses. His head was resting on the window; his face half bathed in sun.

There was a question I knew I had to ask but couldn’t. It was being smothered by the din of anxiety and paranoia in my head. I held my breath, the courage building, the thought forming.

“Does it even matter?” Ken asked, interrupting the thought. I exhaled and the thought sank back.

“What?” I asked.

“You asked me if leaving was the right thing to do.”

Did I?

“Was it?” I asked.

“We couldn’t stay.” Ken was uninterested.

I think he was right. 

“I was so tired,” I said. 

Ken nodded without lifting his head off the window.

I could remember the feeling of moving through life, before I was tired. There were things — goals, dreams, milestones — fixed in space and time. I moved to them, found them, set course from them. I was dynamic. I was in pursuit.

Somewhere along the way, I found the centre of existence. The goals, the dreams, the milestones, the obstacles started coming to me. I’d watch them get closer, fall into my hands, and fade into the past as I prepared for the next thing.

“You still accomplished, you acquired,” Ken pointed out, “what does it matter if you moved to things or they moved to you? Does a bat hit a baseball, or does the baseball hit the bat?”

I wondered how he answered me, when my thoughts never left my head.

Another exit sign, fixed in space, appeared to float from the front of the car to the rear. I saw bold, black lines and curves but somewhere between my eyes and brain the symbols lost meaning.

“What exit was that?” I asked.

“Forty-something,” Ken said.

I focused on the car. The steering wheel was an extension of my hands, the steel body my new skin. If I tried, I could feel the pavement against my tires. I was in motion. Dynamic.

“What exit do we have to get off at?” I asked.

“Fifty-three.”

A goalpost, fixed in space. I set my cruise control; I fixed my destination in time.

“Things will be different this time.” I don’t think Ken cared much, but saying it out loud made it more real for me.

I needed these moments to bring reality into focus; without them, existence lost the boundaries that kept it defined.

“Remember that time the world turned into a scene, projected onto paper, and then a hole tore in the sky?” I asked Ken.

“I don’t think that happened.”

“No, I don’t think it did either,” I trailed off in thought. “But it must have, because I remember the aftermath. I remember not being able to unsee it, the flatness. I remember losing my sense of far and near; not in a way that I missed it, but in a way like I had never known it. Everything was within arm’s reach; everything was on the distant horizon. That felt like the way things wanted to be.” Even just speaking about it, I became hyper aware of the metal box I was currently in. I felt like if I tried to touch the window or the roof, I would never reach it. “Have you ever felt claustrophobic and megalophobic at the same time?”

Ken sighed as if we’d been over this before. “And yet, you could still move left and right, forward and back, up and down. You could still go to work. You still spoke to people, learned of their hopes, dreams, and memories. You existed in a very real space, with real rules and real boundaries, almost never fading into your environment. You still found corners, found the fetal position, and let panic protect you from the monsters. Isn’t that enough evidence that nothing happened at all?”

I stared off at the road ahead. I blinked. It was heavy and slow. There were no road signs for the foreseeable future; the clouds sat static in the sky. I took note of their positions and shapes: a dog above a rabbit, the locomotive car of a steam train moving right, evidenced only by the direction of its exhaust. I had a sense that I had done this before. This wasn’t the first time on this drive that I wondered if the clouds were suspended in both space and time.

Another exit sign was coming up. The word EXIT was clearly written in bold, sans serif lettering. White against the standard green background. The number was odd; lines scraped into a board in a way I’d never seen before.

“Did you catch that exit number?” I asked Ken.

“Nope.”

“I’m sure we’re close now.”

Ken didn’t respond.

“You ever have a bottle of hot sauce, and you can see that there’s still stuff in the bottle, but it won’t come out? It pools at the bottom, and then you flip it and shake it and what comes out is always less than what you saw. So, you put it back, upside down, hoping it’ll pool at the opening. The next time you use it, it comes out in fits and spurts. It’s still less than what you saw though. You can do this dance for weeks. I don’t think you ever really empty the bottle; you just make peace with the fact that it’s as empty as it’s going to get. I don’t think it’s just hot sauce that works that way.”

“Maybe,” Ken said. He had a ball cap pulled down over his eyes. His sunglasses resting on the brim. I wondered where he got it from. He must have always had it, since we hadn’t stopped. How was he reading the road signs with his hat pulled down so far?

“Sometimes I don’t even look anymore. It’s a lot easier to throw it out if you just believe it’s empty.”

“Probably.”

I sank further into my seat.

The mountains were still all around. The ones to the left and right felt closer than they did before; they were within arm’s reach; they were still obscured behind miles and miles of atmosphere. They were farther away than they were before.

We passed another exit sign. I didn’t even try to read it this time.

“What exit was that?” I asked Ken.

“Twenty-two,” he said. “We’ll be there soon.”

I turned on the radio; nothing but static. I turned it off again; static still crackled from the speakers. It was going to be a long drive.

I didn’t even mean to ask it, but it came out, like the last bit of hot sauce from the bottle, “You’re real, right?”

Silence from Ken; the static coming from the speaker sounded like it was coming from his head.

“What exit are we looking for?” I asked.

“Fifty-three,” Ken said.