The Rules of Attraction

LAUREN The next week (or maybe it was a couple of days) seemed like a blur. Motel rooms, driving all night, getting stoned as his friend’s MG raced through the snowy roads. Everything seemed speeded up, time moved faster. There was no conversation, we didn’t speak to each other those days on the road. We had reached a point where there was simply nothing to talk about. We had passed even the most elementary stages of conversation. There were not even polite “How are you’s” in the morning; simple questions like “Can we stop at that gas station?” were discarded. Nothing was said. Neither of us spoke.

Though there were moments that week, even as we sat silently in that car zooming around, when I actually believed something was on his mind. He would slow the car down if we passed anything that even remotely resembled a chapel, or a church, and stare at it, the motor still running. Then he’d speed off again and wouldn’t stop until he found a suitable motel somewhere. And it was in these motel rooms where we started doing the cocaine he was carrying, and because of the cocaine the days, short already, seemed even shorter, and he’d drive faster, more recklessly, trying to get to some unknown destination. We would stay up all night in motels, the TV on, inhaling the cocaine, and if we needed something to eat later to keep us going, to fill our stomachs so we could do more coke without getting cramps, he’d leave the motel room and come back with cigarettes, cheeseburgers, and candy which he had bought with someone’s American Express card since he carried no cash.

The cocaine, oddly enough, made neither one of us talkative. We would do a few lines and instead of babbling away insincerely, we’d watch the television set and smoke, never confronting each other, just sitting there, or in the MG, or in coffee shops, almost embarrassed. He got thinner, more gaunt, as the amount of cocaine he was carrying dwindled down. More motels, more gas stations, another diner somewhere.

I would only eat candy bars and drink Diet Coke. The radio was always on whether there were stations nearby or not. News would come on but there really wasn’t anything to hear. Earthquakes, the weather, politics, mass death. It was all boring. I carried with me a photograph of Victor, and I would take it out and sit in the car, Sean next to me sniffing constantly, his sunglasses kept on, covering glassy eyes, and I’d touch the photograph. It was black and white and Victor was shirtless, smoking a cigarette, half-leering into the lens of the camera, trying to look like an old-young faded movie star, his eyes half-lids, closed in sexy parody. I liked Victor even more because of this photograph and the mystery it contained. But then I didn’t, couldn’t like him because he stayed with Jaime, and that was unforgivable. The only tape in the car was old Pink Floyd and Sean would only listen to “Us and Them” and nothing else, rewinding it over and over, and the draggy rhythm would put me to sleep, which was probably what Sean wanted, yet then he would turn it up whenever the chorus would blast out “Haven’t you heard, it’s a…” and startled I would sit upright, my heart pounding and reach over and turn the volume down once his fingers left the control dial. The song would fade out, then he’d rewind it again. I said nothing.

Sean would light cigarettes, toss the match out the window, take a drag, put the cigarette out.