Work Text:
This will be an experiment.
The motorbike in his hands was a Ninja 250, the 2007 model. Black sleek leather, silver glints of metal, the white-hot headlamp like a single, unblinking eye.
Dale Barbara had never ridden a motorcycle in his life. He remembered the vast blue Iowan skies, of days working in the farm, the breeze, the growl of the tractor rattling in his limbs, lying across the roof with a battered copy of Moby-Dick resting across his ribs as he watched the sun set over an ocean of corn-golden fields, but not once, not then, had he ever thought of riding away. The military was merely a faraway aspiration. The rest was history. He loved those days, and missed them, somewhere deep down, for now he looked back and thought that they were the only days he was ever free.
Barbie looked down. The green light blinked. Neutral, that was. Fingers of his left hand closed around the clutch.
This is not going to work, he thought again, but there was something there, something beneath the surface like lights at the bottom of a faraway swimming pool. Blood was rushing in his ears. Never.
He stayed there, for one moment longer. Both feet on the ground. Hesitating.
It was like gears shifting in his mind, he would think, later on. It was like waiting for that one perfect click.
Can’t be possible.
His foot on the gear-shift, one little tip upwards. Turned the clutch outward.
Throttle.
I cannot be doing this.
It felt, at first, as if the liquid speed was the ground itself moving, sliding forwards like the sliding tile of a treadmill. The throttle, however, triggered all vigorous, violent momentum into life, and blasted him back into his own body with a lurch.
There was a scream in his throat, trapped there, lodged brokenly; if anything happened, he would scream. But it did not and could not happen. The world around him was coming into sharp focus, color so vivid they could hardly be real, empty parking slots on either side, trees planted, white stripes on dark ground, cars swishing by on the outside streets. It was so cold. Even wearing Hanna Compton’s helmet, he felt so cold, all over.
There was darkness all around, the streetlights a mere neon illusion.
Darkness rode with him.
Click.
The vicious hiss of air soaring past, the jubilant roar of the wind, seemed so alive. He could feel it everywhere.
Roadfucker, Barbie thought. He called it the Roadfucker.
The breaking of a previously unbreakable wall, water pouring in from a broken dam. Something was broken, something in his mind; it was impossible and magnificent. The wind was chilling, stinging, rushing by fast, fast. This is it and this had to be it. He called to every living wire, every electric charge, for as far as he could feel, and they responded; they hummed through each guttural vibration beneath him, throbbed with pleasure with every second of gaining speed. His teeth clattered, every bone in his body clattered, like dice in a cup, rattled like the ground during an earthquake, and he hung on. A chainsaw sputtering life, the sound of teeth gnawing on wood. The motorcycle – Roadfucker, he thought – was something alive, strapped between his legs, something so old and delighted and hungry.
He laughed.
Jesus Christ, oh my God–
(he loves this part)
-and I don't know how to turn.
But there was no thought, no reaction, only being. Only feeling. Only soaring.
His hands knew what they were doing, all on their own.
Barbie slowed down. He let his weight go, let it fall entirely into the curve and into the pull of gravity as the world around him spun as if someone up there was spinning a top. It was like dancing, he thought. A wild, lethal, eloquent dance that drove him forward – spat him forward – into something else entirely, some otherworldly plunge of speed. He should slow down, he should go lightly on the throttle, he should hit the brakes and get off before he killed himself, but there was no time to contemplate any of it, not truly. His body had taken over: tensed, hunching, adapted. This baby was powerful.
The turn had passed and he was riding straight again, laughing shakily, manically – aloud, in his mind, he did not know. It was an earthquake, he thought, it felt like an earthquake; he was living through the universe’s biggest earthquake, and he was riding it, like riding the chopping waves of a surfboard. He shook so bad it felt like the violence of the vibration would never be gone, that it would ache like the hissing electric thrums of bass-guitar strings in his blood forever, and the feeling itself was like fuel. It scorched and it healed. It was in his legs, in his stomach, like hot pine-needles beneath his skin; it would throw him off if he stopped hanging on, toss him onto the ground, so Barbie hung on.
(He called it the Roadfucker.)
The engine was in place of his heart, a guttural, stuttering motor, pumping blood and setting the rhythm to his body, letting each shudder run through his bones like flaming electricity.
If he laughed again, right now, he was sure its sound could shatter all the glass nearby as easily as blowing over a house of cards. The wind was so cold, and he was riding on that, too, riding it like a surfer on a colossal wave. He had given up trying to make sense of it. He had given up trying to stop.
(He loved the road, it's the only place he was ever free.)
It was not familiar, yet it was. He had never known this feeling, but he had been feeling this for so long, for the past five years, for his whole life. It was terrible, arcane, but wonderful, he had missed it so much. He drew the power in before letting it seep out, running like water or blood, like a grape popping open, like thick shining pus oozing out of a sore.
He looked forward. He was looking forward when the next turn came. The reaction happened in milliseconds, and it wasn’t his reaction – later on he would look back and be sure that it was not his reaction, but someone else’s entirely – as he slowed before accelerated the way out of the turn, not daring to hesitate, not even thinking; there was some raw thrill in his mind where the rationality and fear should be, some sort of pulsing energy that drowned out the rest. He was riding, along the path. The Ninja was stuttering hard beneath him, vibrating hard, vibrating like a thousand gazillions strings that made up for the fabrics of the universe.
The darkness, the night and its neon dots of light, rode with him.
Roadfucker, he thought, again, and the sound of his laugher was lost in the wind.
He made it back to the parking lot where Hanna and Mattie Compton were, the two of them shadows in the light.
He shifted down. Eased the throttle, turned the clutch. Easy. Easy there.
There was one moment of clarity when Barbie thought he was going to fall: fly over the handlebars and land in a neck-broken heap on the empty parking slot, end this somewhat unbelievable journey with blood and reality – then everything happened at once, all over again: his foot came down hard on the rear-brake and his left hand on the front, fingers rolling the clutch further, gently. So easily.
He dropped one foot back on the ground, balancing the bike as he stopped. Lightheaded and stunned flat, feeling like he could fall and hit the concrete in a boneless heap if he let go of the handlebar, turned and looked around.
Nothing but an empty, desolate stretch of a parking lot, in the late evening gloom.
There was nobody out here, in this big, mad world, no one at all.
This is just an experiment, Barbie thought.
He had his hands clenched around the handlebars and the wind on either side like a whiplash, and there was some humor to how his limbs obeyed the demands of his mind no longer, bypassed its order as if with an overriding key. Turning around the corner and accelerating out of the bend, and regaining his balance like tilting sideways with a partner on the dance-floor. His heart in his throat, two fingers on the clutch, foot nudging the gear-shift, and throttle, throttle.
He fell into the feeling head-first, less fearfully than the last. Wonderstruck. Elated.
The wind in his eyes, his hair, his blood. The third corner approached like an old friend. He leaned into the turn, and built the speed up to rush out of it. It made sense in the very jolt of his bones. It made sense in the mad, shrieking, soaring throb of his leaf-fragile heart.
He plunged forward. His eyes fixed on the path illuminated by the head-lamp’s glow and there was nothing else, only the speed that carried him forward, the steady yet fragile balance that kept him running right along the edge. He wasn’t going fast, only just shifting into second gear and threatening to rise into third. He could go faster. That face was simple, too, staggeringly and terrifyingly simple. He could pull this on the road and go faster.
He remembered the Harley-Davidson parked in the garage, tilted slightly to one side, orange stripes glittering in the noonday sun, dazzling.
He felt no alien presence in his mind, no whispering voices suggesting directions and advice. It was merely that his body knew how to respond like waking up from a long sleep. Trembling, uncertain, assured and impossible, but so viscerally, breathlessly true.
There it was, the feeling. Twist the key and it rises, with every wrench of the right hand and every rising shift of the left foot. He imagined being on the road. He imagined of vibration, adrenaline and speed, of harsh tires screaming against rough tarmac, and the deep, throaty rumble that came from the engine like an old man’s laugh. When you strip bare of all that is left of the world and see that there is nothing else to this terrible existence but life, you would know its power: the visceral, naked glimpse of existence that came with the engine and the rush, an eternal journey revved up into the darkness, waiting for the crash and for the beads to fall apart and spill into the gutter, crushed into oblivion, lost forever.
The parking lot emerged once more, and Barbie knew he would arrive, letting go of the clutch, nudging the kickstand and get off the bike, panting and shivering and feeling like a different person. Perhaps he was. Somewhere in his mind, he thought, the dam was broken. It may repair itself in good time, but right now the water was rising, and he fancied the line that separated him and this universe’s Barbie was no longer visible beneath the murky tide.
Right now, this was life.
He made it around the corner and knew it was going to be over, he was going to let the speed go, let the feeling go, and that was alright, because he went to it laughing.