It was twilight and it was raining lightly. Cloud cover was thick and black but thinned towards the western horizon. It is essential to the story that you see the light conditions this produces: the light came from a single direction, but not harshly, and it was horizontal and the rain washed dust and pollen from the air and gave everything a shiny, reflective surface. Although the clouds were low he could see for miles across a flat landscape from which the colors grey and beige had been removed. Even the dried grass standing in the fields had taken on a yellowish, orangish cast and the greens were intense in this rainy spring dusk.
Although it was still light enough out to drive without his headlights he turned them on after dropping his daughter off at the eye doctor’s for a vision exam. His wife was there with the other daughter and would drive them home later. He took a narrow back road, an access road that ran parallel to train tracks along a field behind the sugar refinery. The pavement ran out after a hundred yards and he had to slow down and this was good because he had to marvel at the evening.
This was the road he used to take when he drove his eldest daughter to daycare ten years ago. He drove a different car then, smaller and so unreliable his daughter used to pray in the back seat when he started it. In the distance he could see other cars on the new road. He saw their headlights first, and then when he concentrated he could make out the cars. There was an overpass where the new road crossed the old road and the railroad tracks. Driving beneath that he saw where there had been a small landslide on the overpass embankment; engineers had miscalculated the maximum slope or the subsoil was too rocky and when the topsoil had saturated in the rain it just slid down ten feet, the grassroots couldn’t hold it; it left a jagged scar along the top and made a bulge along the bottom.
Beyond the overpass the old road curved to the right, crossed the train tracks and curved back left. He stopped the car because he couldn’t drive anymore he had to look at all this. Anner Bylsma playing Bach concertos on a Stradivarius violoncello from the Smithsonian collection certainly had an influence on his mood, but when he turned off the car engine, the music stopped and he sat there in the near silence, just the hiss of the rain, and was still paralyzed. There were no other cars on the old road. The new road intersected with this one at no point anywhere. He was sitting in one era no one cared about or even remembered, looking at another. No one took this road anymore: it was bumpy and had ruts and big puddles when it rained. Rain or shine, your car needed a wash after you took this road. He watched the headlights crawl along the other road, if going 100 km/h is crawling.
Ghosts don’t hate us, he thought, not some ghosts anyway. Some feel sorry for us, sorry as in pity and sorry as in apology, as they watch us move along our new roads.
