Supply Chain

The sky is lower in the parts of America reserved for driving, and this weight absolved James of the conscious thought one might experience in the corners of the world, so stuffed with advertisements and elbow maneuvers that it spread alight the kind of thinking he had once freed himself from. The sex hot line billboards were back, less distracting than the strip club advertisements in which the women faced forward. They grazed a few clouds. These women were not real, though in the past few years James had become even more skeptical of their origin, as if they were conjured like false, generated goddesses. He used to picture their middle school teeth in colorful braces, the kinds their parents must have been able to afford to produce such beautiful offspring. But did they have a middle school? Or teeth? Were they born from the long concrete hallways of the computer? The girl in the newest billboard shaded her face with a cowboy hat as the velvet of her back turned coyly. He flicked his eyes back and forth from the road, trying to decipher her nose from the shadow. Too late. And he forgot to wonder further upon his passing, just as all the clouds began to shade a new piece of land, never reminiscent of anything but pure shape.

James selected the least questionable strawberry from his astray of a cupholder and chewed it, stem and all. Spat the stem on the concrete of the Durham truck stop. It looked like a blood clot, the post matter of an abortion. An explanation mark. Stared at its Rorschach. Dreaming nightly, he suffered images in which every bite of food contained a shiny quarter. The homeless men of his dreams ate yogurt containers full of money, while his sister carved into a chicken, erupting silver. Even in sleep he could feel the ridge of the coin’s edge along his tongue, as if he had enjoyed this delicacy hundreds of times and could recount its sensation unthinking.

The only cure, he told himself, is to practice thinking while awake. Still, tanning his left arm on the I-95, the blankness of the sky filled him with calm and even dissolved all the questions he was planning to ask himself while on the road. His memories bored him. He attempted to teach himself whistling, a hobby he had figured to acquire when he began driving, but the sound of the road proved too much to gauge the progress of his air.

Look, he thought, you once knew how to think. Once, knew how to string one thought to the next. I think you were capable of this. Okay, pay attention to the hair on your legs. What does the wind remind you of? Please tell me. Is there anytime you felt like this before? Was the hair always this coarse? Did you ever drive past that Walmart, and did it feel like this too? Or is that one of the newer Walmarts, the ones with the gun racks? Yeah, maybe you stopped at this Walmart for the cigarettes, or maybe that was after you quit but you needed something else. How long has it been since you were here before? Can you retrace the layout of the parking lot? It probably wasn’t winter, you’d remember the ice. So Spring? Were things dying, or just being born?

He did not answer himself back. The billboard over Virginia Southbound advertised motor homes for family living, easy loans, a wide-eyed little boy.

Three hours later, after several instances of remembering to blink in the dry frog of the highway, James pulled into the Parkway Express. He had a cooler-truck, one of those chilled boxes that required the engine to run non-stop to keep the product from melting. Or waking up. He was carrying lobster. And he had carried lobster, twice a week, Maine to Virginia, seen the claws done up with yellow rubber bands. He once transported window panes, hay, gasoline, plastic palettes of box-store toys, consumer built furniture and crates of stone and gravel, but something in the spring urged specialty demand for lobster something exponential. James had heard a rumor that lobster cells could reproduce infinitum without combusting, that they could live forever if only they didn’t outgrow their shells and suffocate their organs. This cruel god was performing experiments.

He recognized some navy boys in front of the mini mart, drinking coffee which stuck to their misshapen beards, dripping.

You drive through Raleigh? Asked a man with a black eye, You hear about the Sex Machine those guys have in the garage? Some greek name I don’t remember. I heard about it before it even made the news, a friend in Pensacola making his way back and forth. Other shit too.

He sniffed a single nostril,

James shrugged.

Yeah, near the woods… He pointed off into the distance, You got a thin face, maybe no one would’ve told you, but look, take that exit one past the military base, you’ll see. It’s a red garage… looks totally fuckin abandoned in the day . Girls are crazy there, all switched around, just go on a Tuesday night. If you’re driving through I mean.

James pretended to ponder this, then picked at the scab below his knee, an injury he could not remember inflicting and which bled its way through the denim. He wanted to properly discuss the act of thinking with this man, whose name was probably Eddie and who had once, in some other chance encounter, regaled to him the various Hell’s Angels Intuition rituals. Go down on some chick while she’s on her period, he had said, then lick all the blood from the folding chair, in front of her husband and all, and you gotta enjoy it to, or look like it at least. James had said nothing in response. Maybe it was just the look on his face, the taste of salt in his mouth from chewing on some salve for his fixation, which had caused Eddie the conversation to

You see, Black-eyed Eddie continued, gas is expensive, skies are all yellow-tinted — the government isn’t hiding anything from us, no, they’re showing it, just hoping we won’t pay attention. I see families driving, the kids are staring at the phones. Everyone’s watching the news, they’ve got it on all the time, Dolores at home too, she just watches like a.. I’m not sure, like she’s got dementia and it’s the only window. They’re gonna use the new plague to make us sterile, and then the chicks will replace us with.. Well, I don’t remember the name but whatever typa thing they’ve got in Raleigh. Like a rocking horse, that’s gonna be the end of humanity.

Then he saluted, turned inward to the laughter of the others. James hesitantly saluted back.

The sunrise was diluted by the painful claustrophobia of traffic. James wanted to smoke menthol, wanted to punch the horn through the steering wheel. He had spent the night dreamless, save for a strange metal taste in the mouth which followed him everywhere now, bright and inhuman. There were no billboards in Arlington county, just the tall white sheath of the Washington monument, like a missile ready to launch at any moment.

He was familiar now, after several weeks of latent, answerless uncertainty, with the Pentagon security clearance customs; first, he excavated his electricity bill from his glovebox, and then his driver’s license, placed the 45 in the passenger seat, despite its lack of bullets. Fished for the registration too, then the order invoice. And then he waited. Radio waves were blocked at the receiving entrance, and even though he rarely listened to the radio, it bothered him that someone would have such jurisdiction over the flow of energy. All he could pay attention to was the taste, insufferable, as if it began at the base of the spine, as if it was a kind of pain. Don’t look too nervous, the logistics manager at the warehouse had told him, they’ll search the whole vehicle. It’s protocol, standard. But the taste… the wires of James body jumped, marionettelike. He slammed open the truck door.

He blamed the Hell’s Angels, and he blamed the dream, blamed the waifish woman who refused to even show her face. He remembered, in the manner of what he considered miracle, the phone number beside her pale body. He opened the box of the truck, the metal door lifting like a dull sun in the concealed receiving port. The lobsters sat motionless. He dialed the number, a brief tone immediately cut off by lack of signal. The lobsters stared at him in an unconscious mass. He grabbed the nearest one with tepid strength and scraped the eggs from its underside, shoveling them into his mouth, using the edges of his teeth to scrape excess from under his fingernails. He held it over his mouth, as if devouring some meal, some collection of gaudy jewels or marbles, a child attempting to fit as much as it can in its growing jaws. When the heat of his hands stirred the lobster to life, he dropped it with a thud, and moved onto the second. Inhaled deeply, desperate to stir some transformation, of taste, of thought.

A knock on the metal. A man in digitized camouflage fatigues watched as James pressed his nose to the underside of the lobster, a fat blue creature beginning to squirm.

Is this the shipment of lobster?

James nodded and set down, with realized autonomy, the last of his conquests.

Do you have the necessary paperwork for the shipment?

In the front, James said. I can come around and show you. I have a registered firearm present on the passenger seat.

The man in fatigues waved his arm in unexpected nonchalance. And the invoice is paid?

Yes.

The soldier stood steady, looking upwards. James did his best to not look sheepish, wanting to apologize for the few creatures still moving, and wanting to apologize to them, as they buzzed in confused circles. He moved to the driver’s seat as more teenagers in fatigues descended upon the lobsters, carrying them in uniform lines, stacking palettes of the lobsters onto dollies pushed by two men at a time.

You’re good to go, the soldier told him, the box is empty.

James merged onto the highway, into the stream of cars, who, like him, felt merely the insidious presence of power, unable to name it. He used his tongue to excavate the last of the eggs from his back molars. The radio jumped back to life, mid song, quickly becoming no different than silence as his attention waned. He had lost all faith in noticing.

How did they know, he wondered, about the infinite nature of the lobster cell?

He tried to imagine the woman’s face behind the cowboy hat, the anchor of her nose. Her teeth in braces. He couldn’t.