Onwards, to the sky

Where do you want to be, and how will you get there? Perhaps it’s only a dream, but what is a dream if not a different state of mind?

You don’t recognise the car. It’s cool inside, cold even - the air conditioner’s blowing so hard you can feel it against your skin, but you can’t hear it. Everything is silent, in fact. If it wasn’t for the scenery moving past the window, you’d think the car was stopped, the engine dead. Perhaps it’s an electric car? The interior is certainly new enough, plush and comfortable. When you shift, you feel yourself sink into the seat.

The only uncomfortable thing is that you don’t remember the car. You don’t remember getting in to it, seeing it pull up or who it belongs to. You remember heading home - the details are fuzzy, the way things you do everyday are, one day blending into the next. You don’t know if you got there. Maybe you did, just like every other day. Or maybe you never made it back.

And now you’re in this car.

There’s a driver. There must have been, this whole time. The car’s been moving, after all, and not in a way that suggested it was in danger of veering off the road. But it’s only as you take a corner, and the arm rest of the door digs into your side as you’re pushed up against it, that you register the other person sitting in the car with you.

He’s so still that he could be a statue, one of the well-dressed ones you see in movies rather than anything from the real world. Most people in real statues are dressed up in ceremonial dress, all pompous robes and funny hats, dolled up for the sculptor’s attentions in traditional garb. Movies, though, you see more people in suits and sharp shoes, with trouser creases you could shave with. The CEO of the almost-certainly-untrustworthy-but-rich pharmaceutical company who provided life-saving medicine to starving orphans, or the tyrannical despot ruling half the city’s underworld and a few businesses that could be legitimate if you don’t look too closely at exactly what they’re shipping in those containers in back. Your driver dresses like these men, in charcoal with faint pinstripes, and with something hard about the set of his mouth, even when he’s smiling. And he’s certainly smiling. He doesn’t stop, even as he guides the car around another turn and his eyes flicker up to look at you in the rearview mirror. They’re bluer than blue, almost electric, and they make the sky overhead seem washed out and faded. It’s been out in the sun too long, and all the colour it’s lost has been funnelled straight into this man’s irises.

He’s watching you, smiling, alternating his attention between you and the road ahead. Part of you wishes he’d pay more attention to the road - it’s twisty, turning unexpectedly and sharply and besides, his regard makes your skin crawl. You feel maggots squirming just beneath your skin every time he looks at you, laying just between your skin and the glistening yellow layer of subcutaneous fat, their blind, bulbous heads pushing deeper. Tiny round mouths lined with teeth bury themselves further in with every glance.

You ask him where you are. His answer is singularly unhelpful.

“Here.”

It’s hard to know if his response makes you angry. You know it should at least send little flickers of irritation fizzing at the edges of your nerves, but the cold means you can’t quite feel your fingertips. Instead you fiddle with the temperature controls. The numbers go up, but the air blasting from the vents feels as cold as ever.

You want to know more. It’s a reasonable thing to want. The scenery going past seems familiar, deja vu dancing on the fringes of your consciousness, but you can’t quite place the memories. Dim recollections, like familiar shapes hidden by the dark and given a strange edge by shadows and fuzzy perception. Dangerous, but dulled by the sheer monotony of familiarity. The danger here is distant, too, shielded behind a wall of apathy and glass. Anything outside isn’t as much of an issue as the man with a carrion-smile inside.

He’s still watching you, as you watch the scenery go past. You try to ignore the goosebumps creeping across your skin, and focus on what’s outside. Trees. Sky. Ground.

It’s strange. You can’t make out any details. It’s not that anything’s blurry or out of focus, it’s more as though you’re seeing the idea of a tree or a rock as you speed past, careening around the corners at breakneck pace. Your brain is filling in the blanks, not your eyes.

“Do you like it here?”

His voice crawls into your mind like it’s bypassed your ears completely and is coiling up and settling down for a snack in the squishy innards of your brain. Its cool, slimy - something found in a sewer or a week-dead corpse.

Something sharp to it, too. Not a tone of voice, but the question itself. It hooks into your thoughts and demands an answer. Do you like it here? What a question.

You feel sure that he’s asking you about the outside, beyond the cushioned confines of the car and the radio playing slow, dreary instrumentals. You couldn’t say why you feel so certain about this, but you are. When you risk a quick glance back at him, his pale skin gleaming like bone in the harsh sunlight, you see the reflection of the scenery flickering across his blinding blue eyes.

Do you?

It looks pleasant enough, you suppose. Tropical, you’d have said because of the heat shimmer over the trees, but the greenery is a tangled mix of species. Temperate and tropical all mixed into one space, regardless of the ecological implications. Some of the trees - you blink, look again - some of them have a faint dusting of snow on their branches. It looks unreal beside the acacia and liana vines. Everything is bright, almost painfully vibrant. Lush. It’s not a word you would use in everyday conversation, it belongs in the pages of books taking themselves too seriously and sketchy ads in the personal pages of the paper. But it springs to mind when you look at this place. It’s perfect.
It’s not until you look closely that you see it. The trees hide it, at first. They’re easy to see, and green - alive, thriving. But when you take a moment longer and peer through the leaves to the underbrush, you see the truth the trees hide. Beneath the greenery, the grass is dead and dry. A land parched brown and baking beneath a fiery sun and a blast-furnace sky.

There’s a lie here, that poisons the earth and bleaches the sands. Not enough water to keep everything going, just enough to keep up appearances. The awareness of that hidden dryness makes your skin prickle with sympathetic heat, despite the creeping chill.

The car shoots around a bend, and the rough solidity of the door handle brings you back to what passes for reality. The car. Those bright blue eyes. The scenery outside seems so far away behind the glass compared to that icy gaze.

“What do you think of it?”

The question catches you off-guard - the suffocating silence of the car had been cushioning you, lulling you, and the answer slips out of your mouth before you can stop it.

Sad.

That’s the impression you get. There’s a lingering sadness that twines between the branches and shivers in the heat haze. The liana vines suddenly look like they’re strangling the other plants, squeezing the life from them. Your neck aches in sympathy, but when you lift your hand to touch your throat the perception vanishes and the vines are just vines once again. Your neck still twinges, though.

It’s like regret.

You don’t know if you said it out loud or just thought it, but you feel the blue-eyed man smile in response and it feels like it wouldn’t matter if you spoke the words or not. He can read the words in your head like they were scrolling across your forehead on an LED display. He knows. Probably more than you. 

Looking at the scenery flitting past is making you feel nauseous, do you focus instead on the driver. Not his face - not those eyes - but his hands. They’re so tight on the wheel the knuckles stand out bone-white and sharp; compared to the rest of him, it’s an uncharacteristic display of emotion. If only you knew which one. But it makes his fingers seem skeletal, and you trace the curve of his knuckles with your eyes. It’s something to occupy the time, at least a small fraction of it.

It suddenly occurs to you to wonder where you’re going. How long will the trip take - are you nearly there?

How long have you been in the car?

You peer out the window, craning your neck to try and see the sun. You know it’s out, you can see its light, see the heat it produces in the way the horizon dances. But it’s never where you’re looking, even when you twist in your seat so that the seatbelt cuts into your neck to peer out the rearview window.

“Do you want to stay here?”

You shake your head. You don’t even know if he means ‘here’ in the car or ‘here’ in this strange surreally bright world where you can’t feel your fingertips. If you tell him, maybe he’ll stop the car and let you out. Maybe you’ll wake up at home, or in a hospital. There are a lot of maybes, but one thing is certain - you don’t want to be here with this eerily smiling man in a car just comfortable enough to be uncomfortable.

Between one shake and the next - in the space of a blink, between one inhalation and the following exhalation - the daylight sky darkens and bruises. Purple streaks the pale azure, and the unseen sun sheds dim orange light from its new hiding place just below the horizon.

The road straightens out, and the trees fall away, revealing a vast open plain the colour of marmalade. It glows beneath the rapidly darkening sky, and when you risk a glance towards your driver his eyes glow too, blue and brilliant like stars.

“Then, good luck on your next try.”

You open your mouth to ask what he means as the full moon rises straight ahead of you, and you find yourself enveloped in its gentle, silvery light.