The Drive Read online

  For her

  ‘A fast moving car is the only place where you’re legally allowed to not deal with your problems.’

  Douglas Coupland

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  chapter 23

  chapter 24

  PART II

  chapter 25

  chapter 26

  chapter 27

  chapter 28

  chapter 29

  chapter 30

  chapter 31

  chapter 32

  chapter 33

  chapter 34

  chapter 35

  chapter 36

  chapter 37

  chapter 38

  chapter 39

  chapter 40

  chapter 41

  chapter 42

  chapter 43

  chapter 44

  chapter 45

  chapter 46

  chapter 47

  chapter 48

  chapter 49

  chapter 50

  chapter 51

  chapter 52

  chapter 53

  chapter 54

  chapter 55

  chapter 56

  PART III

  chapter 57

  chapter 58

  chapter 59

  chapter 60

  chapter 61

  chapter 62

  chapter 63

  chapter 64

  chapter 65

  chapter 66

  chapter 67

  chapter 68

  chapter 69

  chapter 70

  chapter 71

  chapter 72

  chapter 73

  chapter 74

  chapter 75

  chapter 76

  chapter 77

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  chapter 1

  I wandered into the rental car agency on a Monday morning, carrying a backpack filled with supplies: socks, boxer shorts, T-shirts, my sleeping bag, and six beers. Originally it had been eight beers but I’d drunk a couple of road pops on the bus ride over. The agency was out at the airport. It was called Budget or Thrifty or something like that. I’d found it on the net. They were the only company in the Lower Mainland that offered unlimited mileage, as a kind of sales gimmick. I guess they expected you to pay your money and putter around the city for a few days. That was obviously a huge mistake on their part.

  The office was a dimly lit cubicle with four glass walls, like an aquarium, built into the airport’s underground parkade. As I approached the counter, the clerk on duty looked up and smiled. He was an Asian guy wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a gold hoop earring. His hair was gelled into this retro quiff that stuck up stiffly at the front.

  He said, ‘How are you this morning, sir?’

  I hadn’t really slept for two weeks. Or eaten much. Eating was hard.

  ‘Peachy.’

  I gave him my driver’s licence and reservation number. He started tapping the keys on his computer. His fingers were long and elegant, like spider legs. One had a ring on it.

  ‘You married?’ I asked.

  He stopped typing.

  ‘I’m engaged.’

  ‘I didn’t know men wore engagement rings.’

  ‘It’s fairly common, these days.’

  He began typing again, keeping one eye on me – as if he already suspected I was going to be a problem. ‘Today’s your lucky day,’ he said. ‘We don’t have the car you reserved, but for the same price we can offer you an upgrade.’

  He rattled off a list of vehicles I could choose from: different makes, different models, different manufacturers. The names floated in the air around us, meaningless as vapour. I’d never owned a car and didn’t know much about them.

  ‘Are you interested in any of those, sir?’

  ‘Sorry – what was that last one?’

  ‘A Ford Expedition.’

  He said it like it should mean something.

  ‘Great,’ I told him.

  He handed me a bunch of forms to fill out. As I did this, he received a text on his cellphone. He read it, smiled, and began texting back. I tried to peek at the screen without him noticing, but he caught me.

  ‘Is that your fiancée?’ I asked, still scribbling.

  He frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason. It’s just nice to see other people happy.’

  He turned his phone face-down, hiding the display from me. When I’d finished filling out the forms, he swiped my credit card and handed me the key, being careful not to actually touch me in any way.

  ‘That’s five hundred and eighty dollars and sixty-three cents.’

  ‘My reservation said it was three hundred-something.’

  He blinked. ‘I asked if you wanted our Loss Damage Waiver Plan and you said yes.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘I can remove it, if you like.’

  ‘No. I might as well keep it. There’s a fairly good chance I’ll crash this thing.’

  He didn’t smile. He pointed to the lot and told me where the car was parked.

  ‘Thanks – and say hi to the fiancée for me.’

  As I left, I could tell he was still watching me.

  The underground parkade was lit by cheap fluorescent tubes that flickered and hummed like lightsabers. My vehicle sat in the corner of the lot. It was a monster SUV with tyres as high as my waist, running-boards, and a crash bar jutting out from the grille. I ran my palm across the hood, feeling that smooth-metal sweetness, and imagined rumbling along the American highways. I would be wearing Ray-Bans, and listening to Springsteen. I’d have my windows rolled down and my sleeves rolled up. My forearms would be tanned, my hair tousled by the wind. I’d have a cigarette tucked behind one ear.

  I climbed up into the driver’s seat to see how it felt. I sat gripping the wheel for about thirty seconds. Then I got out and walked back to the office. The Asian guy was talking on his phone. As soon as he saw me, he hung up and stuffed the phone in his pocket.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

  I explained that the Expedition was too big, and too fancy. He looked at me in a way that would become familiar in the following weeks: with a certain wariness, as if I were a dog that seemed friendly but might snap given provocation.

  ‘I’m driving it a long way,’ I said, ‘and through some fairly shitty areas.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I need something that’s good on gas, and won’t get ripped off.’ I pointed out the window. ‘That thing wouldn’t last two minutes where I’m going.’

  I said it theatrically, and it worked. He took the key back from me and gave me new forms to fill out. I signed my name in all the same places and ticked all the same boxes.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘To the States,’ I said. ‘I need to get away. It’s pretty hard to explain.’

  ‘Right.’

  He took the form from me, pinching it carefully, as if it was a piece of evidence.

  ‘Have a good trip,’ he told me.

  The new car was a Dodge Neon, cheap and sleek, with pizza-cutter wheels and a lame little spoiler on the t
runk. It was the kind of sedan my stepmom would drive. Actually, it was the kind of sedan my stepmom had driven. A few years back, she’d owned an earlier version of this same model. That car had been green. This one was maroon red. There were glittering flecks and sparkles ingrained in the paint job. It had been freshly waxed, and I could see a distorted version of myself reflected in the panelling.

  I walked around the car, checking it out. I kicked the tyres a couple of times, just to feel as if I was giving it a proper going-over. I also popped the hood and examined the engine – a gleaming tangle of hoses and wiring and machinery. It looked good to me. The clerk was watching all this through the glass wall of his office. I gave him the thumbs-up, but he didn’t respond.

  I figured I’d better get going.

  I put my backpack in the trunk and got in the driver’s seat. It was an automatic, with only seven thousand kilometres on the clock. The interior still had that new-car smell of upholstery, plastic and glass cleaner. I eased the key into the ignition, feeling that satisfying click, and started the engine. It shivered to life. I bent forward to kiss the wheel.

  ‘This is it,’ I said, to my car and myself. ‘The start of our epic journey.’

  I put her in gear and backed out. The tyres squeaked on the concrete as we circled the parkade. I was so excited that I kept missing the exit, but eventually I found it. Then my car and I emerged from underground into a world full of heat and light and noise and fury.

  The terminals at Vancouver International are laid out in a horseshoe formation, with the parkade in the centre. The parkade is encircled by a one-way traffic system that forms a kind of crescent. I slid on to the crescent and accelerated around it, leaning into the curves. Other vehicles were pulling in and out, making drop-offs or pick-ups. The windows of the Arrivals lounge flicker-flared in the sunlight. I left all that behind, and at the airport exit the road flung me out like a stone from a sling, unleashing me on to Highway 99.

  chapter 2

  Two weeks before, I’d been working on an independent film. By coincidence, we were shooting out at the same airport, Vancouver International. We’d set up on an access road near the landing field. There were planes all over the place: lumbering around on the ground, roaring down the runways, banking and circling overhead. The sky was coated in swirls of cirrus cloud, creating a blue-marble effect.

  ‘Can you use a longer lens for this scene?’ the director asked me. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. He was a scrawny guy who wore skinny jeans and always drank soy shakes on set. A total hipster.

  ‘You got it.’

  Officially I was the camera operator, but he’d only hired me because of my camera. Six months before, on my twenty-first birthday, I’d bought a five-thousand-dollar video camera with money I’d saved up cutting lawns. I’d been hiring myself out with it, as a way of gaining experience. To start with, it had mostly been on spec. This was my first paid job, at a hundred bucks a day. The director didn’t have much faith in me, though. Neither did the DP. He hovered at my shoulder, checking every shot and constantly adjusting the frame.

  ‘All right, people!’ the director called, striding on to set. He’d parked the car we’d been using for the shoot – a cherry-red ’57 Chevy – at the side of the access road. ‘In this scene, our leads are lying on the hood, watching the planes land.’

  There were two main actors. One was an ex-hockey player who did push-ups between takes and liked changing his shirt in front of everybody. The other was this girl with white skin and green hair. She never talked to me or any of the crew, unless we were in her way. Their characters were supposed to be on a road trip together to break her heroin habit. I think that was the idea, anyway.

  ‘Trevor, let’s shoot this from the front. A medium two-shot.’

  I got in position, still fiddling with my lens. The actors were already sprawled on the hood, sharing a cigarette. The director made sure they were good to go, then nodded at me.

  ‘Rolling,’ I said.

  ‘And… action!’

  Right away, the sound guy put up his hand, signalling that something was wrong. He was a teenage volunteer who wore sweatpants and had moustache fuzz, like a patch of mould growing on his upper lip. ‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘I got a blip.’

  ‘What’s a blip?’ the director asked.

  The sound guy gave him the headphones, so he could listen for himself.

  ‘Shit,’ the director said. ‘That’s weird.’

  After that the DP wanted to hear, and everybody else. They all took turns trying on the headphones. I went last. I pressed one headphone to my ear and listened. You could hear the drone of plane engines, which the director had expected. But behind it, every three or four seconds, there was a little blip in the audio – almost as if somebody had tapped the microphone.

  The sound guy was already fiddling with his wires, and checking his connections.

  ‘Maybe it’s low on batteries,’ the jock said.

  The sound guy shook his head. ‘This mic doesn’t use batteries, okay?’

  You could tell he was panicking a little, since it was his equipment. The rest of us milled in a herd, looking around and trying to figure out what could be making the blip. I noticed a radar tower near the runways. The antenna dish on the top was slowly rotating.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, pointing. ‘It could be that radar tower.’

  They all looked. The antenna went around, and around, and around, every three or four seconds. The rhythm was the same as the blip. We couldn’t hear it – you can’t hear radar, obviously – but somehow the microphone was picking it up.

  The director grabbed the headphones to listen again, while studying the antenna.

  ‘He’s right,’ he said. ‘Good job, Trevor.’

  The sound guy came over and gave me a high-five. People congratulated me. Not that it made any difference to the shoot. It wasn’t as if we could stop the radar tower. Our sound would still be screwed, and the editor would have to fix it in post-production. But at least we knew what was causing it now.

  ‘Positions, people,’ the director called out. ‘Let’s shoot this fucker.’

  He loved saying stuff like that.

  During our coffee break I was eating a stale jelly doughnut when the director came over to join me, which he’d never done before. He squatted down on my camera case and thanked me again for solving the riddle of the radar tower. He said he was stoked on the shots we’d got so far, and told me he was going to use this short to apply for a grant from the National Film Board. If he got it, they would be making a feature in the fall.

  ‘How’d you like in on it?’ he asked.

  ‘That would be awesome, man.’

  He grabbed a doughnut from the tray, took a bite, and kept talking with his mouth full. ‘None of this indie bullshit. I’m talking union wages, real equipment. I’m even planning a few helicopter shots. Imagine that. You could shoot that scene for me.’

  ‘I’m great at helicopter shots.’

  ‘I know. I know you are.’

  We talked like that a little more, daydreaming about our make-believe future together. He wanted to take his film on the festival circuit: Sundance and Toronto and Venice and South by Southwest. Then he’d get a distribution deal, and it would blow up huge.

  ‘What’s your feature going to be about?’ I asked him.

  ‘Like this – only longer.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The director popped the last bite into his mouth and licked his fingers, as if it was the greatest thing he’d ever tasted. He had icing sugar all over his lips. ‘Another road movie, I mean,’ he said. ‘Like Easy Rider crossed with David Lynch. It’ll be about one character’s journey. A personal odyssey. But with all these trippy and surreal elements thrown in.’

  ‘Road movies are tough to do. They’re so episodic.’

  ‘You can get around that. I’ll give him some companions.’

  I told him it was a great idea. It would have been fairly awkward if I’
d told him how uninspired it sounded. Also, I thought he might get mad and fire me.

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter either way.

  chapter 3

  From the airport I drove south on Highway 99, past grain silos and wheat fields and a Sikh temple decorated with big yellow spires, like onion bulbs. I dropped through the George Massey tunnel, then shot out into Ladner. At the junction with Highway 17, I passed the turnoff for Delta and Tsawwassen. The sign above the road showed a little pictogram of a ferryboat floating on water. Until then I hadn’t considered how many memories lay along this route. It was riddled with them, like sinkholes, ready to draw me down.

  Tsawwassen was one of the places I’d been with her. On her first visit to Vancouver, I took her to Saltspring Island, and to reach it you have to go via Tsawwassen. When we arrived, we’d just missed a ferry. The next one departed an hour later, and while we waited we wandered down one of the wharves that runs alongside the berths. People were fishing out there. A dozen or so men stood in a row, making casts and cranking their reels. The lines, strung from the rods to the surface, glistened in the sun like spun silk. She got talking to this Chinese guy and somehow convinced him to lend her his rod. That was just like her.

  ‘Five minutes,’ the guy said, holding up five fingers. ‘You fish five minutes.’

  You could tell he didn’t expect her to catch anything, but she did – on the first cast. The rod bent right to the handle and she got yanked towards the edge of the wharf. There was no railing, so me and the guy grabbed her. We held her by the waist and she braced herself and let the line whizz out, slowing it every so often with the reel. It must have surprised the guy to see her handle it so expertly, but her father had taught her. He was an ex-factory worker with a mangled hand who fished every morning off a jetty in the Vltava.

  ‘Good, good!’ the Chinese guy cried. ‘Let it run!’

  From up and down the dock, the other fishermen flocked towards us and gathered around. They shouted encouragement and advice, shoving each other and jostling to stay at the front. Directly opposite us, in the adjacent berth, was the ferry to Nanaimo. It had begun loading and the first few passengers stood on deck. They were watching, too. Tourists were pointing, taking pictures, calling out. One of the straps of her dress had slipped off her shoulder, exposing the tan-line of her breast. She didn’t notice. She was totally focused.