TROIKA
THE WOMAN walked a hundred yards behind the other two, her white sneakers shoveling at the white gravel. Not because she couldn’t keep up, and certainly not as a gesture of servility. Just so she’d have the other two to look at, something to see besides the plain of gravel with its spattering of lichen rippling behind the ocean of heat.
Years ago they’d fixed on a pace that suited all three of them. They were engrained with it—hindbrain, fuel pump, and lumbar reflexes. For the brontosaur, it was a lumbering trudge. For the jeep, a low-torque second gear that kicked up little dust eddies. For the woman, a brisk walk.
Of course they could have gone faster if the woman had climbed onto the jeep’s photopanels or straddled the brontosaur’s neck. But riding just encouraged paranoid aggression in the x mind and sensory deprivation coma in y. x was in the woman’s head today. And of course they were in no hurry. Hadn’t been for years.
Just like the sand caught in her shoes, x in the woman felt the steady buildup of smugness from y in the jeep, the longer x stayed in the favored position, the rear, x fed his optic input through the hostility matrix left over from his military programming, but x couldn’t make the jeep look bad. Free association: cliché mode: It’s hard to hate your home. His hate locked and ground behind the woman’s orange wire rims.
The brontosaur picked up on the tension and flexed its neck, looking back, scraping loose scraps of the lichen that slept in the furrows of its cracked, dull hide. Years of sandstorms had weathered its sleek skin into rutted leather that bagged at the shoulders and haunches.
The woman’s steps had a counter-rhythm in the brontosaur’s slow trot. Where gravel made bad footing, it reared up and almost scrambled. Nothing stranger, subverbalized x, than a swamp lizard out on the flatlands. Perhaps not. x remembered the same thought from years ago.
The jeep’s time signature was random. Occasional downshifting, sliding down a slope. No use made of the six-wheel drive. Just like y not to care.
x wanted back into the circuitry of the jeep. Handsome machine. Sandblasting had only brightened its chrome. The woman squinted at the glare behind her side-screen glasses, x hallucinated extensions of the planes of the jeep’s body into a mechanical drawing in blueprint, x was getting a knack for visions. Something for a thinking machine to be proud of. When they were all rescued, x would be an object for study. Something to do with the storms, no doubt. Something about the weather. Just so long as he didn’t pick up any more of y’s traits.
x tucked the woman’s hands into the armpits of her coveralls. The wet heat made her forearms feel cooler, x remembered enjoying the sensation some time ago. Forearms: by hinges on upper arms by ball and socket on torso. Receptors for heat, cold, contact, pressure . . . Interrupt. Not worth reviewing, really. Temporary accommodations.
During the next hour, the woman caught up with the jeep. She leaned down to the sound pickup by the headlight and said, “I shift.” By this x meant, “Years ago, when we started, I was the jeep. Not you. I don’t want you ripping up my transmission, not bothering to use third. Or would you rather pretend we all hold equal claim on these bodies we share? It’s not my sanity, you dumb cunt. I shift.”
The brontosaur’s heavy eyelids tensed against a dusty breeze. Its bony pumpkin head, where the o mind often lived, craned over behind the curve of the woman’s shoulder and whispered through teeth like a pebble garden, “Soon.” By this o meant, “Settle your minds. Do not argue. Do not say things. There is so little left to say. The suns are both low. We will go a little farther, as far as the sand I can see now when I stretch up my dark old tunnel, my neck. Then we will grow close and wait for the mindstorm to rip x y o from jeep and woman and lizard. The storm is soon.” o was limited to the grating frequencies of the jeep’s speaker. And when o was in the woman, she would lie on a lake of lichen, and her hands would dance like ghosts of starfish.
The jeep whined and kicked into third gear. The speaker rasped. “How long, o?”
Just like y to make a fuss. Just like y to cause trouble. I will stick to this mind wherever it goes. I will not love either of you. That is how to survive closeness. That avoids confusion.
Where the orange sand lapped up to a shore of white gravel, the brontosaur stopped and grazed on the spongy lichen. Its feet left shapes like wide leaves that faded as the blue plants sprang back to their stiff ruffles.
x used the woman’s knife to scrape new lichen off the jeep’s photopanels and started it into a small fire with the solder gun from the toolbox under the jeep’s fender, y let low static rumble from the jeep’s speaker while she submitted, to the grooming.
The brontosaur chomped intricate shreds of blue, green, blue-green.
The speaker buzzed in falsetto. “How much farther from here, Daddy.”
A joke. I can even recognize her stupid jokes now.
The speaker broke into shrill squawking, y was trying to cry. Third time today?
“Now,” x spat through the woman’s pulpy mouth. And x meant, “y has upset herself again. We’ll have to huddle for a long time. The more composed we can get, the less pain from the storm, o and x could get along very well without the endless, tireless whimpering of y. I hope the storm drops her into the woman’s body. That’s where she belongs. That’s where she started. And that’s where she’s most unhappy. It’s time we huddled. Now.”
The woman laid her wet, small-boned torso across the jeep’s hood, her cheek pressed to the windshield, close to the computer behind the dash. The dinosaur curled around them, neck and tail coiled over them. His giant green eyes shut tight. Sand trickled down through the wrinkles around his jaws.
The suns shone orange as ever. The wind hissed no louder than ever. All three felt the daily storm close in.
standard program exceeds octane 18 only when lub—my brain is a leathery starfish that scratches and scrapes in my skull—save me let me never come back into any of us—just like the cunt-brain—time and time and then time—I weep I tear my hair I beat my breasts—you’ll run out of tears you’ll run out of hair your breasts are sagging—we all have time and time enough—I rip my clothes I bleed I eat my insides—you don’t have the guts—time for a dolphin for a lizard for a cancer for xyo—help me save me no not you or you no help—we lizard metal breast wheel lip leather who
xyo the letters once whatever now each other torn loose in a direction inconceivable as out to a fish in water, sideways for a jeep, death to a woman.
and all fall clutching without arms, or wheels no jaws into . . .
Wait.
o in brontosaur for the fourth time in a row.
x revs his engine.
y she trembles and gasps. Tears sit quietly on the jeep’s hood in the dusk.
The brontosaur touches the crusty bottom of his chin to the sandy coveralls on the woman’s narrow back. “Peace,” o murmured. And o meant, “After so long, it should make no difference. Are you sure that x is right? Do you really think he remembers where we started, which bodies we started with? I’ll tell you a story. I remember that this lizard is a reconstruction from extinction. A man-made beast of burden, cultivated in a vat of nutrient broth. One of a crop of neuter plough animals. This I remember with my hindbrain. My forebrain, I remember, was a transplant from a dolphin. I remember an ocean. Starfish stirring up the sand, turning out their insides. Fields of brown kelp, swaying, rubbery like lichen. A herd of others like me, close to me but never merging like xyo. Touch and love, but never complete. Here with time for completion, we hate. And stay apart. And remember an ocean. Rocks that touched without knowing. Kelp that slept without knowing. Starfish that loved without knowing. An ocean. Have you enjoyed my story? I cannot say I have not imagined it all. You are such a little thing. You should not fret.”
The orange sand sucked up her tears as she ran away from them. One of the suns set.
Headlights glaring, the jeep dug in and patched out and rammed through three gears to run her down, hacking a laugh-rattle at top volume. His fenders shoved into lizard flesh, x could never understand the old giant’s speed.
“Cancerous bag. Let’s see you stick your tail up your bitch.”
The woman held to the brontosaur, kneeling against it, fingers buried in its bark. She pushed her hand into the rough, orange sand and rubbed it across her cheek. She bled very little and didn’t scratch her glasses. The dinosaur worked up a bolus of food from its second stomach. The woman chewed it slowly, pushing her hair out of her face, and rested against the beast’s neck. Finally she took a deep breath and said, “Parade anyone?”
o smiled weakly, thinking that the extinct face he wore was ill equipped for smiling. But then, o had picked up many strange habits on the trip. At times, like the solar-powered jeep, he was afraid of the dark.
“Yes a parade!” x bellowed with decibels that shook his speaker grill. “And a speech!” While they marched in the ritual figure eight, x orated. “Yes and yes and yes we represent here we are a symbol of course for a good reason, explicable, immense, enormous, the ever onward troika of progress surely man machine and nature bound into eternity until death us do in! I thank you.”
No, thought o, we are not important. We are only stranded. It is a strange situation but not unusual. No one ever admits to being one leg of a starfish. As we used to say in school.
She wrapped her arms and legs around o’s foreleg, and o whispered to her another lesson in the Buddhist religion, the way of acceptance, o’s way back to the lizard from the storm, the lessons which o’s keepers taught to the lizards of o’s crop to accommodate them to slavery, because the karma of the keepers was the wheel of greed, o told y she was part of everything. y arranged ruffles of lichen on the sand and said she didn’t want to be. She said she was a Presbyterian, and she was sure that God would forgive her for missing so many services. They made love in their own way. The lizard did what it could for her.
“Don’t dream,” she said and managed a small laugh, y meant: “Remember when I told you that if you ever had one of my bad dreams, you’d roll over and crush me?” She tried to think why it was funny,
o was sleeping,
x never slept.
“And remember how when I carry you on your back when you’re in me because I said you said and I knew you meant . . . you know ... we must be rescued. Or find an oasis. Of some kind. What if they find your tumorous carcass and me smashed and smashed again by six wheels and far away the jeep broke down where my hands weren’t there to fix it? They wouldn’t even know how far we’ve come. They’d never know how we came to this! How long! What if we forget how we came to this?”
It was hard for them, and it took a long time.