I’m not sure where this story came from, and perhaps it’s more of a vignette than a story. I know I owe its starting line to 99 Red Balloons, but frankly, the rest is a puzzle. For the record, I have never been to Nevada (or anywhere near it) and only discovered after writing this that Tonopah is famous for its night skies.
I have also never gone out with anyone called Linda, although I did once own an old Honda.
“There’s something here from somewhere else…”
That’s what she said. I asked her to say it again.
“There’s something here from somewhere else…”
“Like what?” I said, still staring at the road stretching out ahead. Route 95 shimmered in the headlights; Tonopah still not visible somewhere ahead of us.
“I dunno. It just feels different. There’s something… Something, um… else. I can’t explain more.”
I looked across at her in the passenger seat. It was dark enough outside that her finely-etched features hovered in the glass of the window against the purple desert sky.
“Just pull over…”
I pulled the old Honda onto the gravel in a crunch of tires and turned to Linda with a question, but she stopped me…
“Shhh… Turn the engine off. Listen.” She got out of the car and walked a few yards away.
I twisted the key, and listened.
The engine pinked slowly, the silence of the evening was closing in and I started to become very aware of my own breathing. But apart from a growing sense of annoyance, I noticed nothing else. I climbed out of the car, softly pushing the door shut, and took a few steps towards where she was standing.
“Look, Linds, you’re going to have to be more specific, cos I can’t hear anything. I’m tired and we could both really do with getting some food and a place to sleep.” It felt awkward; like I was talking in a library.
“You know that story about Johnny Cash – the cave he said he went in?” She looked back over her shoulder at me.
“That was in Tennessee Linds, we’re in Nevada… I’m British but I do know what state I’m in.”
She looked back at the diamond-cut horizon, “You know he walked in there not planning to come out? He basically threw down the gauntlet to God.” She stopped and let the sky speak for a moment. “Do you think there are times when you just need to be broken, to walk until you’re lost? To let it get properly dark so you can see if there really is any light? Even the tiniest pin-prick?” She paused again.
I knew what I wanted to say but I wasn’t sure if she really wanted an answer. My honest answer was “No,” but instead I said, very quietly, “Why?”
She breathed out slowly, and turned to face me, halo’ed by the vanishing light, “Cos I need to know… to know that the the light has some resilience. You know, here…” she turned her face up to the glowing dome above us. More and more stars were starting to push through the haze. “…it just occurred to me that all this light is from somewhere else. And if it’s from somewhere else, then it’s not dependent on me or anyone else… and somehow that feels significant.”
The desert air was starting to ripple through the scrubby grass – I assumed it was grass of some sort – and I lay back on the bonnet of the car letting the warmth seep through my jeans and t-shirt. The sky and empty desert only seemed to intensify my own lack of words. I held out as long as I could against the silence but eventually asked the only question I could think of, “Why here Linds?”
In the shadow of what she’d just said, my question seemed small and silly. I wanted to say something big, and joined-up and significant. A complex jigsaw-piece answer that would somehow just click with her questions.
But all I had were little thoughts and an endless sky towering over me.
She turned back to face me, wrapping her arms around herself against the rapidly chilling air. “It just seems clearer here. Like my thoughts have room. And this light seems… other… you know. I don’t want to say ‘alien’ cos you’ll think I’ve gone loopy and joined the Area 51 brigade,” she laughed and shivered, “and anyway, it’s not alien. It’s more familiar but still clearly, well… other!” She laughed again, “I’m not explaining this very well.”
I smiled from my perch on the bonnet, “Go on then – keep trying! And while you’re trying, come and sit over here – it’s getting bloody cold, and it’s warmer up here.”
She clambered up next to me and lay back with her head on the windscreen, staring at the spectacle unfolding above us. Her eyes turned serious again and she spoke slowly, pulling thoughts from somewhere deep, “While you’ve been driving, I’ve been thinking. So many things in life don’t ring true, they don’t line up the way I always thought they would. The fairy tales don’t resolve. It’s not so much that there aren’t happy endings, but sometimes it feels like someone’s just tacking random chapters onto the story. The plot-lines don’t make sense. Someone leaves or dies, and then out of the blue, other stuff arrives. Not necessarily good or bad, just random. I don’t get it, and by all sensible measures I’ve had half my life already. I should be figuring this out…”
She became still for a moment and I looked over at her. Her eyes were shining, slightly wet in the blue glow. I reached out and touched her goose-bumpy arm as she continued. “Just as we were driving before, I had a sense of something else. I dunno – almost like a logic in all this, but it was much less rigid and far more personal. Like, maybe, if it’s light from somewhere-else entirely by which we see everything – cos the light from even the closest star up there has travelled 4 years just so I can see my shoes,” she wiggled her converse-clad feet as if to emphasise the point, “ – then maybe stuff isn’t meant to make sense in isolation. And somehow that makes me feel better about not having a f..king clue how this thing works. And more than that, it makes me think there might be something outside of me, by which I could begin to make some sense of things.” She tailed off again.
I breathed slowly, deliberately not looking across, not wanting to profane the moment. But I had to ask, “Do you think there’s anything to make sense of… like really anything objective? Cos we all run around, tearing our fingers while digging in the dirt for some kind of thread, dots that we can join. Maybe we’re not supposed to. Maybe we’re not supposed to do anything because there is no grand scheme?”
Linda turned and looked at me, drawing my gaze back to hers, “I used to think that.. I used to fiercely, clenchingly think that. But I’m getting too tired to keep it up – it requires a conscious effort – it doesn’t come naturally anymore. I can’t think how to explain… oh, hang on. I know how it feels! ” She turned on her side looking straight at me, “Do you know how I flip between accents? Cos really I’m a London girl but I’ve been living this side of the world for so long? So I’m like all ‘merican until we’ve spent a few days together and then I’m dropping my hayches all over the place. That’s not because I’m copying you: it’s because I’m relaxing. The American accent is still me, but it’s me trying. The London accent is just me – when I’m alone and talking to myself, when I completely relax and stop trying, then it’s the London accent that comes out.”
I stared at Linda, trying to follow this unexpected branch-line we now seemed to be on. She smiled back, “It’s like that with the way I’ve been thinking recently. It’s become too hard to believe that there is no plan – no point to any of this. When I relax, and drop my guard, then I find that there is some instinctive trust in me that things are supposed to be a certain way… better than they seem to be. And when I think that way I feel more like me. It’s like my default accent is somehow to trust something.”
After a pause she rolled onto her back and stared for a long while at the sky. The stars were staggering in their clarity; shimmering in so many more colours than I’d previously noticed. The vast glow of the fallen sun still lit the skyline to our left and drew a soft blue line along her profile … She continued very softly; “That’s why the light feels important… cos it’s not from me… it’s given, totally from somewhere else. I don’t have to figure it out – in fact without it, I couldn’t figure anything else out.”
Lying there, the engine still audibly cooling below us, distant animal noises echoing to our left and right and a terrifying star-dusted universe above us I felt, for the only time in my life, like I really was clinging to a rock, staring into infinity. In the few seconds it felt like the whole of existence tilted; just a few degrees; towards something that looked like meaning.
The cold, or the sheer viscerality of the experience, pin-pricked my bare arms. I felt the warmth of her hand on my face and then her lips.
And light.
Light from somewhere else entirely, touched gently on the dusty metal beneath me as her head rested on my chest.
The line is taken from halfway through the song 99 Red Balloons by Nena. The original song 99 Luftballons was written in German but was rewritten in English by Kevin McAlea. It’s obviously the English version that I’ve borrowed the line from. The story has absolutely nothing to do with the song. Or balloons in general.
Don Lowe 