Ghost Rider

aka You Can Be a Better Human

Muffled words dangle, inches from where my head lies. Sleep seems to have stumbled into my brain and crashed hard. Did the van bounce now? Or am I only just registering the jostle that stirred me into hearing the voice? Voice? Sleep jumps off me. Why is there a voice?

What would you do? A handful of months into calling this van I bought for the price of a month’s rent home—a way of living that thins my walls to the world and it to me—I’m seeing what maybe I’ve known about myself for a long time. Under threat, I hold still.

Beyond the quickening of my heart and breath, that crystal kind of darkness most dream through, electric with anticipation of birdsong and gauzy rays, falls through the slit of my curtain. I feel, too, the blocky presence of buildings and cars, wholly different from the flow of land that stretches, long and lithe, offering her soft places to sage and desert grass, her mounds to saguaro and sky and granite, her curves to jackrabbits and me.

I swallow. Toothpaste and whiskey—ah; I’m parked below an apartment complex. (Where would you sleep in a city? We car dwellers call this “stealth.” Wanna decrease the odds a house dweller will want you gone? Park where you might be visiting anyone.) I’m near the bar where I met a date for drinks last night. The voice must be on the phone, slogging to some crap job in the wee hours. No security guard come to roust me. Poor guy.

I roll, glacially not to startle him, to my side. Sleep, gentle now, curls a warm leg over my hip.

Inside the van

Can you imagine, in a stillness like that, the renting of industrial-strength Velcro? My heart is a wild fluttering of down and feathers. My bike! Before the van, she was my only transportation for two years. Once, she carried me and all I needed to live for a blissful month riding slowly down the Oregon Coast. Now, so close I could touch her without moving but for the closed window between us, she’s being taken.

I could throw open the curtain. I could slam my palm against the glass. I could scream.

Do something!

Rage taps the fingers from the bow string of fear. I fly through the side barn door. Tiny rocks dig into the soft of my foot. My bike’s already moving away—ghost ridden, the hand of the thief, who’s riding another bike, steering her.

“Stop!” I cry. “That’s my bike.”

The hooded figure falters. Pedals harder.

“Please.” My feet slap pavement. “I love that bike.”

I don’t know if it’s the glow of my attention or because she’s street side, illuminated by a traffic light ahead. But my bike seems to be flying solo. She disappears down a side street. Arriving at the intersection, I can make them out, far down the lampless road—my riderless ride, floating, transfixed by the hunched figure on his too-small steed.

“You can just drop her.” The words fall out as I run, though no longer at top speed. “You can be a better human.”

The bike fully loaded on our way down the Oregon coast

I’ve had things stolen before—the catalytic converter from my pickup, my wallet as I sat eating in a market, a ring. This one stings.

Maybe it’s the way, back at the van, the severed lock on the ground beneath the empty rack eyes me: How did you not hear the bolt cutter? And why am I not waking to mourning doves? To the cardinal with the fiery ’hawk who eyes me from the mesquite I use as a clothesline? For one more drink with a guy I don’t care to see again?

Maybe it’s that I’m building out this particular van (no AC, broken windshield, leaking roof, doors I jury-rig open) (and I’m falling in love with her, don’t get me wrong) out of need. I’m short on cash and tall on debt and a dream I can’t pursue until I change that. And I’m still a jumbled ball of biases and professed beliefs, shamed when I’m seen as “the downtrodden” and then shamed I’d feel that way. And is there no camaraderie among the downtrodden?

Maybe it’s the newness of this life, which is splitting me open (I can only hope, like kintsugi). A lifetime of cracks, now fragments laid out.

Maybe it’s the change coming, the “what was” already disappearing down an unlit road. My impotence a foreshadowing of more to come: How I’ll become feral, in the woods alone for months, while people beg each other to be better, while masking against a public health threat gets politicized by those it serves to divide. How I’ll emerge in Denver to protest the murder of George Floyd and be woken by the van swaying to the boom of flashbang grenades. How I’ll tell you this story amid a sneaking helplessness—like the lock’s already on the ground and a disembodied hand is guiding something I want to hang onto out of my reach. How I’ll have two different endings, and this line is one of them.  

The mask

Later, back in my desert spot, after my daughter scolds me for giving chase—what did I think I’d do if I caught up?—we think of the sword. (Yes, there was a sword. And no, I haven’t told you about it yet. But I will.) We think of the sword and the mask I think is beautiful and she thinks is creepy that rides in my window. Imagining me masked, sword in hand, commanding my unwomanned steed to break free, we laugh till we snort. She, an artist, says through guffaws she’ll draw me that way.

She catches her breath. “You’re such a badass.”

A line of gold mixes with lacquer; two fragments join. Take whatever you want, I think. I have everything I need

The desert spot where the van and I spent the first month or so of the pandemic.

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Thank you for reading, liking, restacking, engaging. If you’re new here, welcome. Our living room is the world. Pull up a chair around our virtual campfire. So many beautiful thinkers and listeners here. What do you recall from the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic? When was that for you? In other words, where were you? What’s your typical response to threat? Especially for those of you not in the United States, are you tired of hearing about the impending US election?

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