[~1,400 words]
I lick my crusty lips. Can’t help myself. They’re an absolute wreck. Left my balm in the trailer. Imagine being this close to death and worrying about chapped lips.
Annoying all the same.
Could just ask someone. Everyone on the salt flats has some in their pocket, but I don’t. Promise myself I won’t tongue them, then do it anyway a few seconds later.
I look over at the bleachers and you’re there, totally oblivious. Reading one of those glossy lifestyle magazines from Paris or London or something. I say reading – you’re looking at the pictures, comparing your life, making yourself feel inadequate, creating desires you didn’t have an hour ago. Looking at all the backdrops of the stylish, swinging, European cities. Some you have been to and some you haven’t. You’re from closer to the flats than any of us. A Utah farm girl from around the corner, in your olive double-pleated chinos from Milan, your little white Scottish wool cardigan from Oxford Street, and the designer penny loafers from wherever they make those – London maybe?
Your husband is about to commit a murder – or maybe manslaughter – and you’re skimming the catwalk gossip.
Lick my lips again, spreading the salt around the cracks. Just can’t control myself.
Up the flats there are four silhouettes walking back over the first mile of salt, back towards the car, if you can call it that.
One of the silhouettes is your husband. A genius if I ever met one. Anything about engines, aerodynamics, fuels, making big slabs of metal with a soft piece of meat inside go fast and stay in one piece, he knows it. Maddening attention to detail, insists on walking the miles himself every time, even though we have guys to do that. He must make sure the salt flat is absolutely flat. If it isn’t, the slab of metal and the sack of meat inside it are going to have a disagreement with the laws of physics.
Undisputed brainiac who brings his wife to the tracks to get fucked by half the drivers. They have a word for people like him. Not cuckold, I mean people who have a brain like his. I can’t remember what it is. I don’t read all those books and stuff, I already told you that. But there’s a lot of guys like him on the flats, they’re always in the mechanical teams.
Your husband is bending the laws of physics. All our glory, our lives, depend on him. If it wasn’t for him there would be no drivers for you to take a ride on. You never understood him or wanted to. Just a mule with a good paycheck to drag you off the farm. Nobody as beautiful as you had ever even spoken to him. He didn’t have a chance. I barely had a chance either. In a way it’s not really my fault, it’s his fault for bringing you to the tracks. Idiot.
You’re looking at your watch. My tongue rolls over my dry lips, again, without thought, no control.
He didn’t bring you out here. You brought yourself out here. Because a genius isn’t enough. A man who can bend reality isn’t enough. A good guy isn’t enough. Nothing is enough.
He comes into sight now, his two-year-old slacks are too long and bunched at the ankles, white shirt with a faint blot of ink at the bottom of the chest pocket that just won’t wash out. He doesn’t even have the right boots, he’s wearing some salt battered, cracked loafers that remind me of my lips.
I lick them.
He just doesn’t look like the revenge type, maybe I will be alright. But he doesn’t seem like the type of schmuck that would end up married to you, yet here we are.
All he has to do is not pick up one of the tiny rocks or not report a tiny patch of damp salt and the car and I will be turned inside out.
I look at the bleachers again. Now you’re just staring into the flats, jaw slack, you don’t look that great right now. It probably wasn’t worth it. Your husband is about to murder your lover and you’re just staring into space, wondering when it is going to end, when you can go back into town. You’ve had your fun, now you’re waiting for the annoying bit of your husband’s life goals to end. If we succeed, his reward will be that you’ll go to the party tonight and flirt obviously with me or someone else and he will pretend not to notice. Or maybe he doesn’t notice. Maybe he doesn’t have a clue.
Or maybe he knows about all of it or just a little of it and is about to kill me.
He drops a sack on the ground, it has the weight of a few stones inside it, things he has picked up while walking the track. Maybe I am going to be alright. He looks at me and nods as he always does. Everyone else has moved away from the car now. He begins his final checks.
He could just overlook something here too. Just tweak something that throws off the aerodynamics in some tiny way and I lose control at high speed. The car would be such a mess after a crash at 350 mph nobody would be able to figure out why it happened. Every time there is a bad crash on the flats it’s just messy guesswork as to why.
I am being paranoid. I am always anxious before the run.
Maybe I actually want him to do it. Get some sort of revenge. Be a man instead of taking your shit all the time. I hope he tells you he did it. I hope you have to wonder what he’s going to do next and you feel you have to leave and you suddenly realise everything he was doing for you and that it’s your fault he left. If I’m dead it will save me the bother of trying to sneak you back to the trailer for a quickie without him noticing tonight.
Why did you drag me into this? I like this guy. I lick my lips.
They’re lowering me into the car now. He’s still doing checks. That is totally normal. It doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t look at me. But that is totally normal too. He is in the zone.
It’s a cockpit really, this is barely a car. It’s a fighter jet with no wings and four wheels. The wheels aren’t even powered. Amputated aeroplanes beating land speed records, it’s not the same now. There used to be more driving skill involved. There used to be more style. Now it’s just an aerodynamic trolly with a rocket on the back. Oh to be Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat, touching 40 mph with no safety equipment whatsoever. We’re aiming for ten times that speed today, but somehow it feels dull, neutered.
I give you one more look before the cabin lid clamps down. You are snapping a make-up compact. I lick my lips. Imagine dying with chapped lips. Did I already say that?
When the jet-engine is rumbling and the car starts moving everything is fading away. No guilt, no women, no desire, just eyes on the line of dye in the salt. Just the endless miles of flats flowing under me. The sodium horizon refuses to move no matter how fast I go. The speedometer pushes upwards to 100 mph in a few seconds, 200 mph. The salt sounds fragile, it trembles underneath me, about to shatter. The car struggles for downforce, desperately trying to stay on the earth. It’s a plane without wings, it desperately wants to fly. 300 mph, 350 mph. The air is now a thick soup the car has to wade through, a soup that gets hotter the faster we go. The aim is 460 mph.
It’s difficult for me to know how fast I am going when the nose lifts off the ground and the car does a somersault before smashing into pieces. It was over 400 mph I think. If that’s right it’s a perfectly respectable speed actually. A perfectly valiant way to go out. We can both have our glory, nobody needs to know.
END
Corporate Clarke's Fiction 