Wheels In the Age of Stones
by Sarp Sozdinler

As a kid, my father warned me that if I turned on the dome lights while he drove, he would turn blind. Despite the urge, I was afraid of making him run the car off the cliff and have us all killed. Over the years, I dreamed of more convenient scenarios where he would only get himself killed​ ​and the rest of us injured, or vice versa, so either the cops or an undertaker would have to take him away from us. From me. Dead or alive.

I didn’t even know what car accidents looked like back then. I’d only seen it once on TV when the princess of some faraway country totaled her car in a shadowy tunnel. My family and I sat dead silent in the bleachy orbit of our TV as if the reporter were a technicolor prophet and we his flock. Though my brother Bud was asleep on Mom’s knees the whole time, he woke up several times during the night, feeling something was “off.” I just figured the car crashes must be bad, for Mom, having lost her twin brother in a single-car accident the day before her seventeenth birthday, wouldn’t stop crying after the princess for days and recounted her story to us as a cautionary tale. Despite all the counseling she’d received over the years, I knew she still felt somewhat responsible for her brother’s death, what with her sitting in the backseat of the same car that took his life but spared hers, with only a seat apart. Every time we went on a trip, she would keep stealing glances at Bud and me through the rearview mirror, always rigid and never once giving away the stormy interior of her mind. Looking back, I could tell the princess’s death had tapped some cork loose in her soul that night, allowing her to grieve her brother after a thirty-year delay.

From what I gathered from the princess’ life story, my folks didn’t look as bad or complicated as the royal family: my mom was a garden-variety housewife from uptown Chicago while Dad worked at the same telephone company as a salesman for seventeen years. The day they met, he was visiting the town with his dad to buy his first secondhand car while she worked the register at her father’s drugstore next door. As the family lore had it, Dad stared at her flat belly the whole time in the same way elderly women would stare down pregnant ladies in the supermarket, as if he were reading into their future together as a couple. I even thought he was maybe the ghost of my brother, Mom would confess one drunken night, to which Dad wouldn’t react in any way to further enhance the mystery in our eyes. Every time Mom reflected on those memories, it made me feel as if she were talking about someone else, some other couple, for I was having a hard time picturing them as lovers at any point in their lives. In all those years we spent together under the same roof, they disagreed over almost anything and seldom showed affection toward each other. Most days, I suspected Dad’s love for cars exceeded his love for any of us, what with taped car races being a recurring weekend theme in our house. He would sit in front of the TV all day long and harp on about Andretti, his childhood idol, while my brother and I played with Mom in the backyard. We would run our toy cars into each other for fun and watch Dad out the corner of our eyes to figure out if or when he might join us. We never said anything. We never complained.

What we did was conspire nonstop. For years, Bud and I devised plans on how to set up Dad to a vehicular wrongdoing and have Mom all to ourselves. Bud was still too little to tell one thing from the other and thought it was all part of some funny game. I made drawing after drawing of imaginary car accidents, in which our buck-green Toyota Corolla would meet various unfortunate ends: drifting off the highway and wading through the ocean; disobeying the traffic lights and getting crunched under a truck. I passed each drawing on to Bud after I was done so he could color them however he liked, mostly picking blue for blood. Sometimes, we acted out those scenarios after dinner—after Mom tucked us in bed and kissed us good night. In the quasi-dark of our room, we let our bodies run wild and our imagination roam. We crashed fictional cars in the shape of our beds and crumpled our bedsheets to soften the effect. We ran under imaginary trucks that were in truth our nightstands. We lay still on the rug like the dead princess. Me, always playing Dad. Bud, the victim.

One night, shortly before Bud and I left for summer camp, I woke up with the vision of the most complicated if logistically plausible blueprint of a car crash we had yet to come up with. In this scenario, Dad would clock off a little after five as usual and walk back to the parking lot whistling to Good Vibrations, his all-time favorite, completely oblivious to the magnetic weight we would be filling the underside of his car with to tamper the brakes’ negotiation with the bends. In the meantime, Bud and I would be playing in our backyard to celebrate our small victory with a glass of pear juice—Mom’s summer special. For days to come, I collected everything I could find at home to make this scenario a reality, things whose absence would go mostly unnoticed. Screws, nuts, paper clips. Disused cabinet latches and Mary Magdalene fridge magnets. Every night, I woke up a little after three to visit the garage and mount the day’s finds underneath the car like all slow and steady markers of death.

On the morning of our departure for the summer camp, Mom looked stricken with something I couldn’t at once decipher. She looked distracted, disconnected from her surroundings. I could always tell something was wrong with her from the way she played with her hair, her biggest nervous tic. Still, I couldn’t discern whether she was upset about losing us for the entire summer ahead or simply mad at something Dad had done. She wasn’t on speaking terms with him at the time for some reason unbeknownst to us kids; even on our last morning together, he sat drinking in front of the TV and enjoyed his Daytona race from the comfort of his couch, all while Mom was busy preparing our bags upstairs. All of a sudden, I got worried that she might have found out about her missing jewelry, which I’d placed under Dad’s car over the weekend. I was worried that she might have discovered our drawings in which Dad was the common casualty. I suspected there and then that it might be the actual reason she was sending us away to this godforsaken camp in the middle of nowhere, despite our protests. Even maybe for good. I couldn’t help but resent her in that moment, for choosing her soon-to-be-dead husband over her eternally loving children.

On the bus that would take us to camp, I watched the road with a growing sense of heaviness in my chest. I kept fidgeting in my seat like a restless dog. Town after sleepy town my mind raced with possibilities and I was worried Dad would somehow find a way to survive the incident with all the qualities that made him a dedicated driver and a car enthusiast. The red-headed counselor in the front seat turned around to look at us every few minutes and asked me if I was feeling all right, to which I could only nod while sweating like a garden sprinkler the whole damn time. The roads undulated all around us as if to mirror my anxious mind.

“What’s going on?” Bud asked as we crossed the state line.

“Fuck off,” I replied, worried that my thoughts could somehow materialize on my face and reveal our plan to the others on the bus.

The early moonlight seemed to have taken over the fields by the time we arrived at the campgrounds. I realized it was going to be the first time we would be staying this far from home, far from our parents. I couldn’t tell if I liked or hated the feeling, especially after Mom’s betrayal of us. There was a nauseating quality about being our own persons for once, which bent our life as we knew it against its fold lines. Bud, unlike me, seemed to have accepted this new reality much quicker than I did, already jumping about and rolling over on the grass like a happy calf.

Every day at camp, I considered giving Mom a call to figure out from the tone of her voice whether our plan had succeeded or not, only to be interrupted by second thoughts. I tried to read into the faces of our counselors to parse if they were at all bothered by some terrible news that they didn’t know how to break to us kids. Bud, having just turned five, could tell that something was eating away at me but knew better than to rile me up by asking anything about it. Midway through our second week, and shortly after my return from our daily morning hike, I found my favorite toy car, that baby-blue Pontiac Mom had bought me as a gift god knows how many birthdays ago, vandalized at the top of the stairs to the second floor, where Bud and I stayed: windows smashed; wheels unwrenched; driver’s seat door removed. It was as if Dad had sent someone over in our absence to pass me the message, to let me know that he knows. A wheel for a wheel. An eye for an eye.

I spent the rest of our stay at the camp totally bummed out. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I was constantly on the lookout to figure out who Dad’s righthand might be, whether it was one of the nobodies at the camp or someone from the staff. Or maybe even Bud. Each new day, my limbs grew more and more tinged with anxiety and with the guilt of what we’d planned together to end Dad. Every time the counselors spoke to us about Jesus, I would start sweating profusely, holding back tears. Deep down, I would say all the prayers I knew to atone for my sins and for making Bud an accomplice. I considered turning myself in every time we passed by a police car on our weekly field trips or whenever a police officer would visit the camp for what he or she called a regular check-in.

Amid all this, I sought the presence of someone to talk to, someone other than Bud. I craved having an actual friend and opening up to him or her with the gravity of what we’d attempted to do. Mom would be the only person who would learn about our plans in the coming years, but that would happen only after I placed her in a nursing home because of old age, trusting she would soon forget. My therapist would claim that I was performing a form of escapism in some bleak, undeniable way, though I couldn’t tell who it was I was trying to escape from—myself or Bud or someone else.

When we returned home at the end of that summer, I felt as if I’d become a totally different person. I tried to get along well with everyone in our household and even helped Mom with her chores. I tried to be a better son, a better sport for everyone involved. Everything in the house looked pretty much how I’d left it months ago, give or take a broken vase here or an additional knickknack there. The furniture in the living room seemed to have been shuffled around except for the TV, or maybe it was my memory that was playing tricks on me. Every now and again I caught Dad giving me the eye but I couldn’t tell if it was because he knew what we had been up to or because he was being his usual, unpleasant self. Mom told us upon our return that Dad had been promoted at work for the first time in seventeen years, for which Bud and I had to hug him halfheartedly in rounds. I just could never understand why Mom cared about any of it, though I suspected deep down that she held onto her grudge toward Dad in the same way she held her brother’s love close to her heart as if the presence of one would somehow compensate for the absence of the other; as if her memories posed the possibility of slipping away had she not.

In the meantime, our old car resumed its life in the garage like the totem of my unreached potential, unscathed and stripped of all the objects I’d once tirelessly stuck under it. I wondered who’d found those items in the first place and what he or she did with them afterward. At night, I looked for signs that could reveal at least a part of the truth, to no success. It was as if time had warped and erased all the sinful doings of my past, minus the actual memories of my pulling them off.

Dad, in the meantime, bought a brand new Grand Cherokee with his bonus and drove us around the neighborhood on an almost daily basis. With his newfound self-esteem, he kept bragging about being an excellent driver and a damn near salesman on top, despite the lack of corroborating evidence. There was a new side of cheerfulness to his old antics, which I found somehow even more worrying. He was more talkative than ever and even made jokes whenever he took us out for a ride. From the backseat, I would watch him hold his chin up behind the wheel like a king getting comfortable on his throne. I would watch the dome lights illuminating his face like an artificial moon that beamed in line with the pulse of the car.

Tick, we’re going; tock, we’re not.

Tick, he’s alive; tock, he’s not.

Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Fractured Lit, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for such anthologies as the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.

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