Simon lies on his back on the metal floor, feeling every bump and pothole. The initial rush of escape has worn off. For the first time in months, he feels something other than dread. He feels excitement. He is free.
Outside St. Clair, the hard rock station switches over to talk, and they hear the familiar sounds of the God King, his nasal New York bluster, coming to them from an undisclosed location, a rasp on the wind. Is it live? A replay? Who can say for sure. Inside the city limits you can forget that he’s out there, twenty-four hours a day, transmitting his every thought. You forget that in the countryside and suburbs his voice is the soundtrack of people’s lives.
“…an omelet and the breakfast sausage, right? I love breakfast sausage. We know this. And they bring it, a little coffee, a little orange juice—and lemme just—Florida orange juice, okay? We grew up with this. The pinnacle. The best of the best. And at my club, no expenses spared—it’s like you died and went to heaven, seriously—but they bring the omelet and so far I’m happy. Nice size, good color, with, like, a little spinach and cheese—and I got my Diet Coke. First one of the day, chilled, a little ice—not like if the other party had their way. We’d all be drinking broccoli juice, or, listen to this, kale? You ever have kale? It’s like eating a vacuum cleaner bag—but I’m lookin’ at the—and did you see what this guy did this morning? The Pretender. The Imposter. Our poor country. This guy in the White House, like those old commercials—I’ve fallen and I can’t get up—remember those commercials? I used to love those commercials. But hey, it’s your money, folks, tax payer cabbage—and he’s using it to—he’s got trucks on the southern border—these big powerful trucks—and they’re pulling down the wall. Our big, beautiful—and I see this, and I think, what kind of sick puppy—but then what are you gonna do? They’re—they’ve got grudges, like, up the wazoo. They hate me. Boy do they hate me. But the omelet comes and the sausage—can I just tell you—the size of my pinkie, okay? Or smaller, ’cause I got pretty big hands—but there’s maybe two of them. And I go—I say—what the heck is this? And the waiter, from like Ecuador, he says, ees sausage, se?or. Probably came over in the trunk of somebody’s car—never seen a sausage before in his life—this is what we’re dealing with, folks. First they steal the election. Then they take our breakfast sausage.”
Duane reaches over and changes the station, and they listen to Charlie Daniels for a while, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” and for the next two hours nobody says a word.
*
They drive through the night and stop around noon the next day at a campground near Springfield, Missouri. Bleary from the road, they tumble from the van, squinting into the steamy daylight. It is already ninety-five degrees in the shade, thunderstorms promised for the evening. Simon has fallen into a fitful sleep. He wakes as Duane pulls off the main road onto a winding country road and sits up to find a landscape thick with kudzu, lined with campsites and RVs. Dust rises from their tires.
Louise rolls her window down, letting in a loud insect thrum. This is her first time in what people on NPR call rural America. The woods are filled with tents and lean-tos. Makeshift laundry lines have been strung from the trees like spiderwebs. Corduroys, blouses, underwear, socks. They pass a Subaru station wagon surrounded by bookshelves, an elderly man seated in their center reading aloud to a group of children.
“Where are we?” Simon asks.
“More important,” says Louise, “did those clowns murder, like, a thousand people back there? Is anybody else freaking out?”
Simon feels his stomach turn. For some reason he thinks of an old woman standing at the stove in her kitchen. He watches as they drive deeper into the park. There are vehicles everywhere, campers and bicycles, people’s living rooms set up right there in the open under plastic tarps. Somewhere a radio is playing loudly—a sonorous voice broadcasting a conspiratorial tone.
“…trust the plan—we know this. Do your research, and remember—you are the news now.”
Megalophobia is defined as the fear of large objects.
What is this place? Simon wonders. A music festival? Are they refugees?
Are there refugees in Missouri?
His short-term meds are all the way gone now, a hot tingle returning to his thumbs. Anxiety, the devil’s tickle torture. There is a small-town pharmacy, his brain whispers, in a rust-belt river bend that ordered more than 5,700,000 pills between 2005 and 2011. Three hundred and eighty people live in that town. In 2008 alone, the pharmacy received 5,264 pills for every man, woman, and child.