Strange Times - Part 10: Beyond the Zero

I don’t want to tell you any of this. I feel ashamed of it. You keep asking me about it and it just doesn’t come out right. It’s always close but just not right. And I can’t keep trying to explain myself with you, where you keep looking at me with this accusation on your face about something I haven’t done. I said I’d write it down for you and this is the best that I can do. Memory is unsure of itself but I assure you: this one is real. I hope you believe me.

I wrote just before that I feel ashamed. I meant that I am scared. In writing this down, I have to say that all this happened. Have to stand by my words, stand by myself. And I have to own that, whatever it might mean for me.

This happened during my final year that I lived in Haverbrook, before I moved away. I was eighteen, it was ’92 I think. I lived with my family in a house at the edge of town, close enough to see the lights of trucks and cars on Bass Strait Road as they bypassed our little town. You know about Haverbrook – I’ve talked to you before of it. I was nineteen, sorry.

I was alone in the house during the days. I spent most of my time on the family computer, this old Mac that Dad had bought on a trip to Melbourne. There wasn’t much else to do. I was lazy, drunk a lot, a slacker through and through. You’d say that I still am, no doubt. Sorry, I shouldn’t say what you think of me. At the time, being nineteen, I was looking for a way out of town that didn’t involve suicide. Days began for me at 8:45 with a phone call from the girl I was seeing.

She asked if everyone had left. I said they had.

She asked if she could come over today. I said that she might as well. There was nothing else to do and if I wasn’t seeing her, I was by myself all day.

She, the girl, was Florence. Exotic girl. Well, pale skin, red hair - in our town that was exotic enough. I don’t have a clue what she saw in me. I don’t have a clue what you see in me either but I think she came over, started seeing me, because she wanted to use my computer. It was one of the few computers in town, not counting the one at the library.

She wrote poems for a magazine in the city, typed them up on it. She had a face that looked like Debbie Harry. So she’d usually come over, we’d sit and talk and sometimes, you know, fool around for a while and then we’d have to both act like nothing happened. I guess she and I had gotten together out of a kind of convenience; we were both unemployed, bored, horny. Later after a heated session of fooling around she turned to me and asked me a question:

You ever hear of the Zero? She asked me that.

I said to her that I had. You need to understand it was a pretty silly question. In our town, the question should’ve been: who hadn’t heard of the Zero?

Victoria State Route Zero, designation F-0 or the Zero. It was supposed to have been a freeway linking Gippsland with Melbourne but had been abandoned due to “problems unspecified” and supposedly all that remained was a large stretch somewhere near town. Supposedly although we’d never found that large stretch; no one had seen the Zero.

She said that she found it the other day. She was explaining how she found it but – I don’t remember this. I was looking at her. She was naked, I was young. I hadn’t gotten used to seeing a girl naked, it was amazing. Gave me goosebumps.

So I said that it was a nice try on her half, a good joke. I didn’t really believe her. She got in a huff and said she had found it. I told her that they’d never found any physical evidence of it. Didn’t exist on any map, let alone exist in real life I said. It was a back and forth there for a bit, her standing naked with her hands crossed under her breasts, me sitting there under my bed sheets, arguing with her about a paranormal road while trying not to look her at breasts and trying not to get an erection. I ended up doing both.

Eventually she asked me to get dressed and get in the car. We headed west on Bass Strait Road. Florence and I sat in silence as the radio blared Crocodile Rock, while she was looking for something outside the car. At a point on the road, she motioned to pull over.

I pulled to the side, a truck blasting past and Florence pointed to this gravel path leading from the road, off into farmland. No signs of life were around us at all, real still.

I asked her if this was really the way to it. She said to trust her but I asked if she’d seen it. She didn’t respond.

Now I love you, okay, you know that? But you need to understand that when I was looking at her, at Florence, there in the car, nineteen years old, horny, depressed, desperate, I looked at her then and I really fucking loved her. I believed in her. I loved her, you know, and I love you, but this was a different sort of thing. But I don’t think I was supposed to; we were just young. This was just being young. So instead of dealing with it then and there, I just drove down the path and starting focusing on the horizon, the path to the Zero.

Around us was nothing. No farm animals or other tracks; short grass and shadows of dark clouds above. The car bumped and bounced. We must have driven for hours, the radio warbling and fading into static, distant white noise that neither us went to turn off. It got cold, the kind of afternoon cold that tears chunks from your legs and twists deep into your bones.

Floss yelled to stop the car. As soon as I’d hit the brakes, she was out. The day was ending in bright orange, cold and damp. I clambered out of the car, all shook up.

She pointed to a long black piece of tarmac, stretching off into the distance. A green metal sign up the road was her evidence: Victoria State Route Zero. F-0. The Zero. We kicked at the tarmac, still solid - no cracks or dirt on it, or weeds. Unbroken black to the horizon, a long line west that ended sharply here, as though cut with a ruler.

I asked her what would be at the end of it.

She shrugged. Melbourne she supposed. But she didn’t sound sure.

I said there had to be something at the end of it.

She nodded. The air was electric, the way it was before we’d fool around. Wind blew around us and I spoke up

I asked her if we should find out.

She looked around at the rapidly darkening world surrounding us and nodded again.

We pointed the car down the Zero and started up slowly at first, wary for things like animals, fences, debris but as we passed ten kilometers with nothing to stop us, we gunned it. The sun had set long ago and now we drove into dark. As we sped down the road, through the blackness, the landscape outside blurred.

Her face was lit from the dashboard as we barreled down the stretch. She turned to me and gave a nervous smile. I don’t think it was a real smile. I still loved her. We gained speed. The blackness around the car grew deep, deep dark, no sight of ending.

We sensed the road begin to change beneath us. The road felt as though it were curving downwards slightly, in the dim headlights it appeared to be bending like a hill with no bottom.

The blackness was now so thick around us that all we could see was the road. The car shook and shook; the lights of the dashboard were absorbed by the dark. I could just see the dashboard, my hands. A pale hand snaked out to grab my left hand, white knuckled on the wheel.

There was Florence in the corners of my sight. She looked pale, frightened.

She asked me to stop and for us to just go home. And she gripped my hand tighter. I didn’t say anything.

I turned back to the road to see a dim blue glow on the horizon, these beams of light coming over the edge like a sunrise. The vanishing point of the road continued ahead, the horizon just a straight line, no hills or features. But the light. Something was just over the rim of the horizon and I knew that in a few kilometers we could make it there.

I could hear a sound like rushing wind in a storm, a thumping like distant thunder rolling wildly in black clouds. Loud enough to be heard inside the car, thumping away at my forehead like a drum. It was so close, just over that horizon.

I felt sick, bile in my mouth. I felt her hand tighten around mine and I felt this intense, red anger at her. I mean, you get it, right? She’d brought me here and didn’t want to see what lay beyond. What good was that? What were we doing anyway? We had to believe in whatever lay ahead, had to keep going, put our faith in the horizon and hope that it’ll remain a constant. Wind was roaring around us, lights growing bright…it was so close, just over the horizon.

I pumped the brakes and brought the car to a stop. The shaking stopped. The winds continued to howl outside the car. I turned to her and nodded and said okay. I stared at the blue glow beyond the edge.

We turned the car slowly and began on the way home. She let go of my hand and I saw her shaking in the corner of my eye. I exhaled. I didn’t even realise I’d been holding my breath.

I told her to go to sleep, and she curled up, shaking, pale and afraid.

That’s all there is to it.

I think back to that night a lot. I think of her more than I should, now that I have you. I think of that moment more than I think I should. All of this, it catches me off guard at times. It caught me at the supermarket. It caught me during a drive back from the office one night. It’s stuck in my body like a piece of shrapnel from an accident. I can still feel the car rattling, the blackness growing everywhere as we thundered along the Zero. I can see her, face growing pale with worry as we sped towards something unknown at the end and I think about how I should have said something but the words never formed. I hate myself for never saying anything but what would I have said? What would have made it better as we sped towards something we didn’t understand? You had to hope we would understand it, god knows I wanted to. I wonder what she would have done if we’d made it to the end of the Zero. I wonder if I could have handled it, whatever ‘it’ was. And all that horizon. What’s at the end of the horizon except more horizon? What’s at the end of anything, except an end…

This is the best that I can give you. Please believe me. I’m sorry about all this. I still love you.

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