The headlights of a 92 Honda Civic mined the desert highway. Isaac and Artemas drove through the night in shifts in the frail white shitheap, painted ochre by seven days through country. Artemas hunched over the wheel – not quite stoned, not quite sober – watching the serpent lane-line shimmer across creation, the shitheap traversing a creature without head or tail. Isaac sat off-duty in the passenger seat, chopping more dope, missing the show.
‘Y’know particles can’t be observed?’ said Artemas. ‘They change their behaviour under observation.’
Isaac contemplated deeply or wasn’t listening.
Artemas tuned the radio, roaming lengths of static, scanning for company. Local talkback crackled, a feeble signal beaming in from afar. He could feel himself getting drunk on narratives. What was the name of her village, again? His village. She had told him enough times: family land was waiting for them back on Upolo, an island he only knew from her telling. She had attempted to school him on the fa’amatai and the politics of family chief titles. Perhaps in preparation for his imagined appointment, she broke their village’s name into bite-sized syllables for him. He still mangled it, a native tongue sitting heavy in his mouth as boiled offal. She would scold him for his White ways, his father’s influence. When she didn’t, perhaps she was scolding herself. Culture was preserved by the orator through word and fire. She was not afraid of death but she was afraid of this: what happens to the word if there is no one to speak it?
They would have sung songs to remember the ways, the nuance of the Samoan tonal, a kind of harmony without lyrics – at least to Artemas’ ears. He had a natural aversion to practising it on his own. It felt crude as the wooden cava bowl it would have been shared over. Was he embarrassed by its apparent rawness or by its sincerity? An alphabet of 14 letters, 3 more on loan – but always stumped by the koma lilu, the glottal stop, a guttural throat sound that exposed any needy outsiders: palagi activists riddled with colonial guilt, or, even more shamefully, an afakasi not raised in the fa‘a Samoa. These were proud warrior storytellers, you see, and more than any war club, the mastery of the word commanded respect, recounted lineage, placed oneself before the listener. After all, the story of your arrival defines you. How can you say you are here if you do not know that story? Everyone can see a lost aitu but he, drifting without knowledge of his history, his people.
‘Thinking’s worse for your health than dope,’ said Isaac, reading Artemas’ crowded mind as he admired his perfectly rolled joint. ‘You don’t have to go kicking over every rock.’
‘An itch needs a scratch,’ said Artemas. ‘You know once you have syphilis, you can never get rid of it?’
Isaac looked at Artemas like he was patient zero. ‘Fire in the hole,’ he said, lighting the joint before cracking the window. The gushing wind was so humid it had density, whipping around them like a flock of trapped birds. The scent of tobacco swirled, then dope, the tail end of an ounce. The sticky concoction revived a dormant high slinking through Artemas’ blood. Isaac went to pass the joint out of habit, saw his friend’s face and showed mercy, declining on his behalf.
Artemas killed the talkback radio and listened to the wind screaming through the window, attuning to the chaotic white noise. He remembered reading once that TV static was cosmic background radiation, remnants from the Big Bang. Was there anything to be extracted from the wind, this swarm of particles filling his ears?
The shitheap hit a bump, suspension crunching, lifting the passengers in their seats. Punishing the V4 engine on an unrestricted length of the Stuart Highway, searching for the Honda’s limits, Artemas felt himself on the verge of his own and backed off the accelerator. There was no outrunning the stowaway in the backseat anyway: the shoebox of ashes.
Artemas had deliberated over an appropriate vessel for the ashes. He was as fluent as he could be in his mother’s secret network of symbols and numerology, she being its sole practitioner (she used to keep count of red vans, decipher neighbourhood number plates, track planes so far overhead that they might not even have been there). In the end, he accepted practicality as a divining force, packing the shoebox in a calico bag with the rest of the luggage for the long haul up north, from Melbourne to Darwin on an improvised cannonball run.
The shoebox was stowed safe under the driver’s side seat, nestled behind a moth-eaten barkcloth mat and a King James Bible with photos, letters and keepsakes preserved between its passages. The plan was to release the ashes on ancestral land. The ocean off Darwin was as close as he could afford to get. The ashes would drift via Pacific currents, weaving through watery veins back to the old country. It was as good a plan as any; it seemed elliptical enough for her. Artemas would sometimes hold the ashes and wait to feel something, enacting symbolic gestures until one stuck. As a boy, he often wished something dramatic would happen to him, something simple and elegant. Now that something had happened, he wished he’d been more specific.
Artemas could taste ash, fine as snow, when a white flash – a creature – shot across the road. Instructors will tell you don’t brake, don’t swerve. Go straight through. It’s too late by the time you can react.
The animal went under the wheel; the sickly sound hit like a bump of cheap speed. Isaac swore and dropped the joint. Artemas punched the brakes, the seatbelt yanking the breath from his lungs. The Honda slid towards the irrigation ditch – that steep dip which would surely flip the shitheap. Artemas closed his eyes. He felt a hand on his, correcting the wheel, gently steering in the direction of the skid instead of against it.
The Honda came to a jagged halt in the oncoming lane. Smoke rolled through headlights. Artemas blinked. Rubber and oil, a rising burnt smell, a scent that gave off heat.
Isaac released his hand. ‘You okay?’
The engine ticked; his heartbeat ticked.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Isaac thrashed in his seatbelt, pinched the joint from his lap, threw it out the window. ‘Jesus, Art.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘And definitely don’t close your fucking eyes.’
Isaac leant forward and covered his face, sweat dripping from his nose.
The car was littered with everything that had tried to exit through the windscreen. Artemas remembered the stowaway. He twisted to the backseat, tangling himself in his belt. The shopping bag was gone. He tore through the flotsam until his fingers found hard edges. Plucking it from the detritus, he clutched the shoebox of ashes. He placed it back on the backseat, gently, careful not to wake its contents.
Artemas peered in the rearview mirror. The fox lay on the road, silver as a ghost stopped mid-flight.