'Splinters' draft: important scene set in carwash

We took Macorna to avoid the speed bumps and then stopped at the first set of lights, about to turn left onto Grimshaw. Sarah drove because I didn’t have a car. In fact, I was fairly certain my licence had expired, although I could never bring myself to take it out of my wallet and check. At any rate I’d always been her passenger. Waiting at the lights, I was surprised to find the carwash on the right-hand corner on our side of the intersection reasonably busy. I had to look past Sarah to look at the carwash; Sarah was looking at me and then at the lights and then at me and we were in a comfortable silence. Her car smelt like nothing, like an old car – it was a ’95 Barina – that had been kept well, and the only pronounced odours were those of her perfume and the stale air blustering out of the demister.

At the carwash, the scene made me think of entering another person’s dream, either through some occult passageway or in the form of that person describing it to me as I tried to give counsel. Every statement was an overstatement; nothing was nothing, or it was less than nothing, which in turn made it more. The scene looked like this: two blokes in neighbouring cubicles were washing what looked to be waterskiing boats, with fuck-off big twin motors and Need for Speed paintjobs, towed by late model supercharged Ford Rangers, one black, one dark blue. There was a small sedan and a people mover at either side of them, which were both covered in pinkish bubblegum-scented wax, the scent of which I knew from washing Sarah's car there. The drivers of those cars were overweight white ladies in their middle years. Spraying the sterns – which nosed a long way of the cubicles – with the low pressure streak-free guns, the blokes had an animated conversation going, animated insofar as it seemed to have just started, like a newly stoked campfire. It was surely a loud conversation too, even though I couldn’t hear it. Then one of them made a bold gesture with his arms, or elbows more correctly, as though he were telling the story of a recent brawl, or doing the Haka, and it struck me at that moment, like an unveiling, that the pair of them had very well-built bodies and that their faces were horse-shit ugly, ugly beyond belief, and that their heads were shaved out of baldness rather than toughness. I also realised that both the ladies were paying the blokes a kind of awkward, shamefaced attention, so much so that they seemed to have forgotten about the wax being slowly plastered to their cars.

There was nobody at the commercial vacuums, which, with their bar-fridge-like bodies and thick, ribbed blue pipes, looked more like fuel bowsers for the cars of an even more resource-drunk future. The pipes were supposed to be wound around a holder to keep them neat but were strewn all over the ground and were probably knotted on one another. The dog wash was also empty but surrounded by big puddles of water and soapsuds, suggesting that it had just been used. I wondered what breed had been in there last – golden Labrador, probably. Labrador owners were the types who washed their dogs in those things, I thought, although I couldn’t make complete sense of that inner notion, nor why it felt so screw-tight. The fur in the drain would have been yellow, or white if the animal was old. I wondered whether the cleaning products were the same for both duco and pelt. I turned back towards the road. Traffic on both Macorna sides of the intersection had peaked; the light was about to change. I stroked my arms with the grain of the hairs and looked back, via the beautiful profile of Sarah’s face, at the two blokes and the two ladies.

What I saw was the same, but what it did to me wasn’t. Maybe by then I’d woken up more completely, or fallen tired again; maybe in those few intervening moments there’d been an explosion, a conflagration of all my good sense, because this time I could hear what the blokes were saying, the same way I used to listen to, plum the depths of, flesh out or straight-up invent strange conversations as a kid, and more harmfully as a dude who spent too many of his early pay cheques on Ice Pipes; conversations which were either not happening at all or going on too far away for me to be liable to accurately interpret every word, to interpret their realities instead of those I’d pre-recorded for them, like the lines repeated over and over by dolls when the strings on their backs were pulled. I could hear what the blokes were saying, and it was about the women, or women in general, and it was bloodcurdling. Some of the women they described were watering houseplants, others were standing in line for groceries, some were sitting with their seatbelts buckled in plane cabins, some were blowing up balloons, others were on dance floors or in queues, so close as to butt noses with one or both of them, others were on the toilet, some were dancing, some were in straitjackets, some were in kindergartner overalls playing with toy animals, but most, most of the women were protagonists in scenes so fucked up that I felt like mangling my head against the dashboard to make the blokes stop talking, or getting out of the car and mangling their heads against the swimming tiles on the walls of the carwash cubicles to shut them up, or having them mangle my own head against them. In that conversation the girls were succeeding each other so rapidly that there was a kind of flipbook singularity to it, and a sense of time accelerating towards something definitive, or at least definitively towards something unknown. The gestures with which the blokes accompanied their anecdotes seemed no less gruesome, and their laughter was the laughter of two insomniacs at nighttime. I was sure, absolutely sure, that the ladies, who had all but finished washing their cars, had had their lives changed for the worse that evening, had been forced to consider the hypothesis that they were beings who stank in comparison to all other beings and who were filled with nothing but sex toys and shit, or at least to concede that a hypothesis of the sort even existed, and this by men, men of the lowest possible order, but still men. 

There were tears in my eyes. My body, on the other hand, hadn’t betrayed the slightest sign of how I was feeling; my hands were folded neatly in my lap and I was still breathing like normal. I was even the one to alert Sarah to the fact that the lights had changed, despite being ashamed, and afraid, to look at her. What she’d been distracted by I wasn’t sure, but thought later, almost with bemusement, that it was me. Realising that she was holding up traffic, Sarah hit the accelerator a touch harder than usual, and the car jolted forwards, old automatic transmission working hard to catch up to that sudden injection of fuel. At the next red, the intersection of Grimshaw and the Greensborough Highway, I thought of Cortázar’s Southern Thruway and the girl in the Dauphine. I reached over and took one of Sarah’s hands off the wheel and laid it on the centre console, just behind the gearstick. I squeezed hard, not letting go until she needed both hands to reverse park into a spot near the restaurant.