The road epiphany.

Laura had arrived back in the early evening. I had been sitting on the ledge of the window with what I had found out preoccupying my mind. I hardly greeted her when the door closed and she made an initial step towards the centre of the room, aware that the air was thick with unspoken accusations. She looked at the tightly packed baggage. Her fingers closed on the plastic wrapper she was holding. I looked at her and could not for a time motivate my face into smiling or speaking. A dead impression must have hung before her in the first few seconds we stood apart in the room.

"Hey. How you doing?" Laura moved forward again, a glimmer of worry or even paranoia in her eyes, a slight frown disturbing her face. She looked across at the bed, at the door to the bathroom, back to the bags against the armchair. The frown deepened. "What's wrong?"

I could not speak and instead shrugged and held back a volume of sentimental emotion that I feared would overwhelm the tiny room. My lips moved without cause and I found I had widened my eyes before I looked back out of the window into the courtyard below. The sound of relentless enjoyment riding on the breeze echoed inside the walls for a time, at odds with the slow static decay of the neglected machinery. The noise seemed to have arrived with Laura, and provoked me all the more. She stood motionless, querying my face, obviously aware that I had found out, knowing what I had done, but saying nothing.

"Are you alright?"

She waited for an answer, and I turned back to the room in an effort to pretend that I had one. The conflict between my memories and what I had convinced myself that I now knew warred in my head. A mere few hours ago, it had been a supposed tranquillity, and optimistic plans for the future. Now there was only the present moment, and a mental retreat to the comfort of reminiscence. I looked at Laura and saw the beautiful girl from the past who would now fade into the future. Alone, I had dwelt on the sentimental details of our mutual history all afternoon; now that she appeared in person, she interrupted the memories and distorted all those images, embodying the deceit that ran through them.

"Karl?"

The terror of this intimacy made me hesitate again, buffeted by the unspooling emotions that coiled around my thoughts and intentions and paralysed me. It was to her I wanted to run, yet it was from her that the pain arose. The horror of knowledge and the desperation for illusion battled in my confusion. I wanted not to know, and I wanted never to know. She was the source of all of this, and I could not reason with the absurdity of her nearness. I wanted to kiss her, but knew I would betray myself. The conflict of the moment crushed my physical presence, and I needed to coil up against it, drop to the floor and hide myself. Shut my eyes, and be back in the memories, even if for only a few seconds, in order to delay the inevitable for that fragment of time. Laura looked down at the bags again, and I tried to smile.

"Silent treatment?"

She kicked off her shoes and leant over the bags to press her lips against my cheek. She grinned, and I could not help but reflect her cloudless outlook as she moved back from the kiss. I put my hand to my face in shock, pursuing the illusion in my head that everything was as it had always been. She was still real, right in front of me, touching me. I tried to cling to each second, to stop time so we could altogether avoid the inescapable.

"No answer?"

The broken dream tripped and rattled in the projector gate, sometimes blurred as the sprocket holes were ripped and the celluloid itself burnt through. Her face looking back at me, the same that had been freezeframed the first time ever I had seen her, now held such familiarity that it was too difficult to imagine it gone. I had pretended to myself that it would be far away, in a place I had never visited, the furthest I had ever travelled, that this moment might come. Her face looking back at me from across the table in some diner, looking down at the froth on top of a coffee whirling round like the disturbed thoughts in my head after finding out.

"What can I say?" I would say.

"There's nothing to say," she would reply.

We'd sit there in silence, and the waitress would come past and see that we shouldn't be disturbed, see the welling tear in Laura's eye and pass by to the next table where the children are misbehaving. This would be the way the road movie ends, the final scene in the diner. One of us gets up and leaves and the narrative is completed. The forces that had brought us together would now be resolved, and new separate stories would begin for each of us, stories outside the time of the cinema, unknown to the other.

"So this is it?"

"This is it."

And I can't bring myself to mention the things we both know. We let the silence communicate the thoughts in both our minds. The shine on the spoon on the edge of the saucer, the beam of bright sunlight diagonal on the table veneer. The strong dark coffee gradually stops swirling around in the cup. Complaints in the kitchen; backchat and laughter. I look out through the tall windows at the highway that tears past the diner. The truck drivers stand in the dust of the parking area, rubbing their hands under their hats, pulling the shade down over their faces.

The road epiphany. You've seen it before.

Laura looks up from her coffee and takes a second to watch the door as it slams against the frame after the latest customer. Her eyes flick across the row of tables, then back to me. I look at her face for a while. The sunlight glows golden against her skin, accentuating the delicate freckles on her cheek, the lucidity of her green-grey eyes. She looks back without apparent thought or emotion. Her hand crosses the table and settles on mine, fingers hesitant but finally resolute. The half-smile appears on her face, the look of sympathy and apology. And then, of course, she pushes the coffee cup away from her, and stands. Wordless, she puts her hand on my shoulder, tousles my hair, and walks away towards the exit. The vinyl of the seat slowly rejects the imprints from the recent occupation. The froth on top of the coffee fragments around the edge of the cup. I do not look up or around, but keep my head staring down at the diagonal edge between dazzling sunlight and the dull mosaic pattern of the veneer. The wire door slams against the frame as it closes. The waitress stands still with the coffee pot lazily hanging from her hand and watches the door and watches me. She shrugs her shoulders. She's seen it before.

Outside, the deep blue of the sky tapers to a misty faded colour nearer the horizon, barely visible above the desert haze. The mountains shimmer in the distance, unconcerned with the intentions of motorists making epic journeys through the scenery. A truck hesitates near the dusty tarmac of the freeway, waiting for a clear patch to pull out and continue the long haul. Drivers shake hands in the parking lot and head back to their solitary vehicles. Laura walks out from the thin veranda into the sharp sunlight, holding her hand to her face as a shade. She does not look back. Out in the clearing, as the dust of departing cars falls back to the ground, appears a man waiting for Laura. His shoes are hidden in the swept sand but his shadow falls dark and vivid on the brown red ground. His face is masked by the shade of the brim of a hat. His hand holds a bag over his shoulder, the other rises to point towards the diner, then wraps around Laura as she greets him. They walk, and disappear beyond the black frame of the diner window. I look back down and close my eyes against the intense light.

And in the morning, the sun's glare is baffled by the vague grey blinds of the motel room window. It is cooler, and it is silent. I look up from the bed at the new light, at the simple furnishings, the TV, the nearby lamp, the bathroom door. I wonder how long I have been dreaming, and put my head down again under the weight of the returning memory of her departure. The bright stark recollection burns through the blurred dawn haze. There is a chill in the room. The dream is over. I lift the blind and look out across the desert valley. There is nothing. I wonder which direction on the highway I should take. There is no traffic. I open the door and feel the warm air on my face. There is silence. I wonder how long I have been dreaming, and whether I will be able to continue the dream alone.

"Have you lost your voice?"