Road to Arcadia: the Path East

Chapter Thirty-three: WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY

Kai slept better than he thought he would.

That may not have been impressive, considering he didn't expect to sleep at all. He expected to lie awake wide-eyed the entire night, treading water in an endless sea of thoughts of home made of one part hope and ninety-nine parts dread.

Instead, he was able to get a couple hours of shut eye courtesy of a weighted blanket named Jey Keo.

There was something so amusing about how the cantankerous, tight-lipped former raider--who had probably murdered multiple people--was about as clingy as a baby sloth. It was...comforting, actually. There was something nice about the human contact. Slowly, but surely, it was sinking in, coating the dull ache around the edges of his cavernous chest. He wasn't sure if this was his travelmate's way of comforting him before his highly anticipated reunion or if it was a selfish endeavor from a touch-starved recluse. He didn't mind if it was the latter. If they both benefited from this, he wouldn't consider it a bad thing.

At the crack of dawn, Kai was wide-eyed and raring to go. He began to peel Jey off of him. The two had become entangled in the last row of seats in a position that, while miraculously comfortable, left him unsure of which limb was his. It took until he had both arms fully extended against Jey's chest for the aforementioned baby sloth to wake.

His eyes slowly blinked open. He mumbled something Kai couldn't make out before untangling himself and standing up. He left the row of seats without paying Kai any mind. Kai blinked only once before getting up and getting ready.

They couldn't get on the road fast enough.

The final stretch of their trip was agonizing. It dragged, but Kai couldn't remember a single solid image of it all. He had vague recollections of the thinning of dead trees, of sprouting buildings, of widening roadways. He couldn't identify the exact moment the roads murmured with early commuter traffic, clogging the lanes with alien congestion. He only half-acknowledged the passing road signs, lingering long enough to pinpoint their location without saying their names out loud.

The signs were so familiar.

Not just in name but in their shape, their color, the wear in select spots that felt acceptably imperfect, like a teacher's handwriting. The names out here were intact, full and without shame. They called out, almost mockingly, to him. Each echo of their name felt like a curse heralded by old desert walkers.

Existence here was an oxymoron. So much of it resembled the photos he had seen growing up, the snapshots from twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, but the resemblance never seemed to satisfy the quiet grumblings of the weather souls who lived it. They knew that the array of cars one the road and houses on the street was a flashy coat of paint covering a termite-infested foundation. They knew just as well as Kai did. They just never said it aloud.

Kai readjusted his grip on the steering wheel. If Jey was talking, he wouldn't have been able to hear him, anyway. The sound of his pulse in his ears was the only thing assuring him he was really, truly alive in this moment.

There was a point he stopped peeling his eyes for signs and landmarks and let muscle memory lead the way. It was the work of phantom limbs he had long since forgotten. He didn't dare ponder his decisions, afraid the slightest thought would rip the memory from his fingertips. He followed along, voice quiet and neck stiff.

At some point he had turned off the highway, entering a humble town that may as well have been a metropolis compared to the ones out west. There were people walking down the street and cars puttering up and down the road. There was a life here that, in some ways, Kai had spent so long searching for. But it wasn't life, he had to remind himself. This was an approximation, a mechanical reenactment like animatronics at an amusement park.