I-80

He throws his cigarette to the ground, crushing the smoky end with the tip of his shoe. His hands are shaking, and he rubs them together to create some kind of heat. It’s too cold to stay outside. He spits and he sniffs. He hears engines whirring and raises his head; cars are coming, and he has to be ready to extort the last cents lost in their pockets.

He opens the door of his gas station and slams it behind him. There is no one inside anyway. Marta is not here anymore. No one can tell him what to do. No one is going to look at him with two exasperated eyes and tell him to be quiet. He goes behind the counter, opens his register, hides his pack of cigarettes in his left pocket, and turns the radio on.

He sniffs again. It smells bad. It is becoming a routine now: as soon as he gets out of his store and comes back, usually after a cigarette break, the effluves of moldy cheese and melted meat make him want to throw up.

There is still noise outside, and Jones can hear the roar of the motors. He is waiting for customers to come inside. He knows they will: there is no other gas station around. There is no one around. The closest store is 47 miles north. He works in the middle of nowhere, lives in the middle of nowhere. His life leads him nowhere -- especially since Marta is not going to come back. There is no bright future for him, no unexpected chance of happiness. He owns a gas station on the west part of the I-80 and eats the hot dogs he sells for dinner.

He feels the pack of cigs against his leg. He remembers telling Marta he would stop smoking. He remembers the smile on her face when he announced he was done with tobacco. Of course, he broke his promise shortly after, as always. He broke so many promises, Jones, leaving all the words, the I swear and the don’t worry I won’t do this again in some unknown place of his brain. So many unknown places. Even in here. There’s the feminine hygiene aisle in which he never goes, there’s the back of the store that he never cleans, and there’s Marta’s red locker. He swore he’d never opened it; scared of what could be inside or of what memories it could bring back. Jones wants to smoke, to go outside and light up another Pyramid, as he just did a few minutes ago.

It’s only when he crosses his reflection in the dirty mirror standing next to the Clinton and Kerry caps that he refrains from smoking again. His hair needs to be washed, and the purple bags under his eyes call for help. He is ashamed of what he looks like. And there, alone in his gas station, judged by outdated milk and blue candies, he finally understands why Marta did it.

“Fuck,” is the only thing that gets out of his mouth. The only thing he is able to say. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he shouts. He slams his hand into the decrepit wall next to him. “Fuck,” he shouts again, and his eyes are still fixed on the door, waiting for some fallen rock stars or fake hippies to enter the station. When he stops yelling, he realizes that the music on the radio is the only sound in the store. They left him too. Fuck, they’re just like Marta.

Usher is on the radio. Again. Fucking Usher with his twenty billboard songs that nobody actually likes. Except her, of course, because she always had been so different. In rage, Jones throws his Nokia at the speaker. The piece of plastic lands on the ground in a muffled noise. He shrugs: nobody was going to call him anyway.

Usher is still playing in the background when he hears the door open. He raises his head, fakes a smile and asks without even looking at his customer: “Good evening, how ya doin’?” Jones hears the guy answer but doesn’t pay attention. He doesn’t even try to figure out where that guy comes from. But that used to be a game between him and Marta: guess where that guy comes from, guess where he’s going… That was fun. Sometimes, Marta would look at the client and directly ask him some questions. Marta was something. She really was. She could go up to some random dude and tell him with no shame: “Hey man, my boyfriend thinks you got a girlfriend but I’m pretty sure you’re married and depressed. What’s the truth?”

Jones smiles alone behind his counter. Life was so much easier when Marta was here. She was good with numbers, good with people, good with him. She made hyperactive kids quiet and helped single mothers to get through the last part of the I-80 with advice he never understood.

“Hey man, you got any Red Lucky Strikes?” The guy is right in front of him. “Five packs, please,” he adds while putting a huge Coke and three packets of gum on the counter.

“You’re going for a long drive?” asks Jones to his client while scanning the articles. The dude hands him money, and it’s only when Jones sees his hand that he starts looking at him closely. There’s a butterfly tattooed on it. Not an innocent childish butterfly, but a scary dangerous one. Jones can’t even describe it. There are no words for that butterfly, all he knows is that he is completely fascinated by the black insect.

“Yeah man, I’m driving to New York,” answers Butterfly-guy. New York. Jones smiles and looks at the kid in front of him who is probably between twenty and twenty-five, stuck in that beautiful period of adulthood in which you still feel like a teenager and in which you look the best. Marta was twenty-nine when Jones met her, but she still looked as shiny as a newborn butterfly.

“Well, that’s a long drive. What are you gonna do in New York?” Jones isn’t especially curious about what Butterfly-guy is going to do in The Big Apple, but he wants to keep looking at him. Customers are rare nowadays, and the few ones that buy something are usually boring. Not this guy. This guy is like a crime scene without a murder. He is full of hints, full of things that need to be explained. And Jones is curious to see what else he can find.

“I’m going to a casting. I’m gonna be famous, man!” Butterfly-guy answers. Jones sneers. The American Dream, the illusion that New York means art, creativity and jobs... The biggest American lie. He looks at the black leather jacket and the white polo. This guy could be in an Usher video. Jones feels pathetic; even in some random customer, he can see bits of Marta.

“Kid, you seriously think you’re gonna play on Broadway? I thought you emo teenagers didn’t believe in this bullcrap anymore.” He’s rude, Jones. He never was nice. He curses a lot, says shit and fuck a lot, because he always thought that there was nothing better than a burst of insults to express himself. His mom never agreed and neither did Marta. But fuck it, there is no woman to control him anymore. He’s free… But he despises freedom. He despises being alone in here, being able to go anywhere without having anyone yelling at him for coming home late, or drunk, or forgetting about buying carrots at Walmart, or simply because he forgot her mom’s birthday. He despises freedom because the freedom he has now is nothing compared to the one he had with Marta; it’s a forgery, a bitter copy, a lie.

“What’s wrong with you? You think you’re better than this bullcrap but you’re working in a moldy gas station and you smell like twenty packs of cigarettes!”

“Don’t talk to me like that, kid,” Jones threatens. “I’m not the one who’ll end up homeless in New York. Take your Lucky Strikes and goddamn sugar-free gums and get the hell outta here!” His voice is menacing. Butterfly-guy doesn’t look like a Butterfly anymore. But Jones isn’t mad, actually. Just disappointed. Disappointed because the only interesting person he had seen in weeks happened to be even more boring than himself; because this kid is an American cliché, something seen and written about in twenty different movies and books and Jones thought he could be different. The tattoo made him think that this guy was something more than just a lost teenager looking for fame. The tattoo could have symbolized something deep, something Jones could have dreamt about at night. But no. Butterfly-guy was just like everyone else.

Butterfly-guy takes his stuff and opens the door. Just before leaving the station, he yells: “Fuck you!” and the door closes quietly. And the store is quiet again, so Jones turns the volume of the radio up, and picks up his phone. The Nokia is broken, which is weird because he always thought Nokias were unbreakable. He always held on to his Nokia, throwing it against a wall or a chair or the ground or even a tree once, but there was never a scratch on the grey phone. Now he’s just looking at it, at the broken pieces on the floor and he almost finds it funny: even the Nokia died after a while; even the Nokia wasn’t strong enough to deal with this gas station.

There is nothing to do. Life is silent again. Jones needs to hear a human voice, one that won’t be boring or telling him about some stupid American utopia. He grabs the telephone on the wall. He dials ten numbers -- he knows them by heart, no need to think about it, and listens to the ringing. It stops. His heart starts beating. He is ready to hang up when he hears a little girl ask innocently: “Hi, who are you?” and behind her, a man in the background laughing: “Anna, don’t answer the phone if you don’t know the number!”

Jones hears himself asking: “Hey kid, is your mom there?” There is a silence. Not only on the other side of the line, but also in Jones’s heart. And someone picks up the phone again. “Marta’s at work. Would you like to leave her a message?”

“No,” Jones whispers. “No need for a message.” He hangs up. The store has never been so quiet. He wants to curse, but his voice is stuck in his throat, stuck with some regrets and cig ashes and the cheeseburger he ate this morning. There’s nothing left to say.

So he simply takes the pack of Pyramids out of his pocket and smokes them all inside the store. And then he smokes whatever he can find around, lighting up every cigarette with the matches he found inside Marta’s red locker, the one in the back of the store, that he never opened even after she left; but this promise, like so many others, he ended up breaking.