Anhedonia

The four hundred glass bowls designed to function primarily as salad bowls; to be taken out once a year at a dinner with your boss, shudder in back.  Another five hundred ornamental wine glasses all stacked neatly on top of each other between the soft downy padding of plastic peanuts and bubble wrap tinkle as their “hand crafted” rims rub against each other.

In tune to the massive orgy of reverberating IKEA designs Seth steers the truck around potholes in the highway. His headlights cast a pale glow on a few feet of the road in front of him, and the silver dollar flakes falling fast from the sky.

“Shit,” he says, more to himself than to her- the woman in his front seat.

There being no need to further address the situation, she simply crosses her stockings and taps her feet against the candy bar wrappers adorning the floor. Her mouth pouts in the direction of his wind-shield. He knows her question before she begins to say it. “How far is it from Regina to Vancouver again?”

“I’m not deliverin’ to Vancouver,” Seth grunts as he strains his eyes at the ground.

“Yeah, yeah…” she whispers, “I remember. But you know, same thing.”

“Thousand seven-hundred kilometres.”

He has driven the route for two days now, watched it disappear in his rear-view mirrors. He’s looking at two days back. A stab of home pierces through him before he remembers reality; a flash of straw coloured hair and soft lips, a small figure in a red jumpsuit, an ornament of sail-boats above the crib; his wife and baby girl. They’re waiting for him back home. But that’s not right: he doesn't have a home. They’re not waiting for him.

The static of his radio breaks his thoughts, but it can't be the radio: it’s been silent for hours. The man on the other end can’t reach him through the thick blanket of snow Seth is being buried under moment by moment, foot by foot.

The hitch-hiker makes the sound again. It’s the raw guttural cough of a woman whose lungs have withered and decayed, slick with oil; lined with tar. Her voice is rough as the callouses on his fingers. “You sure you can’t take me to the Pacific Central?”

“I shouldn’t have taken you nowhere,” he answers, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He knows he would never have left her in the snowstorm. She knows it as well.

“Are you in a hurry or something?”

She of all people, with her lewd clothing and her bottle blond perm, should know about the schedules of truck drivers.

“The snow slowed me down and put me behind. In two hours I gotta' stop, or I lose my job.” It makes sense to say this, but the rule is distant memory. He can't remember why he cares.

The blizzard continues to claim more of the Trans-Canada Highway. The woman coughs again.

Snow falls in great clumps around the halo the lights cast. He imagines it's following him, smothering his truck, trapping him and the woman inside.

“My name is Anhedonia,” she tells him.

Seth glances at her. He does not want to know her name. He doesn't care where she’s going or what she’s done. He doesn't care enough to ask why she’s running away or why she’s dressed like a prostitute and wandering highways in the middle of the bitter winter night. Despite this he cares enough not to let her freeze.

The truck veers into a pothole hidden beneath the thick layer of snow and the china once again clamours for attention. He sighs, he has always preferred the hush of wooden shelves and cushioned sofas and disassembled pieces of plastic coffee tables.

The static of the radio issues a sudden threat. Once he might have felt a thrill of joy, now, staring into the light before him he feels nothing but the warm air of the truck’s heating system blasting at his lips and eyes.

Mechanically he picks up the radio and switches it on. “Hello. Is this getting through?”

The only sound that comes from it is a breath, a phlegmatic inhalation of oxygen: static.

“They've abandoned you, haven’t they?” His hitch-hiker is tracing patterns on the side window. They form flowers and spirals around words.

“It’s just the snow, once it stops the radio ought to work again,” he assures her.

“Not them.” Her reflection in the window is blurred, her expression unreadable.

In her eyes he sees another flash of memory. This time their bodies are mirages in the snow, the straw of her hair splayed out against the outline of a mattress and the man’s outline enclosing and obscuring the face he longs to see, but cannot picture fully. Maybe he no longer wants to.

He can no longer move the truck much faster than a crawl. Snow building up beneath the tires stops their rotation. It's deep now, he thinks. He's in deep. Maybe he should think about how to contact a crew, or how to keep the engine running overnight, but the thoughts are intangible and unimportant.

Instead he wonders how long it would take them to find their bodies in the snow. He wonders who they are.

“You don't even know where you're going, do you?” Her raspy voice cuts in. “Do you even care?”

For the first time, Seth looks at her directly. A flash of straw, a breath in his ear. Her tights have been replaced by paint splattered jeans, her lipstick lips now bare.

“Susan?” He asks. But she's already gone. All that's left of her is a stale scent of cigarettes that she smoked in here, months ago. She was never there.

The snow still falls: enveloping him, hushing the squeal of the engine and the rotation of the tires, muffling the clinking of the plates.

He turns back to the road; to the white calm- and stops.