As I drive up I-71, it takes me a minute to realize the billboards have started speaking to me. And not speaking to me the way an old painting or a Tom Hanks movie might, although that would be weird too. Speaking to me as in talking to me.
HELL IS REAL, the first one says in blocky white letters.
No shit buddy, I think.
Lacey and I have been living in hell for the past three weeks. We have bedbugs—not in our bed, but everywhere else. Everywhere-but-the-bedbugs I’d been calling them until Lacey threw her phone at my head.
Which is why I left for my weekly trip to Grandpa’s Cheesebarn three days early. To give us a little breathing room.
The next billboard says, If you think a trunk full of cheese is going to solve your problems… THINK AGAIN. It looks like one of those government-sponsored drunk driving ads, but I can’t figure out what it wants from me.
Then, in familiar orange and magenta branding, the next one says, Wake up and smell the coffee, you stupid cuck! and it rapidly dawns on me that Lacey’s been cheating on me for months, if not years. As I wonder how long I’ve known this deep down, a bedbug bites the back of my neck.
A personal injury lawyer named “Captain” Jack Sweringer looks over his shoulder at me: Broken dreams? Bruised ego? Captain Jack’s got your back.
My neck is bleeding all over my shirt from scratching my bite, so I start pawing around the floor for napkins and when I look back up I see the gigantic blue eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, retinas one yard high, looking out from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles, their persistent stare telling me, Eyes on the road dipshit, and I say, Yes sir, sorry sir, and put my hands at 10 and 2.
I decide to turn on the radio to distract myself.
To my surprise, the most recently played channel is a gospel station. There’s a woman with a gorgeous voice singing a song that I assume is called Assorted Cheese and Meat Sticks Won’t Save Your Soul. She keeps singing Assorted cheese and meat sticks won’t save your soul, won’t save your soul over and over again. It’s really quite beautiful, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.
Does Lacey listen to gospel in the car? She has taken a turn toward the ecclesiastical lately. In March, I tried to wipe what I thought was a mascara smudge off of her forehead and she slapped me.
I turn the dial to a call-in show. The hosts are talking over each other in jangling, almost satanic voices about their bad dating experiences. They take a call.
I’ve been seeing this girl for a year or so, the caller says, and I think she gave me bedbugs.
The hosts groan; a toilet flushes. I turn the radio off and see the silver glint of a highway patrol car in the corner of my eye. I look at the speedometer—I’m going forty miles over the limit.
As the trooper walks up to my car, I try to formulate an excuse in my head but can’t think past the truth: the billboards and the radio are colluding to ruin my life, and I’m hurtling toward oblivion. When I roll down the window, he takes a step back and says, Pal, you gotta go to the hospital, now.
I guess I must’ve hit an artery or something when I scratched my neck because my shirt is really soaked with blood.
He lets me go without a ticket and I speed away, shaking my head at my good luck.
I pull off at exit 186, drive into the lot, and step out of my car, the heat rising from the asphalt under the shadow of the cheese silo.
I’ve made it. I’m here. I’m in my domain.
Hi Pauline, I say, waving to the lovely middle-aged worker wearing a hairnet and food safety gloves behind the counter. She stares at me, not saying a word. The A/C snaps against my skin as I take in the aisles of dairy before me.
I feel renewed, refreshed, reborn.
I’m going to make things right with Lacey. Hell, I’m going to make things right with her lover too. My love is boundless, forgiving, and pure. I pick up a hickory smoked gouda, envisioning it unwrapped, cubes expanding endlessly into the universe. A red smudge obscures the price. I hold it above my head.
Pauline? I say. She’s still staring at me, along with Terry, Frida, and a gathering crowd of customers. I follow their eye line, a trail of blood leading up to my dripping sleeve.
How much? I say, and the floor speeds toward my face, collapsing my jaw like a Ford Fiesta into a concrete median.