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Hour Six
For some reason, the stretch of I-95 just south of Florence, South Carolina, is
the place to drive a car on a Friday evening. We get bogged down in traffic for
several miles, and even though Radar is desperate to violate the speed limit, he’s
lucky when he can go thirty. Radar and I sit up front, and we try to keep from
worrying by playing a game we’ve just invented called That Guy Is a Gigolo. In
the game, you imagine the lives of people in the cars around you.
We’re driving alongside a Hispanic woman in a beat-up old Toyota Corolla. I
watch her through the early darkness. “Left her family to move here,” I say.
“Illegal. Sends money back home on the third Tuesday of every month. She’s got
two little kids—her husband is a migrant. He’s in Ohio right now—he only
spends three or four months a year at home, but they still get along really well.”

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Radar leans in front of me and glances over at her for half a second. “Christ,
Q, it’s not so melodratragic as that. She’s a secretary at a law firm—look how
she’s dressed. It has taken her five years, but she’s now close to getting a law
degree of her own. And she doesn’t have kids, or a husband. She’s got a
boyfriend, though. He’s a little flighty. Scared of commitment. White guy, a little
nervous about the Jungle Fever angle of the whole thing.”
“She’s wearing a wedding ring,” I point out. In Radar’s defense, I’ve been
able to stare at her. She is to my right, just below me. I can see through her tinted
windows, and I watch as she sings along to some song, her unblinking eyes on
the road. There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of
people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently
misimagined. I feel like this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your
brain must wrap itself around slowly, the way pythons eat, but before I can get
any further, Radar speaks.
“She’s just wearing that so pervs like you don’t come on to her,” Radar
explains.
“Maybe.” I smile, pick up the half-finished GoFast bar sitting on my lap, and
take a bite. It’s quiet again for a while, and I am thinking about the way you can
and cannot see people, about the tinted windows between me and this woman
who is still driving right beside us, both of us in cars with all these windows and
mirrors everywhere, as she crawls along with us on this packed highway. When
Radar starts talking again, I realize that he has been thinking, too.
“The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo,” Radar says, “I mean, the thing about
it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the
imagining than it does about the person being imagined.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I was just thinking that.” And I can’t help but feel that
Whitman, for all his blustering beauty, might have been just a bit too optimistic.
We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can
imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system
like so many leaves of grass—but the game makes me wonder whether we can
really ever fully become another.