A Car in Neutral By Joanna Theiss

        Sheila Sund CC




A Car in Neutral


   My boyfriend as he leans against our bedroom window is a watercolor. His white t-shirt is stained umber from the streetlamp, his forehead is gray-striped from the shadows of branches. 
     Aram says, “There’s a car outside. It’s just idling.”
   I mumble to let him know that I’ve heard, but also that I don’t want to leave our bed. It smells like us, Aram’s scentless soap that transforms in his pores into something earthy, like a rose compressed between the pages of a book, and my overpriced, anti-aging face cream.
     Aram taps on the window. “Shh. Can’t you hear it?” 
    But I can’t. Earlier that day, the landlord bled our radiator, an alien object that neither of us had noticed before. In the October dark, the machine ticks as evenly as the heartbeat of a hibernating animal.
    Because Aram doesn’t move, I put on my glasses and go to him. Outside and two stories below us, a panther of a car pumps exhaust into the silent street. The glow of its headlights falls over the curb like a heavy perfume. 
     Together, we watch it drive away. It bounds over a speed bump as if the driver hasn’t noticed the signs. 
                                                                                                                                      *
    In San Diego, Aram’s surfer good looks carved out opportunities for him, his slow smile acting as an all-access pass. San Diego Aram got jobs in offices for which he had no qualifications; he wore a suit that an old boss bought for him, though I told him that it was inappropriate. In our new city where my job has carried us, strangers break the rule against eye contact to tell Aram that he could be a model, but they don’t hold open doors for him. They don’t buy him clothes.  
    So Aram does what he can: on Tuesday and Thursday nights, he takes the bus south to an art school where he reclines in a chair, or stands prettily erect, or sits on the floor with his back curved like a cashew. Sometimes, the instructor sets a timer and Aram changes positions at every beep so that her students can capture his lines in a few quick strokes.
    Aram comes home jittery. He says all of that holding makes him restless, like an animal on a leash. Instead of sleeping, he pulls a chair up to our bedroom window and watches for movement in the street. 
                                                                                                                                      *
     The movie is over, the pizza finished. From under a blanket on the couch, I ask, “Any news? On work, I mean?” 
    Aram answers by staring at the television’s screensaver, which plays drone views of impossible peaks, Annapurna, Everest. Do the art students smudge in the bruised hollows under his eyes, or are they too polite to show the damage?
    To meet the cold outside, the radiator has lowered its pitch to a steady thump thump thump. I slide my toes under Aram’s knee and talk about my coworker’s crush on her roommate, the feelings that threaten to engulf her.
    When Aram jumps off the couch and races to our bedroom, I don’t have to follow to know that the car is outside, idling on our one-way street.  
                                                                                                                                       *
     At happy hour at the Irish bar near Union Station, my coworker and her roommate drink buy-one-get-one-frees and accidentally-on-purpose touch. I leave early and find that San Diego Aram is waiting for me in our steam-heated apartment on the second floor. He wears jeans instead of sweatpants. He leads me to the bedroom, where he has made our bed in paper, neon-yellow highlighted and blue-ink annotated. Minimalist works of art, expressive of momentum in Aram’s progress toward full-time employment. 
     Aram hugs me and whispers into my hair, “I think it’s a Corvette C5. Take a look.”
     The sheets that cover our bed are about the car. On top of my pillow is an image of a red version of it, its wheels angled suggestively. On the bed’s foot, sales listings for vintage Corvettes. Along its edge, articles detailing changes to the car’s body over three decades. In the center, pages and pages of conversations between car guys online. 
     My printer paper, my precious toner, wasted. Used not for job leads, but for the mysterious car that fuels Aram’s insomnia. 
     “Guys on reddit say you can tell a C5 because of the tailgate, this here. They think it’s a ’97.” 
      I torque out of his embrace. “Why are you wasting time on this car?”
      “I’m curious. Why aren’t you?”
     After all the months of keeping quiet, the car has pushed me into honest, dangerous territory. “Because I don’t have time to be curious. I’m working. I’m paying most of the bills. I’m dealing with you, moping.” 
     With the print-outs between us, Aram repeats the word “moping” until it loses meaning. He tells me that I don’t understand how bored he is, how helpless he feels sending applications into the void, how stupid he sounds around my coworkers. How I can’t understand the profundity of a 6.2-liter engine, the promise emitting from manifolds, and I never will. 
     “Where are you going?” I ask as Aram shoves his arms into his leather jacket and pops the cap off of his body spray.
     “Work,” he says, though it’s not Tuesday or Thursday.
                                                                                                                                        *
     When the car comes, the idling engine is so loud that it wakes me up. It hauls me out of bed, clicks open the doors, belts me in. The upholstery smells like a breath mint and the driver’s seat vibrates under my pelvis and up through my spine. My bare foot knows to press down on the clutch, and instinct guides it to ease up when I feel the bite. My hand thrusts the car into first gear and I am roaring across our bedroom floor. Over the car’s deep breaths, I shout, “Hey, I can hear it!” but my boyfriend is gone, the place that once held him now lost to negative space. 

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Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a lawyer-turned-writer living in Washington, DC. Her short stories and flash fiction have recently appeared in Fictive Dream and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. One of her pieces was selected as a winner of Best Microfiction 2022. Links to her writing are available at www.joannatheiss.com.

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