Wheels

Here’s how you open a hole in the center of the earth.

I’m telling you this so you’ll understand how once I’m gone. Go to Roy Rogers at Exit 17 off the Garden State Parkway, the rest stop there, after 1 am, and order the Gold Rush Chicken Sandwich with no barbecue sauce. It doesn’t add much flavor anyway, so you won’t be missing anything.

With your sandwich in hand, go to the bathroom and find a stall. Sit there with the sandwich in your lap. It’s important you have it in your lap. I don’t know why, but you have to have it in your lap, because I tried once without it there and nothing happened.

Give it about 10 minutes. Don’t worry if someone comes in and uses the stall next to you. The hole that opens is only meant for you.

When you go down into it, there’s no one with you even if they were in the stall next to yours or at the sink. You feel like you’re on a Freefall ride. I was scared as all get-out the first time that I would crash against the bottom of the earth so hard that I’d break every bone in my body from my feet to my head.

It doesn’t happen that way.

You land on something soft like a mattress that smells like a freshly cut lawn and bounce off a little. I know that no grass is that soft, so I really have no idea what you’re landing on. But the point is you’re fine.

What It’s Like There

It’ll be pitch black and you’ll feel closed in, like you’re at the bottom of a corn silo except the walls are thick black jagged rock, like in a coal mine, if you can imagine such a thing, and you’ll say to yourself, okay, what happens now?

There’s nowhere really to go. No one’s there with you. You have no idea how to get back up because the sandwich that was in your lap got sucked up as you went down, like some vacuum snapped on above you while you dropped. The sandwich has got to be the key to the thing. But maybe you’re not supposed to have anything with you at the center of the earth. I don’t know.

One thing you’ll find odd, because I sure as heck did, is that it’s not very warm there at all. When I learned about the earth in science class way back when in school, they said it’s supposed to be lava. But nope. No lava. Shows you that we don’t really know as much as we think we do.

But I’m not here to judge. I’m here to tell you about the voice that comes to talk to you at the center of the earth.

The voice is deep, scratchy as if full of gravel. It’s not nice or angry, soft or harsh—just a voice telling you things and asking you questions.

It starts out by asking you easy questions, like what you had for breakfast that morning and where did you go on your last vacation. I couldn’t answer the one about vacation because I’ve been working two jobs for the past five years with practically no time off and no savings to go anywhere. If you can’t answer a question, that’s okay, the voice will move on. Just say you don’t know. You get the sense it wants you to be honest rather than have you making up stuff.

Then it will start saying things to you that feel a little weird.

Like, the dark will become what you walk into, and two tomorrows do not equal the one that came before.

I mean, what the heck does any of that mean? Maybe I carry darkness in me that gets everywhere like I’ve stepped in fresh paint and I’m tracking it through the house. It’s true, I haven’t been to therapy and I have pains that have stayed with me since I was a kid, so the darkness probably hangs around deep in me for that reason.

Maybe the tomorrow thing is about a fresh start, which I need badly, and getting pulled down thousands of feet below the ground is just that. You get the feeling when you’re down there that the voice knows all these things already. It doesn’t have to ask, but it does, because it wants to hear you say the answers.

There’s one question more important than the others, if you listen for it.

It gets mixed in with the other questions, and you could easily miss it. It comes toward the end of your time there and makes the air get very thin and things on the wall begin to glimmer a little as if someone sprinkled silver glitter into the silo and blew it around with a fan.

What is it that you would like to happen? That’s the question. That’s it.

And the voice doesn’t ask it expecting you to say that you want to get out of the center of the earth and go back up to the bathroom. It’s asking you in a bigger way.

It’s my first time here, trying to figure everything out, where I am, why this is happening, and hearing that question. I was having a pretty terrible day. My ex had decided to cut off contact with my kids, Jake and Amanda, for reasons I still don’t understand. They are grown now and doing their own things in other states, but still . . . It hurt a lot to hear that.

And then I got a stack of past due bills staring at me from the kitchen counter and a voicemail that afternoon from my doctor saying I need to have another scan because they’re not sure what they’re looking at and can I come in soon to get it, soon as possible.

So when I hear what is it that you would like to happen? I lost my balance, got dizzy, spinning in the dark, my mind goes fuzzy, this anger boiling up from my belly into my chest and throat and I just yell out: “I wish everyone and everything would grow a set of wheels!”

I don’t know why I said it.

Didn’t even make sense.

But before I knew it, I got pushed up fast from the darkness and spit back out into the graffiti stall where I had been sitting. The sandwich? Nowhere to be found and I was tired and hungry and pretty annoyed that I had to go and order another one and waste even a few more bucks I didn’t have.

It Started With The Trees

If you watch the news and talk to people, by now you know about the wheel problem. All you need to do is step outside.

First, it began with the trees in people’s backyards tipping over, hitting fences and the sides of houses. It happened to my neighbor Judy overnight, missing her bedroom by a hair. She says it was a healthy tree too, a big healthy oak.

When the tree folks came out the next day with their saws to chop it up and haul it away, they see the roots with these large round balls of bark and tree pulp. They don’t look like they should grow that way in the tree roots. It’s like the roots had swallowed tennis balls and basketballs, which pushed the tree up and made it loose in the earth, loose enough to fall over after a good rain.

It didn’t stop there, as I’m sure you know.

People got into their cars to go to work and backed out of the driveway hearing thump-thump-thump, like they’re rolling over speed bumps. When they jump out to see what’s wrong, they find that all four tires have what look like second tires growing out the bottoms of them, like each tire’s giving birth to another tire beneath it.

But that second tire isn’t fully formed. It’s no longer a circle and instead looks like a piece of tire popcorn, making the car almost impossible to drive. People like me who had to go to work, who had no choice, tried to drive anyway and ended up breaking their axles and ruining their cars. No one could come tow you because all the tow trucks had the same problem. This was everywhere, not just here.

There was all this talk of dominoes falling, but no need to say it when you walk into a grocery store and there’s nothing on the shelves.

Deliveries are stuck out on the road somewhere or in their bays. The companies don’t have nearly enough food delivery drones to make up for it, and even if there were, no one could get to the warehouses to load them.

You have to walk everywhere now and the exercise they say is good. But we’re talking about 3 to 4 miles back and forth to one store and people are in such bad shape already that they’re having heart attacks and spraining ankles and there’s no ambulances around to come pick them up and take them to the hospital.

But all that wasn’t half as bad as what happened next.

People started waking up with funny feelings in their feet, on the bottoms, around their arches. Like a dull ache and bulging that won’t go away. Day or two later, that bulge has gotten bigger and now it feels like there’s a tennis ball attached to the bottom of both feet under the arch. They’re getting a little bigger each day, to the point where you can’t even walk. You put your foot on the floor and the first thing that hits isn’t your toes or heels, it’s that ball in the center.

People got desperate as you can imagine and tried to walk anyway and that’s when they hear two little pops, the sound of the balls under their arches coming loose, or getting unstuck, rolling from the pressure of the floor. If you’ve ever roller-skated or rollerbladed, you know what it feels like to get anywhere. You had to push off with one heel and coast, then do it with the other. You couldn’t use your shoes anymore, although some people cut holes in the bottoms to try. I can’t tell you how many people tried the usual way of going down stairs and ended up in a nasty tumble.

When doctors took a peek inside with their scans, they found a new round ball of bone had formed out of the bone in the foot, the cuneiform bone they call it, wrapped in new ligaments and tendons in a strange way that let it roll in place. Surgeons would remove them, but in a week or two they’d grow back, so they stopped doing the surgeries.

Whose Fault Is It

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I did this.

I knew it in my gut early on, when the growths started happening with the trees. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Then the guilt came rushing, hitting me in waves, keeping me up at night.

I thought about how I let my bad day get the best of me at the center of the earth, how it made me blurt out some nonsense at the wrong time in the wrong place. And so now this was my fault, all of it, everything gone haywire and crumbling around us.

I played it back again and again in my head. I could have asked for a million dollars, a new car, a soul mate to come into my life, someone who really loved me, a better job—ANYTHING but these wheels. Why wheels? I have no idea.

What made it worse was that I didn’t get the growths on my feet. No trees fell over in my yard, even though I have a couple maples. My car tires are fine.

People say that everything in their home now has the wheel-growth as they call it: chairs, shelves, tables, beds, bureaus, even smaller things like picture frames. You can’t touch or sit on something and not have it roll away from you or with you. But nothing is different in my rancher. Not a single thing.

One silver lining in all of it was that all the guns and knives and anything that could hurt people got the wheel sickness too, making them useless, except for baseball bats. But that’s always going to be the case. People will always be able to bludgeon each other into oblivion, no matter what happens, short of a huge meteor taking care of us like it did the dinosaurs.

But since it was me who did this, I had to try to set it right, no matter what it took. I waited until night, found a flashlight, rummaged for some extra batteries, and set out for Exit 17 on the Garden State.

The Center of the Earth

It took me about three and a half hours to get there. I’m not going to lie, by the end, my feet burned like lit tar from the walk. I shouldn’t complain considering how few people could walk normal anymore.

I wove my way around abandoned cars that were lopsided, some with their doors open. I stepped into the rest stop through the double doors, my flashlight carving a path straight to Roy’s through wrappers and other trash on the floor.

I had to get a Gold Rush Chicken Sandwich but obviously no one was there to make it for me. I went behind the counter and started opening the metal cabinet doors in the cook area before spotting a refrigerator in the back. It was off, but when I opened it, still a little cold inside.

I saw what looked like a couple defrosting Gold Rush patties on the middle shelf. I hoped the hole in the center of the earth didn’t care whether the sandwich was actually cooked as long as I held it in my lap. You work with what you got.

10 minutes in the stall and the whooshing came and then the drop.

In an instant I had come to rest on the bottom of the earth, or at its center on the bottom, like the deepest part of the ocean. The coal walls didn’t glimmer.

I waited for the voice.

Nothing.

I’m sitting there. The world is dark. Everyone’s got wheels for feet. Nothing works right.

We’re all sitting in our small cubbyholes waiting for the walls to fall in on us. No one is coming. No one can help. It’s—what do they say? A done deal.

Then the voice arrives. Low, hoarse, flat.

You’re back.

“Yes.”

Did you not receive what you asked for?

“No I did, but I think, by accident, I asked for the wrong thing. I mean, who would want everything to grow wheels. I was not in my proper mind. I was upset.”

There was silence.

“So, um, I was wondering if it would be okay with you, for uh, it to go back. To the way it was before. I’d like to talk to my kids again, see if they’re okay.”

There was silence.

“Please.”

More silence.

“I think the darkness in me spilled out when it shouldn’t have. I was just so under it all, you know? The way things have been. The way they have gone. And it’s no one’s fault. Maybe mine for some bad decisions here and there. Well, you know.”

It can’t go back.

“But sure it can, you brought me down here, you seem to be able to do things, you can make it.”

No. It can’t go back.

“Then . . . do I have to go back? Or can I just stay down here?”

More silence. I stood up and touched the wall, now glittering with that silver dust. Though jagged for the most part, some spots felt cool and smooth to touch, like glass.

Do you want to stay? Is that what you are asking?

“Yes.”

Okay then.

“Can I ask you, will it be like going to sleep and waking up somewhere else?”

Sleep, yes. Waking, perhaps.

“Can I ask you one more thing?”

I waited. Silence again, which I took to mean okay, go ahead.

“Who are you?”

I am everything and nothing. I am the morning and night. I am thought and I am sleep.

“Oh I see. Must be a little tiring, being everything, no?”

More silence.

“Can I ask, why didn’t I get the wheel sickness?”

Because you are the one who asked for it. And the one who asks never receives.

“Oh, so like, that’s the rule. Makes sense, I guess . . . ”

Silence again.

“So you don’t mind making everything fall in on itself?”

There was no answer. I thought to myself I shouldn’t have said it.

Then the voice tells me this is the way all things go, if not in one form, then another.

I sat there wondering what I would do for all time at the center of the earth, sleeping then maybe waking.

Who knows how that’s all figured out, or where I’ll end up.

I suddenly felt a deep need for the world again. To see the stars and watch the sun rise and hear the birds chirping in the morning, even if no one was like they used to be and nothing worked like it did.

But maybe that was the point of all of it.

To show me what I was missing, what beautiful things there are if you look in the right way, if you stare up from the bottom of a deep silo of darkness with walls that feel like glass and glimmer with a million silver specks.

So before the sleep that was promised and maybe waking after it, I’m sending a message up.

The voice said it would carry it for me.

And so that’s what happened, that’s what I did. That’s why I’ve been giving you the instructions on how to get down here, real specific.

Maybe your wish, if you can say it in the right way and your past doesn’t get the better of you, will take us all somewhere else this time, somewhere completely different, hopefully with nothing growing out of us that makes it hard to walk and live and feel regret for things we try to change but can’t.