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Manifestation

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 23/03/09

I can’t feel myself. I can smell wet wood and stone and the faint odor of rubber and gasoline and metal. I can hear the cracking and murmuring and moaning of trees. I see shreds of white mist like torn veils glowing in the dark, floating down the highway.

It is night.

It was raining.

I don’t remember where I am. I am looking for my car. My car is beautiful, the color of garnets. What happened to my car?

I’m on the side of a road. I know I’m walking. My feet don’t register the ground. The ground glides beneath me.

I see light. The refracted light of high beams bent by the rolling mists. I hear the sound of a car. I think I turn to wave. I try to wave. I try to make my body do as I command. I’m suddenly on the slick asphalt. I didn’t mean to be … a shiny bright small car is almost on top of me. Tires screech, the car spins twice, comes to a stop….

I’m looking for my car. I remember now. It is a Buick. A Series 50. But what happened to it, where is it? Where am I? The air is damp and cool. I can see the outline of clouds parting beyond distant crags in mountains. Stars. I see the pale points of stars. There is no moon. I don’t feel cold but I know there is a chill breeze. My hair should be moving in the breeze. Is it blowing? I can’t even tell.

The asphalt is pale and it slides beneath me. Am I on the road again? A small truck — is that a truck, I’ve never seen anything like it before — has me caught in dazzling brightness. I see the truck swerve into the opposite lane, do a little half-turn, and pull back in front of me. It pulls onto the roadside as I approach. The driver jumps out.

He looks strange. He is shouting, “What the fuck, what the fuck,” over and over. I try to explain. I can’t find my car. I am with the man and he’s staring back where I was. The clouds gather again. There is a gush of wind.

It’s raining. I remember now. I was driving to Baltimore. I had to drive through Virginia. I didn’t want to. The Lee Highway, is this the Lee Highway? Where is my car? The rain doesn’t touch me. It falls on me but doesn’t touch me. My body seems to move on its own. Another car — people inside — beside me. I am tired of walking.

I get in their car, my body slides into the back seat. It is a very unusual car. A young man is driving, a young woman is in the other seat in front of me. I try to ask them, have they seen my car. They have stopped talking. The girl starts yelling, “Hurry up, hurry up, get out of here.” They scare me. For the first time since I can remember anything, I feel anxious and afraid. I open their back car door and slip out, closing the door, weaving here and there as I watch them speed into a point of darkness around a bend in the highway.

This is like a nightmare. I can’t command my own legs and arms. I can’t move my eyes to where I want to see. I can’t will myself to step more quickly, or to stop. But then I find myself speeding up, when I least expect it. Or viewing something around me before I know why, or coming to a halt for no reason, in a place I might have chosen but I’m not sure how.

The rain stops again. This road just goes on and on. Gleams of wetness, foggy streamers, bending and whispering shadowy trees and underbrush flow behind me as I move.

I want my car. It’s mine, my identity is in my car. Security is in my car. Where is my car? I am watching as a garnet-colored sedan zooms past me; is that mine? Did someone steal it? No, no … it’s too small. It looks funny. A buggy thing, from a movie or a cartoon.

My legs are moving, everything is moving around me. I don’t know if I’m going north or south, or if I’ve crossed the road, or how many times, or if I’m going in circles. The clouds seem to come down from the sky, silver and gray and glowing from a source of light I can’t see. More noise on the road. Small round cars, long cars, big boxy cars, compact and huge trucks. I think I see colors and chrome and hear the whump whump whump of windshield wipers. Brake pedals smash to the floor, spinning, careening, sometimes screaming. I am sure something hits me.

But no, my toes, my hands and fingers are there … I can see them. I’m alone along a grassy shoulder of the road and the night is filled with crickets chirruping. If I could find my car, I need to find my car….

* * *

Officer Reynolds of the Virginia State Police took another call from dispatch. “Got that. Will be there in five minutes.” He laughed out loud. “Not another one.”

Trooper Blankenship, his partner taking the passenger seat this shift, didn’t look very amused. “Hey, this stuff is weird,” he said defensively.

The officers arrived at the all-night Taco restaurant, and could see a couple of vehicles in the parking lot. Three people were having an animated conversation in front of the restaurant entrance; the light above them made them look sunken-eyed and yellow.

Reynolds pulled the cruiser into a parking slip, turned the key in the ignition. “It’s two in the morning, Ted. Don’t feed into the emotions here, do you understand?” Reynolds commanded his younger partner.

The two men slowly, and studiously, exited the cruiser as the three people in front of the restaurant gesticulated and walked hurriedly towards them.

One older man began speaking first. “Please, you have to go check. I’m sure I hit her. There was a woman in the road. I’m sure I hit her.”

“Your name, sir?” Reynolds asked.

“Forrest, Leonard Forrest.”

“Do you know what day it is, Mr. Forrest?”

“It’s Saturday, June 27, 2009.”

“Have you had any alcoholic beverages to drink tonight, Mr. Forrest?”

“No, goddamnit. Well, a couple of beers around five in the evening.”

“Is that yours?” Officer Blankenship asked, pointing at a medium-sized red truck on the other side of the police cruiser.

“Yes, yes, officer.” The man was clearly close to panicking. “Check it please. See if there is any sign I hit someone.”

Reynolds and Blankenship exchanged quizzical looks.

The young couple who had been waiting with Leonard Forrest followed the three men to Forrest’s truck. The two began talking at the same time, “Someone was in our car. Someone got in our car. We were afraid to turn around. But when we finally looked, there was no one there.”

“Um, hmm,” Officer Reynolds muttered as he pulled out a small powerful flashlight and began inspecting the front end of Leonard Forrest’s red Toyota Tacoma.

Trooper Blankenship tried to avoid eye contact as he was left standing in front of the excited couple. “Well …” he started to say.

Officer Reynolds, after a cursory check, straightened up and continued, “Well, there doesn’t appear to be any damage, or any evidence that you hit anyone.” He smiled at Blankenship, and nodded. “Let’s move over by the police car, please. I’ll need your drivers licenses, and we’ll need to do sobriety tests on the three of you.”

Strangely, no one objected, not even an angry look. The three seemed to be relieved at the down-to-earth normalcy of such procedures. And as it turned out, no one of the three showed signs of intoxication. Officer Reynolds was just handing back drivers licenses to the young couple, while trying to figure out what or how much to say, when a squawky voice came over the police car radio announcing a near accident further south on the old Lee Highway just before Alt. 220 and Williamson Road. “The driver is reporting either a near miss or that he hit a woman on the road.”

Leonard Forrest, who had started to calm down, instantly straightened like a board when he overheard that. “What the hell?”

The young woman looked at her boyfriend. The young man looked at the police officers.

“Now you-all are from this neck of the woods,” Reynolds drawled in his best Andy Griffith impression. “You know these summer rain storms, and how slick these mountain roads can get, and how the fog can play tricks on you at night.”

Blankenship had bent into the cruiser through the open door on his side, and was answering the dispatcher. He poked his head up and spoke to his partner, “We need to go.”

Officer Reynolds smiled reassuringly at the three travelers. “Now you folks go on home. Drive carefully.”

Reynolds slipped quickly behind the wheel, slammed the door.

“Siren?” Blankenship asked?

“Yeah, okay,” Reynolds confirmed. “Might as well. In case this one is real.” He snickered.

Blankenship again did not appear to find anything funny. “Come on, Rog,” he said sternly as the cruiser tore out of the Taco restaurant lot, light bar flashing and siren wailing. “This is the fifth report tonight. They almost hit a woman in the road. Or, they did hit a woman in the road and she disappeared. Or, there was someone in the car with them. All on old Lee just before Alt. 220. We’ve been up and down this stretch of Lee Highway for the last six hours, and haven’t found a damn thing.”

“It’s raining, it’s the summer, there are all kinds of reasonable explanations. She’s probably some crazy woman with Alzheimers who ….”

“Yeah? So how come we can’t find her?” Blankenship interrupted.

***

Officer Lamar Parnell jiggled the dial of the radio in the black 1942 Ford DeLuxe coupe. Suddenly he heard the lilting and lovely voice of Jo Stafford singing “Long Ago and Far Away,” and he leaned back and smiled. He’d returned several months ago from the war, from Italy, where he’d been wounded, but now was fit enough to take up duties with the Virginia State Police again. Duties that included everything from emergency rescue, to ambulance service, to delivering babies, in addition to the usual law enforcement responsibilities.

He was parked with the motor running, a little off the Lee Highway, waiting for a call, or the occasional drunk to go sliding by on these wet roads. Lamar Parnell knew these roads backward and forwards, as he had been born and raised in the Roanoke area. He even had explored the new construction called the Blue Ridge Parkway that was going to link Skyline Drive all the way down to the Smokey Mountains. Tonight he was relaxed, on his home turf, enjoying a Blue Ridge Mountain summer evening shower, sitting in his unmarked, shiny black Ford squad car.

Suddenly all kinds of static came from the two-way communications radio that had been installed in Virginia’s police cars only recently. He turned down the regular car radio, as a mellow male voice said, “And now Artie Shaw and his orchestra, from 1941, ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ ”

Parnell picked up the handheld receiver, “Yeah, Lamar here. What is it? Over.”

“Accident, south on Lee Highway. Passersby reported it as soon as they could. Over.”

“On my way. Over.” Officer Parnell hooked up the receiver and revved up the Ford, shifted gears, and turned right onto the highway, heading south as fast as he could go. In about thirty minutes his headlights illuminated something across the highway on his left, off on the side of the road. He swung around and crossed the other lane and came to a screaming stop in front of a car that was lying upside down, tires up. Parnell scrambled out of his cruiser, and limped to the car.

He could see it was a Buick; it looked like a 1940 Buick Super, and even in the unnatural light of his headlamps, he could see the beautiful garnet color of the paint. He limped back to his car, and rummaged until he found his brass military-issue flashlight, and returned to the overturned Buick. He shone the thin light around into the interior of the wreck as a slight drizzle started.

He adjusted the brim of his hat and straightened up. “Hmmm, must’ve wandered off,” he said to himself, seeing no one in or around the wreck.

Parnell took the flashlight and started walking down the side of the highway, casting grotesque and elongated shadows into the woods and brush of the hills next to him. He began calling, “Is anyone there? Hello, are you hurt? Can you hear me?” The ethereal, vaporous rain continued. Mountain mists swirled around the tree tops. Parnell stopped and squinted ahead. He pointed the light to where he thought he could just barely make something out. He limped quickly as he approached what now grew to be a motionless huddled mass curled up on a patch of grass under a large oak tree. As he came to the tree, and directed the beam of light, he saw a woman covered with blood from head to toe. She was wearing a dress, or had been wearing a dress. Everything was cut and torn.

“Ma’am, Ma’am,” Officer Parnell called, as he approached the body. He knelt beside her. The woman’s green eyes were frozen, wide open. Under the blood dripping down her face, she was pallid. Parnell had seen more death than most men see in twenty lifetimes, but something about this woman didn’t speak to him of death.

He patiently lowered his face to her face and listened and felt for breath. It took several minutes, but amazingly, a quick shallow breath came. Every few minutes. As if she were in some kind of suspension, some kind of limbo, neither dead nor alive.

Parnell removed his jacket and covered the woman. He made his way back to his car, then drove forward to a position close to the woman’s body. He stretched out two blankets, carefully log-rolled her onto them, wrapped her tightly, and put her on the back seat of his Ford. It was time to play ambulance driver. He picked up his handheld as he started the cruiser. “This is Officer Parnell, car 7. Proceeding to Lewis-Gale Hospital, in Roanoke. Over.”

Parnell glanced behind him as he drove; his Jane Doe looked like an ancient mummy, wrapped in his old army blankets. He wondered who she was, and what had happened to her. Had there been just an accident, or something worse? Her fancy Buick had a Maryland plate, she wasn’t from around here. He returned his attention to the road ahead, and said a little prayer.