content warning: gun violence

“The important thing already happened. What follows are only consequences.”
–Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin

There’s a barren stretch of road that runs through the California desert, past Indian Wells, Mojave, and Lancaster. The 14 is an easy route to navigate, a quiet two-lane highway that gives you the straightest shot from Mammoth to Los Angeles. On a Friday morning at the end of summer, there’s no traffic. There are no landmarks either, nothing to mark where you are or how far you’ve gone. It’s an easy drive to tune out. The desert that stretches before, behind, and around does away with your sense of time.

Sips of coffee bring you back to reality. The radio focuses your attention on the here and now, and time moves forward again, taking you with it. The podcast episode that’s just come on is grating. It’s a monologue from a woman who chronicles her recovery from an eating disorder. There’s no dialogue and almost no story. The one before was better. It was about a man in the Northeast—in New Hampshire or Vermont or Maine—who bought a chunk of land in the woods and built a shooting range on it. His neighbors, most of them Second-Amendment types, were up in arms about it and fought back using the most powerful weapon at their disposal: the town’s local zoning laws. The saga unfolded over the course of years, and eventually the man with all the guns was ordered to stop operating his shooting range and pay tens of thousands of dollars in zoning violation fees.

Now that’s a story, you think as you take a bite of your power bar.

Suddenly, you’re jolted back to the road. The big rig in front of you slams on its brakes, then speeds up again. A man on foot is weaving from the side of the road to the stretch of brush and dirt that doubles as a median.

On the right-hand side of the road is another man, in a white T-shirt, standing next to a white SUV. A red gas container sits on the hood of his car.

They must have run out of gas. You can’t stop to help them.

When you’re in a horror story, time slows down.

The man in the road doesn’t seem to care about getting run over. He steps jerkily into the left lane, your lane.

You put your foot on the brake to avoid hitting him.

He’s wearing a dark gray T-shirt, gray shorts, and a black baseball hat.

Beneath it, his hair is black and shoulder-length.

You slow down.

Time is almost at a standstill.

You come to a full stop when he raises his hand toward you. Time stops.

He’s holding a gun.

Breathe. Put your hands up.

He’s thirty feet away.

Find your wallet.

Twenty feet.

Roll down your window just a crack.

Ten feet.

Hold out your wallet to him.

His eyes are glazed. He walks past your door. The wallet falls from your hand.

And then the door behind you opens.

You know how this story ends.

There was a girl in Chapel Hill when you were a grad student in Durham to whom this happened. Her death was sealed the moment the perpetrators forced their way into her car. They took her to ATMs first, then drove her to the woods, where they pulled the trigger, again and again.

There’s a book I use to shake my students out of the daze that takes hold of them near the end of the semester. I tell them that Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream is a true-to-life rendering of what it feels like to live through horror.

The novel unfolds in retrospect, with a child named David pushing a dying woman named Amanda to tell the story of what led her to the hospital bed she now occupies.

“The important thing already happened. What follows are only consequences,” David tells Amanda.

The book spooks my students, grips them, keeps them reading into the wee hours of the night. They become sleuths, set out to uncover the “important thing” along with David.

“We don’t have much time,” David tells Amanda, “and before time runs out we have to find the exact moment.”

In class, we try to impose order on disorder, make sense out of senselessness.

But this turns out to be a fool’s errand. Schweblin knows that when horrible things happen, they don’t happen for a reason.

He hasn’t said anything this whole time.

You look back over your shoulder. He’s leaned into the car and is reaching for the pillow in the back seat, holding it by a corner, inspecting it.

The entire back is full of camping gear—your tent and sleeping bag and backpack and pillow, all the things you didn’t have the energy to pack up properly when you set out before sunrise this morning. You told the students in your tent groups not to worry if they heard movement in the night—it would be you, heading out to make it back in time for a cousin’s wedding.

In a flash, you see yourself being forced to drive with a gun to your head.

They’ll take you somewhere.

You can’t let yourself see anything beyond that.

He’s leaning further forward, his upper body fully inside the car now, feet still on the ground. He’s rifling through the gear.

You floor it.

The pickup on the car is slow, but it catches him by surprise and throws him off balance. You’re going, gaining speed, and he’s on the side of the road now, left behind.

And then there’s a pop.

By the time you register the sound and realize what it is, you’re going 40, 60, 80, and the back door has slammed shut.

Go.

You rack your brain. There’s no script for this. What are you supposed to do, except keep going?

Call 911.

Your brain is slow to process.

That was a carjacking.

You haven’t set up fingerprint identification on your phone, so now you’re fumbling to enter your passcode.

“Hey Siri, call 911.” Nothing.

It doesn’t go through. You’re in the desert.

“Hey Siri,” you say again, this time making a concerted effort to keep the panic out of your voice. You hold your breath.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

You’re crying now, hyperventilating and bawling. Your hands are vibrating on the steering wheel.

You manage to explain about the carjacker and the gunshot. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “I don’t know.”

“Can you try to look and see if you’re bleeding?”

“Okay,” you say, and turn to look over your right shoulder. You grab the right side of your sweatshirt with your left hand, stretch it out. “I don’t see anything.” You’re too afraid to reach under your shirt and touch your back. You don’t know what will happen if your hand comes out bloody. You have to keep driving. “I don’t see any blood on my sweatshirt. But there’s a small hole in the back of my seat.”

When Fever Dream opens, the important thing has already happened, and Amanda is living through the steady accumulation of its consequences. She has fallen ill during a visit to the seemingly idyllic countryside, where she has taken her young daughter Nina to escape the pollution of the capital. Amanda doesn’t realize that she and Nina have sat down in pesticide-laden grass until long after it’s too late, when she’s in the hospital bed recounting her story. The “exact moment” that David’s been searching for has come and gone, but the poison lingers.

Five years ago, you bought a car whose doors didn’t lock automatically.

This is the upshot of living in retrospect: events that seemed insignificant, choices that hardly registered on the level of consciousness, suddenly become arbiters of life and death.

An hour and a half ago, you stopped in Lone Pine for a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich.

Then, once you’re caught in the throes of the past, the future little by little recedes from view.

Five minutes ago, you put your foot on the brake.

How can you imagine what will be, if the consequences of what has already happened have yet to make themselves known?

Four minutes ago, he opened the car door.

How can you imagine the future if the present continuously reveals itself as the bewildering product of a series of choices you didn’t even realize you were making in the past?

Three and a half minutes ago, he pulled the trigger.

What remains is the pain of knowing that the future is not to be counted on.

“Don’t eat or drink anything,” the dispatcher says. “In case you have to go into surgery.”

In case you have to go into surgery. Wouldn’t you know if you’d been hit?

But then you think about all the movies and TV shows where the character doesn’t know they’ve been shot until they feel something sticky and wet and see the blood spread across their shirt. It must be the adrenaline that keeps it from registering until it’s too late.

You look over your shoulder again. Your mustard-colored sweatshirt is still mustard-colored. But it’s baggy. Blood would have to spurt instead of seep for it to turn red. If you’d been shot from behind, would the blood spurt out of your back or would it seep?

You don’t stick your hand under your shirt to check. You’re too afraid. “Can you find a safe place to pull over?” the dispatcher asks.

“I don’t see an exit.”

“What about a store? A house?” There’s nothing.

“Are the police coming?” you ask again.

“Yes, they’re on their way. But I have to know where to send them.” She stays on the line while you drive, and drive, and drive.

Are the men following you? You don’t know.

She stays on the line while you pull off into a long driveway that leads up to a house set back from the highway. There’s a gate and two giant dogs barking from behind it.

She stays on the line while you tell her you don’t feel safe and pull out onto the highway again.

“California City Boulevard,” you say, searching your map for the next road that intersects the highway. You zoom in to get the name, then zoom out again. “I’m not sure how far out I am. Maybe five or ten minutes?”

“They’ll meet you there,” she says.

Yes, she’s going to stay on the line until the police are on the scene.

“I’ll stay with you until you’re safe,” she says.

You’re safe, but the poison lingers.

Life turns into the steady accumulation of consequences.

You get the car washed, but you can’t bring yourself to wipe away the black smudge on the door frame where the police dusted for fingerprints.

You call your insurance company to start the process of replacing the driver’s seat, then drag your feet. They send more and more emails about your claim, until eventually you ghost them.

You click your doors locked each time you roll up to a light.

You’re safe, you remind yourself.

You’re safe, but the poison lingers.

More than a year later, I ask my friend James for the photographs from that day. He came with my partner to pick me up and documented the aftermath.

In the first photo, a dark blue gloved hand is holding a small white box with white gauze inside. It looks like it could hold jewelry, but instead, it contains a bullet with a giant divot in the middle, from where it hit a spring as it shot through my backrest.

The other photo was taken later that day by a doctor back in LA. On my back is a deep purple bruise the size of a fist, with a bloody scrape running through it.

For a year, I’ve told everyone that the bullet hadn’t pierced my sweatshirt, that it had just grazed it. I’d found the wear on the threads to prove it. I’ve explained that the bruise and the blood were the product of the force of the bullet flying right past me, just missing me.

Can you imagine the force of the thing if it causes that much damage just by whizzing by? I’d said, shaking my head.

But James reminds me that they’d found a fragment, too, a tiny sliver of the bullet that splintered off when it hit the spring.

That’s where the fragment hit you, he says. Where that bruise is. Oh.

I remember now. I’m safe.

But the poison lingers.

Calina Ciobanu is a teacher, writer, and independent scholar based in Los Angeles. Originally from Romania, she holds a PhD in English with a certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University, and her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the minnesota review, and Modern Fiction Studies. She is currently at work on a collection of personal essays.