The old man has never cared much for breakfast. Coffee and weed, that’s how he prefers to wake up. The coffee here tastes old and burnt. He could probably sneak off somewhere in one of the fenced-in tomato gardens to smoke a joint, but first he’d have to get one. Without a car, there is no way to get to a dispensary, and they probably wouldn’t take too kindly to an Uber Weeds delivery at the front desk.

Even if the plate they’d set in front of him weren’t dry wheat toast and the same slopped eggs and oatmeal they serve every morning, he wouldn’t be hungry. He figures they carry it over from the previous day, scraping the half-eaten bowls back into an industrial-sized stainless steel pot in the back of the kitchen somewhere. The old man waits for Harper C. to go back through the swinging double-doors to prepare identical plates for the next table. He gets up, taking the shatterproof off-white plate with him and dumps it, and its contents, into the gray plastic trash bin in the lobby. Now that he’s unpacked most of his belongings, he has time to settle in with a book and wait out the clock.

The old man has barely made it back to his room when Harper C. is half-knocking and sticking her head through the door. Maybe he should sit around naked, he thinks, to discourage her intrusiveness.

“Good morning,” she sing-songs at him. “We’re getting ready to take some of the residents to go shopping. You really must go with us. We can get some things to make your room feel more like home.”

“No, thank you. I have everything I need.” He waves her away and looks out over the city.

“Now now, come on. You can’t sit in here all day.”

I really can, he thinks. Aside from not having anywhere nice outside – somewhere quiet with plants – he has no problem with keeping himself company. What is it with these constant activities and social interactions for seniors, anyway? People spend their whole lives constantly trying to be busy and doing things. They kinda do things. Work, shopping, kids. The old man never bought into the glamorization of the hustle culture. The idea that you have to be always busy. Nevermind the claims from these people that they are supposedly working their asses off so they can have relaxing ‘golden’ years. Regardless of the lives that the residents of this institution lived before, he’s sure they couldn’t possibly have aspired to spending every waking hour moving around the semi-sterile hallways and talking to no end about grandkids and the half-off sales they used to have at Robinson’s or Montgomery-Ward. Completing mundane tasks like they’re huge accomplishments. It could be possible, though unlikely, that they go along with it so they don’t have to deal with the confrontation, which has been the old man’s approach since arriving.

He neatly folds a $100 bill from the envelope his son brought from the bank and sticks it in his pocket. What he’d ‘budgeted’ for the old man for the month. Like he should get to decide how the old man spends his money. Harper C. holds the door for him and leads him to the elevator with generic questions about his past and family. Colloquy du jour.

Outside, a line of four-footed canes and walkers with tennis balls on their feet wait in the unshaded heat of the brick driveway while wheelchairs are loaded, one at a time, into the white minibus with the hydraulic lift. The old man paces at the end of the queue, in no hurry to get on the bus, but not a fan of standing outside in the pre-summer sun, either.

The nylon stretch covers on the two-by-two rows of bucket seats are done up in an orange-and-brown stripe over faded blue. There are little white stars across the pattern, like you’d see on an Amtrak train or charter bus thirty years ago. They probably bought these seat covers to make the residents feel like they’re going on a trip. But it could have been because they got a thousand of them at a surplus sale somewhere. No telling how many times they have to replace these seat covers. You know, because of the diaper leaks. Turista doméstica.

The bus only travels about a mile before its first stop, the Dollar General parking lot. That’s fine with the old man. The fortyish seats on the bus are filled with old ladies, flipping through People magazines and attempting to work their crochet on the three-minute ride. Another twenty minutes is spent loudly unloading all of the wheelchairs and walkers, after which, the old man is finally able to open his book. Harper C. and the other two employees are too busy funneling their charges into the automatic doors of the store to notice or care that he isn’t tagging along.

Toothpaste and deodorant and adult diapers. Little mass-produced wooden signs of cartoon angels that say “Blessed” or “Believe” or some shit. The old man’s memory has gone to hell lately. He’d always been one of those people who could memorize thousands of pieces of esoteric information, the details of conversations he’d had. Books and art and poems. Words. Despite his newfound inability to remember where he’d set something down, or what he was just working on, he’d always been a list-maker. Since he was a young man, notebooks and sticky notes and index cards littered his house. They were some of the first things he’d unpacked at his recent internment facility. So, no, he doesn’t need any clearance Crest or off-brand Old Spice or discount Depends. Not only does he have a shopping list already started back at the penitentiary, but he buys necessities three-or-four at a time to prevent running out. Seems like a basic life-skill to him, but these septu/octogenarians haven’t seemed to have mastered it – or even practiced it at a beginner’s level.

An hour later and the bus is reloaded and unloaded again. This time at the local shopping mall. Not the hip, new mall with the corporate-chain boutiques selling overpriced dungarees and engagement-ring showpalaces. This is the mall that used to host those stores, but now it has screen-print “Your Image Here!” t-shirt shops and nothing-over-five-bucks costume jewelry stores. The second floor has been converted to office-suites. Department of Transportation, a job-assistance program, the local inner-city city council guy’s reelection headquarters. Even the once-teeming food court has been reduced to a Dairy Queen and a single rice-bowl place – not even a chain, a mom-and-pop. Literally. An elderly Asian man and his wife watch the erratic visitors wistfully from across the empty cafeteria. Their hand-made posters advertise a half-off ‘healthy’ lunch alternative to the soft-serve, blend-in, high-fructose-and-caffeine-laden fare of their only competitor.

Old women tighten the laces on their specially-designed Nike walking shoes. The kind with the big, curved soles that have holes in them to help with osteoarthritis or plantar fasciitis or Morton’s neuroma. Dr. Sholl’s arch-support insoles and knee-high compression socks. They tap digital watches on their wrists to start fitness trackers.

The ladies race to beat their fellow hens to the mall entrance, pounding on the handicapped button and waiting for the door to swing toward them at a snail’s-pace instead of opening it themselves. Miss Julie from yesterday, wearing fluorescent-green-holes-in-yellow-foam-soled walking shoes with her brown slacks, shoulderpadded blouse, and layers of pearls, hurries to the opposite side of the cavernous entrance bay and vigorously punches at the silver dinner-plate with the blue wheelchair imprint on it. The grandmother hops in a quasi-holding-in-a-peepee dance, disappointed that this door opens no faster than the other side, where the first gaggle has already disappeared into the vast emptiness of what surely was the spot to be on the weekends when she was young and hot – a real looker. She hops from one foot to another at a tempo somewhere between vivace and presto. A piteous version of a Bojangles routine.

Although he doesn’t need to do any shopping, the old man wants to get up and move around. He’s suffered lower back pain for years now. Sitting makes it worse. It was from sitting. So many years in a desk chair, pounding away at a keyboard, had taken their toll on his knees and wrists. The doctors wanted to cut him open to repair the nerve damage. But those medical mountebanks couldn’t figure out what was going on with his brain – and couldn’t treat his stomach pain all those years ago. With that track record, there was no way he’d let them slice at his body. No way he’d get anywhere near an anesthetist, or a hospital, for that matter. That’s why he had to build himself the sofa-desk. One of the few pieces of furniture he was able to bring with him. He’d rather be sitting there right now, even if it wasn’t home. These stiff bucket-seats with their itchy, washed-a-hundred-times covers weren’t doing him any favors.

Once the mass of the exodus has finished pouring through any of the six doors under the gaudy twenty-foot-by-fifty-foot marque, the old man climbs down the steps and walks along the sidewalk in front of the mall. He’s looking for a more subtle entrance. Malls always have them, past the loading docks and security parking. Usually it’s a lone glass doorway that pops in somewhere near one of the anchor stores.

The tall plaster-over-cinderblock walls that serve as aesthetic dividers to hide the trucks and mock-police cruisers give way in large sections where the sidewalk drops on one side to serve as a driveway. The old man pauses to watch people going about their day. A fakin’-bacon mall cop gets into his sedan with the yellow light bar and pulls out a few feet in front of the old man, seeming to look through him as the Interceptor turns out to patrol the lot. An employee carries a clear plastic bag, full of styrofoam take out containers and Dairy Queen cups with polyethylene terephthalate lids, to the dumpster. She races back to the handleless staff door before it latches and she has to walk around to the entrance the old man is likely trying to find, himself. A UPS driver in his Steve Irwin uniform stacks boxes from the back of his matching-brown step truck. With a mound of also-brown cardboard as tall as himself, the courier jumps on the back rail of the hand truck to tilt it back, then weaves it toward a receiving portal, struggling to see where he’s going.

Casually, like he’s meant to be there, the old man approaches the idling parcel vehicle. The back door gapes open, its mouth filled with teeth of umber cardboard and transparent packaging tape enamel. He closes one side, then the other, cranking the heavy, L-shaped handle to latch the panels shut. As he walks around the front of the truck (how’s that for getting his steps in?), he bends and reaches underneath, almost as if he’s picking up something he’d dropped, and checks for a GPS tracker. Satisfied that there’s nothing conspicuous, he launches himself into the elevated driver’s seat, like he’s mounting a horse sidesaddle.

The old man grabs the gear handle that sticks out from the right of the steering column with one trembling hand and pulls it down one click. It’s not nerves, it’s this fucking brain thing. Gives him tremors. So, technically, nerves. He’s feeling pretty mellow right now. It’s like riding a bike, he thinks. He drove one of these big-ass trucks for work decades ago. A menial labor job where he had to haul equipment from one jobsite to another. Lots of miles in one of these. Lots of cigarettes. Lots of back pain. The Big-Ass Truck creeps back, the old man watching the giant dome mirror outside his window, foot off the gas, hovering over the brake.

Finding enough room to turn the truck around in the little alcove, he progresses through the gears and he’s on his way down the main thoroughfare, on his way to freedom. Free at last, Free at last, he repeats in his head along with the rumble of the road. The driver’s door is slid back in the open position and he enjoys the breeze whipping through the cab, despite the heat.

On the dash area, an electronic tablet lights up, directing him to his next delivery. The old man wonders how he got here. When did I get this job? The voice on the box tells him to turn right at the next intersection, so he does. The red line that highlights the street is punctuated with slightly-larger red dots, showing him the deliveries on his route and how to get to them most efficiently. As he accelerates, the feel of the truck becomes more familiar. The old man starts to remember the techniques for checking his blind spot and delaying his turns to clear the rear axle.

Ahead, a carved-granite sign advertises Torigian and Torigian Law. The tablet screen scrolls automatically to show the same sign in a street-view photo. The right tires thud over the curb as the van turns into the parking lot. Maybe I haven’t got the hang of it yet, he thinks as he pulls into a handicap space next to a smaller stone sign, identical to the one on the street.

Shifting the transmission into its uppermost position, the old man climbs from his seat into the back of the truck and easily finds the packages with the black-and-white labels that say ‘Torigian’. He doesn’t remember loading the truck this morning, but he must have – it’s exactly the way he does it. Logical. The old man wonders why he’s having a hard time remembering things today, but can’t get stuck on it for long, he has to get these packages out.

“Where’s the fucking scanner!” The old man shouts to himself in the back of the truck, not loud enough for anyone outside to hear if they were there. Wouldn’t want some Karen to file a complaint for swearing. Some busybody with nothing better to do than harass retail employees or call the cops on people for being Black in public. He searches around the back of the truck for a bit without finding the scanner. Finally, he decides, Fuck it, and takes the packages into the marble-festooned lawfirm, dropping them off at the reception desk. The young woman in the three-piece skirt-suit asks about their regular driver. The old man says he doesn’t know. He really doesn’t. Is this not my regular route? Is that why I don’t remember loading the truck?

Back in the driver’s chair and following the red line on the map to the next red dot, the old man starts to think about this morning. The flaccid eggs and toast. I’m not a UPS driver. What the fuck am I doing? He grabs the tablet from the dash and hurls it through the open door. It bounces away from the convex mirror in its protective case, cartwheeling corner-to-corner before landing flat on its face and disappearing behind the truck. The old man flicks the narrow lever opposite the gear-shift and makes a left turn at the next intersection. He checks for cross traffic before blowing past the stop sign and stomping on the gas pedal.

Pulling up in front of his house, the old man puts the combination into the lock and yanks the chain, but it doesn’t unlatch. He tries a few other combinations that he’s used for other things, in case he’d changed it again. Every six months or so, he changes the combination. Just in case. It’s not like he had many visitors, but you never know who might remember the combo if you leave it open. It’s not one of those dial Master locks like you’d have in high school. It’s a four-digit rotating number. He got it because he could remember how the combinations felt in the dark.

Shit. He thinks for a minute, then climbs up on the fence pipes and steps precariously over the barbed wire to slide the toe of his shoe into the chain-link on the inside of the fence. Throwing his left leg over, his knees seize up and dislodge his footing. The old man tumbles gracelessly onto the dusty driveway. Brushing himself off, he remembers the lessons on learning how to fall from his sporting days. Two-inch foam mats rolled out all over the gym floor, they taught him to never reach out to break his fall. They showed him how to make his body round to disperse the force. He always knew it would come in handy.

At the top of the driveway, his first priority is to find a way to deal with the gate. Then pack a few things and get as far away from there as possible. By now, Harper C. has noticed he’s gone missing. This will be the first place they come looking for him. Next to the house, where his old Subaru Outback and little rechargeable Fiat are normally parked, there’s a monstrosity of a Ford F-350 diesel. What the hell?

Around back, where he keeps his toolbox, he instead finds cheap plastic patio furniture. No hacksaws or screwdrivers. Nothing but molded polypropylene and faux-carved wooden signs that say “Happiness” and “Love” and other solitary nouns that are supposed to mean something poetic. A substitution for real poetry. Real art replaced by meaningless, subjective phrases on display for all to judge you by. It’s gaslighting through art – well, not art, because there’s no soul in it, but you know what I mean. Kitchlighting. The shit they line the entrances of Target or Hobby Lobby with. These words and phrases that are supposed to show the world what a kind, caring, devout person you are. It’s too much work to exemplify these words and phrases so people, they hang them on a wall. They choose these subjective words on purpose, the wall-noun people. So when they aren’t loving, or happy, or kind, or whatever the wall is telling people they are, they can say that you just don’t understand the meaning of “family”, or everyone thinks of “kindness” as a different thing or some bullshit. They’d rather argue with you than spend that energy on something productive. e.g. kindness. What even the fuck is “To the Moon”?

The old man checks under the propane tank, where he keeps his extra house key. Still there. That’s why you never tell people where your backup key is. Have a second key if you need people to check on your house or whatever, but keep one for yourself. Seeing as they took away his cars and tools and changed the gate code, he doesn’t expect the key to work in the back door. It doesn’t. He tosses it in the weeds behind the railroad ties that are stacked to contain the propane tank and paces around for a minute, thinking. Always pacing, always thinking.

In the cab of the unlocked horror-of-a-truck are a set of keys. Just sitting there, on the passenger seat, asking the old man to take them. He’s not sure how they moved his stuff out in just the couple of days he has been at the Sunrise Assisted Prison. Though, when he moved into this house, it was done all in one day with a stock trailer. And using a truck like this. This exact model and everything. It could be the same truck if the floorboards were full of crushed road apples and spent Ding-Dong wrappers. His ex’s family were slobs. Their truck would be considered restaurant-clean compared to their house. The old man cringes and shivers thinking about opening the pantry to find old cans covered in mouse feces. Boxes of instant potatoes and Pasta-Roni with holes gnawed in the side, their logoed cardboard discolored with months of soaked-through rodent excretion. They’d still eat them, too, the in-laws. I guess when your floors are covered with your own and your pets’ shit and piss, a little mouse urine won’t do you no harm. Seriously, though, they were disgusting slovens.

For a moment, the old man considers racing the truck through the locked gate, blasting it open like in the movies. Common sense gets the best of him, he knows that the gate opens in. He backs the truck up to the gate and grabs a length of rope from under the dried alfalfa crumbles that litter the Dynatect-lined bed. It’s no winch or pull-chain, but the old man knows enough about knots to loop it around the trailer hitch and wrap it so the energy is going into the whole rope and not just the sections looped over the chrome ball. He took physics long ago, so could probably figure out and explain exactly what’s going on with the rope, but this is more of a practical technique that he’d learned over the years. Trial and error. Situations like this that required a makeshift pull-chain or lock. Dumbfuck okies getting their ATVs stuck in culverts or in the mud.

He locks the hubs before returning to the cab and turns the dial to 4WL. The old man pulls the gear level into drive and floors it. The neighbors stand in front of their mobile home, Natural Lights in hand, watching as the Ford diesel spins its tires, casting an arc of sharp pebbles before gaining traction. The truck goes nowhere for a moment and the old man is sure the rope is going to fray out. They break away and race several feet up the driveway before jerking to an abrupt halt, being stopped simultaneously by his foot on the brake pedal and the gate swinging into open position, still attached to rope and hitch.

The old man twists the loops he made in his knot to release the tension, a shortcut he learned way back, and lifts the rope from the trailer ball. Leaving the rope dangling from the fence in a neat, two-foot loop, the old man turns the truck around in the flat, dry grass area next to the well. He stops to undo the hubs and puts it back into two-wheel-drive mode before inching around the UPS truck parked between the fence and his access to the street. The neighbors are on their cell phones when he scrapes the trucks past each other, folding back his passenger mirror and painting a diarrhea-brown stripe above the plastic side-molding on the right side of the otherwise white pickup. The finger-paintings of a meth addict on detox. Creatus retrahere.

Racing down the hill, unsure of where he’s headed, the old man follows the highway until it becomes freeway and then highway again. Feeling his hands shaking, he pulls into a Taco Bell drive-thru, again thudding over the curb as he steers the behemoth off the roadway. The Maximum Clearance:9’ 6” bar scrapes on the top of the lifted pickup. The old man continues forward, missing the concrete canopy by inches. He evens the window portal of the truck with the boxed glass displaying “Limited Time” stickers that juts out as the only feature in the dijon plaster.

The cashier sticks his head out the window to look at the plastered roof and the top of the truck.

I should have taken my meds with me. They’re back at the detention facility. He didn’t exactly plan on stealing a truck and going on a hundred-mile joy ride, so he didn’t pack accordingly. He could turn around and head over there – it’s only a few miles. But even if he could get in. If they weren’t already searching for him. He’d have no way to get out without doing something risky and visible, like stealing a security card or taking a nurse hostage. No, he’ll have to figure something else out. The burritos should keep him relatively alert and functional until he can get to his destination. It’s not like he takes anything that will make him flop over, dead, if he doesn’t eat them every twelve hours. Anti-depressants and a bunch of off-label-use medications. Gabapentin and Atarax and a couple others like that.

The lights of the service stations and fast-food marques fade to flat pasture, fenced in with barbed-wire along the roadway. The teetering hand-milled fence posts disappear in a blur out his side windows, reminding him of that old Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen song. He tries to remember the lyrics, but can only remember the bit about the guy beside him being white as a ghost.

After passing a few thousand cows and Private Property: No Trespassing signs, the old man turns off on an unmarked road. Probably marked at one point, but they don’t maintain the signs out here any better than they do the roads. Suffice it to say, it’s one of those county roads where they don’t come up with original street names, so they’re just called Avenue Five and Road Thirty-Nine. No worse than Main Street or Maple Drive, I suppose.

Coming into the little one-horse town, he stops at the off-brand gas station with bars covering its windows and doors to fill the tank before returning the truck. The plastic can in the back is full, so he doesn’t bother with it. His wife never had that kind of courtesy. Filling up and washing a car that’s loaned to you, for example. She didn’t even take gifts to weddings, which the old man felt was incredibly strange, since she was all about gift registry when they got married. He didn’t buy many wedding presents, but that’s because he didn’t usually go to weddings. Anyway, it’s late now, so he won’t be washing the truck tonight. The hundred-bucks-minus-the-burritos in diesel fuel will have to do. The old man folds the mirror out on the right side and rubs at the brown stain and dented door panel with a squeegee, producing few results.

A few blocks up the road – if you can call them blocks – the intersections out here only occur once per mile – he turns into a little subdevelopment. Two-acre plots for people who want to live in the country but also want to have neighbors twenty feet away. Ridiculous. It’s like building a mansion in a deteriorating city. If you have that kind of money, what are you doing there? They want to have the shiniest turd at the poop-factory, I guess.

The truck rumbles into the driveway behind the ranch-style house. His wife and mother-in-law and grandma-in-law and aunt-in-law are home, judging by the crowded parking area, but everything is dark inside. He shuts off the engine and waits, but there’s no chorus of barking. Usually, the kids would run out through the flap in the glass door to greet him.

The old man climbs down from the truck just as Shenzi, a shaggy-coated catahoula, comes outside, the back half of her body being wagged by her long, quill-feather tail. The old man has barely unlatched the gate when she’s jumping up on him, tongue searching fervently for an exposed area of skin to lick. He catches her paws and they dance briefly in the driveway.

No idea what he’s doing here, or why he has the in-laws truck, the old man decides not to proceed inside. He loads Shenzi into the back seat of the pickup and reverses out the driveway, lights off. Once he’s parked in front of the house, he grabs the five-gallon jug of extra diesel and trudges up the walkway.

He pours the fuel in front of each of the doorways and windows. They have a brick half-facade on the front of the house. The old man makes sure to pour above that so the petrol will wick into the walls. He walks back to the truck and searches around in the back seat for a crumpled pack of cigarettes and some matches, but finds none. Returning up the driveway to the back of the house, but on foot this time, he finds an old coffee can being used as an ashtray and, sure enough, right next to it is a matchbook.

Now-empty gas can still in hand, the old man figures the diesel has had enough time to seep into the pores in the wood and plaster around the house. He stops at the front door, the fastest route of egress to the street, and lights a match without pulling it from its little cardboard packaging. That one match lights the rest and, soon, the entire matchbook is ablaze. A shimmering saffron-orange porchlight in the otherwise unlit sub-country neighborhood.

The old man bends over the saturated welcome mat and holds the flickering paper to the cotton-esque mat. The worn natural fibers, whatever they are, will make good kindling, he thinks. Before he can touch the two tinders together, he’s blown back in a blinding explosion. Again remembering not to break his fall, the old man escapes relatively unscathed. Two falls in one day, I really must be getting old. He’ll have to check his eyebrows in the rearview mirror. Looking at his hand, clutching the red plastic handle in a death-grip, the old man notices “50:1” written on the side in faded Sharpie. Dumbasses left their chainsaw gas in the truck without their chainsaw. I wonder if their diesel reserves are in the shed somewhere.

He chucks the container at the front door, now alive with six-foot-high flames, reaching their tentacles out horizontally along the half-bricks to create a curtain of fire, blocking out the windows. The old man jogs back to the truck and starts the motor. Patio and front-door lights are powering on around the neighborhood like a poorly-timed stage effect. Headlights still dark, he rolls the windows down and drives north on Avenue Whateverthefuck. Shenzi sticks her head out the window, tongue flapping in the wind. The old man watches her in the passenger mirror. She stays the same size while the flames behind them grow larger, then smaller as he speeds out of the neighborhood.