Negative Space

the surrounding area filled the van. For miles, no voices. Max sucking taco-sauce packets. Dwayne in a red-eyed meditation with the wheel. The road guzzled by the headlights. Karen staring out the window at things emerging from the gloom.
Then the sign: Pfeiffer Big Sur.
“Oh, Big Sur,” Karen said. “We should stop and camp for the night.”
“What?” said Max.
“Not for real,” she said with a playful punch on his bicep. “Maybe on the way back down.”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey, Karen,” said Dwayne.
“What’s up?”
“Could you reach back in the cooler there and get the jar of cookies in there?”
“Sure.”
“I think we can hang out for a little while,” Dwayne said as he pulled to the side of the road, gravel crunching. “I need a good stretch anyway. And it wouldn’t be a California road trip without some nature.”
“Here.” Karen handed him the jar, which looked to be full of small oatmeal cookies.
Dwayne shut off the engine. Nature bursting all around them, echoing with insects chirping and buzzing, the wind moving like a conspiratorial whisper among the ragged, silhouetted pines.
“We’re not going to be here long, right?” Max asked.
“No. Just taking a stretch. Won’t be long.”
Max was about to get out when Dwayne tilted the cookie jar at him. Max took one. He opened the door. In a cold grip, the air took his skin. He stuck the cookie in his mouth as he fetched his duffel bag and pulled on his sweatshirt. Nearby, Karen munched on her cookie. She’d undone her ponytail, collapsing her golden hair to her shoulders.
“They’re kind of dry,” Max said. “What are these cookies?”
Dwayne took a bite of his own and stared off into the sky, which, unimpeded by big city lights, now stretched its starry cosmic legs. The Milky Way a misty belt. Ancient wisdom winking down.
“They’re whatever you want them to be,” Dwayne said.
***
A short time later, the ground became something like liquid.
It undulated. Rippled. Melted back into some mold newly pliable by God’s dissatisfied hands. There were bubbles, too, bubbles of grass and soil surfacing and popping, tearing little holes in the fragile spacetime about him.
The dark ground and the dark forest and the dark sky bled together, hugged him, breathed on him—the wind the fresh mint-breath of Mother Nature. Calming, but so close, like any mother, so goddamn suffocatingly close. Knowing him too well. Sifting through the disarrayed album of his memories, thrusting them at him from long-dusty corners.
Max tried to steady himself.
“What’s going on?” he said. “What the hell is happening?”
“Max?”
Karen.
“All right there, Maximo?”
Oh no, but it was the woods, for God’s sake––the woods, but they looked cartoony and two-dimensional now. The graphics of a videogame...and things, ill-defined, indefinable things, the enemy of all rationality. Overhead, the moon grew porous then began to liquefy, cascading down the gold-specked night, pooling into a ghost-glow beyond the trees.
Max closed his eyes, body heaving with breath.
“Relax, Maximo. They’re just special cookies. Taking us on a little detour.”
“The goddamn moon just melted.”
“He might be a bad tripper,” Karen said to Dwayne. “Maybe this was a bad idea....”
“Well, can’t do anything about it right now. But that’s why I made small ones.”
“How long does this last?” Max shouted.
“Not too long. Don’t worry, Maximo. They’re safe. I know my guy.”
“Your guy?”
“Yeah. We took ‘em too.”
“This is insane. You fucking drugged me.”
“You can paint it but you sure can’t take it, huh? Whoa!” Dwayne backed up, waving at some mirage of his own.
For another half-hour, the world wore various masks, became a kite guided by the shifting winds of sensation and emotion. Max slumped into a nearby clearing, mumbling for it all to go away as he pinched the gold cross around his neck.
***
Karen sat on the van’s bumper, smoky seahorses curling from the cigarette between her fingers.
Approaching footsteps. Dwayne.
“How you doing?” he said.
“I’m all right. Just entranced by colors right now.”
“I can see that,” he said. “He’s going to be okay, by the way.”
“He will. We will. I need this. He needs this.”
“Certainly seem to know him pretty well already.”
“I don’t know, I wouldn’t necessarily say that. He’s walled off. Typical artist type, maybe. But it’s all right there, all visible, no matter how much he tries to hide it or wall it off. At least to me. It’s like a messy room, nothing’s put away. It’s all there for you to pick up if you just rummage a bit.”
Dwayne nodded.
“I can’t explain it very well,” Karen said. “I have an almost instinctive hobby of analyzing people. And he is my brother; there is something there. I’m not crazy.”
“I know you’re not crazy,” Dwayne said. “Any crazy person wouldn’t have hired me.”
“Kind of funny,” Karen said, exhaling smoke.
“What is?”
“Think tonight was the first time I’ve heard him curse.”
“Wow—observant. Might put me out of a job.”
“Remember, I absorb people. I notice all kinds of things. I noticed tonight you turned your hat forward for the first time since I’ve known you.”
Dwayne laughed again. “Which hasn’t been long, either.”
Silence for another moment.
“Hey, listen,” Dwayne said. “Would you mind if I snoozed for a little while? Just to recharge the batteries?”
“Fine with me.” Karen held up her cigarette. “I prefer my fiery death be slow and painful.”
“We can drive on into TwiFalls in the early morning. Think I can sell Max on it?”
They looked over at Max sitting in the clearing, arms clutching his knees, head cast down into the shadow of his groin. Karen made her way over toward him, then turned back to Dwayne with a hesitant smile.
“Let me tell him,” she said. “Go ahead and get some sleep.”
***
IV
Dwayne slept for several hours, awakening to misty, predawn dusk. He stirred in his seat. The movement sent a ripping pain up his back, and he winced and groaned.
“You all right there?”
Max was awake, a sketchbook sprawled across his lap. Marked up with a frenzy of drawings.
“Hey,” Dwayne croaked. In the back, Karen lay curled up, asleep. “You been up all this time, Maximo?”
“I have.”
“Oh that’s right, you slept earlier.”
“Yeah.” There was something