Cheap Old Gas
Marcus Yu
Off the highway, the barren landscape faced an expansive gorge where pallor was created by the beating sun. Such was the unassuming, serene background that lived before the metal rails separating the water and the artless, yellow highway, behind which lay the rising slopes of arid soil.
Where the road bent was the gas station canopy that dawned shade over the pumps, absent of cars save a glistening C10 Chevy parked since the break of dusk. Two pumps at the end of the canopy faced the Texaco building to which it was connected; they were cubical, short, absent of digital screens and chip readers—the numbers rolled on analog dials, churning over when gasoline dispensed from the nozzles. Life was barren around the small convenience store, painted with a white that reflected the landscape.
Around one in the afternoon, the highway was empty. Tumbleweed and unsung winds procured more presence than the noise of an approaching Ford Pinto, if not an Oldsmobile that chugged for ethyl in its gorging throat. And upon the noiseless air, a metallic vehicle would occasionally materialize from nothing. It was expected roughly every two weeks.
#
On the very first encounter, a coupe projected a low whistle through its bumper, appearing from nothing but thin air. Narrow headlights merged seamlessly with the body lines that were low and articulated around the slick wheel wells. The outlandish car approached the pump, churning pebbles beneath the tires that sported chromatic rims.
A woman rose into the stagnant heat when the hybrid motor shut off. Her pale complexion mimicked the air as she faced the gorge momentarily, black hair flitting gently before turning toward the Texaco store. Her low boots clicked pleasantly into the crumbling pavement.
An old man in overalls named Harry exited the Texaco store and ran out before she approached. The dins of a rusting door chime clinked gracelessly; mildew wafted past her manicured face as he hobbled toward her.
Harry halted in his tracks; his hands were low by his flank as he appraised this anomaly that had just manifested from nothing: a spellcasting witch? A messenger from the heavens? A woman in an outlandish coupe?
Harry felt a fright he could not explain, the same disillusion one must have experienced having encountered the third kind, yet the woman was scarcely apart from the otherworldly save a perplexing attire. She was complete, beautiful, and arrived with nothing but a car at a gas station.
“What in Christ are you?” Harry inquired vividly, panicked and failing to process the situation.
The woman approached him steadily without looking in his eyes, striding one foot in front of the other. She sauntered with swagger. Elegance. Harry ambled backward, but she paused before him.
“I’m a time traveler, and I’d like to refuel my car. Fill regular?”
Harry ogled into her brown eyes, dumbstruck by the situation. “You’re… a what?”
“A time traveler?”
“Woman, that’s science fiction.”
She glanced behind her before returning her gaze. “Isn’t my car science fiction to you?”
Harry widened his blue eyes in disbelief. The car was truly a design outside of reality; nothing he had ever seen manufactured resembled what lay before him. Even the most fantastical Batmobile was but a jester’s attraction before such a work of engineering.
From there, Harry allowed her without a word. He watched her casual movements as she attached the fuel nozzle to her car, watching the dials turn before returning everything to its place upon completion. She even procured American cash in payment, which was blankly accepted with an open palm. Her only request was to keep a low profile, toward which he had no issue, for he genuinely could not discern whether she was a time traveler or an unspoken god.
This incident of science fiction would not rub out of his eyes. He watched her pull out of the station and dissipate into nothingness within a second, and he knew it was real when the cash remained in his hands: textured, crisp American bills.
#
Today, Harry saw her appear again, park her car under the shade, and resume routine.
“Fine afternoon, madam,” his gravelly voice drawled ever so slightly. His deep tone fell over his balding hair and unshaped beard; he shuffled over the pavement under his portly belly held within his overalls. He was an unsuspecting man whom one would have assumed enjoyed the solace of being aged; he was usually passive to strangers and regulars alike.
He expected her, this anachronism. The woman rested one hand on her hip and glanced at him as he approached, facing the gorge. Her clothes were the same as ever.
“Believe it or not, they’re still going up,” the woman’s alluring voice started as she waved a faint hand upon herself, scarcely cooling off any heat.
Harry glanced once at the black tights that wrapped her thighs, once at her supple waist before continuing, “Gas still ain’t getting any cheaper in the new century?”
“Eight-twenty-nine, last time I checked.”
“By Christ, my children have probably dug their own graves.”
She smirked. “You just find a way to get by. Somehow. But one thing I can’t live with anymore is our music, you know? It has no ambition. Soul, like the way people sing today.” An eastern accent revealed itself unnoticeably between the ends of her sentences.
“My today?”
She felt her thighs in a pondering gesture, her slender fingers probing demurely. “Yes, of course.”
Harry approached her closer, standing beside her and the car that struck him imperceptibly, this vehicle—more so a device—that articulated the roads better than any driver could using their brain. Its gray paint reflected the pale atmosphere where it faced the sky, warping into the shade under which they both stood.
“So what we lookin’ at today, Irene?” Harry stepped back to look at the woman, catching a languid note of perfume.
“Fill, as usual.”
“All yours.” He gestured with a dismissive hand as he hobbled elsewhere, never to pump gas into a vehicle so foreign.
As Harry had learned on their second encounter, Irene was her name, the woman who emerged from the next century to refuel her car. It was lunacy—perhaps pretentious—such that the notion would strike him despite the confounding encounters with the future. Yet it was accepted; he found no issue with capturing a glimpse of such a striking woman from another side of the planet, from another century, as he lay trapped in the old western desert. He wished she would stay longer at times to talk about the future, yet she never could. Time paradoxes, timelines, things that made no sense to him. Many times he had suggested the Bible, to which she kindly refused.
As for Irene, she was paying thirty-five cents a gallon. It was 1971, after all, and she hated her century, her 2071. To pay over eight dollars per gallon was apparently stupefying human progress. Harry accepted that he would be dead by then, and that there was no such thing—he would one day be laid to rest knowing humankind’s triumphs of four-hundred pound television consoles.
#
Some two weeks later, the air contorted, and the image of a car emerged onto the pavement. It approached the station in the fair afternoon when the roads grew silent. They resumed their routine.
“So, what if someone finds themselves driving past us during this time? Sees this outlandish vehicle filling at a Texaco? Do we create some, what, rip in our timeline?” Harry inquired as they both stood beside the car.
“I’ve added features to cloak my car into invisibility. I would just be a woman out of time, but who has enough time to think so?”
“Anyone who finds themselves without gas,” Harry remarked smartly.
“Well, I try to dress fairly simple. You wouldn’t suspect me of being a time traveler, would you?”
Harry appraised her. On this occasion, she wore a cropped top and an unusually translucent coat complemented with shorts even tighter than her previous pants. Her exposed wrist borne a watch of sorts, however nothing that featured analog technology or, namely, any conceivable technology. “Of course not,” Harry said. Her shoes were pelting white sneakers.
Irene glanced down at herself, pondering sarcasm. She spoke over the subtle ticks of the pump. “I mean, biker shorts trended in the eighties?”
“Madam, we still got nine years ‘till the next decade. I mean, what drives a dolly to wear a cyclist’s attire?”
Irene shrugged. Her dark hair wavered by the little strands that picked up the slightest draft of air, flickering upon her supple forehead.
Harry gazed off momentarily. The fuel was pumping at six gallons—there were about eight more before the car was full. Suddenly, he came to inquire, “You know, I’m about retired. And this here science fiction flips my lid. I want to see it for myself.”
Irene glanced up at him briskly, hesitating to speak for a moment. “Are you asking me what I think you’re asking?”
“Yes, Irene.”
“Well—I can’t.”
“What, because of ‘paradoxes’ and ‘timelines’ and things like that?”
“Well—”
“Don’t make no fool of me, Dolly. I done seen Wells’ and Kubrick’s work. This stuff don’t intimidate me.”
Irene had to pause and remember such names.
“Aren’t you already fundamentally disrupting time by fussing with the past?” Harry pursued, “I mean, if I were no lonesome man, this here would be quite different, no?”
“But you won’t tell nobody, Harry.”
“For your sake, I won’t. But what’s it got to do with mine?”
Irene gazed at him blankly, taken aback at his proposal.
“I done given you this cheap gas and closed my trap. Any favor of mine?”
Irene paused. “Aren’t you ill, though, Harry?”
Harry did not look at her, maintaining his gaze into the distance. “I’m old enough; I done seen and did everything. Nothing out there I can’t live with, Irene.”
She paused irritably as though Harry now understood the world of time travel. She knew the weary man experienced chronic pains from Crohn’s disease, as he had once told her on their many past digressions. “You know,” she started, “time travel is not for the faint of heart nor the ill.”
“It still don’t intimidate me, madam. You know, I done watched that whole movie until that giant baby appeared over the Earth. Don’t bother telling me mankind ain’t done it all already.” Harry paused with a smirk on his face as the prospects of the future channeled through his imagination. “You know, I’m an ambitious man. I would like to see your future. I’ve got nothing to lose but your sake.”
Irene maintained her unmoving, defensive contemplation, standing before his bargain with a rising wall and rolling eyes. ‘Ambitious,’ as Harry had once described himself, had meant nothing before.
“Are you telling me you’re willing to interrupt our future timeline for your mere interest? Do you know what that could do to history?”
“What do I care? I done lived my life. I’m made in the shade, dolly. I mean, what difference does it make you coming here or me going there? Ain’t nobody seen me as nothing. Are you contradicting yourself here?”
What did it matter since she had already ventured out here? Irene pondered, knowing her own ambitious experimentations had led her here—and there would be no unforgiving encounters in the shelter of her time travel station back home.
The car filled and the nozzle unlatched. They simultaneously glanced at the vehicle; Irene proceeded to return the nozzle and retrieve her payment.
The woman placed cash curtly into Harry’s hands and nearly produced a glower into his eyes. “Two a.m. Meet here if you’d like. I won’t give you any more of a window. Do not bring any of your ideas into the future as well.”
Irene returned to her car and her future promptly.
#
At one-fifty in the morning, the gas station was dimly lit by an adjacent pole. Harry sat inside his C10 and took in the brisk summery air through the window, absorbed by the blue languor of the gorge sky. He wondered how the interior of Irene’s coupe compared to his chromed dashboard and spongy bench seat, the jagged angles versus his square interior.
He patiently awaited the ten minutes as he peered toward the valley, to its silhouette that animated under distant city lights.
In time, the pelting lights of Irene’s car emerged from nothing, puncturing the plaintive blue with a headlight the fraction of the width of Harry’s C10.
The low whistle of the car idled, very much unlike the gargling cam of the pickup. Harry clicked open the handle, and the creaking metal door latched shut as he stepped down from his truck.
The passenger door of Irene’s coupe lifted before anyone reached it, rising into the air as a bird brandishes the colors of its wings. Silent butterfly doors.
Harry apprehensively lowered his neck and arched his inflexible body into the car. He immediately sank far back into the spotless bucket seat that caressed him beyond anything his flat bench seat was capable of. The seamless dash that merged with the doors opened into a flowing display that panned across the car to the driver. No buttons, dials, and chrome-trimmed gauge clusters adorned the space. It was an intelligent screen with a map, virtual buttons, and features the old man failed to grasp. Every adjustable feature conceivable within a car was computerized, automated at the brush of a fingertip upon the screen—and they had blamed gas prices for stupefying human progress.
“What in the Father, Son, and—”
“I can show you around for a short while. Then you will be returned here as though you never left.” Irene did not look at Harry, this disgruntled, ancient American who sat beside a woman of class and futuristic juvenility.
“I mean, this is all just—”
They disappeared.
#
A luminous, empty chamber surrounded them, just large enough to encase the car and for them to stand within. Promptly, a door detached and rose above them from the seamless wall in the chamber. All that Harry heard were his labored breaths and his churning stomach, yet nothing registered in the emergence of his senses into the new century. Irene opened her door and exited the car. Harry scanned for a moment and could not find a door handle; he frantically probed the entire door panel with his fingers before it finally opened automatically.
They both appeared from the cylindrical capsule that entombed the car, a featureless pod in the middle of the room. Irene and Harry appraised the metallic object wordlessly.
“I could explain it to you, but not that anything would make sense. Or mean anything. Also, do no touch anything or I’ll have you sent.”
“Right,” Harry uttered in his gaze around the room, a sort of empty hangar that could have housed two single-engine planes. Yet it was furnished with a porcelain-like white interior, ghastly devoid and dimensionless save the placement of long tables cluttered with unrecognizable gadgets. For one, two flat monitors without a cassette reader and keypad appeared to resemble a futuristic computer. There was a long keyboard beside it, connected to nothing. Two large armchairs floated above the floor, hovering before the desk.
“As for now, my work is undisclosed. I’m perfecting it before anyone gets a glimpse of the next future, the one which I have created.”
With a flick, an armchair approached Irene, into which she sat, and it carried her on a whim toward the desk.
“I’ll be damned,” Harry muttered under his breath. “So you folk don’t even walk in this century? How does one command a chair like a bitch? How does it float?”
Irene faced away in the opulence of her intelligent seat when she replied with a gesture, “Give it a try.”
The old man gaped toward the vacant chair.
Harry gazed and meandered across the lab, poking at miscellaneous items that sat inert on shelves and tables, igniting his imagination. His gut had a throb, yet it meant nothing to him. His dumb smirk embellished his sating curiosity and revealed unfixed teeth that wondered at the world before him. “This is something, my Lord, and I haven’t seen nothing.”
“We only live in such an insignificant fraction of time. No matter how long a century feels, it can never outlast the endlessness of time. With this, I can enable humanity to embark on the voyage we are destined to walk.” Irene’s voice was deep and projecting throughout the room.
“I could only imagine if I were born into your shoes.” Harry pondered briefly at its wonders. He then observed his setting as much as a child would gape upon bubbling fondue, if not a starving tourist scuttling through the enriching steam of vendors. He began, “but what is this?”
Irene looked at him and lost interest. “Harry, that’s a computer mouse.”
“But there ain’t no wire. There’s no—nothing.”
“It’s all Bluetooth and haptic. If you live until ’98, you’ll see Bluetooth for yourself.”
“Well, hell, I’m seeing it right now!” Harry invigorated himself, and Irene ignored the simpleton.
Toward the pod’s rear, the woman approached with the swift chair and placed a hand somewhere, at which a panel revealed itself. She lifted a large cable from the ground and inserted its end into the pod. She grabbed the mouse from Harry’s hands and drifted back to her computer.
“What are you doing?”
“Diagnostics.” Irene faced the computer and typed away at the keyboard. “There is no room for error when you operate a device that travels on a four-dimensional plane.”
In the meantime, Harry had found interest again in the car within the capsule. He walked in and studied the vehicle with the utmost detached curiosity—he scarcely recognized anything and could not find ways in which he could; there were likewise no mechanics amidst the capsule walls. Finding the semblances of his generation’s vehicles was all he could do to enliven his intrigue; a hesitant hand ran across the driver-side door that was durable, dense, yet lacking the heft of raw metal.
“It is my intention to soon reveal the method of materializing this car from our dimension into the fourth.” Irene hovered back subtly from the computer and donned a moving voice. “I have been the only person to successfully link atoms into a temporal field outside of our reality. Flawlessly. I’ve created the quantum form that’s capable of pulling you out of time and into a place of your choosing. When I give the world this key, humanity will become.”
“That’s quite neat.” Irene heard Harry respond from behind the capsule, toward which she did not bother to look. She suspected him of being nowhere else but wonderstruck beside her inconceivable capsule and coupe.
She ran tests operating in lines of indistinguishable code. With a provocative finger poking her chin, she drifted with her words, “And at last, I will become. Irene, the Time Traveler. I will have placed another stepping-stone for humanity’s progression, and I will find my rest.”
She watched it, awaiting its final line to complete, and had not removed her eyes once from the screen that scrolled in its illegible tirade. But it stopped preemptively, apparently due to a disconnection from the machine.
With a subtle cock of an eyebrow, she returned to where the cord plugged into the capsule and gave it a push that resulted in no further click. Harry was not even listening, still in the capsule and infatuating all of his interests into the car. Did he step on the wire when she was not looking? Move something?
Irene switched her attention to the car to ensure there was no disconnection. Even a door not fully latched would occasionally trip her diagnosis into failure, and for this, she wished Harry would not probe around the capsule. She should have warned him sooner.
“Harry,” she called as she approached the capsule door, walking briskly like a parent vexed by an obstinate child. She knew he was too curious and wished to drag him out.
She poked her head into the capsule. “Harry—"
And, of course, there was no Harry. What did she expect?
#
Irene had failed to explain to the tenacious man that the time machine was maneuvered through the vehicle itself. Perhaps, the arrogant buffoon had sat in the driver’s seat to fully behold the spectacles of a future luxury car. How unfortunate it was, however, that an oldie would have found a lever beneath the seat to be all too familiar, such that her digitized generation failed to comprehend.
For she had never before seen a car whose seat was adjusted with the pull of a lever, without computers to leisurely scoot the asses of amateur drivers.
And Harry did not know how to operate the machine. He would find obsolescence in the lever that would do nothing after another pull. It did not operate like that, not without a pilot who surmounted an anachronistic simpleton. He would have already been displaced, thrown into a far future unbeknownst to all.
Harry was stuck in a different time, taking Irene’s machine with him. Still, he would not care, for he was an ambitious man with nothing to lose.
Ten years or perhaps ten century later, Harry would appear with Irene’s machine and be discovered quickly in his unwieldy reaction to the unknown. The future would find him, and they would thus discover the sensation of time travel. It would all surround Harry’s name, and somehow he would fulfill it—for he had apparently seen all of which life was capable—and indulge beneath its pouring glamor; to be the one who sets the stone upon which humanity steps. Whether or not he would be accredited for the genius and marvel of such an invention, it did not matter to him, did it? His name was inside the capsule, and the lore was for him to complete.
It was Harry’s story. And as for Irene the Time Traveler, she was merely a dazzling cheapskate for gasoline.
#
The canopy over the Shell illuminated a striking light across the gas station, the ceiling spanning over nine pumps across the leveled cement. No cars in the midnight hour saw but the faintest of moonshine hovering beyond the horizon. The low-rise city lights dotted the highway beside which it was adjacent, populated by sleeping residents and the fair urban tinge in the air.
A thin, uninspiring man stood before the A convenience storefront with a cigarette in his fingers, unlit before the banter that waned from his chattering coworkers. He looked at his iPhone, browsing through whatever social media typically offered. Green vests spotlighted their small figures under the beaming lights.
From the air itself, from nowhere conceivable, a car emerged with a whimsical whine, shuddering the air audibly while maintaining a soft and measured growl. A car with seemingly detached fenders converged into its short, fastback roof, rolling with an unfamiliar exhaust. Beaming headlights illuminated from a featureless front end.
The thin employee dropped his cigarette upon the impact of the outlandish car meeting the quiet station, seized by witnessing inter-dimensionality. Yet it was merely a car stopped at a gas station.
Tightening the green vest around his shoulders, the man approached steadily with a hunch. Two coworkers within the store emerged by the door in fretting swears of confusion. They watched the employee approach, attempting to trail behind him with beckoning words to proceed no further.
He was about ten feet from the driver’s window. He froze when it rolled down, as casually as any car would reveal its driver.
A bald, shapely face emerged into the light, with all the features of the human visage smoothed into an alien likeness. A thin neck receded into the darkness of the car’s interior, which was washed with a vague glow of teal. This and the vehicle alone were enough to stir a perturbance that drew him away from considering it all elaborate buffoonery.
The employee froze at the sight of the driver, this indistinguishable person, and upon closer inspection of the car, realized that it was unmistakably a vehicle out of time, manifesting from nonentity into this physical world.
Notably, the car was driving on means beyond conventional automotive technology. It nearly hovered in the spaciousness in and around the vehicle itself, likewise the austere lights that glowed from within.
“Hi, commoner,” the driver called.
The thin man paused without an appropriate reaction. “W-what?”
“Commoner, hello?” The driver called again with a louder intonation for clarity.
The hell did they just call me? The employee wondered. “What do you want?” He questioned defensively, his frowning eyes beholding the visitor’s image.
“Stirring trouble I won’t. Refuel my car, yes?”
The employee stood in bewilderment, lost for words. “A-are you human?”
“Are you human?”
Was the alien being smart with him? The employee still inquired beyond the driver’s irritable remark. “Where are you from? How’d you get here?”
The driver laughed. “From conception, as does any human being. Also, this vehicular device of mine. Originated from planet Earth, of course.”
The employee ogled at the driver emptily, profoundly distraught before the otherworldly and a lack of answers. He paused with confusion, hesitant to pursue anything from there.
The driver laughed, waving a dismissive hand in sarcastic humor. “Please don’t be so coy. I am low on time.” They showed no distinct trait such as that of a man or woman. After a reflecting pause, they continued with a smirk, “I’m a time traveler, if you were wondering, from 3647. I embarked on this trip in honor of time travel itself—the tale of Harry McCormack? Ah, I guess you wouldn’t yet know of such a tale. Pardon me, but we could certainly digress in a few centuries.”
The employee grimaced at the digression and the driver’s cordial tone, which he found starkly invasive amidst his wondering trouble. Their tone was condescending, inquiring with obtuse confidence that meant nothing at a mere gas station during graveyard hours. If he was meant to be awestruck at the sight of the future, he was instead vexed and angered in his own confusion. He approached slowly, his coworkers peering closer from behind. “You need something from us?” He inquired tensely into the car.
“Hydrogen, regular, please?” The driver procured his wrist over the window, which began blinking from within their flesh.
The employee looked at the blinking light in disillusion. “What?”
“Hydrogen, regular?”
“The hell does that mean? We pump gas.” His coworkers nearly sniggered at the remark.
The driver looked at the employee with profound confusion. “I came here looking for cheap hydro. Is this not 3022?”
“You really a time traveler?” Someone interjected from behind.
“Well, yes, I am…”
The employee erected his posture in succumbing to the absurdity of the customer before him. If the sardonic driver would address them as ‘commoners,’ then it was his turn to make an idiot.
“It’s 2022, dipshit. Maybe our great-grandchildren can pump you ‘hydro.’ Take your shitshow somewhere else.”
The driver sat in their inter-dimensional vehicle, confounded as were the three men outside the station. Exasperation momentarily carried over their face until a look of realization appeared. “I must have undershot,” they said.
The employee stood watching in a daze. He drew another cigarette from his pocket and lit it without hurry, inhaling a long pull and exhaling fumes. “You need maps?”
The driver glanced into their dashboard and appeared to change gears before looking toward the workers again. “I’m sorry for the trouble. I won’t bother you commoners any longer. Please refrain from stirring about this encounter,” they uttered hastily as the window rolled up and shielded them into darkness. The workers watched as the car crept on idle, driving past the pumps in a sudden farewell and vanishing into nothingness.
THE END