Turn out the lights as we planned.

Palace Players I: Introducing Palace Players

Palace Players II: Some Peculiar Fix, The Two of Us

Palace Players III:

When everything exploded we heard it from upstairs.  There was smoke outside on the street and people were shouting and screaming.  It was early morning just before sunup when our sleep was perfectly perforated by the blast, shaking us awake when flying debris cracked the window by the bed.  Bullets reflected off the house next-door in irregular triplets.  They must have gotten the wrong address.

We grabbed a few things we couldn’t leave there.  For me, a backpack with my computer in it and the guitar I brought over to her house.  For her, her purse and an old box of jewelry.  Everything went in the back of the car.  She shouted at me to hurry as I ran back into the kitchen from the garage to get food.  I grabbed bread, apples, and the American beer I had paid far too much for at the liquor store near her house.  She was already sitting in the passenger seat and tossed the keys at me gracefully as I exited the kitchen, slapping the garage door button on my way.  No more than a minute’s time had passed since the explosion, but we were already on the road.

Her car was fast, some absurd Pagani roadster.  Strangely enough she usually took taxis or called for her driver when she had to be somewhere.  I had never seen her drive, although I was sure she could.  Today though, for whatever reason, she deferred the escape driving to me.  In a normal situation, I would have been nervous about my capacity to drive a car with such an inane amount of rear-wheel horsepower.  Right now there was only the fight-0r-flight response in which we had chosen the later.

Although she was never very specific, she had warned me that something like this might happen and that she would have to leave if it did.  I told her again and again from my heart that I was in it for the long haul, whatever that meant.  Here we were a month later, roaring down Avinguda Diagonal toward the sea.

She watched for followers through the tiny back window of the the closed roadster top while I kept my eyes on the road.  She shouted directions and I would use every bit of driving knowledge I ever gained from playing video games to take her prescribed turns correctly.  Finally connecting to Autopista del Maresme, we accelerated hard and headed North and East up the coast.  In the pink light of the morning a thin column of smoke rose from the residential heart of Barcelona.  The living heart of Barcelona, however, was in her incredibly loud convertible and already making a bee-line for France.

“It’s about 500km to Marseilles.  I have people there.  If you want to drive faster you can, I don’t care.”  She cared.  I accelerated.

“Can you explain a bit?” I said.  She wouldn’t say anything, but the purr of her motorcar overwhelmed a few minutes of silence that may have otherwise been awkward.

The engine in this car was mounted behind the driver over the rear axle for extra traction and better weight distribution, but the result was a feeling of being shoved in the back every time you accelerated instead of feeling “pulled along” like in a more traditional vehicle.  She apparently didn’t care, lying with her head against the softly vibrating glass of the closed window, eyes shut tight, sweater pulled around her narrow shoulders.

I wondered if she felt like she was acting.  This whole “escape” felt like something from a movie and she was a movie star.  As surreal as it was, I could still smell the smoke on the shirt I was wearing. Who were they?  I guess they got the wrong house.  My whole story with this woman made no sense at all but every new experience became the new most exhilarating  moment of my life.

In a little while we crossed the border into France.  She woke up as we slowed down and groaned dramatically; groggy from her nap.

They didn’t recognize me at the crossing, but they sure as hell recognized her.  I was worried they would figure out that we were escaping Spain and try to stop us or something but they just wanted her autograph, leaning far out the window to reach way down to our low-profile car with paper and pen.  The men in the booth were so overwhelmed with her that they didn’t even ask to see my passport.  I slid it back into the front pocket of my backpack and pulled out the cigarettes.  She saw them and reached out her hand, only half-listening as the men in the booth told her, in Spanish, how much they enjoyed her most recent film.  She thanked them in French and they smiled enormously.

We waved and drove off, engine reverberating arrogantly through the concrete border complex.  She lit her cigarette and leaned over to light mine as I drove.

“Do you speak Français, American?” She asked.

I shook my head, “Only kind of.  I’m a lot better at speaking Spanish.”

“You are terrible at Spanish.”

I smiled, “Oh yeah?”

“Si, admirador. You are also terrible at swimming.”

“Is there anything I’m good at?”

She snickered and bit her lip, reclining into her seat.  ”Ummmm, How are we on gas?”

Our smoke curled off the instrument panel where the gas gauge was still dead-set on “F.” That was impossible; this car could not possibly be gas efficient and we had driven all morning. “It says we’re still full but that doesn’t make sense.  Is there anything wrong with your gas gauge?”

She laughed, “Nope, it works great.  Can I drive soon?”

“Yes. This is your car after all.”

 

Palace Players IV: You’ve Got to Get Back Up Yourself

 

The sister series to this one, written by my dear friend H, can be read at areasonabledistance.wordpress.com.

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