The fogged windshield transforms the yellow streetlight into a circular halo, fading into a sickly luminescence at the edges. The side windows are also covered in condensation, and the passenger's side is decorated with a pair of parallel, thick rivulets that slide down toward the seal until they gather into large drops. It seems to be crying.
Mara smells of deodorant stick, the kind that only makes itself known after exertion. She slides down in the seat, rests her foot against the glass, and admires the result. It's a small and delicate footprint that branches out under the heel into a pattern of drips resembling a spider web. Marcello detests the idea of his new Golf being treated with such disrespect, but the sight of the bare, tanned leg encourages him. A few sprays of glass cleaner and a microfiber cloth will be the remedy.
For the girl with the dark bob cut, blue eyes that border on black in the darkness, and small firm breasts with nipples pointing skyward, it seems there is no remedy at all.
She was beneath him for a brief time, too brief, equal to the duration of the Hollies song that played on the radio plus the commercial that followed. It boasted of a tire shop so quick that the customer wouldn't have time to drink a coffee in the bar next to the garage before the flat was fixed. A few seconds, and for Mara, that half-minute jingle plus the length of an old rock song isn't enough to elevate that ungraceful and clumsy weight, accompanied throughout by the annoying squeak of springs, to a proper act of lovemaking.
"Come on, take me home," she says, struggling with the tight shirt that's difficult to put on because of her sweaty skin. She has the look of someone who wants to gulp down some chamomile tea and throw herself into bed.
Marcello, however, sees existence as a football match, where there's always a second half, a final minute, or extra time to find a remedy.
Mara has an entirely different concept of existence. She sees it as a void to be filled, and those times when there's a bit of space left, it's just wasted time with no possibility of comebacks, overtime, or penalty kicks.
Marcello, like all fans, accepts defeat but trusts in the next match.
"Shall we grab a beer at Tony's?"
"Let's make a dash to my place. Then you can go drink your beer alone."
Marcello remembers a moan and a half-cry at the end that resembled a cough. Instinct tells him he shouldn't appeal to such flimsy evidence, but he's a fan, one of those who remain frozen in the now-empty stands, brooding over the defeat. "Didn't you like it?"
Mara doesn't respond. She adjusts her underwear beneath her miniskirt and looks right toward the highway. "Did you like it?"
"Yes... no, god. Of course, we weren't as comfortable as in a bed, but you're..." he runs his hand over her head and tucks her hair behind her ear. "You're so beautiful you make me lose control..."
"You shouldn't lose control. Drive straight and take the curves properly." She looks at her phone's clock. Midnight is approaching. "I want to be asleep in half an hour."
"Let's talk some more..."
"Please, Marcello, I'm getting sleepy," she says, holding back a yawn.
"Let's go another round, then," he suggests as a condom appears as if by magic. "I've got the tire change ready, quick as in the radio commercial!" he laughs.
"Quick as your trigger-happy dick. Step on the gas and let's leave this parking lot to someone who'll make better use of it."
Marcello swallows but that bitter taste remains spread under his tongue. "Why are you insulting me?"
Mara fiddles with the controls until she finds the window button. She presses it and the glass disappears into the door while the warm night air mingles with the car's odors until they're swept away. The look she gives Marcello is elusive and unreadable like that of a bird of prey. She sighs. "Who even are you? What do we have to share, you and I? Forget about me and I swear, I'll forget about you."
"So you didn't like it?"
"Are you taking me home or not?"
"I don't think it's fair to judge a book by its cover..."
Mara fixes her eyes on him. He notices a cement-like grimace that erases the memory of the smile that had enhanced their only selfie together hours before, and alters the beauty of her lips. It seems to last a century. "And you want to call a brief and insignificant chapter a book?"
"No, beautiful, I just didn't think I'd signed up for the Olympics!"
"Well no, but you're definitely signed up for Formula One, or the 24 Hours of Le Mans if you prefer. Make those tires screech and take me home!"
"You know what? You're just a stupid whore!"
She doesn't flinch. "Well, pay me then."
"I paid for dinner, if I remember correctly."
"Not that the restaurant was the wonder you claimed it to be."
"It still cost me two hundred euros!"
"You choose restaurants like you manage your tool. You'll have to come to terms with it, sooner or later."
"You're... you're..."
And anger drowns his thoughts in a deep, stormy sea.
At this hour, the highway is practically unused: just a few motorcyclists challenging death, some drunk claiming the whole road for himself, and a few couples of lovers with their cars still warm. None of them care about Marcello's defeat, who's been shown a red card, or about Mara, who will have to work to fill that void that echoes like a shout in a cathedral. No one has noticed the car parked in the remote corner of the lot, and Marcello knows this well. He knows the place where he lives, is sure of people's disinterest in their neighbors, of the cold detachment with which they participate in others' lives, and so...
"Get out!"
"What?"
"Get out and walk home!"
Marcello sees. He understands that the hand on her knee opens because it's about to transform into a slap, but he does nothing to avoid it. To him, Mara is still a good girl, loving and patient, capable of nurturing a passion until it transforms into the most genuine of loves, of dispensing a smile so warm and soft you could take it to bed to keep your dreams company.
And instead the slap arrives, and with it a flash that forms directly in the center of his brain and then crumbles into a myriad of razor blades that fall down his neck and cut everything, right to the heart. The humiliation burns like that famous core sealed inside the sarcophagus.
He only understands the second half of the phrase because his ear is whistling like a train in the middle of the steppes.
"... and then you'll drop me off at my door and never show your face again, not even in a postcard, you dickhead!"
When he regains control of himself, when his heart stops punching like a speed bag, when the two roads he thinks he sees reunite into the single, unique and real ribbon of asphalt, he's driving toward home, maintaining moderate speed and riding with the right wheels on the edge line.
Before convincing himself, he looks at the passenger seat at least three times.
Finally, he's alone.
One step after another, but the shoes are uncomfortable.
After less than five hundred meters, Mara surrenders to her aching feet and sits on the guard rail that slowly releases its heat to the night, creaking. Only three cars have passed since Marcello pushed her out and drove away with the door still open, and none of them stopped. Too many stories about pretty girls hitchhiking for gangs of robbers, too many stupid urban legends.
Her phone's battery is at three-quarters. Mara crosses her legs to catch the attention of even the sleepiest driver, bows her head over the screen, and opens the selfie taken that afternoon.
Marcello had picked her up around six, and the blooming oleander in the garden, in the flattering light of the low sun, had seemed like a perfect backdrop to immortalize the moment. He had tried to make his smile appear irresistible and had asked to widen the frame to show off his pectorals straining under the tight t-shirt. His robust collarbone was also eye-catching, and everything suggested something truly powerful.
The social media app opens and reminds her there are eighty-six notifications to check. Nothing unusual when you have more than a hundred thousand followers. Dark Mara, even when posting utter nonsense, receives likes by the cartload and comments by the dozen. Many of these are invitations to go out or lewd proposals.
Her profile picture, showing her in a tiny carnival-colored swimsuit, with beach sand sticking to her skin and the elastic of her bikini bottom at the lowest latitudes, certainly doesn't invite philosophical discussion.
The post leaves no room for interpretation:
"Time wasted. All dynamite, no bang..."
One second
Two seconds
Three.
The first response is from Gigi Shock. "You bring the explosives, I'll bring the detonator." 💣😆
Madame Falco follows up. "Are you saying appearances are deceiving?"
Mirko Mirk. "I'm sending you a photo in DM."
Lady Bondage. "Show us the face of this... time waster." 😜
Private Raian. "I'll rip that swimsuit off you!" 😈😈
Baby Boom. "Did you send him crying back to mommy?" 😭
Ale XXX ia. "Put up wanted posters on the streetlights." 🤣😂
The fourth car only slows down to check if she's a hooker. It speeds up again in a suffocating cloud of diesel fumes from a car ready for the scrapyard.
Gengiv Kan. "Come visit me and when I'm done you'll walk crooked for three days." 😵💫
Olivia Oli. "You got played, #DarkMara. Didn't think you had it in you..." 👎
Muscle Works. "Let us meet this steam train, maybe he's just running low on water to boil..." 💪💪
Mara lingers on the selfie. Marcello is so pompous, tanning bed bronzed and inflated like a chicken on estrogen that he deserves public shame. She laughs out loud without realizing it, clicks on the photo which enlarges, and in moments the menu offers sharing options. She feels heat rising from down below, a genuine sexual excitement. You don't leave Dark Mara in the middle of the road, and if she slaps you, it means you deserved it. You should just bow your head and apologize. The comments are in the hundreds and likes keep growing, and it doesn't matter if it's bedtime because the web people never sleep.
Want to share?
Mara hasn't heard the car. It stopped right in front of her.
Truth be told, she isn't suffering at all from the sharp metal against her bare legs. Her dimension, past, present, and future, is all contained within those pixels casting a morgue-like light on her face. The notification chime, repeating with each new alert, is the soundtrack to her personal ballroom, the rhythm of her life where there's never time to waste.
"Everything okay? Need a ride?"
It's a woman in her fifties, blonde, that washed-out blonde, almost ashen. She's pathologically thin, as if work and years had consumed her. Her facial features are drawn and she has grayish dark circles that no makeup attempts to hide. She wears a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck and smells of hospital. She hasn't been to the hairdresser for at least a month, that's certain. Mara, incredulous, postpones sharing the photo with Marcello and asks:
"You'll really give me a ride?"
"I believe in not leaving young girls alone on the road, especially at night. Get in."
Mara doesn't need to be told twice, and before sitting down she has to wait for the woman to move a heavy leather bag to the back seats.
"I'm Mara. Are you a doctor?"
"Yes, night shift, and tonight everyone's sick. I've been driving this road for years, back and forth, always in the dark."
Mara is pleased to have guessed correctly. "I don't envy you."
She thinks about the terminal patient she visited just ten minutes ago: a papier-mâché mask smelling of wilted flowers with a heart as weak as a broken radio. Indeed, there's nothing to envy.
"Let's look at the bright side. I've become friends with every curve, know all the dangerous spots, and I know, before others do, when I need to avoid a pothole." she laughs.
"You're right, this highway is really a trap!" says Mara, and it seems the dimple that accompanies her smile appears on command.
"Where can I take you?"
"Are you heading back to the hospital?"
"Yes." She joins her hands to simulate a pillow. "And I hope to catch a few minutes of sleep."
Her facial expression is perfunctory. Mara can't be sincere unless she's looking into a camera. "Perfect, then. I live right in that area."
The car regains the road.
It's an old white Panda worn out by miles. The driver's seat is collapsed, the steering wheel corroded by sweat, and the engine is annoying. It makes a huge racket while the speedometer needle struggles to rise. To be honest, it also smells of burnt iron.
You can see the doctor struggling to maintain trajectory: the tendons in her arms surface under her skin and her gaze is concentrated on the road. Mara wonders if the lady is quiet because she's naturally silent or because she has to tame a kind of ship with drunk rudders.
"Well, thanks anyway."
The glance is fleeting. After all, there's the Panda to keep in check. "Rather, why were you alone in the middle of nowhere?"
Mara returns to social media. The comments on her new post are over a hundred and the likes at least double that. Her satisfaction surfaces in a grin that seems stuck on with fish glue. She answers distractedly while scrolling the screen.
"The guy I was with kicked me out of the car."
"What a bastard! And... what did you do to deserve such treatment?"
Mara shrugs. "He couldn't fuck me properly, that's what, and I told him so."
The right curve is challenging and a noise from what sounds like squared ball bearings adds to the tension. "Boys have their pride, though, and they should always be, shall we say, handled with care." On the straight stretch, the doctor examines Mara once more with a quick glance. "He didn't hit you, did he?"
Meanwhile, another thirty users have commented and almost all want to see the loser's face. Par de balle stands out above all:
"If you introduce me to Mr. Speed I can recommend him a Tantra Yoga teacher. But from what I understand, he'd need more of a miracle." 😭
Mara thinks it's magnificent. Counting quickly, the new followers are more than thirty, all for a terrible fuck. The doctor seems impatient.
"Won't you answer me?"
She shakes her head. "What, sorry?"
"I asked if he raised his hands to you..."
"Who, that loser? No, don't worry, I was the one who hit him."
They pass over an old bridge where the road narrows. Every time, the doctor wonders how many drivers are capable of interpreting that right-of-way sign with the red arrow paired with the inverted white one.
"You hit him?"
Mara finishes typing a comment and then responds. "But that's nothing."
"Using violence is always wrong. Leaving a girl alone in the middle of the night is equally wrong. To hell with pride! Talk to each other and make peace."
Mara rotates the phone toward the doctor. You don't need to be an expert to understand that she's online with a very popular social network, and not just by good people. "What peace. I've humiliated him and soon I'll put his face up there too."
"They'll stop you!"
"Probably, but not before tomorrow morning."
"They will because someone will report your post."
Mara scrolls through the page while a concert of notification chimes confirms that the discussion she launched has gone into orbit. She looks at the doctor showing commiseration. "Everyone adores me on here, they hang on my fingertips. Nobody reports shit to me. Want to see for yourself?"
There's a traffic light, one of the few that stays on at night. It's a good opportunity to rest her arms, curse that steering wheel without power steering and without grease in the gears, and try to reason with the girl. "Come on, show me what this terrible lover looks like, but I'll tell you right now: don't embarrass him too much because at some point you might regret it..."
The grin has something that makes it go sideways. "No, I'll never regret it but look, look yourself what a pretty face..."
And the glance at the photo is quick, because meanwhile the traffic light has turned green and the pager allows no respite. Somewhere there must be someone who isn't sleeping as they had hoped.
The Panda starts up with effort.
"Don't do it!"
"And why shouldn't I?"
"Because you shouldn't take advantage of your social media success. What's the word - that you're an influencer?"
Mara wants to buy time. She doesn't want to get thrown out of a car for the second time. She sees the doctor even more engaged in driving than before. The roadway, bordered here and there by old sheet metal guard rails, has decreased in width and that stretch of road is even darker. "But I can't disappoint my followers, you understand? It's just a moment from glory to anonymity."
"You mustn't do it!"
"But of course I will! I'll share my selfie with the loser and tomorrow I'll post one full of compliments for you, doctor. You'll thank me for this because it could get you a promotion, you know?"
The doctor is nervous. She pushes on the accelerator and this time it seems the car gains speed. Mara notices the hands tight on the wheel and the rapid, precise gear changes. In fifth gear they're approaching a hundred.
"Instead you need to learn to show respect for others!"
Mara reloads the photo: her, him, and the oleanders in bloom. She raises the phone and touches the share button. "How many followers do you have, doctor?"
They're less than sixty and she doesn't remember when she last logged in. "Leave that boy in peace! It was a bad evening for both of you and you'd better forget..."
Her eyes shine with malice and the dimples, those that hypnotize everyone, have disappeared. A row of straight white teeth shows behind barely parted lips.
She looks like a hyena.
Mara screams. She yells with her mouth open, spits, and to be honest, her breath smells of wine too. "Instead I will and who the fuck are you to stop me!"
The doctor calms down. She must have understood.
She is nothing, after all. She just has to obey a stupid pager and learn to like her filthy existence.
She slows down.
The right wheels step on the white line. The steering wheel seems less hostile than usual and her tired back finally rests against the seat.
"Look ahead, Mara..."
"What the fuck are you saying?"
"Ahead, you must look ahead!"
And Mara does.
She can't share the photograph because in front of her, maybe fifty meters away, a new guard rail begins but this one is really special. It doesn't have the curved protection to prevent it from behaving like a knife blade and the meters now are only ten.
The phone falls to the floor mat and while the worn tires eat up the grass, the scream comes out with the force of a million terrified voices and her eyes could shoot out of their sockets and it's not elegant to say but she still has time to empty her bowels.
The blade shatters the grille, wedges into the frame, penetrates the old engine like a hot knife through butter, tears through the hood metal, crosses the dashboard with the violence of a sword and slices through both the passenger seat and the passenger. In a hell of noise, smoke, sparks, and the smell of burnt flesh, the guard rail exits the Panda's trunk a few tenths of a second later and it's a shame, because in passing it destroys the medical bag which explodes with the sound of a crushed bladder.
The doctor, dazed, gets out of the car.
The first steps are a challenge to gravity, her legs shake, her head aches, and her stomach wants to turn but then it gets better. Through the broken window she witnesses that disaster of blood, ground bones, viscera, and metal. The impact made Mara's jaws clench so violently that her teeth crumbled.
No trace remains of the hypnotic dimples.
She retrieves the phone from the floor mat. It still works and isn't even bloody. She puts it in her pocket, revives her ash-colored hair with some remnants of blonde, and uses her phone to call the hospital.
"I had an accident, a terrible accident..."
"Oh God, are you hurt?"
The smell of blood is strong but she doesn't have even a scratch. "No, but I had picked up a hitchhiker, a girl..."
"You don't mean..."
"Yes, unfortunately..."
"Oh shit! Stay calm, we'll send an ambulance right away."
"Thanks."
"Is it because of that damn steering?"
"And the fucking bald tires. Hurry up, I feel faint..."
Now the Panda's cabin resembles the inside of a blender.
It won't be easy for her colleagues, but she had reported the malfunction of that car on numerous occasions and what can you say, failure to provide assistance is a serious crime and you don't commit a serious crime, even more serious if the girl is confused, tired and abandoned at night on the side of a road.
It's easy to access the smartphone.
The M for Mara, which appears by connecting the dots, is rather predictable.
Before deleting the selfie, the doctor hides her face with her thumb and with her fingertips caresses Marcello's face. She finds time for a few words, hurried and whispered because in the distance she can hear the ambulance arriving.
"Marcello, my love, my child. Nobody can dare to offend you or even hit you, and from now on, please, choose more carefully the girls you invite."
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