What he’d seen just hadn’t seemed real. Oh, sure, he was well aware of his prejudices and fears concerning Janis and her newfound desires. He was, ironically, man enough to admit that he felt threatened by the idea of Janis preferring a woman to him. The thought made him feel inadequate but he was not so dumb as to equate lesbians with dickless men. Todd had read, and even listened, enough to pick up on a few modern notions about gender and sexuality.

But there was something a little pat about what he’d seen. Todd had read an article in Playboy about a guy whose job it was to make movies set in the past look real. And one thing the guy said had stuck with him: it was that the worst thing you can do with a historical piece is—and this was the guy’s word—smother it. By which he meant, don’t overdo the period detail. “In the fifties, say,” the guy said, “not everyone was dressing like it was the fifties. Not everyone. Some people were behind the times, like people are now. Not everyone was driving a brand new 1950s car. Not everyone had a color TV. We weren’t all listening to Elvis. But in a bad period piece—everybody looks too period.”

That was it. Todd was no movie-maker, but he bet that if someone had set out to make a movie about two lesbians going out on the road together and they’d wanted to smother it in the kind of details people associated with lesbians, they might have done something like what Todd had just witnessed. The clothes. The hair. The biker boots. The bike, for fuck’s sake.

What Todd had seen had been as real as the fingers on his hand. But what he’d seen had, equally, been completely unreal.

After that, the rest of the journey felt pretty unreal, too. The miles slipped by, the highway signs changed, Todd was overtaken by cars and trucks (but never a black Harley) and in turn overtook other cars and trucks, and all the time his destination approached, but the sense of going somewhere had been replaced by a sense of—what, Todd didn’t know. Not even movement.

As a child, Todd had owned an auto-racing game where the road was a continuous loop of cloth, like a caterpillar track, and the game’s toy cars remained still while the track moved under them, creating a back-to-front illusion of forward motion. That was how he felt now, that the world was shifting around him to create an illusion of progress.

He was able to shake the feeling off when he finally saw his exit come up on the highway. Todd turned the Volvo onto the ramp and looped off toward a smaller road leading to his first destination.

*  *  *