After, Sab drove him home, but as they neared the front gate of La Villa Aurelia, she asked, “Would it be okay if I just kept driving?” and Excel could see how tight her grip was on the steering wheel, like fists clenched ready for a fight, but slightly shaking too. He put a hand on hers, felt the faint vibrations of the moving car coursing through her fingers into his. He didn’t know how to drive (neither Maxima nor Joker ever had a car), and to be moving like this, to be going somewhere, anywhere, felt foreign, a small and quietly thrilling risk. Here was a day, finally, that wouldn’t play out exactly as he’d predicted.
They drove to the movie theater in Daly City but stayed in the car, talked for an hour, then another, often looping back to their discontent. Sab was sick of changing cities, but couldn’t find one that felt like home. Excel thought he’d be in Colma forever, but wasn’t sure how to leave, where to go.
Later, they realized the parking garage was nearly empty. “Midnight,” Sab said, checking her watch, “maybe we should kiss?” “Maybe so,” Excel said. He leaned in, caught a glimpse of a tattoo just below her ear and behind the corner of her jaw—a tiny black lightning bolt. He traced it over with his finger, kissed it, then kissed her.
It was nearly three a.m. when he finally got home, and though Maxima was on the other side of the wall chatting online with faraway strangers, he slept better than he could remember. The next morning before work, he dropped by the cemetery and saw that Sab was right: the orchid was still at Joker’s grave, intact and untouched, the monkey’s face speckled with pepper but perfectly clear.
He saw her later that day, every day after. The first time they had sex (he was her second, she was his first) went well enough that they did it again the next night, an experience so incredible to Excel that he said out loud, “I think that changed my life,” which made them both laugh. Soon they were spending all their free time together, which required zero adjustments to other parts of their lives; they had each other, and he felt lucky for it. But Colma, Sab made clear, was temporary. At some point, she was moving on.
That point came sooner than expected. Almost three months after they met, while sitting at Joker’s grave, Sab told Excel that her aunt was moving her boyfriend, a mechanic with pet tarantulas, into the trailer. “The guy’s a creep,” she said, “so I’m moving out.” A cousin named Lucia, who owned a small organic soap company near the bottom of California, might have a job for her, a cheap place to stay. “It’s a little out of the way, near the desert. Or maybe in the desert? She said it was ‘off the grid,’ whatever that means. It’s my best option, and it would be nice not to go alone. We could get the hell out of Colma, try something new . . .” She trailed off, plucking out blades of grass, as though she feared his answer would be no, as if there might be any reason for him to stay behind.
ANOTHER HOUR SOUTH ON THE FREEWAY, SAB TURNED OFF THE radio. “So,” she said, “how’d she take it?”
Excel’s seat was reclined all the way back; the only thing he could see was the morning sky, darkness fading to light. “Fine. Good. She wished us well.”
“Liar.”
He took a few moments, then told her what he’d told Maxima.
“‘Excavation’?” Sab said. “‘Lost civilizations’? Who are you, Indiana Jones? Does she believe you?”
“She does.”
“And she thinks this is temporary. But what if a month goes by and she’s expecting you back? Then two months? Then five or six?”
“She’ll be fine.”
“What if she waits for you her whole life?”
He imagined Maxima rocking in a chair on the porch of some house in the middle of nowhere, staring at a long, empty road, waiting for Excel to appear in the distance. “She’ll get used to it,” he said. “People get used to it.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“It’s not fucked up,” he said, “it’s life.” He meant that not telling Maxima he was leaving forever was the natural order of things, the way the world sometimes worked. Maxima had left the Philippines the same way—she’d lived a life and found another, no deliberations or discussions. If instincts were hereditary, then Excel’s way of departure was coded into his DNA, a thing meant to happen sooner or later.
“It’s better this way, believe me,” he said. “If I’d told her I was leaving forever, she would’ve made it hard. Maybe impossible. You don’t know what she’s capable of.”
“Then give me an example.”
She’ll make a man fall in love with her, then take his money—that was the first thing that came to mind, and though Sab and Maxima had never met (Excel made sure of that), he felt a need to protect Maxima, a sudden loyalty; he didn’t want Sab’s sympathy for Maxima to become judgment.
He said, “She slashed a guy’s tires once.”
“Well, at least she didn’t slash the guy.”
“She made me act as lookout.”
“That’s kind of terrible. But also kind of funny.”
“I guess.” He tried smiling, like someone looking back on how silly life could be, but he was thinking of what he didn’t tell Sab—that he had been only eight years old at the time, that he was the one who’d done the slashing. It would look less suspicious, Maxima said, if a kid was caught crouching between cars, rather than a grown woman. She never explained who the man was, or why his tires had to be slashed (“He’s a bad guy,” was all she said, fingers massaging the knuckles of her other hand, like she’d just punched someone out or was about to), but she spent the day teaching Excel how to handle the knife, the right way to puncture a tire. Even Joker gave advice on the best technique (“Jab-jab! Quick-quick!” he said, demonstrating with a plastic spoon. “Like a strike to your enemy’s face!”). Excel had no idea who the enemy was or what he looked like, but he did as instructed, and imagined the moment of attack was like popping a balloon: a tire one second, a scrap of rubber the next. When the time came to finally do it, in the parking lot of Big 5 Sporting Goods, where the guy worked, Excel threw his whole body, the entire force of himself, into the knife. He slashed one rear tire, the other, then ran as fast as he could to the adjacent Burger King, where Maxima waited and watched. When he reached her, she squeezed his shoulders and said, “Mission accomplished,” then bought him a vanilla milkshake. But Excel remembered looking back at the tires as he ran, how solid they were, how perfectly intact. Despite all his strength and training, he wasn’t sure he’d made any impact at all.
He looked over at Sab, noticed a new piercing, a fourth, at the top of her ear, a tiny blue hoop. He reached out to touch it, then placed his hand on the back of her neck, and promised he’d contact Maxima when the time was right. “For now,” he said, “let’s just drive.”
NEARLY FOURTEEN HOURS LATER AND DESPITE EXCEL’S CLUMSY NAVIGATING (they missed three exits, twice went west instead of east), they entered Whyling. They passed a market, a post office, a gas station, a store with a sign that read SUPPLIES, then continued down the two-lane road until there was no road at all, just gravel, then dirt. Excel put away the map, meaningless now, and read the directions Sab had printed from an e-mail and taped to the dashboard.