The Absurd Maintenance of Tom Egan

The car died on Interstate 80 somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else. Nebraska, maybe. Kansas, maybe. The gas station was a fluorescent-lit rectangle in the plains, the kind of place that appeared on highway maps between two exits that were thirty miles apart. Inside: a coffee machine that had never been cleaned, a vending machine with three working slots, and a man polishing a glass that would never be clean.

His name was the Professor. He had been polishing that glass for as long as Tom had been alive, probably longer. He was maybe seventy, maybe eighty, with thin white hair and glasses that magnified his eyes to the size of saucers. He wore a faded windbreaker and work boots that had been resoled so many times they were more sole than shoe.

Tom asked for directions. The Professor offered him coffee. Tom drank the coffee. It was the worst coffee he had ever tasted, bitter and metallic and somehow warm. He stayed.

Three days passed. Tom helped the Professor pump gas, restock the vending machine, and wipe down the fluorescent light above the door that flickered every third second. The light always showed $0.00 when you pressed the test button. Tom pressed it a dozen times. It always showed $0.00.

On the third evening, Tom started talking about a woman he had met six months ago at a bus station in Omaha. He couldn't remember her name exactly. Something like Bing — B-I-N-g? B-I-N-G-E-r? He remembered her hands. He remembered her voice. He couldn't remember her face.

"Can you fix her star?" Tom asked.

The Professor nodded. "I'll need some time."

Every night at 2 AM, the Professor climbed to the roof with a pair of binoculars and a notepad. He stared at the highway. He wiped the binoculars with a rag. He wrote down license plate numbers. Tom watched him from the window, drinking coffee that tasted like metal and regret.

"Who are you looking for?" Tom asked on the fifth night.

"The one you named," the Professor said.

Tom climbed to the roof with him. They sat on the gravel roof of the gas station, the highway below them like a river of headlights coming and going.

"Stars are just headlights that got lost," the Professor said. "You just have to wipe the road clean."

"How do you know which one is hers?"

"I don't. But I clean them all. Eventually, one of them gets clean."

Tom found the gas station's log book in the office the next day. It was a large spiral-bound ledger, page after page of license plates, mileage readings, gas quantities. He searched for "Bing'er" — not in the name field (it wasn't there), not in the notes (she wasn't there), not anywhere. He searched for "Bing," "Binger," "Bing-er" — nothing.

He confronted the Professor: "She wasn't real, was she?"

The Professor didn't look up from his polishing. "Does it matter?"

"I asked her name. I remember it. B-ing-er. B-I-N-G..."

"Or B-I-N-G-E-r. The woman who drank too much and talked too fast and vanished from the bus station because she was running from something."

"That's not her."

"Isn't it?"

Tom spent three days sitting in his car, trying to remember Bing'er's face. He could see her hands. He could hear her voice. He could remember the bus station, the smell of diesel and old carpet, the way she had laughed at something he had said that hadn't been funny. But he could not see her face.

On the fourth day, he went to the post office at the edge of town and looked at the mail. There were maybe twenty pieces a day. Bills, advertisements, the occasional letter addressed to someone named Tom Egan — probably the wrong Tom Egan, because the postmaster had called it "another Tom Egan" and shrugged. He noticed a postcard from Phoenix. The message side was blank except for a single word written in someone else's handwriting: "BING." He picked it up and held it to the light, as if the word might glow or change or reveal something beneath the ink. It did not. He put it back.

On the fifth day, a woman came into the gas station. She was maybe forty, wearing a coat that had been expensive once and was now merely tired. She asked for premium. Tom pumped it while she stood by the window, staring at the highway.

"Do you come here often?" she asked.

"Every day," Tom said.

"Do you know anyone who comes from Omaha?"

Tom felt something shift in his chest. He looked at her. She had kind eyes and the kind of tired that comes from carrying something you cannot name. "Why?" he asked.

"Just curious," she said. "I met someone at a bus station once. Six months ago, maybe. I can't remember his name, but I remember his hands. And I've been trying to remember his face ever since."

Tom said nothing. He finished pumping her gas. He went back inside. The fluorescent light flickered above the counter. He pressed the test button. It showed $0.00. He pressed it again. $0.00. He pressed it a third time. $0.00.

The woman left. Tom watched her taillights disappear down the highway. He went back to the roof and wiped the binoculars. He looked at the headlights — dozens of them, hundreds of them, coming and going. He picked one. Wiped it clean. It shone for a moment. Then it passed. He wrote down the license plate. He didn't know whose car it was. He didn't know if cleaning it helped anyone. He wrote it down anyway.

He didn't know if Bing'er was real. He didn't know if she was imaginary. He didn't know if he was sane or if the fluorescent light flickering at $0.00 was a sign or just a broken light. He knew one thing: every night at 2 AM, he climbed to the roof, wiped the binoculars, looked at the highway, and wiped clean one headlight that belonged to someone he might have loved.

It was clean enough. It was as clean as anything got in this world.

A month passed. Then two. Tom stopped counting. Winter came to Nebraska, and the wind howled across the plains like a wolf with no home. The gas station grew colder. The coffee machine broke completely. The vending machine started freezing everything in it. Tom fixed the coffee machine with a paperclip and a prayer. He thawed the snacks with his hands. He kept the store open.

The Professor climbed to the roof every night, binoculars in hand, wiping them with his rag, writing down license plates in his notepad. Tom watched him through the window, sipping coffee that tasted like burnt metal, thinking about Bing'er's hands and Bing'er's voice and Bing'er's face, which remained, impossibly, blank as a mirror.

One night, the Professor didn't come down. Tom climbed the stairs slowly, each step groaning under his weight, and found him on the roof. The Professor was sitting on the gravel, looking at the highway, his binoculars resting on his knees. He was not looking through them. He was just sitting.

"I cleaned them all," the Professor said, not turning around. "Every one of them. Hundreds of them. And I still don't know which one was hers."

Tom sat beside him. The highway stretched below them, a river of light flowing south, flowing north, flowing in every direction at once.

"It doesn't matter," Tom said. And for the first time, he believed it.