The Three A.M. Question

ACT I

It was a Tuesday in November in Minneapolis, which is to say it was gray at 2 PM and dark at 4:30, and the cold had already moved in and set up housekeeping. June Carlson was at the Sinclair station off Interstate 94, pumping gas for a Ford pickup whose driver never came back to the cab.

June was nineteen, which is a number that sounds young until you realize that you have been doing this for nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven days, and the days start to feel like a debt.

The motorcycle arrived at 3:12 AM. It sounded like a box of loose change being shaken by someone who didn't know the difference between money and trash. June watched it pull in from the pump island.

The rider was young. Maybe twenty-one. He wore a jacket that had once been black and was now the color of the sky, and he had a smile that suggested he had recently learned something about the universe that everyone else had forgotten.

"Full tank," he said, which was a sentence, not a request.

June pulled the handle. The nozzle clicked. The gas flowed. The motorcycle was older than both of them combined and probably had more history than most people June knew.

While the tank filled, the rider looked at the sky, looked at the gas station, looked at June, and said: "If none of this matters—if any of it, this station, this sky, this whole goddamn city—then why don't you just do something interesting?"

June stopped pumping gas. The nozzle clicked off. She looked at the man who had asked her a question that she had been asking herself for years but had never had the courage to say out loud.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I mean that you're standing here, at 3 AM, pumping gas into a tank that belongs to a man who will drive to a place he doesn't want to go and do something he doesn't want to do, and the sky is the same gray it's been gray for three weeks, and you haven't moved."

June thought about telling him that she had moved. That she had dropped out of community college. That she had walked away from a job at a coffee shop because the manager told her to smile more. That she had moved in a circle so tight that if you looked at it from above, it looked like a straight line.

"Someone has to pump the gas," she said.

The rider laughed, and it was a real laugh, not the kind of laugh that people laugh to let you know they're still in the room.

"I'm Dylan," he said.

"June."

"Okay, June. I'm going to go now. But I want you to know: you're not stuck. You're just waiting for a permission slip. And I'm not the person to give it to you. Nobody is. You have to write it yourself."

He got on his motorcycle. He started it. It sounded like loose change and possibility. He rode away into the gray sky, and June stood at the pump and thought about the question he had asked her and decided that it was the most interesting thing anyone had ever said to her.

Dylan appeared at the gas station the next Thursday. And the Thursday after that. Each time, he asked her a different question. Not about her life—not directly. About the world. About meaning. About the specific absurdity of standing at a gas pump at 3 AM and watching the numbers on the display go up and up and up.

They talked at the diner three blocks from the station. June ordered coffee. Dylan ordered coffee and a slice of cherry pie, which he ate without speaking for the first twenty minutes, which was the most comfortable silence June had ever experienced.

"Where did you learn to ask questions like that?" she asked him on the third Thursday.

"Where did you learn to wait for answers?" he replied.

They sat in the diner, and June thought about this. She thought about the way she had spent her entire life waiting—for permission, for purpose, for a sign that said she was on the right track, for something to happen that would make everything make sense.

The night June almost stayed was a Thursday in December. It was the coldest day of the year. The wind coming off Lake Calhoun cut through the station like a knife. Dylan arrived at 2:45 AM and didn't leave. He sat on the curb behind the pumps, wrapped in his jacket that was no longer black but no longer sky-colored either—it was the color of something that had been left out in the rain too many times.

"I'm leaving," he said, not looking at her.

"When?"

"Soon."

"Where?"

"Does it matter?"

June looked at the gas station. She looked at Happy Tommy, who was inside reading a sports section and pretending he was not listening. She looked at the sky, which was still that same color of gray that it had been gray for three months.

"Does it matter?" she repeated.

"I don't think so. But you should ask."

"I am asking."

"Then go."

She went inside. She picked up the backpack she kept behind the counter—a backpack that she had bought at a thrift store and which contained three shirts, a toothbrush, and a book of poems by a woman named Anne Sexton. She locked the gate. She walked back to Dylan.

The motorcycle was cold. June sat behind Dylan and held onto his jacket, which was the color of something that had been left out in the rain too many times, and she held on the way people hold on when they know that letting go means falling and they are not sure they want to find out what falling feels like.

Dylan didn't ask her where she wanted to go. He didn't ask her if she was sure. He started the motorcycle and they rode into the Minneapolis night, and the wind was cold and the sky was gray and June Carlson, who had spent her entire life waiting for permission to stop waiting, was riding on a motorcycle at 3:17 AM on a Tuesday in December, and she did not know where they were going, and she thought: this is not a happy ending. And she thought: this is not a sad ending. And she thought: this is simply an ending to the part of my life where I stood at a gas pump and waited for someone to tell me what to do.

The road went in a direction that June could not see because it was dark. But she could feel the cold, and she could feel Dylan's back beneath her hands, and she could feel the vibration of the motorcycle traveling through her body and into bones she had not known were alive.

She closed her eyes. She did not ask where they were going.

This was her answer to the question Dylan had asked her on a Tuesday in November. Not a word. Not a sentence. A direction.

June Carlson spent the next six months riding a motorcycle across the northern half of the United States. She did not have a plan. She did not have a destination. She had a backpack, a toothbrush, a book of Anne Sexton poems, and a question that she had carried for nineteen years and which Dylan had asked on her behalf so that she would not have to ask it herself: "What if I just stopped waiting?"

They stopped in Duluth for a week because Dylan had a cousin who needed help painting a house. June helped. She had never painted a house in her life, but she was good at following directions, and the cousin's wife told her that she had hands that looked like they were made for holding something other than gas pump handles.

In Minneapolis, three months later, June walked into the Sinclair station at 3 AM and saw a new girl pumping gas for a Ford pickup. The girl looked up at her with an expression that was halfway between exhaustion and something that might have been hope if you squinted.

"Can I help you?" the girl asked.

June looked at the sky. It was gray. It had been gray for three weeks. She smiled.

"If none of this matters," she said, "why don't you just do something interesting?"

The girl stared at her. And for a moment, just a moment, June saw something flicker in her eyes—the same thing that had flickered in Dylan's eyes on that first Tuesday in November. The moment before the question takes root. The moment before the waiting stops.

Then the girl blinked, and the moment was gone, and June walked out to her motorcycle, and she got on, and she rode away, and she did not look back.

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