My no-account cousin Keif (short for Keifer) rolled up to the house that afternoon in a battered old mustard-colored car of no discernible make or model. Keif was in his forties, about a dozen years younger than me, though they’d been harder years for him. I’d watched him drive a succession of four hundred dollar automobiles over the decades, but this one was just about the ugliest. When he slammed the door, I half expected it to fall off in a shower of rust, but it managed to maintain its integrity, which was more than I could say for Keif.

Maybe that was a little unfair. My cousin got sober a while back, but it didn’t really suit him, and he walked down the dirt driveway like a man feeling his way carefully along a pitch-dark street. I was sitting on a log by the dead firepit along the side of the house, looking at the trees and thinking about my dog. Bella was a beautiful six-year-old bluetick hound and my one remaining joy and comfort. I adored that dog. Keif, I could take or leave. So naturally my dog had run off three days ago, while Keif was right here, probably come around to ask for money. And I’d probably give him some, because I’d always loved his mama, my aunt, rest her soul.

“Hey, Wade.” Keif plopped down on the log beside me. He was wearing a neon green polo shirt over lime green cargo shorts and black work boots. He used to dress in camouflage all the time until a drunk hunter winged him with a deer rifle one time, and since then he’d tended toward a more high-vis wardrobe.

I grunted.

He stared at the woods with me for a minute, then said, “I saw on the Facebook how Bella run off. I drove around looking for her a little bit but didn’t see her. I thought I’d come over, see how you were doing. So.” He paused. “How you doing?”

“I was doing about the same,” I said, “until Bella ran off after a rabbit and never came back, and since then, I’m doing worse.” With the kids all grown up and off in their lives, I was supposed to be enjoying early retirement, puttering around in my workshop maybe, but mostly traveling around with my wife. That was the plan when I sold off my contracting company last year, anyway. But it turned out Minnie liked me better when I was working twelve or fifteen hours a day, so now she was doing the traveling on her own, and posting lots of pictures to “the Facebook” about it, and my workbench was covered in dust because I just couldn’t be bothered. So far, I’d spent my retirement drinking too much and spending time with my dog, but now my dog was gone, and talking to Keif was a poor substitute.

“How about we go for a ride?” he asked. “We can look for Bella if you want.”

I spat, which always felt less satisfying since I’d stopped chewing tobacco, even though I’d done that twenty years ago. “Bella’s probably off in the deep woods someplace. No roads back there.” My property butted up against a couple hundred acres of gnarly old pines and briars and swampland that the county owned and didn’t have much use for. It was quiet here, apart from the occasional bang of a rifle in hunting season, but you got used to that.

“Come on anyhow,” Keif said. “Let me buy you a beer.”

I’d never had Keif buy me a beer where I didn’t end up buying him four or five in return, but he had quit drinking, or so the other cousins said. “What are you gonna have while I’m having beer?”

“I’ve been getting soda water with a splash of bitters mostly. You ever try that? Fancy as shit.”

I snorted and rose. The mood I was in, I was such bad company for myself that even Keif seemed better. I walked around his car before I got in it, though. “What the hell is this thing, cuz?”

“Started out as a Dodge Dart, mainly.” He slapped his hand down on the roof, which seemed a poor idea given the vehicle’s overall condition, but it didn’t collapse. “But there’s a Chrysler logo on the steering wheel, and the engine is some kind of custom job, and really it’s all bits and pieces at this point, so who knows.”

“The ship of Theseus,” I muttered. “You’re telling me this thing passed inspection?”

“Welllll.” He took off his gimme cap and ran a hand through his thinning hair before putting it back on. “I might have a buddy at the scrap yard who sold me a sticker he peeled off a fresh wreck. Mostly I try to drive it where nobody will see me. Come on now.” He climbed into the car, and I opened the passenger door—it squealed—and slid into the bucket seat, which was done up in buttery yellow leather, way nicer than I’d expected. In fact, the interior as a whole was a lot less cracked and smeared and beat-to-hell than I would’ve imagined.

“It’s nice on the inside, huh?” Keif grinned at me. “I bought it off this old boy a couple counties over last week. He found it in his dead great-granddaddy’s garage and gave it to me for a few hundred cash. I don’t think he ever even looked on the inside. And look at this.” He tapped a rectangular contraption someone had epoxied onto the dash above the radio (complete with, no shit, an eight-track player). It was about the size of a box of tissues, made of midnight blue plastic, with a tiny keyboard next to a screen like you’d see on a graphing calculator, but bigger. The word, or logo maybe, Wend-Way-Go, was swirled in cursive underneath the screen, and a few finger-thick cords ran from the top of the box into holes neatly bored into the dashboard, connected to who knows what in the car’s Frankensteined innards. “It’s a GPS system! This baby will take you anywhere.”

I turned my head and stared at my cousin. “Keif, first off, you don’t have to say ‘GPS system.’ GPS stands for ‘global positioning system,’ so you’ve got that part in there already. It’s like saying ‘ATM machine.’ Second, your phone has a GPS. Everybody’s phone does nowadays.” I remembered those old dashboard GPS devices, of course, though they weren’t usually this bulky or boxy, and this was probably some kind of discontinued knockoff or technological also-ran; trust Keif to get the Betamax of GPS.

Keif didn’t stop grinning though. “This one’s different, though. Lookit. You know how you’re always talking about that time you went to Spain?”

“I don’t always talk about it.” I’d gone one summer, nearly forty years ago, tagging along with a rich friend I met at community college (after he got kicked out of Elon University for reasons never specified), but I was pretty sure Keif had never left the state or even been on an airplane, so to him, it probably did sound like I talked about it all the time.

“Yeah, yeah, the Sagrada Família, right? Most amazing thing you ever saw.” Keif pushed a button on the GPS and the screen lit up with a pale pink glow. Definitely off-brand. “I was reading how they’re finally finishing that cathedral, only, what 150 years after they started? Want to see how it’s coming along since you visited?”

“What are you talking about? You want to take a boy’s trip to Barcelona?” Well, I could travel—nothing was keeping me here except my dog, and after three days I was giving up hope on her, though it twisted me up to think it. I’d raised her from a pup. I wouldn’t want to travel with Keif, though. He worked under-the-table jobs and didn’t even pay income tax because he didn’t want the government to “have a file” on him, so he wasn’t about to get a passport.

“Best buckle up,” he said.

That was mildly surprising; some of the cars Keif bought didn’t even have seat belts, and he’d never been all that safety-conscious before. But I did as he asked, and he buckled his shoulder and lap belts too before giving a satisfied nod.

“Lookit,” he said again, and punched a bunch of letters into that tiny keyboard, which had all twenty-six letters plus a bunch of symbols, some familiar, most not, each key about the size of a baby tooth. The words “SAGRADA FAMILIA” dutifully appeared on the screen, and then the words “START CAR” flashed. Keif cranked up the engine, which hummed soft as an electric instead of belching and backfiring like his cars usually did.

“SHIFT TO T” the screen flashed, and Keif put his hand on the knob of the big old gearshift lever between our seats. I noticed then that, in addition to the usual Reverse, Neutral, and numbered gears, there was an extra slot marked with a letter T, written sloppily with paint or maybe white-out.

“I think the T stands for ‘travel,’” Keif said and slammed the gear into position.

There was a sensation of rapid acceleration, pressing me hard back into the seat, and the windshield streamed with an oil-slick rainbow of colors, like someone had poured swirling dyes down the glass. Then, seconds later, I slammed forward against my safety belt, the colors drained away, and I was looking…

At the vastness of the Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s immense cathedral-as-work-of-art, with its Art Nouveau towers, its Gothic Revival silhouette, its walls and doors bristling with sculptural details and design elements—bunches of fruit, the faces of saints, various animals—that should have clashed but instead, somehow, melded. It was night in Barcelona, but the structure was lit by spotlights here and there. The last time I’d seen it, forty years earlier, the structure had been covered in scaffolding and cranes, but now, it was finished, or so close it might as well have been.

“The windshield is a screen,” I said. “This is some kind of video.” But Keif just laughed and got out of the car.

I got out, too, legs shaking, gaze fixed on the cathedral. The church wasn’t just visible through the windshield. It was really there. “Be nice to see it in daylight. I always forget about the time zone thing.” Keif walked around to sit on the hood of the car. “It really is something, though. You weren’t lying.”

His impossible car was parked in a spot near the park across from the cathedral, and there were a few other people walking around, pointing up at the structure, chatting in English and Spanish and Catalan. Nobody paid us any particular attention. I sat down heavily next to Keif and stared at the church for a bit longer before looking at him. “Keif,” I said. “What, and I cannot stress this enough, in the actual fuck?”

“I figured it out pretty quick, after I got the car.” He patted the hood affectionately. “I was just playing around with the GPS thing, and I put in my address, and it said ‘shift to T.’ I figured that gear was some kind of turbo boost bullshit, you know? But, whoosh, it took me right back home, the same way we got here. Then I played with the GPS again, put in ‘Disneyland,’ because it was the first thing I thought of, and I ended up as close to the gates as you can get in a car. I most always end up in a real good parking spot, I don’t know how.” He shrugged. “Then I punched in Dollywood, because I always meant to go, and there I was in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. I got out of the car and started jumping around, all happy, and I didn’t even go inside the park. I went to Hollywood instead, and then I went to the Coliseum in Rome, and hit that time zone problem, because it was like the middle of the night there. So I went to Chicago, to see Wrigley Field, even though there wasn’t a game or anything, but at least it was daytime. I was gonna check out Buckingham Palace, but the GPS flashed ‘DANGER’ and ‘WHELMED’ and ‘COOLDOWN REQUIRED’ so I had to spend the night in Chicago, slept in my car in a Walmart parking lot, but the seats are comfy. The next morning the GPS was working good again, and I now know not to push it so hard. That was…” He squinted up at the sky. “Three days ago? It’s hard to keep track when you’re in so many time zones. I been a few places, though. Waikiki Beach. The Eiffel Tower, but I didn’t think it was that good, just looks like a big old oil derrick. The Statue of Liberty, but only for a minute before some cop or park ranger ran up and started screaming at me. I guess cars don’t really go to the island the statue’s on? Usually the car ends up in a legal space but if there’s no spots I guess it just does its best. Anyhow, I had to shift on back home real quick. That poor guy must still be wondering—”

I grabbed his arm, and he looked at me, startled. We weren’t much for touching on that side of the family. “Keif. This thing. The things you could do.” My brain was spinning with possibilities.

He looked at me, face open and curious. “Like what?”

I blinked. “I don’t know, man. Disaster relief. Rescuing refugees. Transporting organs to surgeons in other countries. You can fucking teleport, cuz!”

Keif nodded, looking almost sage. “I thought about that stuff too. But see, if I did all that, people would notice, and then the black helicopters would come for me. The government would take the car and use it to transport Seal Team Six to assassinate the head of whatever country the president’s mad at this week. They’d take apart the technology and figure out how to replicate it and then it’s all over, true global hegemony, you know? Plus they’d put me in a black site and torture me because they wouldn’t believe I just found this thing.”

I opened my mouth to object, and then closed it again. Keif was a paranoid conspiracy theorist, sure…but in this case I didn’t think he was actually wrong.

“But I’m not going to use it to smuggle cocaine or anything, either,” Keif went on. “I could use the car for good, and that would end up being evil, or I could use it for evil, and then I’d be rich, but, also evil, and who needs that? Plus I’d probably just end up being tortured by a cartel instead of the Army. A guy like me, with something like this.… I figure it’s best not to get too ambitious or greedy. I wasn’t going to tell anybody about the car, I was just going to see all the places I’ve always dreamed about seeing, but, well.” He shrugged. “You’ve been so sad, cuz, since Minnie and all. I thought this might perk you up. Take your mind off things.”

I barked a laugh. “Blowing apart my entire understanding of the nature of reality? Yeah, you’re right, it did take my mind off things.” I looked back at the church. I could clutch my head, or howl at the moon, or tell myself I was dreaming, or any of that, but there was the Sagrada Família, right in front of me, absolutely real, and almost as unlikely. My mama raised me to be a realist, and in this case, that meant acknowledging the impossible thing happening to me was real. “I wish you could see the inside,” I said.

“I might be able to get us in there, but the car might mess up the pews or something. We can come back. Anything else you want to see? We can probably do three or four more trips before she needs to cool off. I’m here to cheer you up, Wade.”

I grinned at him. This was a miracle, and I decided to embrace it. “Hell, yeah, there is. How about Yosemite? I’ve never seen Half Dome.”

“I don’t even know what that is. That’s why I like talking to you, cuz. Hop on in. You can punch in the next destination.”

So for the rest of the night, we traveled. I figured Keif would hit all the big obvious tourist places himself, so I tried to come up with places he wouldn’t necessarily think to go. After Half Dome, which was just as majestic as I’d always heard, I took us up to Norway, above the Arctic Circle, and we looked out the windshield at the Northern Lights flickering and shimmering above a plain of white. The heater in the car kept us comfortable, and we sat there for a long while. “Looks kind of like the colors on the windshield when we travel,” Keif murmured. He was right, and I tried to figure out if that meant anything about how the device worked—solar particles, magnetic fields—before giving it up as beyond my current scope of understanding.

From there, we went to Egypt—Keif probably would have gotten around to the pyramids on his own, sure, but screw it, I wanted to see them, too. The car settled down in the sand, with a view of several of the great tombs, surreal and bizarre. To think human hands had made them, and without benefit of engines. Keif probably thought aliens built them. I seemed to recall a drunken rant on the subject at a family reunion once.

“All this sand is making me thirsty,” Keif said after a while.

I grinned. “There’s a place I always wanted to try.”

It’s not so hard to find parking in central London when you have magic, or alien tech, or whatever, to take you there. We appeared in a spot right around the corner from the Savoy Hotel. Now, the dress code at the American Bar is smart-casual, but Keif had a decent change of clothes in the back (“for going to court and such”) and he wrestled himself into something approaching adequacy. We strolled into the bar about an hour before they closed for the night. (Keif was right: the time zones were a bitch.)

“Some people say this is the best bar in the world,” I told him when we walked in, and he let out an appreciative whistle. I’d seen pictures, and the reality didn’t disappoint: the gleaming curved bar, the elegant stools and tables, the ranks of shining bottles, the white-jacketed staff; it all elevated the whole notion of a bar into a genuine cultural experience. “Hemingway drank here. And Winston Churchill. It’s where Neil Armstrong had his first drink after the moon landing.”

“That was fake,” Keif said absently. “But still. Why is it called the American Bar?”

“Back when it first opened, more than a hundred years ago, they called it that because they served ‘American-style’ drinks—cocktails, we call them nowadays.”

“America invented those?” Keif said, pleased. “Greatest country on Earth. I don’t have any pounds or anything though, just a little regular money.”

“My credit card will work here,” I said.

“The government tracks you through those things.” Keif said.

“I’ve got a valid passport and I’m retired. There’s nothing weird about me doing some traveling. The government won’t notice. Come on, cuz.” The bartender was a consummate professional and made me a beautiful old fashioned in a weighty crystal rocks glass that should have been on display in a museum. When Keif asked for soda water with bitters, I winced. “I’m sorry, cousin, in all the excitement, I totally forgot you aren’t drinking anymore.”

He turned in his stool and smiled. “It’s all right, Wade. To tell the truth, I always just liked hanging out in bars, and the drinking was mostly sort of a side effect, and it wasn’t a good one. This is a nicer bar than I usually hit though, that’s for sure.”

We sat in companionable silence, taking in the ambiance of the room, or at least, I assume that’s what Keif was doing. What I was doing was…well, brooding. It was the taste of the whiskey put me back in my funk.

The last time I’d seen Bella, I’d been sitting out on the porch, sipping a whiskey at dusk, and she ran off into the woods after that rabbit. Minnie used to say I loved Bella more than her, and while that wasn’t true, there were times I sure liked Bella better. She was a hunting breed, and she liked to roam, but she knew her way home, and she’d never been gone more than a few hours before. I knew she was out there in the woods right now, lost, maybe hurt, maybe even run afoul of a bobcat or caught by a stray round from an off-season illegal hunter. I could think of a thousand scenarios for why she hadn’t come home. None were good.

Keif’s miracle had distracted me, but that’s all it was: a distraction. Soon enough I’d be back home, alone, instead of listening to Bella snoring on the rug at the foot of my bed or sitting with her head on my lap on the couch (where she was allowed any time she wanted, now that Minnie had moved out).

“Penny for your thoughts, cuz,” Keif said. “You all right?”

“Just missing Bella,” I grunted, and Keif nodded, and even patted my shoulder. He couldn’t hold a job for more than a week or two at a stretch, he gave up on everything he’d ever tried the moment it got too difficult, and if he promised you he’d do something, you could just about guarantee that was the one thing he’d never get around to doing…but there was no meanness in him at all. He could’ve shown his car to anyone, but he showed it to me, because he knew I was sad, and wanted to cheer me up. “You’re a good cousin, Keif.”

“I was wondering if you’d ever notice,” he said with that grin.

“Time, gentlemen,” the bartender murmured, and so I settled up, tipping generously and not bothering to think about the exchange rate. No tourist had ever taken a cheaper trip to London, after all.

We went back outside, me trying and failing to shake off my melancholy. Keif was quiet, like he was lost in thought. We made it back to the car, and got in, and after a moment of sitting silently, I said, “I reckon we should head home before we overwhelm your system here.”

“Sure,” Keif said. “Or, well, there was something I’ve been wondering about, and sort of wanting to try, and now seems as good a time as any.” He reached for the GPS and started typing. I watched, not even exactly curious, just feeling sort of hollowed out, and wishing I’d had a couple more drinks.

He typed in “WADES DOG BELLA” and the screen flashed “CONFIRM NONSTATIONARY DESTINATION? Y/N” and before I could say anything he punched the letter Y.

SHIFTING, the screen said, and the car started up and the gearshift moved without Keif even touching the ignition or the stick. The acceleration was tremendous this time—I thought my spine was going to punch right out through my back—and there were dark streaks swirled in with the rainbows on the windshield, and they spread until the whole windshield was black, and I thought, Keif, you idiot, you killed us—

But then the acceleration eased and we gently rolled to a stop, and I realized the black windshield was just a view of a forest at night.

The Wend-Way-Go emitted a harsh beep, and the screen flashed the words WHELMED and INTEGRAL FAULT and MAINTENANCE REQUIRED and then gently sizzled, a tendril of acrid smoke rising up from a new crack that appeared in the casing. Then the little screen went dark.

“Well, hell,” Keif said after a moment. “Let’s see if it took us to Bella, anyhow.” He turned on the headlights, illuminating trees right in front of the beams. We weren’t in a parking spot this time but wedged into a space between mossy old trees barely big enough to fit the car—in fact, one of our fenders was pressed right up against a knotty trunk.

I got out of the car, not expecting much, not daring to hope, and called, “Bella?”

I heard a whimper and went stiff. “You there, girl?”

There came a whine, and a weak bark, not far ahead.

Keif went around to the trunk and came back with a flashlight, and we moved into the trees, shining the light around, me calling Bella’s name and listening to her increasingly louder barks, until we found her.

She was at the bottom of a hole, her eyes gleaming up at me in the flashlight beam. A real big tree had fallen over, probably in one of last winter’s windstorms, and uprooted itself, leaving a crater that had probably been made deeper from the erosion of rainfall. The steep, loose slopes were all scrabbled up from Bella’s attempts to climb out.

I started to rush down to her, but Keif said, “Whoa, we don’t want two of you stuck down there, hold up.” He retuned to the car and came back with a lot of tangled old rope, and I wrapped some around my waist while he looped the other end around a tree. I went down into the hole and Bella jumped up on me and licked my face when I picked her up, all fifty pounds of her. There was some water pooled down at the bottom of the hole, and she must have been drinking that to survive, but she had to be starving.

Keif pulled on the rope to help me up the slope as I struggled to the rim with Bella in my arms, then set her down gently on the ground and knelt beside her, ruffling her fur while she kissed my face, laughing and crying. She licked the tears off my cheeks.

Then I looked up at Keif. “Cuz. Thank you. And…I’m so sorry. I broke your miracle.”

He shrugged. “Aw, well. What was I gonna do with it that was more important?”

I snorted. “You could have…I don’t know…used it to find Amelia Earhart. Or Bigfoot. Or a shipwreck full of gold.”

He flashed that grin. “Amelia Earhart is probably dead, and Bigfoot would kick my ass, and I don’t believe even that car is capable of functioning as a submersible.” He shifted his weight and crossed his arms over his chest and looked back at the car, where the headlights were growing dim, like even the battery was giving up the ghost now that the Wend-Way-Go was busted. “Besides, we’re kin. I love you. I never had any really good thing in my life that lasted more than about a week anyhow. Usually I just fuck things up, but this time, I did something good instead. And I saw more these past few days then I ever expected to in my whole life. I’ve been to Rome, Wade. I’m happy with that. If I’d pushed for more, I woulda got eaten by a polar bear or kidnapped by government assassins or stranded on Mars or something anyhow.” The headlights died completely, and he laughed. “Might as well leave the car out here, huh? No way to get it out of the woods now, and if anyone finds it, hell, it’s not registered in my name anyway, never got around to it.”

I laughed, and patted Bella on the head. “Do you know the way home, girl?” We couldn’t be too terribly far from my house, I didn’t think.

She did know the way, and she stuck close to us while she led it. The flashlight kept us from stepping anywhere too swampy, though we both got plenty scratched up and muddy over the mile or two we walked. Me and Keif both whooped once we hit my backyard, and Bella ran circles around us, bounding around, her hunger and privation forgotten.

I gave Keif a ride back to his trailer, with Bella in the seat right beside me, and I actually hugged him goodbye. Then I went back home, gave Bella some food (which she loved) and a bath (which she hated), showered off the dust and grime of a couple continents, and crashed into a deep and dream-filled sleep with Bella snoring beside me, right up on the bed, this time, and probably forevermore, I imagine.

The next morning, me and Bella took one of our walks in the woods, and I tried to retrace our steps and find the car, but without much luck. It was dark the night before, and there are enough animals in the woods that I ended up following some deer trail instead of ours.

I’ll keep looking, though. Even if it takes days or weeks, I’ll find the Wend-Way-Go, and pry it off the dash, and open it up, and see what I can see. INTEGRAL FAULT and MAINTENANCE REQUIRED doesn’t mean the same thing as BROKEN FOREVER, now does it? Keif has his good qualities, and I appreciate those more now than I ever did before, but he’s always been a quitter, and that’s not me.

I’ve got a whole workshop to tinker around in, after all, and everyone says the key to surviving retirement is to find some meaningful hobby to pass the time.

© 2025 Tim Pratt