TheBanyanTree: Honda Hearst

[Monique Young]

She left us in the dead of night, silently and without warning. No note left
behind, nothing but an empty space where once there was a car. Alone she'd
been for a week, parked safely, so we mistakenly thought, by the management
office where the management had told us to leave her. Perhaps she missed our
company so greatly that she went in search of us, or perhaps her irritation
with our absence grew so great that she wished to leave us behind, or
perhaps she was carnapped, unscrupulous thieves seeing an opportunity in her
bruised and aged body to make a killing by ransoming her for a queen's
ransom, which, as everyone knows, is much higher than a king's. (Perhaps not
quite everyone knows that, but that's because it's a well-kept secret. )
Whatever it was, we couldn't tell. All we knew was she was gone. If only
she'd waited a few hours more, we'd have reclaimed her! If only the
treacherous bullies who absconded with her had taken ill with too much drink
and had gone home to sleep it off instead of picking on such a helpless
target!

                There is nothing quite so dismaying as walking to where one
has left one's car and finding . . . nothing. There may be other things as
equally disturbing, if not more so, but at the time it occurs, this is quite
enough to convince one that the world is indeed a cruel and heartless place.


                We waited for a ransom note but none came.

                We called the police, and when they responded several hours
later they did not give us the impression that a door-to-door search would
soon be underway. Their demeanor was rather complacent, as if they see this
sort of thing daily and it no longer has the power to shock them. What sort
of world are we living in, when even the most heinous crime such as this
does not engender outrage? 

                We didn't know if we should mourn her or not. We didn't know
if she ran off on her own or not, and the police were not particularly
reassuring on this point. "We see this often," the tall lanky one said,
"they run off thinking they can get better gas somewhere else, thinking the
oil is cleaner on the other side of the fence, and then, in a day or two,
reality sets in and they return home, none the worse for wear."

                We didn't believe this for a minute. Surely not our Honda!

                We knew she'd been abducted while we slept, we could imagine
her screams of terror as she realized what was happening, we kept the news
on all day and all night, expecting to see her involved in a bank holdup at
any moment, forced into a life of crime by the scum who had taken off with
her. They did not hesitate to steal a car, what else were they capable of?
Would they turn her into a drive through escape car? Would a late night trip
to Dick's Burgers result in mayhem, with little Honda in the middle of the
fray? Would she see sights we'd spent her entire life protecting her from?

                We were beside ourselves with fear, which made four of us
instead of two, and we researched the current doings of the SLA, certain
they were behind the disappearance of little Honda. Nothing useful was
discovered during these searches, but we did discover a series of
interesting facts behind the disappearance of Atlantis.

                We stopped sleeping. We stopped eating. Was Honda eating?
Was she sleeping? We did not know, we received no psychic emanations, the
air was still with presence of her absence.  

                One evening Andrew asked about a tragic incident from my
past, when my Toyota (who has since moved on to bigger opportunities)
disappeared, only to magically reappear one week later in a parking lot less
than a mile from where she had last been seen. "Perhaps we should look for
her," he said, and since we were in Esmeralda at the time, he thought that
perhaps a cursory search of all parking lots, apartment complexes, and
subdivisions in our immediate area would be a good idea. I pointed out the
futility of conducting a house-to-house search in an area so inundated with
the same that we'd need to be an army to do so in less than a month, and he
gave up on that idea, though I suspect he still harbored the idea, deep in
his psyche, that if only he looked a bit, she could be found.

                We began a search for a replacement vehicle. Such a
betrayal! The body not yet even found, and here we were, looking for a car
with features little Honda does not possess, such as air conditioning. We
knew we would burn in hell for this.

                By the end of the week we'd settled into mourning. Still no
little Honda, no sign of her anywhere, and the news was, thankfully or not,
bare of any mention of little Honda running wild in Seattle.

                By Friday night our spirits had dwindled, our souls
exhausted from the strain of not knowing what had happened to our favorite
little Honda, and it was then that the phone rang. Our phone rarely rings at
midnight as the only people who call that late are the police (though they
do call infrequently) and drunken friends of friends of friends who reach us
by dialing randomly. This time it was the former instead of the latter, and
they had news about little Honda! 

                Next to our complex is a large empty expanse of dirt which
is, even as we speak, being converted into an upscale living/shopping
center, and, next to that, is a sprawling apartment complex, and it was
there, by the management office, that little Honda sat alone in the dark,
now in the company of a K-9 unit. 

                Our enthusiasm could not be contained! All four of us (the
dogs insisted on coming along) jumped into Esmeralda and dashed off down the
street. We greeted little Honda with affection, with exuberance, with the
sheer joy of finding our little Honda still alive, in one piece. She came
home with us, but either she's been brainwashed or is suffering from post
traumatic stress, because she has yet to speak to us about the experience.
It's been three days, and still she remains silent. Perhaps she's ashamed?
Perhaps she did commit some horrible crime and doesn't want us to know?
Perhaps she was abused in ways we cannot imagine. Her gas tank was empty,
and she was out of oil, and the scum who had absconded her left her filled
with trash. 

                We mourn her lost youth, her lost innocence, and we wonder
what happened during that week. We are glad to have her back, but since we
don't know if she sympathizes with her abductors, since we don't know if she
might run off again, we have taken the drastic action of immobilizing her.
Her gas pedal now requires a special key, a key that we keep in our
possession. Perhaps she would not run off again, but if she has been
brainwashed we have no way of knowing, and so we take the necessary action
to ensure her safety. 

                The important thing is, she is home now.