Protected: The Girl We Locked in the Trunk Is Very High Maintenance

When it begins, Mack Gelber’s “Driving Through Pennsylvania” might conceivably be the story of a road trip. The narrator and her companion Derf—a man whose name is really Fred, except in the state of Ohio, where he had it legally changed—don’t appear to be in a hurry. They’ve been on the road for two months, winding along I-80 in a midsize sedan. At the Best Western Plus, they chat with fellow travelers, enjoy vodka sodas, and spin tales about themselves, the way you can for an audience of strangers you will never see again. They are traveling children’s entertainers. Land surveyors. Day after day, Pennsylvania spools out before them. “We’re getting there,” Derf says. 

But very quickly, the appearance of an ordinary road trip gives way to something else. At a pit stop, Derf walks into a Panera Bread and the narrator checks on Trunk Girl. That’s how it happens, without preamble. In the span of a sentence, a road trip becomes a kidnapping and Pennsylvania becomes a crime scene.

And yet, as the miles accumulate, the nature of the crime becomes increasingly unclear. This is not an ordinary road trip—but is it even an “ordinary” kidnapping? The details of the narrator’s circumstances are alarmingly unfamiliar. There are the instructions left by unknown handlers, their placement along the route so exact, it’s almost supernatural: an envelope in the bathroom stall of the Panera, text hidden beneath the underlayer of a scratch-off lottery ticket, messages on the highway mile markers. KEEP. HER. ALIVE. WE. ARE. WATCHING. There’s Derf’s insistence that “the situation is his bitch,” his vague allusions to Macedonian thugs, Polish gangsters, bikers. There’s Trunk Girl herself, who is, quite obviously, more than just an ordinary girl in a trunk. And, of course, there’s the fact that it doesn’t take two months to drive through Pennsylvania. 

“Driving Through Pennsylvania” is an intelligent story. It asks horrific, human questions about complicity and the elasticity of choice. It is also unsettling—less because the “there” Derf and the story are hurtling toward has become a perilous destination, and more because the story invites the reader to question its telling. Trauma, like a nightmare, is recursive. Might the narrator be in the throes of either? It is to the credit of Mack Gelber’s writing—and his devastatingly mordant sense of humor—that the story convincingly asks such harrowing questions against a backdrop of opossums and inflatable pineapples, its soundtrack a repeating loop of the song “Fun Times USA.”

– Wynter K Miller
Managing Editor, Recommended Reading