The Sunglasses on the Dashboard

The sunglasses sit on the dashboard, lens-up, arms folded, the way a pair is set down when the driver only stops for gas. They are a cheap frame of dark acetate, the color worn off the bridge where a thumb rests, the nose pads ground down to whitish nubs. A wrap of black tape holds the right temple where the hinge broke. The left lens carries the whole record of it: a crowd of hairline scratches running one way, one deeper groove where the lens met a jacket zipper, a dull scuff low on the corner from lying face-down on gravel.

The lenses are plastic, not glass—molded dark, thin at the edges, light enough that the pair could pass for new if a person did not look close. But the high desert gets into everything. Dust comes through the truck's vents on any road that leaves pavement, settles on the dash in a gray film, and clouds a lens within an hour. So the lens gets wiped on a shirttail, on a thigh, with a bare thumb when nothing else is handy. Every wipe grinds a little grit across the plastic. The Great Basin has been doing this to the pair for years, the way weather does paint, until the hairline marks outnumber the clean spots.

The day they were sat on, they were resting on the passenger seat, lens-up, while the driver went in to pay. He came out, swung into the cab, and sat down without looking. A person does that once. The frame took his whole weight across the bridge; there was a crack like a dry branch, and the right temple folded outward, hanging off the lens. He drove the rest of the afternoon with the pair crooked on his nose, one eye clear and one eye flapping, until a roadside station produced a roll of black electrical tape. The tape was wound around the hinge three times and pressed flat, and it has been there since.

After that the pair rode the passenger seat on the long afternoon drives, and the tape did the job it does now. Out in the basin country the west-running road lies straight ahead into the sun at the end of the day. The light sits low in the windshield and turns the asphalt into a sheet of glare. Lane lines go white and lose their edges; the shoulder disappears; the road ahead becomes a single unreadable shine. A clean lens is worse than useless then—a clean lens collects the light and hands it to the eye. The scratches are what make the road visible. The tiny grooves split the glare into a hundred threads, each scratch throwing its own slice of shadow, and out of that broken light the texture comes back: the grain of the asphalt, the dark line of the shoulder, the heat rippling off the surface in wavering bands. It is not a clear view. It is a readable one, and in the worst of the afternoon sun it is the only view by which the center line holds.

The tape has been rewound once or twice, and a second wrap covers the temple below the hinge. The scratches have stopped spreading; the pair is lifted by the bridge now and wiped with a damp rag. On the dash the pair comes to rest lens-up, and when worn the right side rides a degree off level, the road through the right lens lying a hair lower than the road through the left.