True Depths

In writing the screenplay for his directorial debut, Badlands, the filmmaker Terrence Malick took inspiration from the real-life killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, which shocked the United States in early 1958. But Malick also took liberties. Rather than unfolding in Nebraska and Wyoming, where the actual crimes occurred, the 1973 neo-noir film is set in the Dakotas, Montana, and Saskatchewan. The fictional Kit Carruthers, played by Martin Sheen, is twenty-five; Starkweather was only nineteen when he terrorized Middle America. Similarly, Holly Sargis, played by Sissy Spacek, is a year older than fourteen-year-old Fugate, who may or may not have been in love and a willing participant in the carnage.

Malick changed many other biographical details for his protagonists and their victims and told their story in a way that diverged from the historical record as often as it paralleled it, but Badlands is the better for it — an eloquent “intersection of crime, romanticism and myth-making,” as the Guardian once wrote. The same can be said about Vijay Khurana’s striking debut novel, The Passenger Seat, which is inspired by but not quite based on the July 2019 killing spree of Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky along the Alaska and Stewart–Cassiar Highways in northern British Columbia. Those familiar with the murders of Lucas Fowler and Chynna Deese and of Leonard Dyck a few days later will recognize Khurana’s debt to the headlines, even as the narrative contours aren’t quite what we read in the newspapers. And for those coming to the horrible events of that summer for the first time through fiction, The Passenger Seat will both mesmerize and refuse comforting resolution.

Adam Velum and Teddy Anscombe have grown close — their friendship having “accelerated” in recent months — as they near the end of high school in a small seaside community not far from the Canada-U.S. border. Adam is an eighteen-year-old virgin, able to grow a “scraggly beard,” and trying to find meaning and purpose through podcasts and a “secret book of wisdom” that sounds a little like Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. Still seventeen and unable to drive, Teddy has at least started having sex, though it’s “not much to brag about” and his girlfriend seems increasingly uninterested. Both Adam and Teddy “crave witness”— especially, it becomes clear, from each other.

Their budding friendship is an awkward yet gentle dance, shot through with contradiction, jealousy, and, though neither wants to admit certain “delicate things,” palpable desire. “He and Adam are building something, placing alternate blocks one atop the other,” we learn from Teddy’s perspective, “and he knows he cannot be the one to let the tower fall.” And while these two boys on the verge of manhood, or two men not quite willing to let go of boyhood, set metaphorical traps for each other, “there is still something in Adam that makes Teddy want to stick around, just to see what will happen.”

Sticking around isn’t on the table for Adam, who wishes to put distance between himself and his “failure” of a single father. That means the Arctic coast — a fifty-hour drive away. Adam likes “the idea of having gone as far as anyone can go” and recruits Teddy, who “imagines the two of them arriving in a place where they were each the other’s only family.” Telling their parents they’re just going on a short road trip in Adam’s black and red pickup —“an extended-bed with an Ultrix camper on top”— they set out to find their own version of Terabithia, what Teddy thinks of as “a secret camping spot only the two of them know about.”

They have no concrete plan as they head out of town — a place that resembles McLeod and Schmegelsky’s Port Alberni in some respects, though it doesn’t appear to be on Vancouver Island. Adam just wants to “head north and see what happens.” He also wants to needle his “first mate” about leaving his girlfriend behind. In response, “Teddy punches him in the thigh. Pretty hard, actually. It’ll leave a bruise, even though Adam has said stuff like that before and they’ve both laughed.” The bruise becomes something of a talisman over the coming days — both a source of masochistic pleasure for Adam, who repeatedly presses his thumb onto the injury, and a corporal countdown to when their adventure must end.

Vijay Khurana is not a Canadian author but rather an Australian who divides his time between Berlin and London. Perhaps this grants him a degree of artistic freedom that a writer from the Lower Mainland or Montreal might not feel. He peppers his text with appropriate markers, including symbolically charged ketchup potato chips, but the occasional turn of phrase and place name — Victoria Parade, for example — sound imported. The distribution range of certain vegetation also seems overly generous, as when Adam “plucks a maple leaf and uses it to wipe the dipstick,” even though the travellers are quite far north at that point. Although such particulars might strain the novel’s verisimilitude for some, they enhance its dreamlike qualities of escape — the sense that Adam and Teddy are living a “mythical, pure” fantasy as much as a men’s reality.

One glaring inauthenticity is central to the plot. Shortly after hitting the road, the teenagers stop at an outdoor recreation store so that Teddy, who has a gun licence from a hunting trip he once planned with his father but never took, can buy an SKS semi-automatic rifle for $349. Of course, in Canada, seventeen-year-olds are not permitted to purchase firearms, and a retailer that seems above board in all other respects would not make such a sale. No matter. The transaction provokes envy in Adam, who offers to cover half of the rifle’s cost. Teddy declines, as that “would defeat the purpose of having it.” The line is an ominous one — doubly so because we will read about the ultimate climax only many pages later. And when we do, we will be left uncertain of Adam and Teddy’s final moments but fairly suspicious that theirs is not a suicide pact like that of McLeod and Schmegelsky in northeast Manitoba.

After their first night of camping —“at a bend in the river that looks deserted enough”— Adam emerges from their jury-rigged tent wearing only his underwear, a rather titillating act among two adolescents still unsure of nudity, who would never “let themselves be seen before and after gym class.” Adam looks at Teddy, who “doesn’t have to ask what it means. Let’s do it, Teddy says, but not here.”

Wittingly or not, Adam and Teddy derive some sort of sexual satisfaction from each other. Teddy, for one, “hasn’t even felt like jerking off” while on the road. And for Adam, “even the thought of what they’re about to do this morning makes him feel something, not turned on, but something.” As Teddy finally teaches his friend how to shoot the rifle, in the most private of settings, he “takes hold of Adam’s shoulders and shapes him”— the two becoming one.

Verbally, too, the distinctions between the friends collapse. Teddy is fond of saying “Let’s get the fuck” instead of the more complete “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” Adam adopts the elision before they leave town, and soon “they have both started unconsciously paring their sentences, seeing how minimal they can make them and still be understood. If they stayed together long enough, they would end up with their own language.” But Teddy, who imagines sharing secrets with Adam, is also unsettled by sharing too much — as if he doesn’t want to fully give in to the subtext of their relationship.

As they continue driving toward the Arctic coast, never more than a nebulous destination, the boys happen upon a young couple playing cards next to a stalled “yellow hippie van with a pop‑top.” Adam wants to “fuck with them,” an equally vague impulse. He gets out, puffing his chest and aggressively asking the pair if they need help. The woman is beautiful, “like truly,” and sounds American. The man, who has shoulder-length hair, sounds Scottish or Irish. (The American Chynna Deese and the Australian Lucas Fowler were driving a 1986 Chevrolet van across Canada when they were murdered by McLeod and Schmegelsky.) They rebuff Adam’s offer of assistance, saying they’re just fine. As the three go back and forth — Adam and the increasingly agitated couple, especially the man — Teddy gets out of the truck and readies his rifle, perhaps not realizing what he’s doing. “The man with the gun gets to decide,” Teddy thinks. And when the long-haired guy understands just how far things have gone, he almost squeals, “Let’s — let’s calm down, okay? Let’s both just drive away. We won’t tell anyone.”

It’s the man’s use of the word “both” that bothers Teddy: “It sounds inaccurate, makes it seem like he and Adam are one person.” A perfect stranger’s recognition of their growing sameness frightens and infuriates Teddy, who nonetheless “wants to check into a motel with Adam” and “to please Adam, who would probably like it if they stole these folks’ car.” The perceived conflation is too much; the relationship between the boys becoming men too confusing, too intense, too erotically charged. Out of frustration or denial or anger, Teddy fires his gun several times, killing both strangers and setting into motion a string of crimes that will prompt a nationwide manhunt and see Adam murder a third motorist. “If they’re going to get clear,” Adam quickly resolves, “then they need to be a unit.” But the men who are really still boys will never get clear. Terabithia, after all, is a place of sorrow as well as imagination.

We last see Adam and Teddy on the lam ten days into their trip, at a nameless hot spring in the early morning hours. Adam realizes that his bruise is gone, that “there is no trace of the pain he has grown used to checking in with.” And for the first time, he finds himself “making his fantasy smaller rather than bigger.” It’s clear they’re running out of road.

Teddy too has an epiphany after he reaches into the dregs of their ketchup chips and pulls out a finger “bright as a blood test.” In doing so, he “comes close to glimpsing how this will end, a swelling that feels a lot like love for his friend.” He has a new, hard-fought understanding for Adam and the situation they’ve created for themselves: “Teddy feels protective suddenly. He wants Adam to himself.”

Although Teddy’s resolve does waver in their final hours together — could he possibly “play the hostage” and pin the blame entirely on Adam? — it is with unspoken agreement that the two fully undress and slip into the water, as if into “an enchanted pool in a fairy tale, the kind you can never leave once you’re in it because it slowly paralyzes you with pleasure.”

Adam, at least, knows that an “audience of police psychologists, parents, posters, everyone” will try to parse their actions, “desperate for meaning.” While we are left to wonder if Teddy ultimately kills his friend before killing himself a kilometre away, we know the two have meant something profound to each other. It’s their inability to interpret those depths without resorting to violence that is the central tragedy of The Passenger Seat. By taking liberties with a terrible event from the recent past, Vijay Khurana has explored emotions that are very real.