I drove down the long boulevard that flanks the park. It draws a deep straight line across the north side of golf lawns, wide and green. It cuts through the heart of the sprawling city, dividing color and money. And on late afternoons like that one, made sparse by the coming storm, the space created by the wide even lanes and the gently rolling municipal nature beg the boulevard’s few participants to speed without remorse. That’s what I did, windows each down, west into the punching wind. My burst struggled slow, as the balding tires hissed at the wet asphalt and spoiled the throttle. My wishful fuselage swung its hips from side to side as I carefully managed the roaming wheel. As if my hands knew the young skid by name and could coach it out of danger like a trusty neighbor. My physical mechanics knew the water beneath the tires like men who drive truck far north must know the slippery white pack that is the road’s melting forever snow.
Ever straightening, ever stronger, ever fast I barreled into the street ahead. I wanted west forever. The wind was coming harder than I thought it knew how, I had grown used to believing this city was incapable of producing the sort of winds that can truly rip and replenish my soul. And here they finally were, I saw the wind as if it were dull arrows, with feathers that never stop. They boxed my pulsing car, feeding the engine through the sinister grill, diving in the windows, and howling for deaths unfair.
The storm, in its diagonal power, throwing new force through urban pockets and thickets of surprised and shrieking trees, had an unsettlingly quiet stance on the city. There was not lightening or thunder, nor forecasts to fit the description. The people weren’t wary and warned of an oncoming storm, and so I slowly wondered in my drumming speed. Could thousands be missing from this late Saturday afternoon for thousands of eerily aligned reasons that had nothing to do with the weather?
In grade school, every few years I’d arrive for the oddest morning of academia, a day in which nothing was out of the ordinary, and no one was sick, but most of the class was absent in an unplanned unison. The teacher and I would hold one another’s gaze for a fraction of a second, with the slightest combination of fascination and horror rumbling in our subconscious. Something out the narrow classroom window might silently collect my attention from the periphery during that muted day, like the wind or an unleashed dog. And then I’d never forget. I wondered if this day was like those. The radio told me it’d been 18.6 years since the last lunar standstill. Maybe it was some dim morning in 1987 that a combination of parallax and refraction between us and the barely waning moon bent the low light in a whisper that made my young peers stay in bed without a conscious reason. Either something was amiss or absolutely nothing was. As my velocity climbed, my thoughts and vision slowed to the tiny beat that hums beneath everything. I was floating in an air ponderous and wet at the moment the speedometer pegged its furthest corner, rattling in expectation.
Later that night, under a dark cerulean sky I would study the glowing whites of a pretty girl’s two eyes soaked in the strangest amber that came from nowhere. Across the courtyard and under the slightest cover, a man called Folds would pound off-key melodies on a piano slick with mist for hundreds of young rich white folk. Their adoration only matched by the swollen bulbous sky that buckled and warped overhead and behind. It was then that I would know this endless hint of twilight was unlike any other. But in my speed on the roadway, the remainder of my evening became an unacknowledged obscurity. There was no certainty, and no end.
The city speed thrashed at my chest, begging my mind to name it and act as though somehow, my soul was opening up to something great as I laid the law behind me in vanishing silver tracks. City speed, unlike that of the open country, never truly allows such personal events. I knew then that I may choose to later describe such speed as freedom and power, but by passing hydrants and houses and street posts and millions of well-kept blades of grass, I knew that in truth, the sensation was the opposite of freedom. It was terror. My defiance of law, safety, and place only made me pay more attention to their impenetrable power. There was no way to ignore the fact that I’d either be caught or killed. And if somehow I escaped those first two laws of nature, I’d never get far enough. Never to the desert or sea that my whipped flexed cheeks hoped to know. The faster I pummeled forward, the thickness of my prison’s wall was only more apparent. This could not be a dream and my sense of reason fell down upon itself in a frantic argument without words. From then on, my unrelenting speed was solemn.
Up ahead in the outstretched distance was something wild and ominous, out in the street and twinkling five shades of green. The weather above us, strong and silent, had finally proven itself a storm or more. A house-sized tree had been uprooted. Fallen in the street, like a bewildered old man, naked and tragic. In its row, it was one of many. Part of a colonnade ignored. But across the asphalt it was something to see and love. I saw an officer wearing a blue shirt, a shade or two darker than the sky above. His arms were straight, palms toward me, frightened and stern. He braced for me but believed I would stop. Yet the wind was at his back, making his defiant arms seem like paltry windsocks battered straight.
I never thought of braking. The officer stood his ground until one scared instant. He put his left hand on his soaked black pentagonal hat and sprinted behind his cruiser. My car jumped in. To the lurid thickness sleek and quiet, fast as can be. I felt the tree move with me, the branches thumped and shattered the glass without sound. I watched as limbs multiplied, shaking beads of water off the aged oak bark, its veins like a hundred desert rivers, carved into the land. While loaded green leaves brushed my forehead I saw one sharp bough with a putrescent yellow center thrust through me above my belt. It soaked itself red where it met me, like an overused paint roller that foams with color. I couldn’t close my mouth and everything slid.
In the pieces of glass across my lap white pops blinked and whistled, dancing red and blue. The green leaves turned an earthen navy, and vivid white blots took my vision like dripping ink. The spots across my view fluttered and shouted but I heard nothing because the low low hum that had followed me since boyhood had grown so still it was infinitely loud. As if at my birth, the lowest of the seven octaves had been pounded at once with the sustaining pedal, to thrum under each of my twenty-five years, always just out of reach. And now the note was played once more, to rip the first memory out from my unconscious. Maybe the sound had always been there, new only to me. Each remaining surface turned to buzzing video lines in a stasis that could not be undone, and a sidelong glance at the slipping world was all that I could keep.