He closed the door of the car and despite the relative silence inside he could still feel the storm above him shattering the sky in blinking whites and cavernous thunders…he could see the outlet of the covered garage where sheets of gray rain obliterated the views. He knew no flights were able to depart and in a moment of simple math he calculated the distance in his mind and the time of arrival. He could see her soon if he merely drove the one hundred and eighteen miles between him and her.
Her voice from the last call played in his mind like a record-player in an empty house…he could still hear it, could not exactly place its location but he knew it by the tiniest of sounds…the music of her, the tone and tenor. The slight husk when tired…clipped when mad or annoyed…the last conversation was bright…light and anticipating.
He pulled the transmission into drive and headed out into the downpour.
The rain thudded across his car, breaking the silence and smearing the windshield in a thousand rivulets…the gold setting sun behind Phoenix like some great eye peering at him…due west. He wasn’t headed that way, couldn’t benefit from the glow but as he thought about it he felt faintly like her allure was as much a color as the fading star. He could follow that path quite easily and so he turned from the sun and instead went due south, driving slowly in the flooding rains that piled brown and muddy waters on the highway.
He looked in his rearview mirror and it looked apocalyptic…a blackness over the airport that was drawn like a curtain across the east…filled with flashes and grayness and it went from the top of the airport to 35,000 feet. It was a massive bruise against the evening, blue and throbbing. He could only hope to stay ahead of it, with the sunset on his right and the turbulent storm on his left. I-10 went between both, and the flashing lights of cars and trucks only reminded him that this was a bit of a risk.
There was a time, probably ten miles into the trip when he had the tiniest of doubts…that the foolishness was about to catch up with him. That somehow, nature, or something bigger was attempting to thwart him. The storm had caught up with him in traffic, the heavy thuds of massive raindrops turning his car into a drumset, the traffic in a redlight slowness in front of him and the barely visible sunset teasing him to his right. Once the full thrust of the storm was upon him he’d likely need to pull over, wait out its length and watch the clock reminding him of the lateness of the hour. He glanced left, willed the cars in front of him to proceed and pulled into the passing lane…accelerating past the slower cars he really hoped he wasn’t going to go hydroplaning across the lanes and into the ditch separating the northbound lanes. He kept up this pace, the windshield a white and gray blur and half expected either taillights of cops’ lights to appear. Neither did and the pavement became drier….and his momentum kept him just yards away from the backlash behind him.
He shifted into a more comfortable mode, no longer just trying to edge out the storm and make it safely…he now could allow his mind to let her slip over the walls that he used to bring focus. She could climb over them and grab hold of his attention like an old-fashioned water pump, grasping his mind with her hands, working the lever and ultimately pulling on it until she cascaded all over him.
The ink spill of the evening finally covered the whole of the windshield and the desert’s vastness was more than darkness…it was an absence…it could have been a cliff, the edge of the world. There were no guide lights, no indicators…just the long plume of headlights against the charcoal pavement. An occasional driver heading north flared with two pale points of light but mostly it was limiting his sight to the road directly in front of him.
The music was settling but it was also a reminder…the big space outside was like his mind…and the music was the road…and the lights of the far-off city were her…such contrast to the outside world and occupying a completely different realm than the millions of others out there.
Behind him the storm winked, clearly disappointed it didn’t disrupt him and he watched the endless white highway slip by him at the length of his headlight beams…and the dark kept repeating itself in black patterns.
If visible the landscape outside would resemble Mars…a desolate planet with little distractions…mountains spearing into the sky like teeth and flat open spaces where tiny cars could convene. His trip was almost into such a void…the rest of the world was behind him…in time, in location. Here they were completely alone…completely untethered.
They were their oxygen…needing only to be close enough to breathe in…they were interlinked and intertwined, a tumble of limbs that binded them and grounded them…even the colors were foreign, and minds sapped by jet-lag merely took in the vast array of browns and tans.
He glanced at the time, and he could feel her close…feel it like a kinetic energy…the way you discern slight atmospheric changes…the way it smells when it is about to rain. He knew she was close, and as dark as the outside was the sense of her was almost blinding…and he drove faster…accelerating into the evening that had been sucked dry of light and could feel the first faint parts of his mind beginning to breathe her in.
