And now a pause. A breath. A moment away. Leave the car. Just open the door and step out. Stretch if you must. Stand on the tips of your toes, bend your knees, jump skyward, toward the moon—the little that’s illuminated. Don’t worry about your skin. You have no skin here. This is only the imagination—its senses—that’s taking this flight. Move higher, higher, until you have attained the perfect perspective, the better perspective. Move higher still and look. Look down. Can you see it? Can you see the automobile? Follow the spray of light. It’s moving eastward, through the mountains. It moves swiftly, quietly.
From above, to an eye overhead watching—your eye, our eye—the automobile cuts deftly through the night and through the storm. From above, from up here, there is no panting dog, there are no slapping windshield wipers, no quickened human heartbeats. There is only the hazy yellow light moving forward through the clouds and steam and water, and the solo auto—just a flashlight advancing, a flashlight following its light, following its high beams east along an otherwise blackened highway—looks almost peaceful. There are no towns lit up in the distance, no headlights from oncoming traffic, no streetlamps delineating the thin road’s turns and dips.
But the sky? Where we are? So far up, the sky is a port-wine stain of brooding purple, punctuated by flame-like lightning, train-sized thunder. Several thousand feet higher, a place even higher than where we are now, a place from where we couldn’t see the car, where we couldn’t see anything, not even the rippling purple currents—several thousand feet higher, there are sheets of ice falling fast and loud, planks of snow like wood being battered and bullied by the atmosphere: a cacophony of ripping and tearing, a punching and hollering of ice pushing back against the steamy earth air, which shoots up fast and hot. Where the ice meets the heat, the sheets turn warm; they thin and loosen first like glass breaking and then like glass melting until the ice is water and the water is landing in waves—landing on the countryside, on the highway, on the roof of the isolated automobile so far beneath us.
But back to the car, the perspective is closer, tighter. The air-conditioning inches in humid and funky, a loamy mixture of wet soil and soft asphalt. The car—a tiny capsule of dryness—pushes forward awkwardly, hesitantly, with none of the finesse and speed suggested from above. There are no sounds from the radio, and perhaps no sounds either of any particular heartbeat, but the rain lands hard on the roof and the windshield wipers hit their marks with a troubling rhythm and the dog sits wide-eyed and panting, an uninterrupted string of drool extending from his gum to his shoulder. From the car, there is no sense of the bruise-y purple majesty battling in the ether overhead. From the car—the headlights its only guide—there are just the few dozen radiant feet of constantly moving rain and fog and road. Nothing more.