ANOTHER MIDNIGHT DRIVE across the mountains, first the Greens, then the Adirondacks. Todd Rundgren on the radio, “I Saw the Light,” 9N near Lake George, 1972, says the DJ, the year I was born—when the red taillights in front of me blur left, revealing another pair. One driver thinks he’ll pass another. Impossible move. Across the double lines, around the curve, the glare of white light oncoming. Double red, white, double red, and for a second I flash back to J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, the alleged eroticism of machine smashing into machine. I read it when I was eighteen because I thought it was cool, but I didn’t get it. It was just pulse and metal and flesh, the fantasy not so much of the crash but of “this immense motionless pause.” That was the line that returned. A frozen moment, red and white, all electric color. I get it now. It’s gorgeous.

Then one pair of red taillights swerves behind the others and the white lights pass on by, and I need a breather, and here this is, genocide kitsch, “efficiencies,” “honeymoon suites,” off-season, parking lot empty. So I leave the car running and the door open and because it’s upstate New York, next on the radio is Zeppelin, no kidding, “Stairway,” and I take my little picture.