In his car along the street among the houses in the light—something shaking where the sun was—some complex hole—the father could not remember how to get to home. He was supposed to be already back at his desk now for the next day, for more staring. He could not even feel the wheel.
He sent an email from his cell phone to his superior, a man he’d never seen or heard or known by name:
To Whom It May Concern:
Sick. Sorry. Soon.
Yours,
A reply came back in several seconds.
To Whom It Does Concern:
You snide shit. I’m getting groggy. I am becoming an exploder and you are nearby. I have sleds in my sheep barn—barn, barn, house, your house. Got it? Suck one. Suck good. And bring an extra arm.
Best,
Somewhere now out lost in loops around the building—where was the building?—the father could not at all recall even the direction he’d made the car aim in the name of home all those evenings, and those mornings, in reverse—which way to go now in the nowhere that had settled on the air. Today the day was bruisy like a dropped baby and half of the sky seemed stood before, as if by god, or a cardboard cutout of god in god’s absence, wherever he or she or it had gone. The father refused to capitalize the word god even inside his mind, despite how in the night inside his mind when he could not sleep, he prayed. Prayed so loud inside his mind it hurt, it made the house stink, which his wife assumed was indigestion.
Inside the car the father rolled long along the street among the buildings in the light—something shaking where the sun was—he’d already thought all this before. His balding head was pounding. The streets and trees had blanched a white. Where there’d been strip malls somewhere before, billboards, the wet and wire were all covered in a gloss, webbed fat with chrysalis or kite-string—an ever-present mayonnaise. By miles the roads would loop back to where they started, farting the father back out nowhere clear. The nearest roads’ names had changed to SLORISISIIISSISS, VORDBEND, MONNNNNNEY. There was nowhere clear to get a beer.
Along the streets in all directions a slow, thick rain raining in rising from the earth into the sky.
Inside his car the father felt an awful feeling there was something breathing besides him. Something right there on the backseat, strapped in, needing, shaped like him. He could not bring himself to peek. Through the windshield in his car out in the street among the houses in the light the father watched the car continue forward, scrolling, returning where he’d been again already—no sound—the years inside him itching, eating, and, outside, the years upon him soon to come.