Out in the street there, hours over, among the mist of night the father came upon a box. He could not remember the box he’d seen out on the neighbor’s lawn all those days or weeks before. This box here was much like that box, of the same texture and shade, except bigger and giving off a stream of steam, sent out to mesh and branch upon the night.
The box here, in the middle of the highway—how had he hit, at last, a highway? where were all the other cars?—took up so much of the six lanes heading south—six other lanes blockaded off beside them heading the opposite direction—there remained no room on the blacktop for the father’s car to fit around it. The box seemed to give away its own light, in flux of concert with the row of streetbulbs and skyspots overhead.
Under the loom of lamp the father slowed the car approaching, stopped before the box, got out. He left the engine on behind him, burning power.
Up close the box smelled like the son. The father had never had a particular stench he associated with the child’s air, but here it was the first thing that he thought—like charcoal and like money, cake batter or a freshly painted wall. The father put his head against the surface, listened. Inside, he heard a motor, churned—the same sound as his own motor, there behind him, clearly repeated in the box. As well, the sense of something softer hovered, inches from his head there, ear to ear.
Hello, he said aloud and heard the words come out all from him, and heard it also in the box repeated back. Hello.
Oh, he said, realizing. Oh.
He peered up toward his car. The windshield had fogged over so thick he could see no longer in. Something hulked behind the shading. Heads. He felt his eyes move in his head to see the sky above him, flat clean black.
This box was warm. The father knocked. He heard the knock as well repeated, two sounds from one move.
My name is . . . the father said, then waited, to hear the voice inside the box fill the sentence in, but it did not. Instead, an itch dragging up along his inseam, a spark of choir. My name is . . .
The father threw up on the ground. In the vomit, there were errors—strings not vomit, but language, light. The bunched up bits were writing something, words at once sunk into the ground.
The father’s hair was longer now. He could not feel it.
The father walked around the box. He brushed his hands along the surface, after something—ridges, locks, or doors. At the corner, between where the highway’s edges held the box in at its side, there was a little aisle of space where he could sidle down along the box’s left flank, pressed in. He could not see from here how long the box went on. It seemed to stretch forever down the way, as if the whole highway from this point and thereafter were seated with it, hosting. A light far beyond it gave it size.
The father hesitated at the box corner, not quite blinking, then he began along the box. His belly rubbed. His backbone. Inseams. Friction. The grain of the box, unlike the concrete median, was soft but firm—both wanting and somehow giving.
On the north side of the highway, there behind him, the father felt an audience, all watched. The median between them dragged against his back’s tagged body fat. What if the box grew larger, all of a sudden? He would be crushed.
Inside his chest, he heard applause.
Inside the box, as he squeezed sideways, onward, inside the box, too, he heard the brush of flesh on box.
Father? the father asked it.
This time from inside the box came no reply.