From the back seat her son explains what would happen if she got sucked into a black hole. Moon-faced flowers are wild sweet potato with heart-shaped leaves and hairy seeds, white and alive in the night. “It’s a perfect example of exponential growth,” he says. In summer the light stays long, cicadas apocalyptic with the windows rolled down. Fast down the hill toward the Ohio heading home. On the opposite bank an oil refinery spreads into Kentucky, its tall stacks shooting flames into the sky. “Imagine your body being split in two halves,” he says. West Virginia is wild. It’s right there on the signs: montani semper liberi. Montani semper liberi means mountains are always free? “Then imagine both halves of your body being split in half, and those halves being split in half, then those halves being split in half, and then those halves being split in half. So you’d just keep splitting your pieces until you were only molecules.” You were only molecules, she thinks. And those sweet potato flowers like a million wagging moons. “Mom?” he says. “Are you listening?” In a story she read last week at the beach a man in a straw hat cut off a duck’s head while the children stood and watched. “Lid—lid—lid—,” the man called. “Qua—qua—qua—,” said the duck. Then the head fell to the grass and the duck’s feet ran its bottom half away. “Yes,” she tells him. “Yes!” She shouts over the wind.
It’s the hottest week in the world. In Sweden a forest fire has crossed the Arctic Circle. In Oman the overnight low is 120 degrees. Near a small German town famous for its asparagus, long-deserted bombs are exploding beneath the trees. And just downstream in Czechia a Hunger Stone has emerged in the Elbe, the water having hit a record low. “If you see me, weep,” it reads, the words etched desperately four centuries before. A second message emerges upriver: “We cried—We cry—And you will cry.” But the dead are loud as toasters. The fish flash in the mud. Meanwhile, further north, seen only from the sky, ghost landscapes rise up via drought: the blueprint of an eighteenth-century mansion on a lawn, a WWII airfield beneath a Hampshire farm, an elaborate Victorian garden long ago erased. Looking at the drone shot of that nonhouse on her phone, she thought of pressed flowers gone brown—no, those cyanotypes of seaweed she saw once on display. A woman named Anna Atkins laid carefully dried specimens on chemically treated paper. Left out in the sun, the seaweed burned its own pale shadow onto a deep blue page. The smell of Kentucky is flammable, damp. The refinery like a spaceship. “This Blue Drama,” that exhibition was called.
“In 1672,” her son informs her, “Robert Boyle read an entire magazine by the light coming off a piece of rotting veal.” From Delaware to Kentucky, they’ve counted fifteen deer by the side of the road. Once the sun set, the deer began to glow. “It was a neck,” he says. “It was this disgusting fatty piece of baby cow neck.” At a cement table by a grassy field they eat warm melon and pretzels and hard-boiled eggs. A red-winged blackbird trills on a stalk. An old man in the darkened lot moves toward them like a glacier. “I love summer,” her son says, oblivious to the stranger, listening to cicadas ringing on and on. “We should just keep driving to wherever it’s summer, and when it’s not summer there we should drive to wherever it’s summer next.” The air is thick with meadow grass and bugs. On the one hand, on the highway, traffic rushes past, but pale moths twist over the field as if there were no time. A part of her whorls outward with those moths, out and out to native plants as weedy as her kid—a crooked stem aster, a blazing star. When she was small, smaller than he is now, and quiet, much quieter than him, her mother wallpapered their apartment in a stylized jungle print. The leaves on the banana trees curled away like ribs. The eyes of the jungle cats looked out like human eyes. Every night when the lights clicked off she saw men stepping between the leaves and right off of the walls. They were quiet as leopards so as not to wake her mom. At last, the stranger has arrived. “Hello,” she says. Her son turns. The old man opens a toothless mouth. He is trying to tell them something, and they are trying to hear it, but it takes him thirty years to get it out. “I know,” she says when he is done. He turns his gaze to the clamorous field. “No,” he shakes his head, “you’ve got a long way to go.”
Night comes to Kentucky with red clouds and green sky then the fields are dark. No breeze blows. Some satellites shine. With the old man asleep in the seat beside her and her son asleep in the back, she is the only one to see the electric billboard in the middle of nowhere that says “Jesus Recycled Humans.” The road rises up. Two weeks at her mother’s house has emptied her all the way out. O house in Delaware, bought by a dead husband. O house, a vast expanse of white. That first morning she stepped into the yard and everything was wrong—pool, umbrella, plastic shark. As if she’d never been there. “On the rocks?” her mother hissed before even brewing coffee. Several minutes ticked away as she waited for panic to pass. But the sun was clearly rising on the wrong side of that yard. Or else she’d woken back to front, and this was what it was like to face the ass side of your mind. The road rising steeply, the trees nearer the road, the moon like a beacon now between sweet gum and ash and pine. In Pennsylvania, she knows, there is a house made of glass where you can stand in one spot and watch the sunset and the moonrise at the exact same time. How comforting it sounds. Up on a hill, surrounded by woods, invisible from the road. “Who’d want to live in an invisible house?” rings her mother’s voice in her mind. Then a neon something flashes past and she remembers a half-forgotten class about the beginning of everything back before the bang. A whole semester of lectures on the origin of the world—a yawning gap there was, to start, and regions of fire and frost, and salt, but nowhere grass. In every direction the fields run gray, as if the night absorbed their green, but once upon a time all matter and light were one—and then the stars and then the fireflies and then the grass. She has no idea of the time. The clock on the dashboard tells her it’s tomorrow. She searches out her phone on the floor, but the car swerves, surprising her, and the old man stirs in his sleep.
For hours the road just goes. Traffic has thinned and her mind makes little visits to that story she read at the beach. “Oh, but I do want to be a bee frightfully,” said the child called Kezia, who sometimes dreamed of camels. But she wasn’t allowed to be a bee. She had to pick something else if she wanted to play the game: a rooster, a bull, a donkey, a sheep. Then when she raised her eyes from the book it was as if the story had dreamed the bees. Tiny golden bees were hovering above the sand. And the waves were going nuts, since somewhere out there a tropical storm was turning and headed in. So they fled her mother’s house, days of endless rain—fast through West Virginia and Kentucky heading home.
It’s the hottest week in the world. In Siberia the permafrost is collapsing into holes. In California the tide at night blooms an eerie blue. A wildfire in Texas caused a storm with one-inch hail. Then a billboard warns her HELL IS REAL and like a joke the road descends to another refinery and its pipe stacks shooting flames into the sky. All is passing memory, she thinks. In the largest of those Siberian holes, what scientists term a “mega slump,” they’ve discovered an ancient forest and plants untouched by the light of the sun for forty-five thousand years. The locals are afraid. They call the slump a door and claim it makes sounds in the dark. Their hands are cracked and shaking. Who wants to crawl inside? When they walk across the tundra the ground beneath their boots turns to jelly with every step. First it’s one hole and then another and then at the bottom of the deepest hole they find a frozen lake. The ice is black and solid, but someone sees something inside. He gets down on his hands and knees. He brushes away the snow. “Look!” she says, she can’t help herself, sparks from the refinery are drifting through the night sky like luminescent plankton. The old man’s toothless mouth expels cool air and bats. “Where are we?” cries a voice in the car. The road begins to turn. They are driving upside down on the bottom of the planet. She wishes she could tell him the truth. She says, “We’re almost home.”