Each day dresses itself in a week. A month ago the sun broke its sunrise over your trunk and you passed through the Appalachians. Then Kentucky. Hills mined beyond recognition. Chewed by tractors. Nibbled through to their ribs. If there are trees they are infants. Mechanical claws, wheels drills rotors land themselves like insects over the slopes.
The trans-Siberian railway continues. You keep going. You drive through the smells of diesel and cost-effectiveness. Your eyes red themselves with exhaust. You try to look. To tell what you see. The perverted anonymity of motel rooms. Gas stations where chewing tobacco receives a separate isle. I-Hop diners where miners row themselves in front of Football telecasts with the attentive concern of UN delegates. Where Evangelical crosses stick lit and gleaming out of the night forest. Where the earth tilts and the hills slide off.
Where you see with your own eyes what silence looks like. Where “nothing” turns into a qualitative object. Where the earth is flat. Where next weeks’ weather hangs at the far end of the chessboard. Where people use words like “ours” and “here.”
You keep on going. You go past “just over there.” You go where ghost cities of highrises form themselves like playing blocks over the snow carpet. Where you move like a fly towards them. Where even these glass sentries seem to lean on each other under the winds that keep on and on on on on on from nowhere on to nowhere.
But sooner or later everybody sleeps. For the first time in years you slide into the backseat. You are little again. Everything is simple. You close your eyes.
And resting your nose on the metallic cold of the glass you again open them. You are on a local road, the sun is heavy over the side of your neck. In the front seats parents are hoping for gas. A forgotten stable passes you on the other side of the window. Then a bit of snow. Then your eyes snap open. You slide up in the seat look back over the trunk reach for balance, reach over the seats and suddenly and unexpectedly –
“Stop!”
