Wide Open Throttle

I can feel my toes crushed up against the tip of my shoe, mashing the pedal to the floor, not coming up for air. I'm racing across a red desert of rocks, past dry, cracking landscape and trenchant bluffs. A plume of earth rises behind me and I can't see where I've come from. I can barely see where I'm going through a sepia tinged windshield covered in dust. The wheel is trembling as I gain speed, uncertain on ever changing ground.

"It'll be fine," you say, your gravelly, leisurely baritone crackling through the phone. I'm sitting on the edge of the dining room chair with my back arched, uncomfortable, my brain making forty-thousand connections in every direction.

"But how will it be fine?" I say. It's rhetorical, which you also recognize, but you answer anyway. You are lying in bed, and your voice reflects this, and I can hear you raise your arm up over your head.

"I feel chill when I'm around you."

My long hair blows backwards and whips me in the eye. It stings, and I can feel tears escaping and gliding along my temple. I can't let up, I can't take my foot off the gas. And now I see it, the cliff, the broad blue sky holding the whole world, the future accident.

"I don't feel chill," I say. "I feel anxious." I'm pinching the lip of the dining room table and my fingers have made a sweaty outline. I hear you snuff through your nose, gently, then reposition the phone.

"We can just see where it goes, it doesn't have to be serious," you say.

I'm clenching my jaw. I look again in the rearview mirror but it's nothing but dirt. There's grit in my teeth and the roar of the wind drowns out everything except the empty expanse I am fast approaching. I am entranced by it, this vast gap of nothingness, of the simultaneous unknown and absolute certainty.

"I don't foresee this ending well," I say more quietly this time, pressing my phone up against my mouth.

"I'll dial it back," you say, and then, "Babe, we could have a great time together."

I hang up while you are still talking, but it's not on purpose.

There are two endings to my dream.

In one, I free my frozen right foot and I brake. I brake as hard as I can and on that crumbling surface the car starts to slide sideways, the cloud of gravel changes direction and I am pelted by pebbles and sand. I duck down but I continue to slide and when the car finally stops I sit up to see the immense canyon just below my elbow, and I hear the rocks falling beneath the car, striking the cliff as they fall to the bottom. The dust descends slowly, and I am alone.

In the other, I never let up. The canyon is growing in depth and width, and I can almost see everything in it, the river, the trees, the unforgiving treachery of every sharp angle. But I can't stop. I won't stop. I can hear only the engine, the violence of the wind, the shaking intensity of every part of the car. And then I don't hear anything. One minute there is ground beneath me and the next, just sky.