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By Root 361 0

they turned and opened and closed again as I shot down the middle of the fields. I accelerated but I still felt as if I had stepped wrong and was plunging backward. Like the rider on an amusement, I had that strange satisfaction that it was all designed to be scary, to be fun, and would soon be over. I wondered if that meant I was going to die. I had no reason to think I would, but I wondered. I put my foot to the floor and stared straight forward while the terror of high speed opened up the sinuses in my head and put a taste of pennies in my mouth. And I drove like a spear through the tiny towns, miniatures in a work of meticulous depiction floating on the fields of corn and soy, went speeding along through them toward some deep violent conclusion—to have my heart torn out and eaten while I watched. The sun had set but the fields were soaked with light in the dusk. I wanted to stagger to the shore of this mindless iridescence and throw into it my most beloved thing, my very favorite thing. When I’d worn myself out going too fast, I pulled into the roadside weeds. I stopped the car in the middle of the round shimmering table of the earth. Meanwhile the dusk wouldn’t die. Everything was visible and there was even enough light to read the title of the pamphlet from the Friesland Fellowship: “Come to the Father.”

I picked it up from the dashboard and read its few paragraphs. I found myself disappointed by what it said. Its author stressed that an inward experience of conversion was important. In my current frame of mind I’d hoped for warnings much stranger and not so obvious: “Brown shoes are important.” “Attention to the length of the fingernails is crucial.” “Everything depends on the sky.”

On the very brink of making love to her, I hadn’t seen Flower naked. More than once I’d seen her stripped completely bare, but not this time. She’d had her smock unbuttoned, that was all. This time I’d been the one stripped bare. A nakedness both sudden and long in coming. Did she do that to me? Or did it simply coincide?

I thought of what she’d said, in my mind I heard her saying it, I couldn’t stop hearing it, I wished she’d never said it:

“I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.”

I drove on toward the world’s darker half. Now the horizon was like that of the sea around certain islands, tar black, blended with the night. Halfway up the sky and to my right floated the new moon. Satisfied that darkness had found me, feeling in a way hidden from myself, I put the car in gear and went to my home.

—Which I reached within an hour. I spent a good long while opening the door, which I’d never operated, of my house’s small garage, and parked the BMW. In the dimness I couldn’t make out the color of this vehicle, and I hadn’t bothered to notice in the light. I can’t think of any more significant betrayal in my life, that is, any clearer contradicton of a former self, than owning this car after four years’ mourning two victims of a car crash. I pressed the button and stepped out quickly as the door rolled shut. I stood on the walk looking up at a hazy sky from which nevertheless a bit of starlight descended. The waterfall noise of a stadium crowd reached me, exploding and fading. A block away we had the high school, the town’s biggest, or so I understood: low penitentiary structures and trampled grounds. In the mornings, clumps of students plied the neighborhood. I wasn’t around to see what they got up to in the afternoons.

I took a liter bottle of Pellegrino from my refrigerator and walked over to the high school, where a night baseball game was in progress. The stadium lay in a vale—a dell?—one of the few significant depressions in the area’s landscape. The whole world had seeped away and down into this bowl. The playing field below me was utterly green with vegetable life and white with electric light, floating in an empty blackness.

I watched the rest of the game. It seemed an important one. The fans behaved like an excited, roaring liquid. Over this distance I couldn’t make out the ball itself, had no evidence of it except the