I steered our crowded van. Wasn’t I doing the same dumb thing that I always did: looking for meaning where there wasn’t any? Why did my mind always go for these outlandish supernatural explanations, rather than the most reasonable? Maybe I had tripped one too many times. One day I might take a trip and never come back, go over the deep end, like her. But it wasn’t just me; it was a generalized problem with the human mind, the downside of cognition: the need to find order in disorder, to make sense out of the inexplicable, even if we imagined it.
As my mind buzzed with debate, the woman motioned with one hand. “Right here.”
I parked in front of a large home set back on a verdant yard, expecting her to dart from the car and run to safety. Instead, she hung her right leg out the car door and paused. “Okay thanks,” she said. “We should hang out sometime.” She scribbled her number on a scrap of paper that she fished from our ashtray. “Call me.”
Dean climbed into the passenger seat as she sauntered up the front steps. He pocketed his knife. “My God,” I muttered. “What a trip.” I began mulling over theories as to what we’d just experienced: was she running from a rapist? An abusive boyfriend who threatened her? Was she suffering from amphetamine psychosis?
“You know there was nobody following us,” Dean said, “right?” I nodded then admitted I wasn’t entirely sure. He snickered at my naiveté. “She’s totally schizophrenic.”
I trusted he was right, but I didn’t want him to be. While the empirical side of me favored scientific thinking, the whimsical side resisted the idea that medical science could classify and explain away the complex and sometimes troubling nature of human behavior. I thought I’d read somewhere that certain scholars believed many of the great Biblical prophets’ visions resulted from seizures. What modern doctors would diagnose as epilepsy was, back then, perceived as the frightening ability to channel divine messages. When prophets spoke, ancient people listened. Now prophets and believers got tranquilizing prescriptions.
We debated calling the number to see if the woman was alright, then we stored the paper in the ashtray and headed out of town.
I steered us down the winding roads and onto the interstate, merging with the stream of morning commuters. The sun rose over the Cascades, blinding my tired eyes. Dean sipped his soda.
“I can’t believe you thought she was serious,” he said further down the road.
“Hey, what do I know?” I shrugged and put on my sunglasses. “She was scared. I mean, anything’s possible.”
Dean shook his head, sucking on his straw.
We slept in a south Seattle motel that morning: checked in during rush hour, checked out at 6:30 p.m. For the next two days we drove through Washington and Oregon into Northern California. As exhaustion set in not long after sunset, we agreed to sleep in the next town we hit. Twenty-nine miles northwest of the town of Weed, and several hours before bedtime, we arrived in Yreka.
Next to a pasture beyond the glow of lights, we emptied the capsules onto a CD case and cut the PCP into lines with a credit card. Unsure of the proper dosage, we did it all, snorting it through a rolled dollar bill until our eyes teared up and noses stung. I wanted to sneeze but feared expelling the precious powder.
We sat in the van wiping our eyes. I cut the engine and rolled down the windows. The smell of dry grass mixed with the glue-like odor caking my nostrils. Crickets chirped in the field. Our arms rested on the warm metal frame.
“This stuff sucks,” I said. Knowing we’d be too many hundreds of miles away to complain, our Canadian hosts had probably cut the drug with something to keep the bulk for themselves.
“Maybe it takes a while,” Dean said. We decided to drive around.
Searching for a safe place, still hoping to lose our minds without attracting police, we headed west. Like the rollercoaster in D&D, the narrow country road buckled, lifting free of the golden valley and hurling us into the mountains. Thin pines crowded around, deepening the already deep night. On a curve in the road, I eased the van into a dirt pullout tucked against a hillside. We stepped outside. A fine patina of stars dusted the heavens. I looked up and my head spun so fast I thought I was going to puke. Dean said he felt the same. I looked down, hoping to dull the motion sickness, but the dizziness remained. Squinting didn’t help, or drawing breath.
One of us said, “I need to lie down.” For some reason we chose the middle of the road.
Stepping from the shoulder, we laid on our backs on the warm blacktop. Feet to the east, heads to the west, Dean sprawled on one side of the lane line, I on the other. We folded our hands across our chests like mummies and set our shoulders a foot apart.
The chirping crickets grew louder and warmth rose through the back of my shirt. Following teenage drinking protocol, I focused my eyes on something fixed: the stars. They glowed between the dark treetops but were not staying still. They seemed to be slowly rolling over, the night sky’s entire surface slewing to the right. I watched the celestial film drift southward as if atop a body of water, pulling me with it as it spilled over the trees. I pinched my eyes shut, trying to halt the world, but it revolved within the darkness under my eyelids.
“I’m getting sick standing still,” I said. Dean too. We were in the foothills of the Klamath Mountains, in one of the West Coast’s most Eden-like and least populated areas, and we couldn’t do anything but close our eyes.
The hills were quiet enough that we assumed we would hear a car approaching. Or, with our eyes open, at least see the headlights reflected on the pines. We wouldn’t be able to test this theory until a car drove up from either direction, and it didn’t matter. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. My chest pounded and pulse thumped in my neck. Pressing my fingers to my temples, I awaited the pang of expiration.
I had long wished I shared Dean’s quiet acceptance of death. Heaven sounded wonderful, reincarnation better. I wanted to imagine that, upon dying, our spirits were ferried into another dimension where our minds lived on—our conscious selves, with all our memories, personality, and sense of humor intact—so that, even if reincarnated as a Skagit Valley farm cat or a Snoqualmie Pass huckleberry bush, we would forever remain ourselves. Aaron, always Aaron. I just kept thinking of what my dad believed. “When you die,” he’d said on numerous occasions, “you die. That’s it.” He’d been raised Baptist but later forsook it as “Fear of fire and brimstone.” Many people, some in our own family, spent their whole lives preparing for the afterlife—penance, church services, no drinking, no dancing, frequently giving alms. But what if, as I feared, their conception was wrong and my father’s was right? That we were doomed to lie in the dirt until we became indistinguishable from it? Lying on that mountain road, I thought we were resting in our graves, that if a car didn’t kill us the PCP would, leaving us for the animals to pick apart. Foxes would emerge from the forest to tug at our flesh. Coyotes would drag an arm in one direction, a rib in another.
During my elementary school, a recurring sensation often washed over me. For that brief moment right before sleep, I drifted through space in a universe without planets. Nothing in the distance, nothing in every direction. For one overwhelming second my primate brain grasped the elusive notion of death as a long, black, empty forever. That’s what awaits us, I’d think: eternal nothing, infinite blackness. The sensation never lasted more than two seconds. Then my eyes jolted open, and I pressed my face into the