*_Author's note_: The following text includes descriptions of activities that could get one seriously injured or very likely dead in real life. The author in no way endorses these activities, nor should this text be construed as an endorsement or encouragement thereof. We're sure you can find a better and far safer way of getting your kicks.*

February 12, 2010. Manchester, NH

I am the passenger
And I ride and I ride
I ride through the city's back side
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, they're bright in a hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight

This has nothing to do with the past. This is not a recursive thing, which acquires meaning after the fact. All I can tell you is where I am right now, not what my intention is or how fast I am moving toward it. At this moment, I am both fixed and moving. I am driving Chloe's car at fifty miles an hour north from Manchester, in the snow, with one window down and the heat and the radio on. The car is breathing heat against my legs, smell of old leaves left over from autumn caught in the air intake. Snow is swirling in through the passenger window, melting on the seatback. Right now, my stomach is cramped and my legs feel detached, but my focus is undiminished. Right now, I am so sure.

I am heading north, because there isn't enough room in the city for me to do what I need to do. Last night, waking up with my timesight on and the sound of snakes in my head, I realized that my apartment has become contaminated -- too much richness, too much potential. The light over my desk, the readout on my alarm clock, the refrigerator's bulb, all glow, sparkling with a crackling electricity. I have artificially strengthened my doors, my windows (even though they are currently open, windowsills filling with snow), even the telephone lines, and the isolation has bred itself strong. Right now, things are battling eachother even in my absence for the nutrients I've left behind, epiphytic flowers blossoming from the kitchen cabinets, carpet breeding readymade fossils.

I am the passenger
I stay under glass
I look through my window so bright
I see the stars come out tonight
I see the bright and hollow sky
Over the city's a rip in the sky
And everything looks good tonight
Singin' la la la la la-la-la la
La la la la la-la-la la
La la la la la-la-la la la-la

This has nothing to do with memory. There is a rule of diminishing returns, so far as memory is concerned. In my experience, memory ceases to become useful when it becomes pleasant -- when it turns into nostalgia -- because nostalgia takes your mind off the present. We are all solely of the present, and thinking otherwise is a vain hope; we cannot know the future, we forget the past. There exists only the present and the potential ... that which may potentially be, and that which might potentially have been. Reading Chloe's journals, and writing my own commentary on them, are not two separate actions. To the best of my ability, I am trying to write that which she did not, but might have. I am trying to create a different future for her past.

In the snowcovered field next to the car, blur of snow like cirrus clouds rushing across the stubbled wheat and frozen ground, I have a momentary sense of split vision. I am here, listening to the rushing of snow and the car's ticking as the engine cools, and I am also there, on the floor, listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights -- loud in my ears, in the silence -- and the ticking and gurgling of my body shutting down around my stopped heart. The white ceiling and its gray waterstains are the slate-gray sky and massive, smeared-out clouds above me, and the numbness in my hands here is the same numbness there. Far across the field, at the edge of the faded red snow fencing, the trees are blurred and bony; in my eyes, I can only see the corner of the window, upside-down, where the trees are unseen but blooming.

I walk a few steps away from the car, rush of snow like static through its headlights, hands in my pockets, Chloe's fifth journal (Autumn-Spring, '79) under my arm. Out here, there is no movement, just a gradual receding that seems almost not to have occurred at all.

Get into the car
We'll be the passenger
We'll ride through the city tonight
See the city's ripped insides
We'll see the bright and hollow sky
We'll see the stars that shine so bright
The sky was made for us tonight

This has nothing to do with Chloe being dead. I have come to terms with her death, and my role in it, and what I did and did not do for her. I am not trying to fix things, or make things right, out here in the field with one of her elementary-school journals and her gun.

I found her gun at the bottom of a box two days ago. I hadn't thought about it since she died; in a way, I'm sure I conceived of it being buried with her, Egyptian, perhaps settled next to a little model boat or a blue porcelain figurine. It was something that she had always had, as long as I had known her, and it had become more a part of her than anything else had ever been. As far as I know, she had never made it anything special, never named it or grafted it with a spirit's life or carved markings into the threads inside its barrel as others did. Still, it was hers, and lifting it from the box the day before last, it felt like her hand in mine.

Holding it then, I remembered holding it for the first time. Now, listening to the snow and the car settling into itself with its murmurs of shrinking metal, I hear the hissing and contractions of the machines that kept her breathing to the end, breathing as I do now. Even when she died, in the midst of my hesitation, her hand was still as warm as the gun is now.

Oh the passenger
How how he rides
Oh the passenger
He rides and he rides
He looks through his window
What does he see?
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He see the stars come out tonight
He sees the city's ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
'cause it just belongs to you and me
So let's take a ride and see what's mine
Singing...

This has nothing to do with what I have learned. All I can tell you is where I am; putting into words my motivations or intent is impossible, inherently excluded by knowledge of my position. Burkert, in his book on the mystery cults of antiquity, writes that the mysteries were "arrheta" -- literally, unspeakable -- not because their details could not be revealed, but rather because, by their nature, the mysteries could not be contained in the spoken word alone. What, then, can I tell you about what I have to do, what I am doing right now? How can I convey this to anyone but one of my symmistae, my co-initiates?

I've intentionally left my keys in the car, the doors unlocked. I can hear the radio through the open window, Iggy Pop on some college station through the static. I take off my gloves, fumbling to shove them onehanded into my coat pocket, almost drop the gun into the snow and the journal after it. My breath steams, fogs my glasses. I am inhaling, slowly, as my glasses clear.

I am taking a bullet from my coat pocket, remembering their faded green box on Chloe's dresser. I am pulling the cylinder from the gun, slotting the cartridge into one of its six holes, pushing the cylinder back into place. I am remembering Chloe's face against the hospital pillow, the tubes in her nose and the bruises around her eyes, her delighted smile. I am pulling back the trigger with my thumb, halfway to cocked, rolling the cylinder against the palm of my bare hand, where snowflakes are gathering. I am breathing in, rife with possibility.I am standing outside myself, watching me put the muzzle to my right temple and squeeze the trigger. And click.

And squeeze, and click, and squeeze, and click, and squeeze and click, and squeeze and click and squeeze and click.

I am breathing out.

In six out of six potential futures, my blood is steaming into the air like my breath is now. Here, my stomach unknotting, my head filled with static from the radio, I am pulling the cylinder from Chloe's gun, fingers moist with snow, seeing the dimpled mark where the cartridge, hammer-struck, did not go off. In six out of six probabilistic futures, my body is unbreathing, muscles spasming, clockwork ticking to a halt. Here, I am breathing in, the first breath that has ever been wholly of my own creation.

Here, I am walking back to the car, socks already damp from the snow, dropping the defective bullet like a premature seed into one of the earth's furrows. Snow is already thickening on the car's hood, whispering across the windshield like something I've seen before. Here, I am opening the car door, pressing the key into the ignition, backing up with headlights on and the heater coughing back into life. And there are so many beautiful people in the car with me.

Oh, the passenger
He rides and he rides
He sees things from under glass
He looks through his window's eye
He sees the things he knows are his
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He sees the city asleep at night
He sees the stars are out tonight
And all of it is yours and mine
And all of it is yours and mine
Oh, let's ride and ride and ride and ride...
Singing...

Lyrics: Iggy Pop, "The Passenger"