“I’ll be right back,” I said, putting my fork down, next to the half-empty plate. “I just need a little air.” My head thrummed, my ears drummed, and I could feel my heart convulse in fear. I stood, pushing the chair back with what must have been an abominable squawk. I’m not sure, I could only hear the beating blood in my ears. HRUSH, gluck, HRUSH, gluck.
I don’t remember how I came to stumble out of the restaurant’s glass door, but I do remember spilling out into the concrete, trading the blue white fluorescent glow for the sodium yellow fuzz. The surging sound in my ears calmed as soon as I replaced the fake stucco ceiling of the fake Italian for the great dome of the night. We were far enough into the city that the great yawning blackness was just the polluted indigo of “civilization,” that great blueish bruise on the sky.
Before I knew it, my car door was open and I was sliding into the driver’s seat. A quick turn of the key and the engine turned over and I was going… somewhere. My eyes throbbed with the same uneasy, liquid rhythm that my heart churned, the headlights and taillights seeming to surge and fade with the gurgle. I didn’t know where I was going, but something in my backbrain knew what turns to make. My hands took the turns of a volition not my own.
The city pared down to suburbs and further bled into farms, and then, suddenly, a great swath of nothing. As the sky darkened and the great sick yellow glow of urban sprawled receding into memory, so, too, did the surging fluids in my grain fade. As I climbed out of the car and started walking along the side of the highway, gravel and loose road asphalt crunching under my heels, my eyes turned to the sky. My irises spun open and my pupils dilated, more and more of the tiny pinpricks of starlight growing visible.
The stars seemed to pulse tonight. Gone was the cheery twinkling star of my youth. These great balls of elemental fire faintly throbbed with some message, flashing with some urgent note sent from the creation of the universe. If I could just read it, I thought, stopping just long enough to stumble as my heel broke. I abandoned them both, impractical as they were to my mission. Wet grass swished, slick, against my bare legs, as I headed deeper into the unmowed field, deeper into the dark, to read and listen.
