End of transmission.

•

I drove very fast. It was a precarious morning, and my mood was as fragile as the glass-spun light in which autumn lavishly wastes its colors: postdiluvial, a rainbow across gurgling water. I floated above it, kept my sensoria under a steady, gentle pressure like that of my sole on the gas pedal, the quivering of the speedometer needle, and the dials of the tachometer and the oil gauge.

Like these, my sensoria were, of course, ready to drop to zero as soon as I let up. I had to keep them at full speed, even if it became dangerous. Life is just a risky business; I don’t cudgel my brain about what could happen if I’m doing a hundred ten and a tire bursts or a piston jams because of some worn-out valve in the bowels of my car. The results wouldn’t exactly be edifying, but that’s life, things like that happen, not all miracles have ceased . . .

•

Incidentally, that was an amusing notion. It could really happen—and what if it did? What if my car flew from the road at this speed, caroming back and forth like a billiard ball between the boulevard trees, and eventually boring into the plowland beyond? Wouldn’t that be a godsend for my son? He could turn me into his myth (which, if I went on living, he could not, presumably, do: “My father died before he could finish his work”—that sounds nice when the father is twenty-four, less nice when he’s seventy; forty-nine is the outer limit anyway) . . . In any case, the idea was pleasurable because of its novel-like dramatics. I saw the ruins of my vehicle, a wheel ripped from its axle, springing far into the field, reeling and fluttering around its tire like a decelerating top. The metal casing was squooshed up like a discarded piece of tinfoil (candy bar wrapper), the engine block had been shoved in, blood was oozing underneath into the peacock-blue, iridescent oil . . . perhaps my hand was dangling slackly from the half-shredded door, with the frame bent in like an hourglass (a jewel from Gaia’s stories about the youth of her mother, the alleged Princess Jahovary: the hand she had to suspend in morbid grace over the balustrade of the box when she was taken to the opera as a girl; her governess whispering to her, “Gabrielle, n’oubliez pas la main morte!” and the totally different meaning of la mano morta in Italian: a lecherous paw in a crowd, wedging, as though accidentally, between a girl’s thighs—fine: it boiled down to the same thing).

At any rate, what I imagined could actually occur a few miles down the road. Would probably occur someday, if I kept driving through the countryside in my foolish fashion. It was even bound to come; I have known my death for a long time—now I suddenly felt it very close.

I am not timorous, which is why I drove no slower than before—in fact, even faster, more daringly, passing other cars more heedlessly, taking curves more ruthlessly—but my throat did tighten: