He had never shared this bizarre and shameful experience with anyone. How could he? He had killed other human beings while in a state of ecstasy. Then, after no more than sixty seconds of nirvana and a half dozen Vietcong cut down, he had been hit, a leg bone shattered, and the feeling was gone. He had lain in abject terror for hours under U.S. Army C-123s raining defoliant. Before he knew it, he was back in the Bad Axe, back in the slow and secretly dull grind of living, with his new bride Maryanne to remind him not to piss and moan, to stop yearning constantly for more.

So, no, he did not miss his beloved at this moment, as his car bumped in beneath a primeval umbrage of maple, birch, and hickory, as his rusty bumper pried through tangled buckthorn and blackcaps, as a profusion of KEEP OUT and NO TRESPASSING signs exploded in his peripheral, because this was a moment truly beyond Maryanne, the plunging again of his exhausted soul into that terrible, secret sea of death-indifferent joy. He shouldn’t be here. So what?

He leaned toward his window to drink it in. The feverish shade screamed with insects. From above, sunset torched the treetop shrouds.

Noon is our new midnight…

Wow. Once more he tickled open the letter for a peek.

Changes in latitude, changes in attitude.

Jimmy Buffett, of course. But in the letter’s context, the line read as a prediction of mass movement by climate refugees, a vision of the clashing of displaced peoples with invaded peoples, of global conflagration.

He flipped the letter over. In his bizarre postscript, FROM HELL HOLLOW had written: Please forward to General Secretary, Group of Eight, Hotel du Palais, Avenue de L’Imperatrice, Biarritz, France. To be opened at noon, August 26, 2019. Dear Mr. Secretary: Look out the window.

Fanta stomped his brake. A sick whitetail buck staggered toward the Tercel. The creature’s ribs and hip bones showed through a ratty coat hung with odd polyps, warty and black, wobbling as the animal lurched toward collision. The buck’s head lolled. His jaw dripped. Fanta softly tapped the Tercel’s horn, but the deer blundered on until his splintered antlers struck the Tercel and he jumped back in blind fright.

Fanta gaped in sorrow at the ravages of chronic wasting disease. The buck’s brain, gone spongiform, performed little better than a sopping loaf of bread. The infected prions massing in the tissues of his eyes brought a closing darkness, while fibroid demons tried to escape through his skin. Weakly feisty, the poor creature blustered forward and once more challenged the Tercel’s grille, jousted with his ruined antlers, then careened away into the underbrush.

Fanta continued, but his sea of joy had begun pitching and plunging steeply.