“Sort of a crunching sound?”

Eyes front, soldierly, she cocks her head as if listening for something inaudible.

“Maybe it’s more of a grinding. Maybe the axioregulator bushings misaligning.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

If I weren’t so disoriented by Charlie’s uncharacteristic fearlessness at my car’s polyglot noisemaking—and her first-ever refusal to participate in one of our oldest rituals—I would laugh, for it’s clear I am not making it up. The noises of distress that the Reliant is making are so clear that they are discernible not only as vibrations in your inner ear but as vibrations journeying through the car seats and deep into the tissue of your body.

The car is literally humming with ailment.

“That,” I clarify.

“The radio?”

“No, the noise that is making the gauges rattle around,” I say as the engine gags brutally. “The noise that sounds like a flock of California condors getting sucked into a jet engine.”

“The what?”

The car shudders, groans, spits something metallic onto the asphalt below us.

“That,” I say again.

“I think it’s just warming up.”

“Warming up?” I say in a tone of voice that may fall somewhere on the anger spectrum. “Do you know what car you’re in?”58

A lifetime of honing the wrong instincts impels me to step on the brakes and yank the car to the curb. Before I know what I’m doing I have popped the hood and extracted the ring box from the engine bay. Beads of perspiration rappel down my back, forming freshets. I can feel each one coursing down its route, splitting and rejoining, making me an idiotically grinning delta of sweat. I am also suffering from a momentary fugue of anti-déjà vu: nothing is identifiably like anything else. I walk this street all the time, I shop all these stores, yet suddenly I cannot name them. For reassurance I peer around the hood and look at Charlie. Through the cracked glass her features are split and Cubist-like, nearly frightening, her expression a glossary on anxiety and confusion.

Something in me tells me to stop.

Something else tells me to go go go.

I feel light-headed, as if I’ve just noshed on a gift basket of Pavulon and Nix. I open the box. The ring is impossibly brilliant and seems to embody a purity I can never hope to attain. I close the box. I run a fingernail over the surface, making characters of unknown meanings in the velvet. It feels good: complicit and rare. Almost erotic. I wonder why I’ve never snuggled this box. That would feel great. A homeless Asian guy attired in a smock of canvas and discolored paper maps hobbles past, smiling in a way that makes his face go bruised and troughed like a dried apricot. Again I open the box. The ring is still there.

Platinum-banded shine: check.

Otherworldly sparkliness: check.

Inexplicable feeling of mortal dread: check.