An elephant’s square gray rump,

Leaves us in

The New England dust.

Tock, tick. Robin hasn’t uttered a word in . . . five minutes? Ten? As Captain Lucas attempts to navigate his flimsy vessel homeward, stewed synapses sputter inside his skull, then spark with tiny twinkles of light. He imagines that if he’d taken the time to have a second thought back in Cambridge before dropping the Orange Sunshine, it might’ve gone something like this: It’s going to be a long enough drive home to Long Island without dramatically increasing the risk of taking an imaginary exit into the vast unknown.

Or into a ditch.

How long will the drive be? Hard to say. Acid time is spongy — not that Captain Lucas is complaining. The irreversibly toxic tick-tock from present to future is the enemy. In less than twenty-four hours, the love of his life decamps for the frozen tundra.

Odysseus oozes to a standstill. The thing that from a distance resembled a garden trellis stretching across the highway and draped with green vines and shimmering pink flowers is in reality a row of tollbooths.

Ah! Sweet relief! The trippy nervousness that usually accompanies any interaction with a Straight Person of Authority mellows when the toll collector appears to be not much older than me. Bushy sideburns. Dirty-blond hair creeping out from under his cap and down over the collar of his green uniform. Face made of pink doll plastic.

Our eyes meet, and the toll guy grins knowingly — as only someone intimately acquainted with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds would. “Outta sight, man. Wish I could be where you are right now.”

“Wish you could, too.” I offer him a handful of viscous coinage that has puddled together in my palm like lumpy silver mercury.

My plastic-faced comrade chuckles and plucks out what’s owed. “Peace, brother.”

“Hang loose, man.”

And away we —

“For God’s sake, Lucas! What if he was a cop?” Robin wigs out. Taken by surprise, I unintentionally wrench the wheel, making the microbus swerve violently. Tires screech as Odysseus rocks like a boat tossed on stormy seas.

I’ve just regained control of my trusty rusty ship when a voice from behind us mumbles, “Huh? Cop?” It’s Milton. I’ve forgotten that he’s sleeping on the mattress in the back. On our way home from a brief but torturous visit to Maine, we stopped in Cambridge to pick him up.

“It’s nothing, man. Go back to sleep,” I tell him. Meanwhile, Robin’s twisted around in her seat, hands locked into fists, peering out the back window as if expecting the entire Massachusetts Turnpike Tollbooth Cavalry to be thundering up behind us. In the past, my ladylove has, on occasion, been known to err on the acute side of uptight, but given my currently blitzed sensibilities, am I truly in a position to cast judgment?