When the roof opens, he changes the music. He puts on Wagner. He starts telling me the story of the Ring Cycle. Which is quite insane. A brother and sister fall in love, but they don’t know they’re brother and sister. After they find out, he goes to kill her husband with a magic sword. Then Wotan’s wife shows up to defend marriage. This is all about the Rheingold, which is gold at the bottom of the river, the Rhein, and we’re by our Rhein, the Hudson, which is why there’s Rhinebeck and Rhinecliff with the train station.

Not much rain gets in, because we’re going forward, but when it does, it feels amazing. Just like the trees are covered in that amazing ice that sparkles like diamonds, the rain drops that do touch our faces are almost frozen and they feel like sparks of cool energy…zip, zip, zap, zap…ahh…you know I love words…I could say ineffable but all ineffable means is that there are no words for it…transcendent? Could that be it? See the crystals, feel the crystals, be the crystals.

I know, I know, it’s because we were tripping. I don’t know what the doses were, but they were full doses, not microdoses.

A world more beautiful and glittering than diamonds.

The car is part of the magic. We’re moving. The lights of the car are moving. Changing dark to light. Shooting out the beams that turn into diffraction and splinter into colors. The sound system is astonishing. Even with the roof open, it sounds perfect. The heat pumps out so that we don’t feel cold at all.

Mick still wants sex, of course. That never went away.

I know it. He knows…or at least hopes…that I know it and that it is going to be part of the trip.

He unzips himself.

His cock is hard.

Under other circumstances I might have laughed—to myself—of course—I try not to be rude—surreal, it was surreal, but so totally typical—and that’s how whores—how women—keep our sense of superiority against your sense of superiority—we do that to you and it’s like a handle on a suitcase, the kind with wheels, like the one I came with, you grab and it trundles along after you, carrying everything you need.

But then, it was just an erection.

I was outside of so much of the things that I’m normally inside of. It was like I was escaping from myself, as well as the world, in this magic chariot ride.