As her, the girl with the holly-wreath hair, I stand back in the dark part of the place and I listen to the music blossom and expand and I smell the fragrant burning rings of the trees. And then in my floaty blouse I float up and look down on the lights in the clearing, with another ultra perspective, the perspective of the person directing the film. And I see how everything is informed by everything, because there is no way it cannot be. And then I wake up, and choose not to trouble my wife with any of it.

DRIFTWOOD (1968)

He came out of the canyon with his guitar at dawn, queried by the distant howl of coyotes. He was wearing a stranger’s shirt and had not been to sleep. The first truck he flagged down stopped and after one more ride, in a hoarse 1959 Buick LeSabre driven by a silent man who smelled of cigarettes and reminded him of his aunt in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint, he reached the airport. Everyone there looked almost but not quite as tired as him. The dehydrated fur all over his brain amplified a paranoia in him, made each of his small actions feel observed. On the plane a stewardess brought him a nest of dry chicken with some lettuce so papery and devoid of moisture it seemed like fake lettuce, lettuce made solely for photo shoots of lettuce. She asked him if he was travelling on some sort of business and a cough-laugh escaped his throat. What on earth kind of business looked like this? He’d told himself he had done enough of going where everyone said you should go, and wanted to try the alternative approach of going just somewhere, roll the dice across a map, but it was a little more pre-meditated than that. ‘I’m going back where I come from,’ he told her.

As the coach moved sluggishly through the last outposts of the city, it rained, just like it did in the songs. Rain-grey town, known for its sound. None of the flamboyant outfits he’d heard about were in evidence. All of his fellow passengers were wearing clothes mimicking the colour of the sky. As the rain cleared, he saw toy cars, made to measure for the toy road system around them, and the toy driveways of the toy houses beyond that where the toy cars secured their prescribed eight hours’ sleep every night.