THE BLACK BOX

Michael opened his eyes in an afterthought—believing himself long dead. The night sky was somewhere over him in a yawning chasm, but with no room for tingling stars. Noises from the tumbling crash were somewhere back on the dark highway and waiting to catch up. He was unable to move any of his extremities. The hard asphalt clamped the vehicle fast, and he with it. He adapted to his predicament with sprints and sputters of detail. A flashing twelve indicated the car’s clock had survived the impact, whereas the rearview mirror had broken free of the windshield to lay in some orientation to his head. It was either up or down, yet angled in such a way to capture a piece of the road outside the busted window. A squeaking sound gradually emerged over the din of crickets. One of his car’s wheels was still spinning, and this at least located the crash not too far behind him in time. A plopping noise (perhaps brake fluid dripping down into the same wheel well) wound around an axis and tightened into a single corded thought: Something was clomping on hard heels down the cheek-flushed highway toward him. He floated in and out of it until a woman’s urgent voice took shape in his radio speaker.

“It’s not enough I tell you I love you, but I want to show you!” The interior of the car darkened from a shadow at the window. It dropped down out of an eyedropper to curve like a projection on the back of his retina. The voice was not coming from the radio but from the cell phone. “You must let me show you how much I love you!”

Michael strained to focus the blurry image—certain it was in the dislodged mirror and not in his head. Someone or something was towering over the wreck. White smoke billowed up out the entrails of the car to cloak her in the tattered plume of a dress.

The woman pleaded, “You must let me show you!”

Fingers congealed out of the shards of hanging glass in the window, becoming ribbons of hot taffy dragging back and forth over his exposed skin. He tried to make sense of it—to see how it was connected to him. Everything crystallized under a hail of falling glass. His briefs had been yanked down to his hipbones by gouging fingernails, and he could hear more than feel his flaccid penis slapping numbly against his thigh. Skulking metal rumbled overhead with thunder close enough to touch.

“You must let me show you!”

Ceiling upholstery covered his face like loose foreskin—it was impossible to breathe. He struggled to free an arm, but managed only a hand that sent a chunk of glass clinking to find which way was down.

His voice jabbed at her. “I can’t! I c…!”

The creature was instantly a pestle pressing down hard on him, making the sticky blackness ink half-dried on his body. Marrow squirmed in her pliable bones with each contraction and attempt to couple. A sliver of moonlight escaped her smothering to illuminate punching knees at his sides, and a snarling, hare-lipped face rolling over his genitals.

“You must let me show you!”

The rest of his arm finally broke free and struck the suitcase lodged behind his seat. It was sent banging into the car roof to empty its contents of ashes and schematics; he gagged on the kicked-up cloud. Saliva, streaked with soot, ran up into his nasal cavities and burned. His freed fingers lifted to cover his stinging eyes and grazed her flesh covered in the fine cinders; the texture was somewhere between peeled grape and fine-gauge sandpaper. Michael pushed against the slippery slope, but had no place to retreat into. Her hand cupped the still supple member as it burst against her stomach like overripe fruit. His body stiffened to dispossess it, but then wanted only to coil around her forearm with the agony of a dying snake. It felt as if a dull-edged knife were being used to scrape out his insides, and what had been impassable was now oozing freely down along firmer bones in her fingers. After a smarting tweak, his underwear was pulled back up in the fashion of a convenient blotter. His bones were little more than crushed powder under her, which left nothing to blunt the ripple sent mumbling up through his body.

She knelt down to kiss the cool chaff of his cheek, whispering, “I love you.”

He was already sinking back into the jaws of the car when she rose to eclipse the clock on the dashboard; it betrayed her female form in the haze. She stirred the loose pages at her feet, and even appeared to retrieve something of them. Loose gravel popped when the vehicle pitched to one side with her shifting weight. She slithered off with a crinkle over the blown-out window, picking up bits of glass and leaves in her gelatinous veil. He watched her shrink away to become something inanimate along the roadside, but what he faintly perceived was only an afterimage, as when an object falls into a black hole and appears, through an act of infinite regression, to never completely vanish on the horizon.

Cinders too small to be crushed into stars hung in the moonlight, but they inevitably succumbed to the same gravity that claimed him. They sifted down to form a shallow grave, yet perversely offered no sleep. His hand, seized with something, ran over the dusty pages at his head. He had a notion it should be there, but it was not.

His journal was missing.

Only a few drowsy thoughts dangled from the end of his boneless hide. One took the form of a drop of sweat, which caught on his eyelashes to make them flutter. A snippet of twilight glowed in the rearview mirror: an indanthrone blue stippled low, aureolin clouds. The jeweled hues drooped in the branches, darkening before sloping down to fill the car. A welcomed breeze marked the transition to night, and shadows further softened the sharp edges of his confinement. From there, he crossed back and forward over a line, with only a waning crescent Moon and the flashing clock marking time in any real way. He tried to blot out the pinch of the car seat and steering wheel, but like tight clothing, or even the unseen watch on his wrist, he hated prolonged pressure against his skin. He occupied the hours by conjuring to mind passages from some of his favorite music: Poulenc’s Prayers for Saint Francis, Schmidt’s String Quartet in A major, any of Brahms transcendent choral lieder… When his two remaining beacons eventually winked out, only his eyelids were left to transverse the abyss. The trapped man looked in the direction of a mirror he could no longer see, thinking what was hidden in it was only the part of his fate still unknown to him.

His thoughts had whittled down in the long hours, and his acclimation to his environment became so complete that it was with surprise he detected a new odor amid the fumes of motor oil and gasoline. He raised a trembling hand to feel the supple, ruffled edge of a lily among the torn roof upholstery.

She had returned to the car, but had not awakened him.

He could stretch as far as the edge on the glove compartment, and over the trim for the passenger seat, but his domain was limited. After thinking he had poked into every conceivable cubbyhole, he located the cell phone stuck under his seat. His ears were dull with fluid, yet he could tease out a faint pulse. Pressing the mouthpiece to his cracked lips, he muttered, “I want to see you… I need to see you…”

The phone dropped from his hand to slip back down into its fissure. His mind followed it down, as though to create a space to hold it. But the world—his world—was now only large enough to accommodate thoughts of her.