Invisible Fire (1998)

For Dan, who found it...

We're screaming over top of the freeway in his tired car, and he's making it swerve out and shake. It's 7 in the morning and no sleep, and the freeway's so crazily big under the sun... Winds forcing in through the gap he's left in his window.

I'm prying myself awake to keep him awake alert, his mouth's still rushing on about night that spun into day, where it disappeared, where the night really hit! The rave was the planet we visited before this one, planet of pixel colours and sugartalk.

The sugar's still rushing out of him, mouth expanding bright... and the pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse is still there fast with us. Hear it in the wind distorting. Hear it in the lane-markers shooting under the wheels. Hear it in the sun-glow.

"It's all made out of invisible fire!" he shouts out, all revelatory and caught-up, and it's all about light rippling and patterns forced through on us, and the illusion of houses, and mutli-colour shopping centres, and rippling greengrass standing up roadside.

Breaking through under bridges that stretch all the way, cross-horizon. Head blurred but all is sharp - all is sharp and dangerous today; sleep cries out hours away.

He's looking to tell me all he's got, all he's collected in flight - can't keep his eyes nailed to the road on this morning, and he says to imagine what it's like in the US, with all those spaghetti junctions and fat immense highways. And in his shooting-star car, I can imagine; in the scorching daylight, I can imagine.

We go fast, go where we want to be. Our faces dry and red-spotted but we're too beautiful to look, and I'm not sure he knows his hands have the wheel... We are guided by invisible fire.