WHITE LINE FEVER

Have you ever been to hell?

The night is a black throat and I’m stuck in it. Lodged deep within like the choked surface of a rising gorge. My headlights illuminate only the road. A narrow, winding wound slicing through an endless desert clogged with the swollen tumors of the dark hills. The enveloping abyss keeps trying to swallow me as if I’m some obstructing morsel.

I don’t know how long I’ve been driving, or where I’m going. A skeleton’s hands on the steering wheel, possessed of their own volition. The speedometer hovers around ninety even though I can’t feel my foot on the accelerator. Green numbers glowing on the dashboard clock like hieroglyphs; each time I look at them, I’ve forgotten what they were before. Hours may have passed. Seconds. Maybe time doesn’t exist out here. Maybe nothing does.

Have you ever been to hell?

“I have to get out,” I’d said to someone. I don’t remember whom, or when, but I remember the words on my lips. An empty bar on Franklin, nestled in the shadow of the looming Hollywood sign. “I have to get out of the city.”

“I think you just need some sleep,” said whoever was sitting across from me. Some faceless void. A shimmering disturbance in the dingy air. “I think you’ve lost touch.”

I remember hitting my cigarette and not tasting anything. Staring into the glass of grapefruit juice & tonic water that I didn’t want. “Lost touch with what,” I’d said.

“I think you know.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“I think maybe that’s your problem.”

Have you ever been to hell?

The desert dark keeps rushing up at me. I turn the stereo on, but no sound comes out. I still don’t know what time it is. Have no idea how long I’ve been driving. I wonder if I’m close to the place I’m trying to go, or far away from the place I’m trying to flee.

There are no other cars. There is only the road, and the night.

Have you ever been to hell?

At a rest stop earlier, I’d stood in front of a bathroom mirror with my hands clenching the edges of the sink. I kept trying to see something in the glass. A phantom, a ghoul. An angel. Anything. But there was nothing. I’d checked the stalls, too, expecting to find some specter, some zombie. Crouched and grinning, waiting to spring. The city wouldn’t let me leave. It would send its emissaries after me. In a black Nissan Juke, no doubt. A witch at the wheel, so horribly splendid.

Have you ever been to hell?

Before I’d fled into the desert, I’d skulked along Hollywood Boulevard as the crimson evening bled into night. I kept glancing over my shoulder. My eyes scanned the trundling traffic for a black Nissan Juke. Sometimes I thought I saw it.

A tired, overweight Batman asked me for a cigarette. When I said no, he told me it had been fifteen years since he’d seen his kids. Then he started beat boxing.

An emaciated angel with mascara tears running down her face told me I looked sad as I waited to cross Vine. She touched my arm. Her fingers were like talons. She said I was lost.

“I have to get out of the city,” I told her.

The sorrow in her washed-out eyes made me want to shriek.

“You can’t get out,” she said. “There is no way out. It’s inside you. It will follow you wherever you go. You belong to it now.”

“That can’t be true. I just—”

Have you ever been to hell?

“—have to get out,” I’m muttering to myself as the car careens through the desert. The road is a snapping bullwhip, a rattlesnake, coiling and lashing. My car passes along the spiraling loops of its own accord. The black sky keeps sinking lower, an oppressive ceiling that makes me think of dead infants smothered in their cribs. I can taste the imminence of doom. Its ashen bitterness languishes on my tongue and grinds between my chattering teeth.

Have you ever been to hell?

I’d been bewitched at the start of the summer by a black-haired girl named Delphine. Such a long time ago, it seems. But time has gotten away from me.

“I’m afraid of you,” was the last thing I told her, and she had called me a coward.

Sometime before that, I had stood shivering in the long, dour corridor outside her apartment and listened to the urgent whispers of unseen ghosts.

You’ve been here before, they said. You keep coming here. You know how it ends.

But then her door would open, and she’d pull me in, and it didn’t feel like anywhere I’d been before. I kept telling myself lies I could almost believe.

She’d clutched me beneath warm candlelight and pleaded through bleeding mascara tears. I’d held her and made promises I thought I could keep. Her name on my lips tasted like salvation. Just another sensory deceit. No one can save anyone. Damnation comes in so many lovely flavors.

Have you ever been to hell?

Lights in the distance, or so I think. They’re faint—twinkling embers buried deep in a dying hearth—and they never get any closer. There have been no signs of civilization in I don’t know how long. I’m forced to wonder if I’ve gone back in time to some prehuman era, or been transported to a lifeless planet sequestered in the far recesses of the universe.

Maybe I’m asleep.

Maybe I’ve never been awake.

I keep driving because there’s nothing else to do. My body has forgotten everything but the rhythms of the road passing beneath me.

Have you ever been to hell?

As summer began to wane, a nameless disquiet took root within Delphine. She became shifty and restless. Her eyes darted with furtive suspicion. I would notice her watching me with an almost hateful mistrust. The ghosts outside her apartment kept telling me I couldn’t save her. They followed me home and taunted me, cloaked in long shadows.

Sometimes, the disquiet hardened into something worse. It changed her. The planes of her face would shift, transforming her into somebody else. Somebody I didn’t recognize. Somebody who loathed me, wanted me dead. The words her lips pushed forth did not belong to her. They were spoken in a voice her own throat could never have conjured. The hate burning in her eyes couldn’t have been forged in her heart. Not this girl. Not the one who’d wept and clung to me, begging like a child for little assurances.

The city watched me lose her. It lorded over us, cold and aloof. Always so smug. It laughed when I told her I was afraid of her. It jeered when she called me a coward.

Cold tears would spring from my eyes at night, invoked by the devil winds. My nose ran like a junkie’s.

“I have to get out,” I’d told somebody, anybody. “I have to get out of the city.”

Have you ever been to hell?

I shouldn’t be driving. I should pull over. Park somewhere out here among the darkness and the cacti. I need to shut my eyes. Just for a little while. I’ve been driving too long. I don’t know how long but I know it’s been too long. I need to stop, but it’s impossible. My hands on the steering wheel will not obey commands. My foot will not ease off the gas pedal.

Maybe it’s because I’m afraid. Afraid of what will come for me from the hills. Afraid headlights will finally appear behind me, that they’ll belong to a black Nissan Juke. Afraid that what I’m running from is in the car with me. That it’s the one driving.

I had told Delphine I was afraid of her, and she’d called me a coward.

She hadn’t been wrong.

You can’t get out, the angel on Hollywood Boulevard had told me. There is no way out. It’s inside you. It will follow you wherever you go. You belong to it now.

Delphine had never been the one I was afraid of, nor had it been the ghosts outside her apartment.

“I have to get out of the city,” I kept telling people. Anyone who would listen. “I just have to get out.”

There is nothing to do but drive. Nowhere to go but deeper into the hungry dark.

Have you ever been to hell?

I have only ever been to hell.