Karmafornia

WHERE THEIR STEAM had frosted the windshield he drew a huge truck bearing down on a tiny car - I-80 in Wyoming, both lanes jammed with semis, everyone but him picking up speed down the hill - going flat-out he couldn't pull away from the one behind - on that radiator she'd counted tattered wings of eight butterflies and moths, a perfectly intact damselfly and over a dozen bees by the time the trucker jockeyed an opening in the left lane and swept out to pass, blasting his air horn - she swore even the car jumped. Now she could laugh, and while Walt scratched DEATH on the trailer she gave the car wings, then spots on its back - and it became a ladybug. The acid coming on made their windshield etchings more intricate. He drew a Greek temple, she decorated the slopes below it with olive trees, and gradually she could read his thoughts and he could hear hers in his head. Meeting, their eyes crossed centuries.

"Kallia," finding her Athenian name on his tongue.

"Phoros," she greeted him, and they opened the curtain of time, those lives waiting beyond it like scenes in a play. Here he was embracing her in an almond grove, the cloud of faintly pink blooms lighting the dusk, her sweet skin competing with the subtle fragrance; another time she met him in the agora and pulled him to the back of a stall where she laid him on stacks of rough folded cloth, the merchant out front oblivious till she could no longer stifle her groans and cries - how they laughed when the indignant old man chased them out. All was rapture, centuries-old love binding them to each other - till the warrior Arkhilos attracted her. Phoros saw them together climbing the slope to Aphrodite's temple, offerings in their hands.

"I thought I pleased you," he told her, next time they met.

"Arkhilos pledged me honors - will you?"

Kallia expected them to meet in combat so Phoros accepted the challenge, but his rival was taller, quicker - when Arkhilos's sword lay at his throat he asked for death - who would live dishonored? As his spirit slipped free his final sight was his beloved extending her hand to his slayer - Walt stumbling out of mental darkness perceived Laura. "You owe me."

"There's more to who we've been," she said, and they flew together, the heat of dragons in fierce copulation. He bit her neck with his fangs the way some poisonous creatures mate, repaying sex with death. She loved him violently, scorching his face and horns with her breath, accepting the mortal wounding he'd dealt her but entangling him till her last pulse. And when he struggled away drunk from her sulfurous heat, scales broken by the lash of her tail, deafened by her roaring agony and blinded by the triumph of instinct over what in his corrosive heart passed for love, he was an easy kill. The spearman's arrogant laugh was the sneer of Arkhilos.

Those dragons no more cruel than the world celebrating their destruction, woke Walt and Laura to a past not behind them but lodged within. "You've hurt me too," she said. "Don't sit around resenting my ambition."

"I just feel like you're way out front," considering she hadn't even left a Berkeley course catalogue anywhere he'd see it - no clue whatsoever till she dropped her bomb - her thinking was 100% Laura. He'd initiated their sex marathon in anger, but under that energy was a spreading shame, making him first melancholy then defiant, trying to drown it in sweat and semen. When his hostility backfired he'd flinched under it, taking refuge in her embrace, hoping he'd never wake from the warm asylum of love. Now it was obvious why they'd found each other - their souls were trying to get it right - again. "Why won't you stay with me?"

"I am with you, silly." Their love strobed, bodies alternately furnace and freezer, threaded through with ecstasy that trickled along their nerves like ice melting, metal liquefying, frost forming. The air in his lungs was partly her exhalation and therefore partly her, seeping into him the way cold crept into the car. They were one substance - was separation possible? This Walt Sanders identity was a single chip in a great mosaic, their multiple lifetimes creating the complete image. He'd seen enough fragments - he longed to break out of this skin for a glimpse of the whole.

"Being part of everything isn't imprisonment," she said, knowing his thoughts.

"This existence is a limit - I want the history of my soul to flow through me and take me along."

"There's as much infinity between zero and one, as between zero and infinity," she observed. "Whatever your soul knows, is here. Every wail of birth and ash of scattering is in you now." Fingers light on his temples, rubbing little circles, she said, "You're thinking so furiously your head's all tense - let go."

Under his skin he followed her touch, each muscle going fluid with joy, every cell smiling as thoughts bounced telepathically, faces stretched so far it seemed their lips would split. Laura started the Grateful Dead's American Beauty in the tape player; voices and guitars circling like a net gathered them up to be reborn in light, the whiteness of this snowbound car. Intricacies of frost had decorated their drawings on the windshield, acid's brilliant blues and pinks edging the crystalline feathers. Music rose in spirals visible as their breath, teasing every receptor to shrug off habits of perception - the world was incomprehensibly rich, and now they were awake to drink it in.

Whether they spun inside the notes of a song or walked among olive trees hand in hand, each minute was its own experience without accumulating into hours - trip-time was elastic, all-encompassing - and exhausting. When she thought to open the passenger window to angle upward into the snowfall, the road was a gray blur, occasional headlights going by. The whiteness dimmed, the storm continued. Some time later the acid relented as though they moved in a comet's elliptical orbit, zooming back in then receding, each journey releasing them a little further from its grip. At last they put on long underwear and cuddling heart to heart, sank into sleep, the vast silence punctuated by snowplows.