ferus rex

A big white flutter.
You know you saw it, but where…. There in the tree! Look! Look now! Trust your eyes! “Christ he’s beautiful. My god what a wing span…, so graceful…, so effortless. Flight. Just flight. And then he’s gone.�?
And now what’s that? No, no. What’s that in you?
“A flux of some sort, a draining kind of, from here to there. So?�?
So, drive!
“How?�?
You know how. And so you do know how… That’s it. Long, exuberant strides of automotive…
“What? Exuberance? Liberation?�?
Yes and yes. And what is your name today?
“Dr. Antoinette Marelli.�?
Nope. Try again.

So you steered the nose of the Saab convertible to the right edge of the road for a sweeping, downhill left-hander. The apex of the curve was clipped with precision, and fourth gear fell easily to hand. Right foot’s mounting pressure on the pedal, and the invitation of straight-away demented you slightly; enough so that the living, barked-over balusters leaned back, and braced their green boughs together as you passed, a blur. Frenzy rained out of the sky in gold streaks. Faster and faster. You were feeling the limit of adhesion getting closer, imagining the slipping out of control, the manic, futile attempt to correct the line, and your last sight: the impassable, solid, deeply-rooted, massive tree. A long, clear moment later, impact and explosion, a fountain of flame, a scattering of you at the atomic level, as the Snowy Egret heaves majestically away. But not today! 118 miles per hour, and still alive! Now, yes now, you are Toni (hello), free and forever twenty, hair a chestnut flame in the wind, smile a beacon racing ahead of the car, bright as a captured dapple of sunlight, and perceptive as X-ray. But foremost, you just are, and the warmth of the sun is a gratitude.

The car was a chrysalis. A secret transmogrification was proceeding invisibly in the driver’s seat. Greenwich and parents and childhood’s home fell back from her rear tires in a roil of dust. She merged into I-95, with the cars moving in coagulated clumps of July 4th’s ebbing last wave of traffic, and stretching like a thickened artery all the way to Manhattan. As she drove and the flow of cars mired to a standstill, the Toniness that the empty stretch of twisty road and the ignited tree-tops had summoned up, was, for the moment, killed. It died in frustrated sighs and in the futile twitching of a shift-hand with too little to do. And there was a sequence to the death, like there had always been, a slipping down from being Toni to being something else, then settling into a final thing. And although at this moment of her life there was a generous measure of satisfaction to be taken in what was left after all the Toniness had subsided, though now she was Dr. Marelli and life cooperated with her like a servant, there was no way to rise up to Toniness without passing through, on the descent, all the other people that she had at one time or another been forced to become. And these characters remained in an unalterable, insufferable state of etched permanence in the mind. They were frozen into the history of her life. There was no way to delight in being Toni, carefree and wild, without reanimating the memories of Toniness back when it was a sin.