BACK OUT

If you leave sanity and hang a left at common-sense, you will come to my cardboard city. Saturated with neon lights and populated by chimera, it exists and does not exist outside of me. It is found somewhere along the road-map of my neurons, in the great plains of my cerebrum in a world of gray and white. Pass the wall of bone and membrane - pia, dura mater and arachnoid - and you may see it, crackling with the electricity, existing in the time it takes for a synapse to be crossed, a signal to flare and die. My cardboard city with every inhabitant a cut-out of my subconscious, a dream that fades with the dreamer's waking. As I do now. I look back on my outback - at the set on which my psychological ddrama has been played out amongst slums and suburbs - as if he would be there. As if he won't stop being the instant I leave this place for San Francisco. As if I could return. Why can't he understand that I am doing this for his own good? That by leaving I am setting him free from my fantasy. (Or dooming him to die, Julie. If you love someone . . . murder them.) The highway ahead is steel-grey, straight as a dagger, slicing through grassland. I look back. Foolishly. The streets are empty. The windows of the houses dark, empty eyes, the doors gaping mouths, the trees stretching hands. Corpses begging their creator. Oh, Maxx, can I take the risk? Can I not? Turning my back to their pleas, to the memories and anger of my indigo totem-rabbit, I depress the accelerator. The car purrs and gains speed, devouring black tar and white lines in its haste. It's odd. I expect my last thought, my farewell to the Outback, to be profound. Instead, with dream-like, surreal logic, I think the automobile-edible lines look like so much PEZ.