I remember one thing vaguely about Delaware. It was dark, past midnight I think, and I was driving on a two-lane road. I was somewhere in between Harrington and another town I can’t remember. My head was hurting, I was groggy, and, outside, it was the kind of pitch, enveloping darkness you find in lightless rural places. Stars everywhere, and I gawked at them and then back at the road, trying to keep my head afloat before things went spinning. Things were spinning, eventually. I had to stop myself from looking at the stars because every time I whipped my head back to the road, I lost equilibrium, and I had to blink, blink, blink blink blink blink.
I don’t use high beams often and I wasn’t really in a logical enough state of mind to use high beams, anyway. The bright yellow lines on the road were only visible for a few yards, and beyond the penumbra that escaped my light I couldn’t see a thing. For a moment, I thought I saw something in the distance in my lane, a silhouette of something ruminant. I didn’t think anything of it, really. My window was down, the cool air flushed through my car, the music was loud. Abadabad, Beach Fossils, Wild Nothing, something to make me feel good, to soothe the prurient mania fomented by frontal lobe damage, and to ease the pain, the fear, the throbbing, heightened, synaptic cataclysm of neurons shooting off haphazardly.
I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t bring myself down. In my head, my brain was vibrating, rocking back and forth violently in the grey matter, and I couldn’t focus.
And then I really saw something. This strange piebald deer standing nonchalantly in my lane, looking out toward the darkness, to the fields of whatever vegetation—corn, probably—was out there. She didn’t move, not an inch, and I slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel hard to the left, and then quickly back to the right, fishtailing myself safely back onto the right side of the road. An oncoming car far ahead flashed its brights for whatever reason. I put my car in park and looked back out the window but I didn’t see my mottled doe. I didn’t see anything, and I wondered if I had just imagined it all in the floating recesses of my mind. The otherworldly, spotted deer in the middle of a Delaware Highway in the pitch black nothing, a tenebrous fog roiling, roiling roiling roiling roiling on forever.
