Fugue State: Lying to Authority

Houston, Texas -----------> Jackson, Mississippi

As I sped for probably 80% of the drive from Houston to New York, I constantly had to adapt the premeditated lie I would tell if pulled over on the highway. The lies would shift from place to place.

On the first stretch from Houston to Mississippi, I left late and had to make up time. I planned to get past Jackson before sunset so I could set up at a campground for the evening. I had all my camping gear and clothes from the summer stuffed in my backseat with a large backpack; the lie was that my girlfriend had thrown me out and I was headed north.

I passed through the spread of East Texas, which goes from suburban sprawl, strips and outlets, to farms and factories, the small colleges, and the rodeo arenas, Port Arthur -- birthplace of Janis Joplin -- and then Louisiana.

I-10 through Louisiana hangs above the swamp and it looks like there were cities already buried by deluge (before it became topical), the tops of trees prod out of the water like cartoon feet in the air, symbolizing the indistinct dead. I pass the highway divider upon which the slogan "9/11 was an insid job!" has been spray-painted, misspelling and all.

The lie becomes I'm trying to catch up with someone who is showing me the way to go when I-10 splits to I-12. It makes me feel harmless enough.

These are the longest days of the year but when I reach Mississippi the sun is starting to go and I am not going to pass Jackson before sundown. I pull off where I see a sign for a campground and I drive into a place I don't belong. Inside the camp, I find a sign directing me to the tan double-wide where I ask the proprietor, a woman whose disdain at the sight of me and a volvo sedan could not be more firmly entrenched in her eyes, if the campground was for tents or just RVs. She sends me away. I've just been rejected from the trailer park.

I know I'm going to have to stay in Jackson but I'm speeding. My lie is that driving in the dark makes me nervous and if I could just go a little faster, I'd make it to Jackson before nightfall. This lie makes me seem just pathetic enough.

The radio stations are all a jumble of fuzzy noises and preaching and I've plugged my laptop into the tape deck for music. I'm at the will of the random function. The music goes from Woody Gutherie to Chopin, one of his nocturnes, I couldn't tell you which, and at first it embarrasses me. But now I'm speeding down one certain stretch of the road and there are no longer the columns of tall birches flanking the roadside. My whole line of sight is finally clear, the tableau of farms and fields, not dire and functioning like East Texas, but clear, like Elysium, the sun tanking and covering the dirt with a flaxen polish.

I'm speeding more deliberately. The road has cleared of cars. I cut through the back-lit plains and I think, for once, about telling the truth when the trooper pulls me over.

I tell him that I don't have a job (like his) where I wake up and it's my duty to protect other people; I have no wife and no children who depend on me. Speeding down this highway while it's cleared of cars, cutting down a grade while the nocturne plays, while the sun sets is the one moment I have that day to feel powerful. Could you understand that?

I break out of the hypothetical conversation with myself. The nocturne is dwindling away, the higher notes and the sun past the bank of the hills. No one has pulled me over and in Jackson, I capitulate, spend the night in a hotel.