Clearly Now, the Rain by Eli Hastings

does closer mean? I try to snap my brain closed and enter the room. The blue neon Vacancy sign bleeds through the thin curtains. I watch her and Monty collapse into bed. I lie on the floor with a beer, scrawling my confusion in a spiral notebook.
    Monty decided we would be making a detour: from Denver up to St. Paul to see his brother, a cool thousand-mile tangent. It was then, rolling up the spine of Minnesota, that I really laid into myself:
    What the
fuck
was I doing?
    But before I got a chance to turn the query on her, she shut me up.
    We are at a Thai joint, in the company of Monty, his older brother, and some girl. They are all chattering away. She slides her hand under the table and grabs mine. She flips it over like she’s examining it; then she tangles her fingers up with mine and just holds it against her thigh. If Monty leans back, he will see this. But I don’t have to hear anything from her anymore. I’ll follow her without a discussion of anything at all.
    Finally we’re whipping through the outer belts of Chicago. We go with Serala’s brother, Emet, to dinner in a vegetarian joint on the outskirts of the ghetto. I see us all candlelit and eating bright green falafel, the flames winking through pints of amber beer. Emet is so warm that a part of me wants to stay on with him and be done with the questions of our caravan. He’s carefully dressed, a bit of a pretty boy, actually, thirty-odd sweaters gathering dust in a walk-in closet. But he’s unpretentious and funny, as at ease discussing
South Park
as Nietzsche. While Monty and Serala have an ill-concealed fight by the restrooms, Emet entertains me with stories of his road trips, as if he’s covering for his sister, protecting her virtue by not allowing me to see her strife with Monty.
    And then we swallow Dexedrine capsules and begin riding into the northern Midwest, pointed toward Ohio. When we hit the storm at two or three in the morning, we are driving blind. There is too much water to see anything besides the squiggled embers of Serala’s taillights and the flashbulbs of lightning all around. I’m thinking we should stop, but I know Serala won’t want to.
    What my Buddhist stepfather would call my “monkey mind” has been turned loose by the speed and I’m talking a million miles an hour to myself. I want to know it all and I can’t fathom the notion that something will happen between Serala and me, nor bear the opposite, so I don’t know what I want, and I think that she does, but she won’t say anything clearly, and then there’s Monty, to say nothing of Jay, and the pitfalls here are many but maybe it’s not even an issue because—
    BOOM!
    The bolt quite literally blinds me. The thunder shakes my truck—so hard that I hear the grinding whine of the transmission, trying to pop out of third gear. Luckily, my fishtail on the asphalt swings me into the empty lane and not the drowning culverts on the shoulder. I’m white knuckled and silent and too frightened to stop. The Zen disciplinarian in the sky has applied a castigating blow to my chattering head. So I stay that way for hours, strangling the steering wheel, rigid, keeping on after Desert Storm, which hasn’t slowed a bit.
    The country around Elyria, Ohio, is quintessential Americana: red barns and rolling fields, intersections with kids selling fruit from plywood stands, signs pointing directions and giving miles to the next town, the roller coaster of blue highway hills. When we get close to Cassie’s campus, it’s already early morning and full-fledged sun is coming soon. Coming around a corner, though, we hit fog sifting through a grove of trees. A black bird lifts off a gravestone in a cemetery suddenly on the right, cuts across my path. And then there is a car—only it’s not a car—right fucking in front of me and I have no choice but to wrench left into the oncoming lane; fortunately