HELL IS SEDONA IN AUGUST

Saturday morning. Or afternoon. Who the fuck knows at this point.

I’m in the front passenger seat of a Jaguar F-PACE hurtling toward a lightning storm somewhere in the mountains outside Sedona, perspiring cocaine from a bevy of glands, pores, fissures, and previously undiscovered openings in my vessel.

In front of us is maybe the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Also possibly the most dangerous.

Rust-colored stone. Rouge sand. Mountains stacked against the horizon like some enormous prehistoric cathedral. Above it all, a sky splitting open every few seconds with flashes of pure white violence.

Lightning everywhere.

And blasting through the Jaguar:

Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift.

Naturally.

There are several people in the car, all occupying different circles of hangover hell. Mine is unquestionably the deepest. Everybody else seems merely poisoned. I am actively decomposing.

I think we stopped for bagels.

I remember standing in line somewhere in Tempe surrounded by ASU coeds: glossy lips, Botox, silicone, tiny shorts, giant sunglasses, and the general aesthetic of people whose internal organs had not spent the previous evening being chemically waterboarded.

A few of them looked at me.

Or maybe they didn’t.

Paranoia has always been an incredible casting director.

Either way, I imagined they saw exactly what I was: the physical embodiment of every drug counselor who ever came to their high school auditorium.

This is what happens.

Disheveled. Sweating. Crusted over. Eyes simultaneously dead and much too alive. Still infected with enough leftover substances to smile at them like a disturbed mental patient who had briefly wandered away from his handler.

“’Sup, girls? Stay in school. Or don’t. I didn’t, and look at me.”

Back in the car, I became increasingly convinced that death was imminent.

Not metaphorically.

Not in the dramatic way hungover people announce that they’re “literally dying” before ordering a breakfast burrito.

I thought I was going to fucking die.

My heart couldn’t decide what kind of emergency it wanted to have. One minute it was trying to punch its way through my sternum; the next, it seemed to disappear completely. I kept drifting into strange little pockets of half-sleep, half-fainting, half-death. Yes, that’s three halves, but mathematics had ceased to be relevant. I never cared much for fractions unless it was 1/8 or 1/4.

Then I’d snap awake.

Lightning.

Red mountains.

Taylor Swift.

Jaguar.

Death.

It’s new, the shape of your body…

And I sang.

I sang those Jack Antonoff-produced choruses as loud as I fucking could because some irrational part of me had developed a theological loophole: if this really was it, maybe I could convince the devil I’d have too good a time in his world.

Maybe he’d look at me and think:

Absolutely not. This asshole is going to love it here.

And send me back.

The temperature outside was ninety-eight degrees, which in my condition may as well have been 375. I could feel Arizona broiling me through the windows.

But hey, it’s a dry heat, right?

The air itself seemed hostile. Every ray of sunlight felt personal.

I couldn’t drink enough water, but I couldn’t get it past my lips without a dry heave. Or would that be a wet heave? I didn’t have the strength to investigate.

I couldn’t sweat enough poison out.

I couldn’t find a position in the seat where my body didn’t feel like an abandoned crime scene.

And still we kept driving toward that storm.

The whole landscape had become biblical. Beautiful enough that I couldn’t look away and terrifying enough that I wanted to crawl underneath the seat.

I remember staring through the windshield and wondering:

Is that lightning actually real?

Because by then, reality had become negotiable.

Maybe this was hell.

Maybe I had already died somewhere between the previous night’s last line and the bagel shop, and nobody had bothered to tell me.

Maybe hell wasn’t fire and demons and pitchforks.

Maybe hell was Sedona in August.

Maybe hell was being trapped inside your own maligned body while one of the catchiest pop songs ever written played at maximum volume and God repeatedly photographed your death from the sky with every crack of lightning.

BANG

BANG

BANG

My pulse raced.

Then fluttered.

Then seemed to vanish.

My eyes closed.

Opened.

Closed again.

Did I die?

I don’t think so.

There was still pain.

That familiar, miserable evidence of being alive.

Fuck.