Supernova

dedicated to all that is here and then gone

We were driving through Old Hickory toward I-65 when the storm came in from outside of the city limits.

Storms in Tennessee are humbling. The hills darken and take on the ominous weight of uncertainty. The sky sinks. Lightning strikes at different elevations and from different directions, ceasing to obey a singular perspective. For several dragging moments, when the world trembles beneath itself, entire landscapes become electrical—not luminous exactly, but gravely charged. Whatever confidence one had in the permanence of roads, buildings, or bodies seems briefly misplaced. These are the moments that remind us of our own severe fragility and the illusion of permanence gives way.

A man who had once lived in the penthouse several floors above us died yesterday. He was halfway through his fifties when he had a stroke and drove himself to the hospital. At the hospital they found a brain tumor. By then, we were told, it was too late.

He had been single. He had been alone.

Four doors down from our home, he had a storage unit filled with instruments. Hundreds of guitars and endless recording equipment. An entire studio arranged behind a metal door in a climate-controlled hallway. We went down to see it. There was nothing to see, of course, except the locked door, but we put our hands on it anyway. I thought about the guitars inside, although I could not see them. I thought about the years required to assemble a room like this: the appointments and transactions and private distinctions, the knowledge that one maple neck was not another maple neck, that this pickup produced one sound and that pedal another. I wished him the orchestra of sounds he had spent his life trying to make. I wished that somewhere, finally, those sonic waves had reached him.

This was hours before the rains became fierce.

We were on a two-lane road and I could see it falling ahead of us in distinct strands, pale vertical lines suspended beneath the clouds. For several seconds the rain looked less like weather than like stage rigging, strings lowered from somewhere above the visible world before the clouds closed over it. Every streetlight went out at once. Tree branches thrashed from left to right, and the wind pushed the rain sideways across the road with such concentration that it seemed to have intention. Cars turned on their hazards. Some stopped. Some pulled onto the shoulder. The road ten feet ahead no longer appeared to lead anywhere. There was frantic, jolting movement everywhere and no apparent way through it. When the lampposts came back on, the stillness and relief of returning power lasted only half a second.

Lightning struck one of the bulbs, cutting the silence. The world turned white, blinding us, and then blue. Not the blue of daylight, or neon, or police lights. It was metallic and depthless, the blue of something occurring outside the atmosphere. The lamp continued burning. Embers fell from it, blue and hot, scattering in the rain like fireworks celebrating a new coming of age, strange debris, or the death of a star.

My heart was racing. Jacob kept his hands steady on the wheel. We reached across the console and held each other by the arms.

I do not remember breathing. Do we ever?

The day before, I watched Jacob do some session work at a festival in the city. I met an electrician from Peru, Indiana, who told me he lived in the circus capital of the world. He said he had not known that, in other places, you have to pay for gas before you pump it. In his town, he pumps first and pays inside. I have never lived in a town like that.

He seemed just as shocked by my life story. I was surprised by this.

It is clear to me that we occupy the same country and understand different arrangements of it. This happens constantly and is rarely remarked upon. Instead, people speak as though we occupy one America. “Unity in diversity,” they call it. With time, I've become less certain. Lately, it seems more accurate to say we inherit different arrangements of it. Each pair of eyes receives a different version. One man lives in a town where the circus is part of the municipal identity and gasoline is extended on trust. Another spends his life assembling hundreds of guitars in a locked room. One person drives himself to the hospital. Another drives through a storm and watches a streetlight become a blue star.

We are here for different amounts of time. Somehow, the privilege of being here at all is everything. Still, we mistake what we collect for what we are looking for. Then the power returns, or does not.