900N

Driving down the gravel back roads of Charleston this morning at 3am, I cursed the GPS. In a calming tone it had assured me that it would be fifteen minutes faster to cut through these corn fields than to take the main roads. Unfortunately, its circuits could only make decisions based on calculations in time, not horror.

Or perhaps it could. I had just started working in IT a few weeks before, and had received these words of advice from my pierced-lipped manager: "Your computer can think. Just because it can only think in one way doesn't mean it can't think. Sentient? I don't know about that, just know that it can think and it hates you."

It was my girlfriend's GPS. Perhaps, like a dog barking endlessly at neighborhood kids, it chafed at serving more than one master. This seemed as logical an explanation as any as to why it would lead me onto roads so country black my brights only illuminated ten feet in front of me, so empty that tree-stumps reconfigured themselves into mirages of hitch-hiking ghosts. I had made the mistake of turning off the radio, and out here the absolute silence made me feel like I was being drawn along by a conveyor belt, or hovering over the road. I was reminded of the opening scene of Mulholland Drive, the slow descent down the titular road as if into a dream or hell, all wordless Lynchian mood.

I had miles to go before I could sleep, and I could feel the edges darkening. "Next Rest Stop: 63 miles" read the sign in Manhattan I had hubristically breezed by. Tonight I would be swallowed by corn.