book of days serial #15

It was late December. The night was wrapping down across the desert and the sky was so clear that the street lights on Sunset burned across the sky like a solid vapor. He drove east but didn’t return to Culver City. At La Brea he turned north and bled over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino, like a moonbeam, a flash. There was nothing lonely about driving in the dark. It was afternoon that sunk the spirit. He often said that driving at night was purifying. This road was a vigorous linear filter of his misgivings.