You and I are in the car.  Oh you precious, you. I’m driving.
We are on a mountain road.  (Why are we on a mountain road?)
We’re excited, the kind of excitement you know will make a memory for your grandchildren.  The road, it winds, sloping ever upward.  We have an unspoken destination.  We are told it is the Apex Theatre.  We know that we are of the chosen tonight.

Our Jaguar hood ornament tilts ever more to the zenith, and we think we are at 45°.
The cruise control kicks in, and I can’t stop it.  We are rocketing.  It’s a straightaway, the uppermost point obscured in an improbable mist.  We ejaculate from the very top, sailing at 160, tumbling into a waterfall.  The surreal scene slants downward, and we regain the road with dripping tires, beaded windows, and uproarious laughter.

It’s all downhill from here, the yellow line glowing on the asphalt ahead.  Once more, there’s a mist.  We’re again on a 45 degree slope, downwards.  The cruise control quits, but my brakes fail.  We enter a tunnel of rushing water, unscathed.  Moses and the Red Sea.

We hit the final whirlpool and are flung.  With broken teeth and bloody faces, we smash open windows, and push out, gurgling to the night sky.  Grabbing, grabbing for anything.
We catch branches, floating logs, and our breath……….and there it is.

Through wind-driven sheets of wave, we see the Apex, in green neon, sporting searchlights, glaring in the fume.

My arm’s broken.  Your shoulder’s not where it should be.  But we don’t care.  We look at each other and smile a bloody smile.

We’re expected.  We may never come back.  The Swimmers come to bring us.  The searchlights move to the vertical, then converge a thousand feet up.  The fifty foot folding doors of oak begin to groan open.  We are held gently and propelled to a landing.

The Sun is inside.