A husband describes his wife's road trip dreamscape and eventually enters into it.

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My wife is in the bathroom and I am loving her from the other side of the door. She is asking me questions about where we will go, like, Where will we go, my angel? Which roads are best? Will we eat farther down the river, or would you like to sit down with a plate of barbecue before we begin?

I am planning to return with my wife to a place where she has never been. I have yet to go either, but it is a return of sorts. What I know of the road within dreams is only what my wife whispers between shallow hehhhhs and huhhhhhhhs when I am awake and she is not. Every night, she is asleep within minutes of deciding, I will be asleep soon. Every night, with pleasure she says good night! to every object that comprises where we are. It is more like a greeting in reverse, as if the objects will of course stretch out their arms and awaken while she slumbers. A book of manners, a paring knife, a terracotta pomegranate on the mantle. She roots herself to the hardwood and gives her eyes to the room. At last, stiff pink sheets culled from the Last Chance! superstore bins. I kiss my wife good night, so that she remembers me despite my unrelenting wakedness. I am her husband, and she is my beautiful wife. To join my beautiful wife on the road to nowhere is life’s most obvious pleasure.

She starts her whispers, and the journey begins. The road she wants to take will take too long, and by then night will obfuscate the point of making any movement at all. No more flat land, no more bends in the road. Light ahead and light behind and nowhere else except above and barely. Awfully boring after all, she whirs. One inch to the right and the rumble strip drops into soybean row after soybean row. The rows would make me nauseous, she promises, if only I could see it. I forgive her for the many faultless truths: It is too late in the day, and there is no other time. Today, tonight, the long haul awaits us, and we are hurrying toward it!

We don’t have a dog or anything, yet the car drags with burdens. They are in the trunk, she thinks. It is just us; I don’t know what car we are driving. I am not driving, she hehhhhs to me. We are driving South and she is not driving any more than she is selling me a memory that neither of us have. I spilled my guts here, she huhhhhhhhs, when I was nine. She points at a crossroad. On the right, an animal is demanding from our open disposition the right of way. The request comes via clicks in my wife’s throat. These are the animals that act dead and rarely die, too full of fear to ever really lose The landscape as I can’t see it: a tractor turning off somewhere behind the corn, us, the crawling wimp, a sudden shrine to my wife’s bile. We believe. It is still winter, as my wife has mentioned, so the sun works elsewhere and neither of us are sure.

My wife is a chorus of katydids. Katydid, Katydidn’t, Katydid, Katydidn’t. She can’t make up her mind. She is one million bugs starved of a bush to chew. The road sounds like this—mysterious and urgent, always out of sight, immaterial until my wife opens her throat. Katydid from within the hyacinths, and so I fight the urge to leave the sheets and check for clusters of nymphs. I stop fighting: Katydidn’t, say the lips of my fearsome guide. The chorus sheds its mass so that one sure voice can be heard. My wife claps her wings together, so that I can hear the road. One voice disguised as an insect disguised as a leaf disguised as my wife. She is my wife, and we are at home and in bed. We are somewhere on the way to two conflated somewheres.

My wife hehhhhs again in the register with which I am most comfortable. Attuned to the reflexes of her pupils beneath their lids and the pattern of exhales trumping inhales, I accompany her through the night. We carry on driving as she describes the cloud patterns made visible by the moon through the open moonroof. The car is old,she promises, as if something new and replicable like access to a view of the sky would disintegrate the authenticity of our efforts at communication. Please, she huhhhhhs through lips turned down, walk with me to the end.

With our belongings in the car, we use our feet, and she promises an empty room at the end. This is advantageous, she explains, because we can protect our privacy. Which of us can say how violently we will react to the past, the imaginations of our love, exposure to a different version of ourselves, the lust for feeling promised by something new, somewhere old? What if the end offends? Neither of us have been to this place. Neither of us know where it is that we are moving through to be going toward. There is the beginning, which my wife never accounts for, then there is the road, and maybe, too—I suspect, an end.

You will be asleep soon, the katydids croak. I hear the gaps between my movements, and soon I begin to see as well as hear. Veins of green swallow my sight. I can’t hear my wife anymore. Instead, I adjust to one long, continuous screech until I am no longer waiting for an image known only to her.

She whirs on as my eyes adjust to the road. Unfiltered, the picture fills out. The rows of soy hypnotize me as my wife had promised. A structure sits empty a mile back from the road. There is nothing in the way of accessing the open door. A porch ahead, porch behind. Walls of splintering wood and a bench to receive us once we arrive. The light is on and is illuminating the end from the other side of the door. I can see the structure completely, and our matching steps follow the guidance of the soy.

My wife is not a guide. She is my wife, and she has never been here. I am with her, and we are wading through. I could reach for her hair, her bottom lip which I love, or her ankle. I could drag her down into the ditch and beg her for answers. Her open palm could reassure me of the point, convince me that we are safe and alive, material and known.

But I do not touch my wife. I walk as she walks. We turn before we reach the door. We circumvent the structure, pause on the bench, and consider the moisture of the soil. We identify our footprints, and we do not retrace them. I follow my wife across the creek between the crops, and we do not speak. We walk into an open field.