The very last time I dropped acid it was spring. Just the week before, I had watched the fall of Saigon on a department store television, and now I was driving up into the Smoky Mountains, looking for some commune Miranda wanted to join. The trees were in flower, splotches of white scattered across the wooded mountainside like splattered bird shit drying on a windshield. Things were getting rather freaky. There were a lot of hairpin turns and the van stretched out like a slinky as I rounded each corner, then collapsed back in on itself, making a sound in my head like a dying vacuum cleaner. I started to say something to Miranda, but my tongue didn't feel right. Besides, I had just noticed how much she looked like a lizard. A lizard with green eye shadow and granny glasses. And wearing a very faded orange miniskirt covered with yellow daisies.

I was wrestling with the question of whether I had ever actually killed someone. I didn't think I had, I mean, I was a peaceful guy. But you never know. You could do something like that and never know it, because you blacked out or something. Maybe it was like the Incredible Hulk, you got angry and blacked out and you didn't remember what you did. Maybe it was Karma, something you did in a past life.

But in this life, I was just trying to steer the van around those curves without killing us. If I wrecked the van and killed us, that would mean I'd killed someone. But I hadn't wrecked the van. Not yet, anyway. So everything was cool. So far.

Maybe I had been in Nam. I knew I had never been in Nam. But what if I was wrong about that? Maybe I had been in Nam, and killed hundreds of people over there, and it was so horrible that I blacked it all out, and now I was back home and my girlfriend was a lizard.

Everything had changed the past few years. It just seemed like nothing had been the same since the Beatles broke up. People were getting older, moving on. And I was almost twenty-six, just four years short of thirty. I couldn't believe it.

Miranda was more interested in the commune than I was. I had already done that scene once, back before I met her. It had ended up just being a bunch of people ragging each other over who should do the work, and who was screwing who, and who stole those cookies that Paula baked for her old man, and on and on until it was way worse than the world outside, even.

Maybe I stole those cookies. Yeah, I was pretty sure it was me. Heh. Paula was pissed, man.

So I wasn't into joining another commune, but I thought I knew what I might want to do. My friend Otto owned this record store up in Indiana, up in Terre Haute. I had run into him at a Dead concert, and he said he was doing good. He had this old house that he filled with records, and people came in there to buy music and black light posters and hash pipes and underground comics like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. He said he drank beer right there in the store while waiting on customers. He told me to come up and see it sometime.

Now I was running this fantasy number in my head. I was working for Otto, drinking a beer. I was waiting on this hot chick. I asked her if she wanted to get high with me after I got off work, and she said sure. Terre Haute, I had heard, meant high ground in French. I wondered if it was way up on a mountain. Were there mountains in Indiana? I didn't think so, but I liked thinking of myself sitting up there on top of Terre Haute Mountain, drinking beer and talking to hot chicks in this hip record store.

I was so into this fantasy that I almost hit a coal truck with the end of the slinky van. Miranda gave a little shriek. Then I could feel her lizard eyes studying me.

"Clive, are you on a trip?" she said. She had been into clean living, yoga, meditation, all that shit lately. She did not do anything except smoke a little pot now. I hadn't done anything for a while either, but I had found a couple Batman tabs in my backpack before we left that morning and decided I couldn't let them go to waste.

"No, just tired."

"You shit. You are tripping. Pull over and let me drive."

I whipped around another curve, the vacuum cleaner in my mind went wheeeeoooh and there was something up ahead, a cloud, brownish-yellow and sparkling in the sunlight. Was that real? It was like a little cinnamon snowstorm floating in the air.

"I'm okay, man, I'm just tired," I said, as the swirling miniature brown snowstorm came right at us. I could see the individual golden brown snowflakes that danced around each other. This had to be karma. The souls of all the people I had killed and forgotten were coming for me.

"I thought you threw all that shit away," Miranda said, "I thought we were going to . . . Watch out! What is that?"

She saw it. That meant the cinnamon storm was real. I tried to swerve to the side of it, hit the guard rail, caught a glimpse of a deep hollow, filled with trees. Miranda shrieked as the brown flakes exploded on our windshield, bursting like pellets of rain, but leaving a thick residue.

We swerved over to the other side of the highway, onto the shoulder of the road. I could not see a damn thing. I slammed on the brakes.

Miranda was screaming at me, cussing me up and down. I had trouble getting my door open. I climbed out and stood beside the van. Was any of this real? The van was breathing softly. I reached out to touch it, felt the shuddering life inside its skin. I patted it to reassure it, calm it down.

I knew that things were ending. A coal truck roared by, blasting its horn, and I walked around to look at the windshield. I saw bits of insect wing, small angled bug legs, splattered tiny bodies. I touched the sticky yellow-brown glaze with a fingertip, put the finger in my mouth, tasted honey. I had killed, and the taste was sweet.