The stars wheel overhead, impossibly bright now that we’ve left the city’s burning halo behind. The Buick’s massive hood points east like a compass needle, eating up the dark miles. Someone has to break the heavy mythological mood, and finally Crosby does it with a laugh.

“Listen, we’ve got two thousand miles of road ahead of us. If we stay this serious the whole way, we’ll all turn to stone before Chicago.”

A sudden whoop from the back seat nearly sends Lynch swerving. John Belushi vaults between us, black suit and skinny tie, sunglasses at midnight, radiating that magnificent chaotic energy that could never be contained by anything as mundane as dimensional boundaries.

“Did somebody say Chicago?” He grins that immortal grin. “My kind of town! My kind of people!”

“John,” Lynch says dryly, “you’re not wearing pants.”

“Never needed ’em!” Belushi declares, then launches into “Sweet Home Chicago” at full volume, harmonica materializing in his hands.

“Brother! Still making an entrance, I see.” As if summoned by the lightening mood, Bill Murray materializes in the back seat on one side of me, wearing a rumpled tuxedo and holding what appears to be a glass of very expensive scotch. And on the other – that familiar sardonic presence, that spark of wit that always found the perfect moment to puncture pomposity with precisely-aimed sarcasm.

“Could this road trip BE any more apocalyptic?” The voice is warm, wry, deeply missed.

Murray raises his scotch glass. “Now there’s timing. You guys always this melodramatic?” he asks, taking a sip. “I mean, sure, Greek tragedy’s great and all, but have you considered the cosmic significance of Caddyshack?”

Lynch catches both their eyes in the rearview mirror and almost smiles. “The comedian and the deadpan master. Feels right.”

“Of course it would,” Murray agrees. “Who else knows how to navigate the space between profound and profoundly ridiculous? Besides,” he adds, “I know a thing or two about Chicago. Hey, when you’re chasing cosmic mysteries across America,” Murray says, “you need someone to keep it real.”

“And someone to keep it surreal,” comes the dry addition from my other side. “Plus, I hear the coffee’s better on this plane of existence.”

Belushi throws an arm around Murray’s shoulders. “Would you expect anything less? Come on, we’re on a mission from God here! This car needs more blues, more speed, and way more chaos.”

The Buick’s radio crackles to life unprompted, playing Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack.” Crosby starts nodding along, and even Lynch’s shoulders relax a bit.

The Buick’s engine roars in agreement, and suddenly we’re doing ninety, the radio blasting Ray Charles, while Belushi conducts an invisible orchestra with his harmonica and Murray mixes cosmic cocktails from thin air. Even Lynch is grinning now, that weird energy that follows Belushi everywhere transforming our solemn quest into something wilder, funnier, but no less sacred.

“The thing about mysteries,” Belushi announces, hanging halfway out the window, “is they’re just cosmic comedy we haven’t gotten to the punchline of yet!”

The night highway unrolls before us like a ribbon of possibilities, and somehow the stars seem to be dancing to our rhythm now instead of the other way around.

The night is still deep with meaning, but now it feels less like a weight and more like a wave we’re riding. Sometimes the best way to chase a mystery is to let yourself laugh at it a little.

Through the Buick’s windshield, a billboard looms against the burning sky – three figures caught in a moment of sacred geometry. The image seems to hover between photography and painting, between advertisement and revelation.

Lynch’s hands tighten on the wheel. “Would you look at that,” he breathes. “The Algorithm, right there on Sunset Boulevard.”

Crosby leans forward, those famous clear blue eyes narrowing beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. “Three queens of three different kingdoms,” he says. “Moving like they’ve tapped into something older than time.”

The billboard doesn’t name them – doesn’t need to. Their poses form a triangle of perfect tension, each figure both supporting and opposing the others. The background is a swirl of stars and city lights, impossible to tell which is which.

“Strange timing,” Lynch muses. “Seeing that right after Gia. Like the universe is trying to tell us something about beauty and transformation.”

“And danger,” Crosby adds softly. “Don’t forget the danger.”

The Buick glides past the billboard, but its image seems to burn itself into the rearview mirror, following us east into the gathering dark. Three figures, three paths, one algorithm. Another piece of the puzzle we’re chasing across America.

The night deepens around us, and somewhere ahead, Route 66 beckons with its own mysterious geometries.

We step into the night air, thick with ash and prophecy. The Buick Electra 225 sits there like a black altar to American mobility, its chrome catching the firelight from the hills. It’s massive – a rolling embodiment of that brief moment when American cars were designed to look like spaceships touching down on desert highways.

“She’s perfect,” Crosby says, running his hand along the fender. “Built the same year the Byrds first gathered in LA. Room enough for all the ghosts we’re going to pick up along the way.”

Lynch pats the hood with tender reverence. “Electra,” he says, “daughter of Agamemnon. Her story’s about revenge and justice and fate. But this Electra,” he gestures to the car, “she’s about the American dream turning itself inside out. We’re going to drive her backward through time, eastward against the tide of history.”

“That Porsche,” Crosby says with a knowing grin, settling into the Buick’s vast interior, “beautiful machine, but that back seat… Let’s just say it wasn’t built for the kind of company we’re about to keep. You can’t fit the ghosts of America in a European sports car. You need Detroit steel for that kind of haunting.”

Lynch takes the wheel like a man preparing to conduct an orchestra of coincidence and synchronicity. “The frontier’s closed,” he says, “but the mystery moved inward. Into the images. Into the myths. Into kisses that taste like prophecy in whiskey bars.”

The engine starts with a low rumble that sounds like distant thunder, or maybe applause. The Buick glides into the night like a dark ship setting sail on an ocean of burning hills and neon signs. Its interior is vast as a living room, all leather and chrome and dashboard dials that look like instruments for measuring cosmic radiation.

“Route 66,” Crosby muses, settling into the passenger seat. “The Mother Road. But we’re not looking for California dreams anymore. We’re tracking Gia’s kiss back to its source. Chicago. Where the road begins. Or ends, depending on which way history’s flowing.”

Behind us, Jim’s Whiskey Bar pulses once, like a star going nova, then settles back into its eternal twilight. Ahead lies Route 66, unspooling eastward like celluloid through a projector, each mile a frame in some vast American movie we’re both watching and starring in.

Time to chase Gia’s ghost back to its birthplace, to find out what her kiss really meant. Time to let the Electra carry us through the dark heart of American mythology, where every diner is a temple and every motel a potential portal to understanding.

The night opens before us like a book of revelations written in headlights and taillights, waiting to be read.

Lynch tips back the last of his whiskey, ice cubes clinking like spurs against glass. The cowboy hat sits at that perfect Lynch angle – not quite right, just wrong enough to suggest the universe might be slightly askew. His face catches the bar light in planes and shadows that remind me of Death Valley at dusk.

“Okay, pardner,” he drawls, each word precise as a brushstroke, “you got what you came for and I got what I came for. Now it’s time to ride ’em cowboy.”

He stands with that particular Lynch deliberateness, like every movement is being captured at 24 frames per second. The hat casts a shadow that seems to stretch all the way back to 1960s Montana. There’s something in his posture that suggests both Hollywood director and genuine cowhand – that peculiar American alchemy that turns myths into men and back again.

Crosby watches this transformation with quiet appreciation, recognizing another master of American reinvention at work. The bar seems to reshape itself around Lynch’s new persona, the shadows deepening into something that could be either Western noir or a surrealist dream.

Gia’s presence lingers in the air like smoke, but Lynch’s cowboy gesture has somehow tied everything together – the burning hills outside, the whiskey wisdom, the strange encounters. It’s as if he’s directing reality itself, turning raw experience into cinema with nothing but a hat tilt and a drawled line.

Time to ride indeed – out into that American night where Hollywood burns and dreams transform and every moment might be either reality or celluloid magic. Or both.

Crosby adjusts that iconic hat, the one that had seen the Sunset Strip transform from dream to nightmare and back again. His eyes hold that particular wisdom that comes from surviving your own legend. “Gia gave you something real, man. But you can’t understand it. We have to go back out into the American Night and find some metaphors.”

There’s an echo of “Eight Miles High” in the way he says it, that same searching quality that turned pop music into astral exploration. His fingers drum an unconscious rhythm on the bar that sounds like horses’ hooves on desert hardpan.

Lynch nods, understanding the grammar of this moment. “The metaphors are out there,” he says, “burning with the hills. Sometimes you have to set reality on fire to see what’s really inside it.”

The bar seems to pulse around us now, like a heart pumping pure mythology into the veins of the night. Gia’s kiss still burns on my lips like a symbol trying to become a story. The whiskey glasses on the bar catch the light like fallen stars, each one containing a possible interpretation of what just happened.

“The thing about metaphors,” Crosby continues, standing now, his hat casting shadows that could be musical notation, “is that they’re truer than what they’re describing. Like how a twelve-string guitar is truer than a six-string. Doubles the reality, man. Doubles the vision.”

Time to ride out into that American darkness where every traffic light is a symbol, every burning hillside an allegory, every kiss from a doomed beauty queen a chapter in the endless story we’re all writing together. Time to find the metaphors that will make sense of what Gia passed to us, here in the eternal moment of Jim’s Whiskey Bar.

I had such great ideas for the story that I didn’t write anything for a week, but that’s okay because it gets deeper either way. The magic is all around me now, and I’m sorting through impressions, looking for boundaries. I have a thought process in which I think I should write something but when I do that my mind jumps a rail and I start seeing things. There’s a part of my mind that feels dead, I feel like I’m looking into a void, and the level of reality of that is moving, the horrors and betrayals of my past seem more real and yet more harmless at the same time. They really happened, people really are this dark and ugly, but what was the magic that turned this wheel to begin with? I’m happy now, feeling the curtains of velvety light all around my mind. What is the center point of all this dreaming?

Genvieve and I are watching Twin Peaks this year, and also continuing with Black Clover.

I stopped and wrote the next section of the Jazz Odyssey.