As the three transformed saints complete their ritual, Lynch touches my elbow with the gentleness of someone handling a rare butterfly. “Time to go,” he says, though his lips move like a film running at the wrong speed. “The next part requires wheels.”
We exit through a side door of the cathedral—though I’m not entirely sure it was a cathedral when we entered it, or if we entered it at all. The door opens onto a street that exists in at least three decades simultaneously, and there, gleaming under streetlights that pulse like distant galaxies, sits the black Porsche 911 SC Cabriolet. It’s 1983, except when it’s not.
“The Lost Highway,” Lynch explains as we slide into leather seats that feel like they’re molded from pure midnight, “isn’t just a road. It’s the space between what America thinks it is and what America dreams it could be.” He turns the key, and the engine speaks in tongues of precision German engineering.
The cathedral recedes in the rearview mirror, becoming smaller or perhaps just more distant in time. The saints we leave behind are still dancing their eternal algorithm, but now their light follows us like a comet trail through the gathering dark.
“Kerouac understood part of it,” Lynch continues, steering us onto a street that might be every street in America. “He knew the road was sacred. But he could only see it from ground level. We’re going to see it from the level of dreams.”
The Porsche moves through the night like a thought moving through the subconscious. We’re searching, Lynch explains, for the places where the American Dream cracked open and let the sacred leak through. For the moments when parking lots become temples, when diners become sites of revelation, when the ordinary transforms into the infinite.
The night spreads out before us like an invitation, like a mystery, like a song about to begin. The Porsche slides through darkness like black silk through darker silk. Lynch’s hands rest on the wheel at precisely ten and two, though we might be driving through time rather than space. The dashboard glow creates a cave of comfort, a mobile sanctuary where past and present perform their intimate dance
“The Kilimanjaro Device,” Lynch says, his voice harmonizing with the engine’s purr, “isn’t just for hunting Hemingway. It’s for finding the frequencies where truth still broadcasts.” He adjusts the radio dial with movements that seem to bend probability rather than merely change stations.
The song pours through the Porsche’s speakers like liquid light, McGuinn’s twelve-string guitar creating spirals in the air that match the curves of our temporal trajectory. Lynch turns the volume up just enough to let the sound fill the cabin completely, until we’re swimming in it, breathing it.
When David Crosby materializes in the back seat, it feels as natural as dream logic. His presence brings with it the scent of ocean mist and burning sage from another America—one that existed in the spaces between definitions. He’s not the youth from the covers of old albums, nor the sage of later years, but something in between: a quantum superposition of all his selves.
“Listen,” Crosby says from the back seat, his voice mixing with his own younger voice in the recording, creating a strange stereophonic wisdom. “Right there—that moment when the guitar sounds like it’s falling upward, like angels descending but in reverse. We didn’t know it then, but we were building a ladder of sound.”
The song fills the car like a presence, like a visitation, like a reminder of what it felt like when the world first cracked open and showed us what was possible. We drive on through the night, carried by music that sounds like revelation, like memory, like prophecy, like prayer.
“Beauty had to change its disguise,” Crosby continues, watching the night through windows that might be portals to 1966. “We thought we were just making music, but we were really learning how to pray in a new way. Every time that song plays, somewhere, someone is understanding for the first time that transcendence doesn’t have to follow the old maps.”
Lynch steers with one hand now, the other conducting unseen frequencies in the air. “The angels in that song,” he says, “they weren’t the ones from scripture. They were new ones, born from electricity and light shows and consciousness expanding in all directions at once. The kind that could only appear over America in the middle of the twentieth century.”
“The old maps don’t work anymore,” Crosby says, his voice carrying the weight of decades. “The sacred places have gone underground, gone digital, gone sideways into spaces we never expected to find them.”
Lynch nods, taking a turn that seems to bend us through the membrane between realities. “That’s why we needed the saints to come back as influencers,” he replies. “The signal adapts to whatever frequency the people can receive.”
The harmonies swirl around us like aurora borealis trapped in the car’s interior. I can see what they mean—each note a golden thread connecting earth to something higher, something that speaks in the language of pure vibration. The song isn’t just playing; it’s happening, unfolding like a flower made of sound and memory and possibility.
The Porsche glides through a darkness that seems to shimmer now with the same iridescence as the music. Lynch nods slowly, understanding flowing between all of us like an electric current. “The angels are still descending,” he says. “They just use different frequencies now. Sometimes they come through phone screens, sometimes through memory, sometimes through nights like this when the past opens up and shows us its secrets.”
The night outside the car windows begins to crystallize into patterns—sacred geometries that might be stars, might be distant phones lighting up with notifications, might be prayer beads in the hands of medieval pilgrims. All at once, I understand that we’re not just driving through Hollywood or Los Angeles or even America, but through the idea of America, through its dreams and nightmares, its prayers and prophecies.
“The thing about highways,” Crosby muses, “is that they’re all connected. The one that led to Monterey Pop connects to the one that leads to Coachella. Different revelations, same search.” He pauses, watching the signs we pass that seem to be written in a language that only makes sense at night. “People are still looking for that moment when music turns into prayer.”
Lynch takes another turn, and suddenly we’re driving through what might be the 1960s, might be 2025, might be both or neither. “The sacred,” he says, “is like water. It finds new channels when the old ones get blocked. Sometimes it flows through TikTok dances, sometimes through late-night drives, sometimes through conversations that exist in all times at once.”
“That’s why we needed the saints to come back,” Lynch adds softly, almost to himself. “Because beauty keeps finding new forms, and somebody has to help us recognize it, help us remember how to see the angels even when they’re wearing designer clothes and posting on Instagram.”
The song continues its spiral journey through time, through us, through the American night. We’re silent for a moment, letting the interweaving of guitars and voices paint mandalas in the air around us. Each note seems to carry all the possibility that was contained in that moment when music first learned to fly, to shed gravity, to carry human consciousness to places it had never been before.
The Porsche purrs onward, our Kilimanjaro Device carrying us through the American night, searching for the places where old magic still hums beneath new frequencies. In the back seat, Crosby hums a melody that sounds like the future remembering its past, while Lynch navigates by stars that might be pixels, might be prayers, might be both.
We drive on, through the darkness that isn’t darkness, looking for the next sacred broadcast.