I is Another

Talking Jon Fosse Car Crash Blues

Feb 03, 2026

The car crash starts just after four in the morning and the county road is all covered in snow so I am driving towards the lights of the tractor factory and the interstate beyond and it’s silent in the car and I am thinking about the road and I am thinking about the car and about how it’s due for an oil change because the display screen keeps saying it, REPLACE ENGINE OIL, over and over and then I think that this car has driven all the way to the moon and that it’s on the way back, and I wonder why I always think this, that whenever somebody asks about the car, I say it, that the car “has driven all the way to the moon and it is on its way back.”

I said this once to Art Cullen. We were sitting at the Deadwood Tavern and watching the Cyclone game when he told me that his brother once watched Denis Johnson shoot heroin right down there by the river. Said that he’d driven down from Storm Lake today in an electric car. “What kind of wheels you got now?” he asked, as if he’d been keeping track.

We’d met about nine minutes prior.

I told him I drove an 08 Toyota Highlander with 327 thousand miles behind it. The one with cursive “Live Love Laugh” (sic) bumper stickers stuck above the taillights.

Then I said the thing about the moon.

I forgot to tell him that the car had spent a good part of its former life in the service of a retirement home, shuttling packs of seniors still in independent living back and forth to the drug store/shopping mall/doctor’s office/Red Lobster and I am thinking about how strange it is that I am driving it now towards the grocery store, to the interstate because I never take this way, especially not when it is snowing, and for some reason I did, and I am thinking about Jon Fosse’s Septology because I have been reading it in shifts all winter, always in the morning, or at least never in the daylight, which is probably the best way to read it.

The book is about a painter named Asle who is driving his car through the snow in Norway, forever back and forth to Bjørgvin and Asle is thinking about his life and the life of another man, a person known as The Namesake who’s also named Asle, who’s also a painter and he lives in town, in Bjørgvin, and the novel recounts their individual and shared lives, the lives of the two Asles who both paint and drink and love and die in Norway.

I need to finish it because the library wants it back soon and at times it has felt like a chore to read but also wildly hypnotic and moving and the sentences pile up across pages and reading it somehow feels so much like your mind while you’re driving through the snow, and that’s why I’m thinking about Septology as I merge onto the interstate and then I remember when yesterday, not a half hour into first shift at the grocery store, Bryce lays the latest research on me regarding the nature of linear time. I mean he really let me have it. He was unloading packages of salmon out of cardboard boxes when all of the sudden he walks over to me and tries to explain quantum entanglement, how we are at once moving forward through linear time while also still actively affecting the events of the past. He’s fallen hard into yoga and on the mornings after his classes he shows up and talks me through his spiritual journey with the cadence of a professional wrestler, circa 1998. He tried several times to lead me through it but I guess I wasn’t ready yet for that kind of talk and after a while he gave up and went back to the waiting salmon and left me in what I call “the dungeon” because I can’t hear the radio back in the corner of the produce cooler where I am most mornings, kneeling on the ground, surrounded by carrots.

It’s usually just semis and service vans on the interstate at this time in the day but with the snow and cold it is especially light and from what I can tell the road is clear and I can see the lane lines fine and I test the wheels against the merge and it feels alright, and now I’m driving east on the interstate and the wind is behind us blowing big sweeping waves of snowdust across the surface of the road beneath the headlights and right then I start seeing myself driving to work at the grocery store on all the other days and nights before this, in the snow and on just regular days too and I’m marking the year by the windshield that I am looking out of and I am thinking that in a way it’s all kind of the same drive, the same snow even, and right now I’m climbing up the hill where the highway cuts straight through a clump of windmills with their eyes all blinking red and now I’m cresting the hill and I see taillights ahead and they aren’t blinking at all like the windmills, no they are a solid red and then I see the semi jack-knifed through the cables up beyond the tail lights and I have to make a decision quickly now, like right now, either ditch or median, so I try hit the brake lightly and aim it towards the median and I understand right away that it is over, that I am going to wreck the car, that in many ways I already have and I know it because a warning goes off, a dire bell ringing soft, ding-ding-ding through the silence in the car and I actually say as we start to slide “HERE WE GO” softly but still out loud to myself and to the car and all the other versions of myself in those other cars on other days because yes, I suppose they are also in here with me, and who’s to say when the crash actually started, you know, it could have been years ago that I first started drifting gently, but now the car is swerving hard towards the ditch and I make it around the semi while the rear end of car drifts up until we’re almost parallel and pointed straight north and then I hit the ditch and the tires catch the frozen ground and I try to straighten out the car before I hit the cables hard and keep moving forward as the two bottom cables catch the front and run along the side while the top cable jumps across my hood, hits my windshield hard, scrapes across the top of the car and shaves off the racks up there, but the car is still running when it comes to a stop so I take it up out of the ditch and park it along the side of the interstate and turn on my hazard lights and I can hear them blinking and all of this still feels very normal to me, I have no great feelings of shock or surprise I think, because I didn’t have the time to be afraid, it all just sort of happened at one time, and that now, it was all over.

For some reason I get out of the car and walk around to the front and look back up the road to where I had lost control and I realized slowly that I shouldn’t be standing out there, that I shouldn’t have gotten out of the car at all, and so I get back in the car and nudge it forward and it goes, so I limp it to the next exit, boxed in all the while by nervous semis, blinking lights. From the exit ramp, I called Bryce at the store, who’d just tried to tell me about time and space and how we were constantly moving back and forth through it, through all of it, and I told him on the phone that I wasn’t going to make it in.

He didn’t seem surprised.

I made it back to work the rest of the week in Sara’s car and on my last day in, Bryce tried again with the quantum entanglement material. He says, “Dude, last night at yoga I reached a point where I was breathing in and out at the exact same time, and brother let me tell you I understood it…You know, that time thing I was telling you about,” and I could actually see it in his eyes, the understanding, real bona fide physical and spiritual comprehension, and he was experiencing it right there, standing by the citrus table.

And now it’s been weeks since I crashed the car and I am looking out the window and I see the moon is hanging low and it’s shining on the crumpled heap that was the car that had once made it up there, had made it all the way to the moon and had turned back around again and wound up here, busted apart in Iowa County, the exact place, according to Bryce, it was destined to be, the place where it has been all along.