It's not about Doc.

It happens later—after the best season Lightning's ever had, in fact. After he's just won another Piston Cup, after he flat out wins that final race for good measure, too. He almost sets a point gap record.

He unwinds in the fields, with Mater. Makes Lizzie feel young again when he screams in terror, forgets his sense of scale and sound and thinks she is a train. He has a date with Sally. He books a ticket to Tokyo for the World Grand Prix. Life is good.

But Lightning seems different. Which Sally chalks up to exhaustion at first—either from the ten months racing, or the ten seconds of that train prank earlier; it's hard to tell—but that thought doesn't last long. Lightning's a sleeper, and he's nodded off enough times in the middle of their late-night Skype sessions for Sally to prove it. He's also a cuddler. That night, he does neither. She hasn't seen him in a while, though, isn't sure how long this has gone on. Maybe it's a blip.

"Hey, what's up?" she asks him.

"Nothing," he replies—and see, Sally believes him. It has to be the truth, because Lightning is a terrible liar. 'Nothing' is honestly what he believes.

"Nerves?" he says. "Tokyo."

—

In Tokyo, he and Mater step into a showroom roughly the size of Vermont. But it sounds like the inside of a trailer, and he can't— quite keep track of what's being asked of him. So he says all his usual things, and only gets a few frowns. But that's okay. They'll massage it into whatever their pub needs, he knows. That's their job. It's okay.

He's okay.

He ends up staring at the edges of his tires, not sure which part of them is in contact with the ground.

He sees himself on so many screens can't tell which one is the real him. It doesn't occur to him that he might be the real one. That he has to be.

He wakes up late the next afternoon, the time difference having done him no favors, and asks Mater if he can see their itinerary; he wants to double-check the location of the opening reception tonight.

"You mean them's fancy party last night?" Mater asks. Because it makes sense that Lightning would want to know where it was, because when he tells Sally about it perhaps she'll want to look up pictures.

"Tonight," Lightning corrects.

Mater's expression knits. "Wait, so what was last night?"

"That was an airplane, Mater," Lightning says. He's not in the mood to play along.

Mater looks at him like Lightning's trying to tell a joke, but he's bad at it. Like he doesn't want to hurt Lightning's feelings. "You mean with them's fancy toilet seats, and the pistachio ice cream, and all those reporters? You don't remember that?" Then Mater gets it. "Shoot, are you sayin' you're a time traveler? Why'd you only hop one day? If I could time travel, I'd go back and see the dinosaurs!"

"What."

And the thing is, the part about the dinosaurs and the time machines is the only part that Lightning understands. That's Mater being Mater. But how could Mater have possibly had time to imagine what a press dinner looked like? And why would he bother?

Then Lightning gets a call from the front desk, and his transport has been waiting an hour, and he's going to miss qualifying if he doesn't come down, stat. Except it's not time for that, is it?

Then he's in the middle of a lap, almost wrecks a Sardinian racer when Lightning clips the Sardinian's back left and and the Sardinian fishtails wildly through the turn.

"Hey partner, tone down the aggression," cautions Jeff Gorvette, as he swoops past. "That's not your game, McQueen."

Except it hadn't been aggression. Lightning just hadn't seen, or had misjudged, or—

Suddenly, he's not sure which direction he's supposed to be going.

It's a race—there's only ever the one direction. But Lightning's not— He can't figure out how to do that. Direction becomes a function of taste and then he feels sick to his stomach and Mater's voice buzzes over the comm line, "Buddy, you okay?" and Lightning can't tell if he's going zero or 200 miles an hour but he hopes zero, he hopes—

It sounds ridiculous, but he truly doesn't see the lake until he plows straight into it.

He almost drowns.

—

He isn't overheating. Nothing's leaking. Nothing's slipped. According to the track EMTs, Lightning's a clean title—if a bit wet. Whatever's wrong with him is beyond their expertise.

Don't go to a Japanese hospital, though, they caution Mater. The Japanese, they take mechanics very seriously; choke on one cloud of exhaust and you've got a face mask and a boot for a month. You step into a garage in Japan and you'll probably never leave.

Decisions like these are not Mater's forte, and Lightning doesn't trust himself to speak. So Luigi takes over, which means Sally takes over, which means they're immediately on the next plane home. Guido spends the flight taking Skype calls, spitting in Italian at tabloid artists and news anchors alike.

Lightning, for his part, has settled some. He knows what day it is. But he doesn't know what happened, and this ignorance arrests him. He locks up, stalls out, and he sinks somewhere deep inside himself. Because that's the one thing he's always known: What he's doing. Even when he didn't know why, or why it mattered, the one thing he's always known is how to make his body fly through space. That's his grace.

But somewhere, somehow, it had wandered away, and he hadn't noticed.

That's what terrifies him.

Mater tells him a funny story to pass the hours on the plane, to make him smile. There are spies and corporate conspiracies and ladycars and even the Queen. Oh, and a death plot.

Lightning just stares at him, like he's not really hearing the words, or they're not meaning what they're supposed to mean. Towards the end, just as the bomb is about to explode and just as everything's about to be made okay, Lightning asks dully, "Mater, how come I always have to die in these things?"

The escapade with the lake is still a sore spot.

But part of Mater believes that if he'd just gotten to the end of his story, everything would have gone back to being okay again. Later, he assures Sally that it would have been the story that saved the world—or at least saved Lightning. From whatever this is.

Instead, Lightning makes him stop. He sleeps, fitfully, and nine hours later they're on the tarmac in LA and Mack scoops them up with so much well-practiced care Lightning doesn't have to say a word.

Sally is planning to meet them in Phoenix. Lightning wants home, not Phoenix, but apparently he doesn't get a vote. That stings.

Mater assures him, "Well, sure you got a vote. You was just outnumbered—nine to one!"

"iNine?/i"

Mater counts off. "Me, Luigi, Guido, Mack, Miss Sally, Miss Sally—"

"Wait, what—"

"She says she's your lawyer and your girlfriend and so she gets two votes—" Mater explains, so quickly the words slur together, eager to get on with his counting—"your Mr. Agent Man, your sponsor, and your other sponsor, and—oh, that's nine already!"

Lightning cringes. Agents, sponsors—so the whole world knows, then. He's not sure why every time his life takes a detour, it needs to happen as dramatically as possible. Harv's probably eating this up. Maybe not, though. Flaming out's probably not great for your investment profile. All Lightning really knows is he doesn't want to go to Phoenix, but there's no doctor in Radiator Springs anymore.

Besides, Doc was internal medicine. Never a psychiatrist.

—

Lightning plans to fight about this—the not going to Phoenix. Not because he thinks he's fine but because it feels like he's losing his mind, and everyone's just making it worse because no one is listening to him, no one is paying attention not even him because the only thing he can focus on is not being in Phoenix because it's the most important thing in the world to not be there it just is. But tell that to the road signs, which list the ever-shrinking mileage, herald the Nevada state line, then the Arizona one.

Once in Phoenix, Lightning sees Sally and instantly gives it all up. Whatever happens, whatever decisions need to be made, he cedes every ounce of his trust to her. He lets himself let go.

He's hers.

—

Of course, Phoenix doesn't know what caused the dissociative episode. By this point they're well into the weeds with this, it's been days, and Lightning is antsy again. He laughs in his doctor's face when the portly car broaches, cement-truck slow, the possibility of past traumatic experiences.

"All right, we'll go with 'no' for now," says his doctor.

"Doc, I've been here ithree days/i. I've got places to go!" says Lightning, without really thinking about it. There's a sudden, brilliant flash in his mind of desert sun, dust in his lungs, the scent of fresh-laid asphalt and the memory of cacti in places they shouldn't be.

He shuts himself up.

They leave Phoenix with few answers—just a medication to try and another appointment in Phoenix in two weeks, a month, two months.

"If it doesn't conflict with Florida," Lightning insists. In two months, he has to be in Florida for qualifying.

"Okay," says his doctor, in that "yeah, okay" sort of way. But Lightning does feel okay, and but for the part where an encounter with Arizona highway patrol is a narrow miss, Lightning quivering at 85, hiking to 95, willing himself to 85 again, Sally relaxes, too.

And why shouldn't he be okay? He watches the western sunlight glance over Sally's hood.

His life is perfect. It was probably just a one-time glitch.

—

The first two weeks go poorly. So much so that they leave that second trip to Phoenix with a completely different med, and too-complex instructions for switching over. They take the drive home slow. When they start climbing elevation, out of the desert basin and into the buttes, Lightning has to actively convince himself not to roll over the edge.

Sally can tell.

—

Lightning spends his vacation refusing to be convinced he hasn't blown a spark plug or four (he hasn't) and trying to keep his fuel down. He's not sure where symptoms end and side effects begin. He never dreamed it were possible to get this catastrophically ill this fast—especially since all his tests keep coming back clean. That's the real insanity of it, as far as he's concerned. If it's all in his head, it sure doesn't feel like it.

But as long as you stay out of the sun, the pace of life in Radiator Springs isn't taxing. Lightning does okay. His meds go down, then up again. Then down.

That feeling that he's not entirely inside himself, of being misaligned (again, Guido swears he's not; or at least, his wheels aren't) never goes away.

By Florida, Lightning's at a point where he's not going to lose his breakfast for no good reason, and his engine's not going to backfire for no good reason. It's a good place to be in life. It's a bad place to be if you're planning to race 500 miles. He feels like hell, and the press is ravenous. He does his best, but he knows there's no way he'll outlast them.

Sunday's laps aren't great, but they're not terrible. On Thursday, he ekes his way into starting 22nd. Come race day, he's exhausted and he hasn't slept in four days, and there's only so much Cal and Bobby can do to keep the press focused elsewhere. Like, you know, on racing.

They try their darndest, though, and for that, Lightning can never thank them enough. Especially since they know about as well as the press does what's up—which is to say, they don't have a clue. Lightning doesn't know how to begin to explain it, since most of the time he feels as much in the dark as they are. His doctor says "depression" but that word means nothing to him. It doesn't feel like an explanation. IHe was happy./i

All any of the three of them know for sure is that right now, Lightning needs them.

That's all they need to know.

Lightning finishes 36th, in front of two cars who wrecked out early on, a third held together with more racing tape than metal, and a fourth who gave him enough of a run he couldn't just coast it. Were it not for this fourth, he's not sure he would have stayed in the field for the full 500. The last forty laps feel impossible. His competitive streak pushes forward, with or without him.

He doesn't have anything left for the press, whose camera flashes he stares at, glassy-eyed. Within the day, headlines of lesser repute are hypothesizing that Four-time Piston Cup Champion Lightning McQueen is wasting under the tire iron of some terrible, corrosive terminal illness that he acquired during a secret rendezvous on some third world island. Which is insulting to Japan but not wholly inaccurate, Lightning decides, when it comes to him. It's all he can do to make it back to his trailer without passing out. It's going to be long season.

He runs races he does not remember. He has no idea how well (or not well) he does. He has conversations he's not really present for. He misses calls because he can't bring himself to dial out. He misses more because he can't pick up.

His world gets quiet, until nothing speaks but his memories. Sad ones he thought he'd forgotten, but never missed a chance to dredge themselves up. Happy ones that turn sad because they're gone now, like the car he made them with. But the worst are the ones that don't do anything at all, moments he knows he treasures but has somehow lost the meaning of.

Sally's birthday last year.

That time with Mater, with the Cougars.

The track.

He thinks of things he should have said five years ago. Three years ago. One.

The first time he misses a race, it's not his choice. He qualifies, just barely, but he can't drag himself to the driver meeting and the start time comes and goes and he can't make himself go.

Mack can't fit inside the trailer and Cal and Bobby are afraid to overstep. Guido and Luigi know not to. But after a few days of Lightning all but dead in the water, something needs to be done.

Sally comes, at great expense. (Because of course this has to happen in Virginia, clear across the country from home. Why would it happen anywhere else?)

Lightning wants to be happy to see her, but he's not, and he can't handle that. He can't lose her.

Sally handles it. She makes him eat something and gets him back on schedule—because when movement dropped out, so too did the meds—and together they make the decision to pull Lightning from the next four races. Mack talks to Harv and cancels the sponsor junkets and other publicity engagements. Lightning could weep with relief; he just wants to go dark.

And if Sally weeps, she doesn't do it in front of him.

This is difficult for her, though. She hates to see Lightning in any kind of pain, of course—but his confusion is worse. Sometimes she looks at him, and she catches his panic, at once frantic and restive, and it's all too clear that he doesn't have a clue what's going on. He's at the mercy of his emotions, and their betrayal when they leave him. He doesn't understand what's happening. He doesn't stand a chance.

It's so at odds with who Lightning is Sally can hardly bear it. Lightning's never been the type to think deeply about this kind of thing, or get philosophically existential in the way that every single one of Sally's past boyfriends have, but he's never backed down from a puzzle. She's heard him spin off a dirt cliff thirty-seven times, loudly ranting all the while that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY, OLD MAN, to turn right to go left—only to hear him try for number thirty-eight.

There aren't pieces to this, though. There's no puzzle. Just brain chemistry.

They end up back in Phoenix. For a long time, this time.

For ten days, every day, Sally makes the drive down from Radiator Springs to visit him.

One blessing: The press relents. For all the bombast of Lightning's World Grand Prix that wasn't, the rest of it all is quiet. There's nothing to see, and nothing to report, and at the end of the day they love racing over ratings.

Sometimes it's hard to remember, but they're not all bad. A letter comes once, from a race magazine Sally's never even heard of, expressing handwritten well wishes for Mr. McQueen. It might mean even more to Sally than it does to Lightning.

—

It's quiet when Lightning finally returns, after what was meant to be four and then was seven races out of the game. By now they're back in Daytona, which is as ironic a place as any for a fresh start.

Lightning takes a deep breath.

There's still a good two-thirds of the season yet to go. He's got this.

He does well, just shy of the top 15.

A week later in Kentucky, he's seventh.

He quickly learns that he doesn't have to feel like himself to race like himself. When he can't be stylish, he gets tactical. He takes third at the Brickyard, which the radio hails a triumphant comeback, given Lightning's rocky start to his season. Lightning feels like a scrap heap—which is to say, he feels not much at all—except maybe a vague and disembodied relief. It's like he's absent from his own comeback.

But he thinks, nothing can take this from him.

—

At Lizzie's birthday party—she's turning 104—Lightning sings the loudest.

He kisses Sally under starlight with a gusto six months in the making.

Ramone shows him the shop's back room—where few have been privileged to enter. The long wall mural-painted, a stylized progression of all the life Ramone has lived. Lightning is awestruck—a feeling that strikes his engine first and radiates outward into every pin and bolt.

At Michigan, he falls in love with his sport again. True, he also misjudges the course and falls back to 27th again, but he doesn't remember ever being happier. He imagines Doc chuckling at his errors.

iCoulda sworn this wasn't your first reason, rookie. But I guess time don't fly after all./i

—

Back in Virginia once more, he wins.

—

Doc's second anniversary happens to coincide with a downturn in Lightning's brain, and really, that's just bad luck. But Lightning pulls up and truly, the worst part about it all is Sally, her hyperawareness to him—because he never meant to scare her, he never meant to hurt her.

He knows, though, that the only way he can make it up to her is to put that grief from his mind and not be sorry. She's told him so many times, he's not allowed to be sorry.

He sends her farm-fresh maple oil from Vermont, which is a little too homespun for Sally to trust within a mile of her engine.

"You know," she says, when she admits she didn't drink any. "Hillbilly hell, standards. That whole song and dance."

She promises that Fillmore enjoyed it, though, and Sally's real gift is the look on Lightning's face as the explains, with lengthy exuberance, the process by which it was harvested. He's been racing at Vermont for years, but it's the first time he's ever actually been to Vermont.

"I'm still not going camping with you," she says.

"But you can sleep under the trees!" Lightning objects. "By babbling brooks! It's fun, I promise!"

"Stickers, I can iguarantee/i you've never actually been camping before," says Sally. And she notes, with levity, that she doesn't understand why anyone would sleep under the trees when they could be supporting small-town local businesses. Motels, for instance.

"Hmmm." Lightning's lids slip low over his eyes and he smiles lazily at the screen. At her.

"What now?" Sally asks.

"Nothing, I just love you."

—

He learns to live with it. This thing that he still can't name, will never really understand.

When he's up, he learns how to leave everything on the field. Which is something he thought he'd mastered long ago, but there are deeper places in him than he'd ever dreamed before, now that he's not at liberty to keep anything back. When he's not, he learns how to pace himself. He learns how to win without fire. He also learns how to judge when a race becomes a points game, and not a fight for first. Years from now, they will call him crafty—a true veteran of the sport. That road starts here.

Lightning never quite learns how to quit, or how to stop when he needs to, though. Instead, he learns how to fear it.

He makes a promise to himself: He will do whatever it takes to never have to stop again.

He needs this.

—

Lightning ends the season solidly in the low-upper quartile. Nothing to write home about, though Mater will expect the postcard anyway. If he's quick about it, it might even get there before he does, since he needs to make a pitstop in Phoenix again before heading home.

"Hey McQueen," calls a reporter, standing apart from the throng that surged the winner's circle. Lightning doesn't know him.

"I was on assignment for the World Grand Prix," explains the reporter, and in spite of his best efforts to stay buoyant, Lightning feels the heart of him sink. He braces himself for questions he will not want to answer.

"What do you want to know?" Lightning asks, a little guarded.

The reporter shrugs. "Nah," he says. "After the Prix, I been keeping tabs on you here and there. Just to see what's up. I gotta say, you're gonna be a hell of a guy to watch out for when the season starts up again. You got a lot of stuff, kid," says this reporter, a complete stranger.

This stranger says, "I'm proud of you."

—

When Lightning returns to Radiator Springs, he heads up to Willy's Butte and Doc's headstone, as is customary.

"You'll never guess what happened the other day," Lightning says, to the desert air and the smell of sage.

The world feels kind and warm. He is happy to be a part of it.