I gotta get up. That’s the first thing. Get up. Rise, you dumb brute, rise.
So I do, I struggle up, arrange my feet underneath me, shake off the pulse of pain in my kidneys and in my shoulder and my head, and start to walk. The air is fiery yellow, it’s ash-streaked gray, it’s billows of angry red at the horizon’s furthest edge.
I walk along the road that is just a strip of asphalt through an endless landscape of hardscrabble dirt and desert sand.
Every direction I look the air is warped and shimmering with heat.
This is what it’s like. This is what we have protected ourselves from, in there, at home, but now I’m out here. I’m gone from home and I have to get back.
So I go. I walk. One step and then another one and then one more. It hurts but I go. Back toward home.
Because I fucked up. I fucked it all up and now I have to get home and put it right. Save the State.
Past brown desert plants, dead or dying. Through low drifts of sand that come across the road in dry rivulets. Clutching my side, wincing, breathing hard. Past stands of bent cactus and clusters of rocks in tottering piles, crusted with old dirt.
I’m walking, I am, but it’s not easy. Staying upright, staying ambulatory. The basic mechanics of forward motion. Not easy at all.
I am following the road. I was trying to pay attention, the whole ride out here, trying to stay in tune with the motion of the truck, so I could retrace my steps. So I could get back.
The sky is a constant yellow glare that makes it hard to hold up my head, so I don’t, I stare at my feet while I walk, keep my head hung, my chin pressed into my clavicle. I clear my throat and spit on the ground, or actually what happens is I try to spit and manage only a thin clot of dried-out mucus, which dribbles from my lower lip into my beard. There is a steady pulse of pain from my wounded shoulder, and I keep falling into the pulses’ cadence, walking to the miserable rhythm, one footfall for every angry throb. My kidneys hurt bad, from where the men’s boots slammed into me, so I clutch my side and walk stooped, bent, one step after the other, feeling individual drops of blood form and fall from my nose.
I think one of my eyes has come loose. That’s what it feels like, like it’s loose or swollen somehow. I can feel it getting bigger inside the socket, threatening to burst.
About a half mile from where I got tossed off the truck the road is blocked by an old highway sign, green with white detailing, fallen from its mooring and covering the road, bent up at a sharp angle and shimmering with heat lines from the unceasing sun.
I try to step over the broken sign and misjudge it severely, because I can’t see because of my fucking eye, and I scrape my shin on the sign’s edge as I pitch forward onto its face, sliding forward like an awkward kid on a playground slide, down the blistering hot surface of the sign until I land in a heap at the bottom.
I get up. I keep going.
I’ve gotta get home, that’s all. Get back.
Although first what I’d really love is a drink of water. My tongue is fat inside my mouth, and my throat is burning, bristly, thick with sand and dirt.
I keep thinking I hear laughing voices, or cars coming, or my radio singing out, but I’m always wrong. I carry no radio. I have no identifications.
I stop walking and stand still in the heat. Shakily I raise a hand to my brow, try to block the sun from scouring my eyeballs. I wipe blood and phlegm out of my beard. I just gotta stop a second, that’s all. Try to get my bearings. Make sure I’m walking in the right direction.
I’m not. I’m walking in the wrong direction. Fuck.
I got fooled. I got turned around. When I fell across the downed sign, or maybe earlier, maybe all along. There’s just no way to tell anything. The sky is all one sky, all one ugly swirling pale gray, a color that is no color. The air is tremulous, coruscated at its edges. It’s like—it’s like all the lies I have ever seen, all the times I’ve watched the air bend and ripple, all the dissonance of the atmosphere, it’s all gathered around me now, thick and getting thicker.
I don’t know which way to walk. The road is lined with Joshua trees, speckled with their small hearty blooms, bristling with prickles, standing with their hands in the air. The sun is hidden, or the sky is all sun; it’s all heat, a wall of glass heat, and such a sky cannot guide my way. There is horizon in all directions.
I go back the way I came. Retrace my stumbling steps. My feet are burning, swollen and itching with heat inside the leather of my shoes. Intolerable. I stop and my whole body nearly pitches forward with the teetering momentum, and I sit down to wrestle off the shoes. I get the left shoe off okay but there is a knot in the lace of the right one, a miserable tight little bastard that my thick fingers cannot possibly undo, and the sweat makes it impossible to even see, so I end up tearing the damn thing off entirely, wrestling the whole shoe off in one furious gesture, like tearing the skin off an animal, and then I fall backward, staring up, my head in the impossible heat of the sand, and start screaming at the sky.
In the silence, when my voice runs out, I again hear sounds in the distance—not even sounds but the echoes of sounds, toy sounds. A truck’s horn blowing. The jingle of small music.
My mind drifts upward, feeling around in the absence of breathable air. Maybe it is the lies themselves that affect the atmosphere out here, out past the reach of the State. Absent the bulwarks, without the bedrock of the Record beneath it and the sheltering fortress of full and permanent truth above, maybe this is what happens to the world, it gets to be so shot through with lies that it traps in heat and multiplies it, sears the ground and poisons the air.
Maybe this, after all, is the history of the world.
Exactly as feared. Exactly as we have been warned. An unlivable world, outside our boundaries, east of the mountains—this is what the world has become. Has become and remains. A sky alive with lies, constantly rolling and billowing, boiling in on itself. Here is a sky that is no sky. Here is a world that is a vacuum of itself. The sun is a fiery liar, burning into me, burning me down.
I hear a voice and it’s Arlo’s voice, whispering cruelly as he did in the bowels of the Record, telling me how it’s all a metaphor, lies like heat and untruth bending the sky, it’s all a system of metaphor we have talked ourselves into believing, except now look! Look, you old asshole. You traitor! Look at it out here! The sun is burning my skin, the sky will bake me alive, so fuck you with your metaphors.
I get back up. I keep going. There is no reason to keep walking except that I cannot bear the idea of stopping: of just lying down and letting sand rise up slowly and cover me over.
So I keep walking, barefoot now, starting to pick up some speed again, moving in what I am now just fucking hoping is the right direction, bearing my melting bulk back toward the Golden State. Because Arlo arranged my exile for a reason. Our defenses are weakened. Public trust in the Service has been grievously assaulted, and now he’s going to…
…fuck, though. I can’t remember.
I can’t remember what he’s going to do next. But I have to get back. I have to stop him.
Shit.
Wait. Shit.
I don’t know which way to walk. I turn around, a half-turn, scratch my head. Sand drifts out of my hair. I start walking the opposite way, because, yes, this is the right way, this way is south. I think. I press forward, one step after the last, moving automatically.