After a while I take off my coat, walk with it folded over my arm for a few paces, like I’m going to find a chairback out here somewhere to sling it over. Then I fling it into the desert, watch it unfold like a winged beast and fall dead to the ground, and I laugh, the sound of my own laughter a haunted croak. I think maybe I was walking south before, and now I fucked it up. I’m just not sure.
I stop. This is how it ends: you just stop. You keep walking until you see a sign by the side of the road, a tall pole listing aimlessly to the left, an oval pitched on top of it with words in it—a word and a letter. It says “FLYING J.” That doesn’t mean anything. The sun has baked sense out of my mind.
I pitch forward off the road, toward the sign, and as I reach for the metal pole I imagine somehow that it is going to be cold to the touch, but it burns me when I grab it. My fingers start to cook and I shout and let go, draw back, totter, and fall.
I wake up only because I have no choice.
“Hey,” I say.
Someone is peeling my eyes open. I mean literally digging their fingers into my eyes and peeling back the lids.
“Hey,” I say again, or maybe I just try to say it—my throat is clogged with dust and heat. My lips don’t work. I say a noise that sounds like “Hey” while this lady digs my eyes open with her nails. She is squatting over my chest, straddling me with her heels dug into the sand, peeling at my eyelids with all ten fingers, hissing, trying to get my eyes open.
“Hey,” I say, really say this time, getting the word out with an effortful croak. I try to rock myself up, but I can’t move. I’m big but weak. I’m a downed bear in the dirt with this lady on top of me, laughing at me, her face matted with grit.
I can feel her weight on top of me and feel her fingers in my eyes, but I don’t trust that she is real. Maybe it’s a vision, or a dream. Maybe this is the way it works out here, outside the State, in the thin air of the truthless world: you wake with a demon squatting on your chest and she scrapes away your skin until your flesh is raw to the world.
“Smoke smoke smoke,” says the woman, and her voice is familiar in its tone and its rhythm. “You smoke, yeah? A smoker and a joker, that’s my boy. You got any?”
Her breath is outrageously bad, a stale reek blowing right into my nose and mouth. I bat her away with the back of my hand and she grabs on to my wrist, slaps me in the face with my own hand and giggles, witchy.
“Stop hitting yourself,” she says. “Stop hitting yourself.”
The light slashes into my brain and all I can see is her face, leering with want, her tongue clucking. I have seen this face before. A round face, high cheeks, a laughing mouth. Now that my eyes are open she has switched to my cheek, dragging her ragged nails through my beard, digging hard. I feel cuts opening, feel blood blossoming and draining out into my beard.
“Come on,” I say. “Stop it.”
“Where you keeping ’em?”
She is real and I do know her.
“Hey,” I say one more time, and manage to angle my torso up and thrust my elbows beneath me. The lady tumbles off into the sand, and both of us struggle to our feet and stare at each other.
“I was just asking for a cigarette,” she says.
“Lemme see.”
I abandoned my coat miles ago, but I’ve got a pack in my right front pocket, with three cigarettes still inside. I shake one out and hand it over. She pokes it into the corner of her mouth and it dangles there. She doesn’t ask for a light, just stands with the cigarette at a raked angle in the corner of her pursed lips. As hot as I feel, she looks hotter, wearing three or four layers of skirts, wearing a jumble of overlapping t-shirts and vests, like she was wearing when I saw her in Judge Sampson’s courtroom.
You’re not alone, out here in exile. That’s not how it works. Not with so many having been exiled before you. A whole universe of wanderers out here, further and further from home.
“How did you—” I realize halfway through my question that it makes no sense, but I finish it anyway. “How did you find me?”
“Wasn’t looking. Just good luck. What about you?”
“What?”
“How did you find me?”
She laughs, crazily, but I am gathering the distinct impression that she is not crazy, or not as crazy as she was. It’s also possible that I can’t tell anymore, because I’m crazy myself. The heat is a monster hunched above us, the heat that is bloated, greasy with untruth, the heat that has us both baked inside it.
“You have to help me, I tell her.”
“Oh yeah?”
“We have to get back,” I say. “We have to…”
She’s waiting. Gaping at me, her mouth curved up, ready to laugh, and I know why. What am I about to say? We have to foil the plot! We have to defeat the Golden State and save the Golden State! Lunatic slogans. Idiot ravings. Nothing is real.
“Where are we?” I ask her instead. “What is this place?”
“‘This place,’ ‘this place,’” she says, parroting my voice, but mildly, friendly. Then she holds up both hands, like a Joshua tree, and turns in a rapid circle, like I saw her doing in the courtroom. “America. Just America.” Then she points one hand toward the sprawling, low-ceilinged building behind us. “This place is Flying J. Okay? A truck stop! Magazines, prostitutes, and cigarettes. Fried eggs and waffles, playing cards and gum.” Her voice has rolled over into a giggling singsong, and she is dancing from one foot to the other, and now she starts singing outright in a low croon: “‘And I think to myself… what a wonderful world…’”
Ms. Wells is tapping at her hips and then her chest, frisking herself for something, which she then finds, deep within some pocket: a small plastic cigarette lighter.
“Oh,” she says, holding up the lighter. “Here we go.”
She lights her cigarette, and I’m thinking how awful it looks to be smoking in this terrible heat, surrounded as we already are by the choking misery of a thousand lies, when Ms. Wells abruptly spins around and trots toward the building.
“Hey,” I say. “Wait.”
I lumber after her, but it’s too late, she’s already slipped inside the building, and I can see her through the glass—the whole front of the building is glass, the doors are glass—doing her mad dance through the empty aisles, puffing on her cigarette, hopping from foot to foot.
I try the door. She locked it. I bang on the glass.
“Hey,” I say. “Hey!”
She stops dancing. The shelves are almost entirely empty, an empty shop in the emptied-out world, but there are a couple of things in there. Ms. Wells has got a red plastic can. A gas can. She slowly unscrews the stopper and begins to empty it out, swinging her arm to splatter and splash the liquid all over the filthy tile floors of the Flying J.
I watch her, astonished, as she starts to move through the store, rushing up and down the aisles while gas streams out of the can and splatters on the floor, until finally she turns the can upside down and taps out the last drops and dribbles. She tosses the can itself at the front of the store and it bangs off the glass and back toward her.
She looks at me and does not look crazy. Her pale eyes are lucid.
“What the fuck?” I shout, trying to make myself loud enough to be heard, as if she can’t see me clearly enough. “What the fuck are you doing?”
She drops the cigarette. It spins end over end from her two fingers to the floor and by some miracle doesn’t land in the gas, but bounces and continues to burn, harmless, on the floor.