Understand, lastminute preparations, removed to a secure location, an alarm, bad intelligence, we identified a credible threat; undisclosed, nu, even to you, it’s no use…we’ve lost Him, sir, hymn — but Der keeps his promises like grudges, fistheld: don’t worry, we’ll have Him back in one piece…thinking, even if it’s a bodybag, a loonysuit or tux — bright and early for the ceremony, tomorrow…or, we might have to postpone, take the Temple public without Him — I’ll have to get back to you on that, I’ll check in on the fives. Der with sleeve wipes the receiver, wipes his sleeve on his chaps on his chinos, turns the phone over to Johannine just getting over a hangover, to talk crazy with Shade’s special advisor on conversion: identify eventualities, address the particulars…a call made from a payphone lonely though it’s also a toilet, urinefloored, dreckwalled, boothed in scratch and acidulous pit (scorpions nesting in the neutered slot for coinreturn, and thin, silvertongued snakes winding around the cord of the receiver, subsisting on metal and glass), way out here on the flatland, the unofficially even if Chamber of Commerced Mittel of Nowhere, a Utopia not proverbial but actual, really No Place At All, to be found if ever halfway along the stretch of highway mating Siegeles and Angels in either direction, any of them but south into Mexico, whose border they’ll eventually head to in pursuit: Naco, Nogales, or Sasabe to which they assume He’d flee, one unrepentant of hundreds of thousands seeking asylum from their government and its unelect God at the great Garita, Tijuana to Mexico City to make a plane down to Panama, deeper into the freak, ever further the jungle, anywhere a million nosings and scrapings and outstretched arm reaches away from any horroring signs of the wondrously civil, making lately like barbaric decay — truly nowhere, that’s the only where for Him if He’s to survive: open and free and air and spanse, a land resigned to its nowhereness, accustomed to any element, accommodating any threat of the sky. Nimbi fried deep in whorl, then frozen. The glow of a prevoyant moon. And then, not a rising but another descent: a stodgy spaceship, sausageshaped, an unidentified unsteadily flying object, falling, that’s only later identified as a Descending Object, Plopping Every Second (a Dopes, in the Mamaloshen of your mutter-inlaw), plodding, dropping air over the hump of each dune; then, on a flat flush with giving, sifting, sinking though impenetrable sand how it hovers, wobbly, as if too exhausted to give a flying futz about being blippedout on radar. Underneath, around, everything’s stilclass="underline" the dunes stay in their ergs, the cacti unbent, dreamt unbowed. Slowly, precariously, the ship begins its settle, lands to dig itself vertically into a small sucking valley indented upon the face of the desert by gravity attendant on girth; from this womby depression it towers up rudely, then opens itself, blooms like a flower foreign to sandscape, multivalent petals dusky, verdigrised, and then blossoms, too, wider at base into a beardy mess of exposed, burntout wiring and patchy, pocked atmospheric shielding it seems, a gratuitous shedding of panels grayedover with exhaust — a wreck, not only has it fallen, it’s falling apart; and finally, with a mechanized groan it converts itself into its consummate form, which is an indecent triangulation of rusted strut: two bulging pods surrounding one large shaft that pierces the air with antenna, as if to conduct the spurt of its weather.
Farblondzhet’s the technical term, which is lost, and yet Ben drives this route unmarked in the dark at a speed excessive, totally reckless. And sure as the desert, sure as the Law, He’s stopped, and He’s ticketed. A state trooper, mirrored aviator sunglasses studded in pyrite, prefab arrowhead pierced to hang on a horsehide thong around his thick, sunburnt, windchapped neck — brother-inlaw up for State Dayen, he’s telling everyone lately, who could contest? He puts the ticket under a wiper for luck, from which it flaps as if the overworked tongue of the hood, drives on the pickup truck panting, only to be stopped maybe fivehundred feet or so later to be ticketed again, now by the trooper’s partner, his brother-inlaw-inlaw, who he’s so far gone on moonshine and mycohallucinogens he thinks he’s a dybbuk’s dybbuk (worryingly, with the sidearm to prove). Ben starts the ailing truck up again and — nu, alright already, so you tell it: how He actually hits this trooper, cuts him off passing to nowhere or is hit by, or else just clips Him changing lanes to keep it interesting, Himself awake; anyway, all this stopping and starting, it can’t be good for the engine — before He releases the clutch, He’s ticketed yet again, a preventive measure, this by the trooper’s partner’s partner, yadda. To swerve on slick enforcement, skid into fine. Who has a lawyer. Who could afford. Goldenberg, I’ll pay you with money you made for my father.
I know you, they say, I’ve seen you before. No, you must have me confused. Has anyone ever told you you look just like. I get that all the time. Flattery’s what I mean. For insurance information, ask His Maker, His license and registration, too. Ben goes — slowly now — for them in the glovebox, where they’d probably be; finds in there a lone rubberglove, and expired documents for one Doctor Karl Young, whomever that might’ve handled.
Attend, the speed limit before here’s legally posted, but where at what, though once you enter the reservation’s the reservation, Injun territory with the Navajo police lying in wait if not sleeping on horseback, sidesaddled on the backs of billboards layered six times over in the service of seven interests imported, mockedup boulders on loan from Holywood appropriately cragged for ambush and overgrown with crabby flora, the limit, here definitely unmarked, drops in half and they’ll ticket you for anything even a thought over remote, bet your tuchus, believe it: this drop in speed going into force in maybe a matter of a foot, that fast, an honest living — with the penalty for infraction almost the only justification for such reservations still to exist, revenue taxing the road between Siegeles and Angels their only profit of late, enough to keep the remaining tribal elders in last skins and scalps while their people wander off to Affiliate. By the time Ben’s edged His fender into the reservation, even only dawned it dimly within the arc of His headlights, He, as Jacobson, Esq. now doing a decent Doctor Young, has incurred in fines almost one thousand worth of shekels He doesn’t have even though His own face is on them, all over: tickets and citations and contemptuous slaps on the wrist for well nigh among others reckless driving, out headlight, taillamp, moving and even staying still violations, a parkingticket for when He’d pulled over onto the wrong side of the tracks, guardrail down, to receive a ticket for speeding — owing such serious altarage both to the people of the State of New Mexico, Nevada, or is this Arizona, and don’t forget the Navajo Nation. Is there no Hopi? Tell you what, I’m going to go ahead and give you a point for your loss.
Ahead, there’s a stretch of no police, Injun or otherwise, a no mensch’s land, or alien. And it’s only here Ben notices the lights; either His own lights light them or it’s just a mirage with a solid sense of humorless timing: He’s just run out of gas. All that stopping and starting again for the law, idling the truck while they spit out His tickets, a scribble of spittle, the blot of their chaw; or, it’s that the truck only now gives out, breaksdown, what do you know, nothing much; transmission dropped from lack of stickshift prowess, an expert I’m not, bumper hanging off to one side, He can’t tell; mechanical, technical, the get your hands dirty knowhow, the metal and oil familiar, how could He even presume; if it goes, it goes, if not, I’ll pay. He rolls tardigrade, to a stop on a shoulder, stooped in sand, in its pretense as it doesn’t exist and there’s only desert; an arid splutter, He kills the engine entirely dead then opens the door and goes out to hail down a dream.