Now that I sit in front of the fire and try to think about this whole thing, what happened so far and what’s coming up next, I’m blanking. The thick paint of thought melts off of my brain, leaving a colorless canvas in my head. It drips down into me, collecting in a coagulating puddle of brown sludge in my heart.
My back is ice cold facing the black night, but my front is covered in still drops of sweat. I squint my eyes against the hot dance of the flames and breathe in heavy, thick smoke. The desert wind is always blowing, and right now it’s blowing the heat in my direction.
An hour ago, after my shadow on the red dirt had disappeared and the bottom of the great orange sun kissed the razor-straight horizon, I happened upon a dead tree standing in its own lonely spot among the great flatness. Scattered around the base were some black flecks of something. Dead leaves, maybe, or a desert bird that had keeled over one day, right out of its nest in the branches. All that was left.
I stopped the car, a true shitbox caked in deep dust, so that each inch of the fading blue body was covered. A narrow trail of hanging dust stretched back behind it, marking my zigzags through this nameless desert. Drifting in no direction to speak of, maybe west. A few days back, after finishing off the last of the whiskey I’d stockpiled, I spent hours doing donuts in the sand, occasionally pausing to hear the echo of my animal howls.
This was after one of the lenses popped out of my sunglasses while I was hitting myself in the head for having burned the rest of my cash after I got off the highway. I fished around in the dirt for an hour trying to find the damn thing. I get frustrated and out here, I can’t take it out on anything but myself. I used to curse at myself, horrible things, but I outgrew that. Now I don’t speak at all.
The tree was bone dry, the bark shrunken and twisted, choking its innards. I stared at this lone sentinel of the West, almost sorry that I had disturbed it.
After a while I saw the sun disappearing, and fetched the extra gas container from the trunk and hauled it over and dumped a fraction of the stuff onto the base of the tree, a few drops falling onto my ragged sneakers, the rubber sole hanging off of the base.
As I walked from the car, rattling the matchbox I’d retrieved from the console, I said something of a prayer, a stray thought that somehow surfaced from the pitch-black depths of my mind: “Thank you for something as pure as fire.” I lit a match and dropped it on the tree. It went up, and the last of the sunlight faded away.
For dinner I bludgeoned a hole in a can of Dinty Moore beef stew with the dullest of the three blades in my knockoff Swiss Army knife and slurped the stuff cold. I drank my water straight from the gallon, one of five I was carrying in my trunk, but the only one that wasn’t empty yet. It was warm, almost hot, but suited me just fine. I finished another page from A Farewell to Arms: I read it, reread it, then tore it out and ate it.
I snap out of my stare and rub my eyes, shift in my seat on the dirt. Something touches my ankle, but my body doesn’t even twitch. Lazily, and with the sharpest knife, I start cutting the other leg of my filthy jeans, right above the knee like the other one. I study it for length, the uneven tears already sprouting stray threads, quivering in the chill breeze.
The burning tree is shining like some apocalyptic beacon, indicating a path that led to nowhere, signaling to fellow travelers that would never come to pass.
I could sleep in the car, but I figure I’m cooped up in there for most of the day anyway. Earlier, I used to drive at night for a minor change in scenery, but after the second headlight faded out I hit a rock and almost popped a tire. The sky is impossibly deep and wide here, and I lay my head down on the ground and stare into it, thinking of ghosts like me. Thinking of nothing at all.
Because I have no future, I dream of the past. The long barrel of my dad’s revolver stuck deep in my mouth. Three in the morning. I sat there in front of a snowy television like that for an hour until I finally pulled the thing out, now warm and wet with my vapor. I waited until the knot in my stomach undid itself, then I stood up and stuffed the thing in my jeans and pulled the note off of my bare chest. I tried to tape it to the wall, but after four tries I just left it there on the floor, grabbed my wallet, marched out the door and into the car and out of there.
I drove for miles, out of suburbia and into the city, all day until I found a place that would sell alcohol to the underaged. Canned food and water at the grocery store, strangely populous in the dead of night. Then to the highway, far away. No phone, no radio. I bought the Hemingway at a rest stop.
It’s been almost twenty-four days: I’m sure my parents have made the national news by now. A cross-country search for yours truly. When I was some distance down Route 15, I jerked the wheel to the left and veered into a long stretch of sand, extending past unseen horizons, an endless empty basin, a hopeless slab of creation.
Awake now, but the world is still dark. I scratch at my beard, grit my teeth, tug at my growing hair, which is finally peeking down over my brow. I write “water” into the dirt and pretend to lap it up, scooping little hills of sand into my mouth. I rub it out entirely.
How will I do it? I left some tall cliffs behind that would have done very well. Now my options are limited. Two rounds in the gun, the rest spent on an empty water container. Three too-dull knives. No medicines to speak of. Will I simply let life drain away? Let my spirit evaporate into the wide atmosphere? Would it ever reach that deep, black tapestry of stars? I collapse into dreamless sleep and awake to a bright landscape like all the others.
I stand up and face it. The emptiness has been devouring me so slowly. The days stretch to unreasonable lengths. But here I have found something. Something speaks to me in the strawlike patches of grass, the everlasting sandstones, the vortex of the occasional dust devil. The distant mountains, alternately real and unreal, call to me in a womanly voice, low and smooth as the gliding water of a brook.
Behind me I spy the thin vertical lines of a cityscape, shuddering in the heat. I can hear its ceaseless noise, all the way across this nothing. A gust of wind rushes by, and it blows the hair out of my face. All of a sudden, the pain floods me: my skin boils, my feet crumble, my head is collapsing in on itself. The heat sears my eyes, dissolves them. Something deep within me shrivels and turns to black. I welcome the sensation, and slowly collapse onto a bed of hard, compacted dust. My arms and legs stretch out into a long, twisted X. My dry mouth, cracked lips contort into some awful smile.
My breathing becomes audible: I listen. With each breath I move deeper into the light, a wash of brightest white. I break apart and become one with the desert. I bake. Something in my ear: a voice calls me home. A rush of images, thousands of them, all at once. My heart cries out, tears at its cage within my chest, aching to bust out. I want to get up, can I get up? My head turns away from the sun.
Stop, I cry. Listen to the wind. It whips in and around me. Can you not hear it? Can it never be silent?
The tree burns out, a thin smoke rising. It is burned into memory, and everything is impossibly still.