The landscape we’re driving through is spotted with cacti and sage and the tentacle stalks of ocotillo rising out of the sand. It’s just the four lanes of the highway, two going west, two going east. A few small junkyard shacks pop up now and then but basically it’s flat desert and barren hills. However, at one of the shacks, as we pass, I notice a compact station wagon. Just the one car, and I think that I can see, sitting in the driver’s seat, a lone head with the hair of a woman. Not that it matters. It’s not Anne’s hair, but because the car, which may not even be a station wagon, is more interesting than the horny old man, I tell the driver to let me off.
“Only if we do it,” the old man says. He’s got both hands on the steering wheel. I mention the shack and the man says he’ll take me there, but “only if we do it.”
So, okay. “Fine,” I say. And this “fine,” when I say it, is the “fine” of surrender. It’s not that the man is omnipotent or anything, it’s that I’m willing to abdicate my own potency in deference to his. I’m letting him decide what will happen. We don’t shake hands, but the man agrees. He drives to the next exit, a crossroads without building or tree, and he pulls off the road and parks the car on an incline overlooking the highway. He puts his plastic microphone back in the glove compartment and tells me to take my “thing” out.
You wouldn’t call it coercion because I know I’m not trading my services for anything. I’m pretty certain the man isn’t going to drive me back to the junkyard shack, and it doesn’t matter. I sit there, staring out the windshield, and the man leans over and does what he does. And it’s wetter than I expected, but I try to imagine something, not Anne because Anne is dead, but something like Anne, something to make the event seem a little more normal and comfortable. But as the act continues, I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable, and then more uncomfortable, and my reaction is to concentrate on something else, on something alive and real. But there’s nothing I want to concentrate on.
We’re given a life and we have to do something with that life, and at the moment I’m letting the man decide what my life will be doing. And by resting my eyes on the maroon mountains in the distance, and by not looking down at the man’s white head in my lap, I am able to imagine that life, and pretend to lead that life, and to bring myself, in not much time, to a climax.
There, I think, that’s the bit done.
But not quite. As I zip up my pants I notice that the man is doing something with himself under the steering wheel. And whatever it is it’s not working out.
“That was too fast,” the man says.
I say something about there being, as far as I could remember, no time stipulation. But the man is unfulfilled and with a raging unfulfilledness he tells me to get out of the car. This doesn’t seem completely fair, especially since I’ve already settled into my seat, but when the man tells me again to get out of the car it seems like probably the easiest solution. So I grab my pack, close the door, and notice, as the man drives away, that he’s driving in the direction of Yuma.
As long as I had my need I was able to move forward, but now I’ve lost what I want, forgotten what I’m doing and where I’m going, and in fact, at the moment, I’m not going anywhere. I’ve stopped moving. I look down at a desiccated plant beside a gray granite rock and I don’t know what I’m thinking, probably not thinking anything, because my body has taken over. My body is feeling like a rock, the heaviness of a rock, except a rock that once wanted something.
The junkyard is out of my mind by now. The heat of the sun is scorching my face, and my shoes, which had always been comfortable shoes, are bothering me. My socks are slipping into my shoes but I don’t pull them up. I would stay where I am on the crusted sand but walking is habitual. So I walk down to the overpass, and under the shade of the overpass I wait. Not wait. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m looking at the overpass support columns and behind them to a cool and dirty ledge of cement, and I’m planning a night on that cement.
But the night is a long way away. I wait under that overpass the rest of the day. No food, no drink, not even a mandolin to play. I could take out my notebook and jot down my thoughts, but I don’t want to notice my thoughts.
I hardly notice the cars passing by on the highway, and I don’t try to recognize a recognizable driver.
There’s nothing I can do.
Except walk.
Walking is habitual for me but now I don’t even want to walk.
Why walk, I think. Is any spot on the pavement, or any destination, better than any other? No. I actually say the word out loud. “No.” And partly I’m saying no to the lack of hope, and partly I’m saying no to hope itself.
It’s not that I can’t go on, it’s just that I don’t feel like it.
And you might call this a low point, and I might have called it that, but in calling it that, I would have made it a thing with a name, and since I was a thing with a different name, I would have separated myself from the thing I was naming, in this case the quicksand of hopelessness. But I didn’t separate myself. Instead I went to the low point, and in a way embraced the low point, and fueled by the feeling I was having, the low point sank even lower.
3
Evening descended on the desert. After a while I found myself in the middle of darkness, literally. Looking up at the night sky beyond the overpass I could see the stars, which would have been considered beautiful, and the moon, having already set — that was also probably beautiful, but I was a thing apart from beauty or the recognition of beauty.
That was when the car pulled over onto the edge of the highway. It was an old brown Mercedes with two guys sitting in the front seat. The passenger window was rolled down and a stubble-faced man was telling me to hop in, hop in, so I did. It was a four-door and I got in the back and off we went.
The passenger was a big guy with stringy, dirty-blond hair. He swung his arm over the seat and said, “Where are you going?”
“Where are you going?” I asked him.
And he answered, “All the way, man, just like you.”
His name was Jimbo, and the driver, with dark hair, was Craig. They were both drinking from cans of beer, smoking cigarettes, and they seemed extremely friendly. They asked if I could contribute to the gas fund, and when I said I couldn’t, they didn’t seem to mind. Jimbo passed me a beer and it seemed as if we were all good buddies.
Since they didn’t have gas money either, what they would do is pull into gas stations, and Jimbo would go into the store, begin to seem to buy a few bits of food, and then, when Craig had filled the car with gas, Jimbo would run back to the car and they’d drive off without paying. “Living off the land,” Craig said. He took the role of the level-headed, intelligent one. Jimbo was wilder and prone to small but detectable fits of anger.
But they seemed to like me, and they convinced me, after a barrage of pointed questions, to tell the story of Anne, which I did, and when I did they told me not to worry. “We’ll catch her, man,” they said, as if they hadn’t heard that she was dead. Although we’d been driving fast enough before that, we drove even faster, as if we might possibly catch up with her.
And I didn’t mind.
At a certain point I offered to buy them some real food. I’ll pay with my credit card, I thought, and so we stopped at a roadside café near a place called Calexico, sat at a booth by the window, and had some eggs and coffee.