The borderman and the driver rush down off the truck after me. They move quickly. The borderman squats at the roadside, digs into his pocket, and I suffer a quick vision of that spray aerosol coming out, the lighter, and I’m already so hot—No fire, no—but it’s a knife he takes out this time, a short effective blade that slashes the binds on my hands and on my feet.
He nods at the driver and the driver nods at him. Done. Mission accomplished.
I rise to a feeble seated position, blink helplessly in the brightness. “Wait,” I say. “Don’t. Listen. This is a mistake.”
“Liar,” says the borderman.
“I’m not a liar,” I say.
“Liar,” says the driver, and he kicks me away from the truck as I try to follow them back on, and I tumble backward, land on my ass. The concrete is hotter than the sand.
“There’s a plot,” I say, and turn up my palms, for mercy. “A plot to destroy the Golden State.”
“Yours,” says the borderman, and catches me under the chin. “Your plot.”
He kicks again, and my face flies backward, and I’m on the ground again, blood pouring from my nose. “We’re in danger,” I say, and he kicks me again, a hard one, again in the center of my stomach, and I moan “Danger,” and he says “Liar,” and then the driver catches me in the small of the back—“Liar!”—and the other one does, and then both of them together, over and over, and the individual words begin to blur and rise together, into the single word, loud as anything, true as doors on houses, louder and stronger: “Liar! Liar! Liar!”
And then they move swiftly back up the steps onto the truck to escape from the air, which is already baking me inside the suit.
A blur of sounds—“Liarliarliarliar”—a whirl of inward-collapsing sound, which rings in my ears and hangs in the air and mingles with the retreating hum of the bus, driving back to the good and golden world, leaving me here in the sand.
25.
This is what it’s like outside the Golden State.
Now I know. A new piece of truth to add to my personal store, to carry along with me for however long it is before I collapse out here and die.
The fate of the exiled is unknown and unknowable, until you are added to their number. Until you get put on a truck and kicked off the truck in the hot, empty air of the world outside the world. The fate of the exiled is unknown until the knowledge is all around you like a carpet of heat, shifting under your footsteps like burning sand, stinging your eyes like windblown grit.
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.
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.
So Ms. Wells crouches, squints at the butt like she is inspecting a small insect, and then gives it a small push with one finger, and in an instant the convenience store turns red with living fire, flames bursting up in the center of the store and rushing out in all directions. I scream. The fire spreads with astonishing force, racing along the floors and up the walls, consuming the cheap plastic shelves in an instant. I see Ms. Wells with her arms up, wincing, shaking her head from side to side and dancing at the center of the fire, see her disappearing inside it like curtains are closing around her. What is she—what the fuck?
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