by Paul Hawkins
*
He had her that night and lots of nights after. In the half-light that came through the one cheaply shaded window of the room in which they slept her skin was blue. Every inch of her was smooth. Blaise had been too lonely for too long, and she was warm and willing. Who cared if they were European? He did not know who she was, but she said she would be who he wanted her to be and that he should just rest. He knew there was something creepy about that, something German, but he had been too tired to chase the thought. And after he had been with her the first night, he fell back into the bed and she was gone and throbbing music came through the wall and rapidly changing lights seeped through the crack under the door, and it felt like she had taken something from him but he did not care because he was out of prison and still finding his feet and kind of felt like an alien to the world. Maybe the world had changed. Maybe he was the dinosaur. And when he woke up in the middle of the night wanting her again, whoever she was, she was there. And so he tottered off back to his Airstream and fed Bess. He felt guilty about ignoring Bess – maybe that was his saving grace. He looked after every day and walked her in the evenings.
From Blaise’s Journal
My dinosaur squints to the West, whence Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea disappeared, over the mountains and down the Columbia to the nation's end, the misnamed Pacific. To them it was a land of wonder; to go where they went, we'd have to go farther. What did they wonder when they saw the ocean breaking at the end? For all their awe, a sinking? For all the wonders they'd seen, what do you do when you reach the end not having found that one dear thing you most desire, the one priceless something you don't even dare name? When every inch has been quantified and surveyed, how can you lie to yourself that it's still there, just hidden, or maybe only hidden in your mind instead of space?
It took them 187 days to retrace their steps and get back to St. Louis. They all got honors and stuff. For some of them it was never enough. The memory of their great achievement was a haint to every mundane day after. Merriwether Lewis killed himself.
From Rosalind’s Journal
Blaise ended up spending his days at the filling station and most of his nights at the mansion. It turns out the Eurotrash were scientists from the German line of Bohrs and had made a machine to talk to the Void. There was a whole crowd of German people there, young folks who had reconciled science and drugs and bad techno-pop, and they were friendly enough but they did not talk to Blaise much. They could sense his aversion to androgyny and spandex and pill-popping. He was almost more like an icon than a companion to them, a thing they wanted because they liked trophies.
Though other girls offered themselves to him he always came back to the Maria, though she was not Maria. The real Maria would not have done the things this girl did. At least he didn’t think she would have. To tell the truth he didn’t know.
He told them the machine wouldn’t work, but they just nodded to him politely like he was doddering grandfather. The other trophy they had was an ex-astronaut there who had gone to the moon and then gone nuts. He was their prize possession. He spent most of his days watching TV and was too agoraphobic to even walk down to the bait shop for a soda, so Blaise would run the odd errand for him.