Crossroads

It was difficult to speak with jaws clenched against the chattering of teeth. “Give me the money.”

“Cliff’s got it. He’s counting it.”

“Who’s Cliff?”

“Flint. He wants to talk to you.”

Deep pain and brutal cold, a shuddering of chest muscles. He’d still had his wits in the warmth of the car. The thing he’d always had was wits, but now they’d abandoned him. He was stone-cold stupid.

“Go on. Take the flashlight.”

He took the flashlight and proceeded through the gate. Stupidity had reduced him to hoping for the best. Hope was the refuge of the stupid. A paddle-limbed cactus loomed up, a nest of rust-eaten oblong cans, ragged sheets of unidentifiable building material, a charred tree stump. The signs of abandonment were unmistakable, but he went around to the back of the stone structure.

There was no back of it. Only the edges of a wall that had collapsed into rubble.

He heard a sound as familiar as his father’s voice, the whinny and rumble of a Fury wagon’s engine starting up. He heard wheels spinning, an automatic transmission shifting gears.

He was too cold to be angry, too shaky-limbed to run.

The speck of dark matter had been tiny only in spatial dimension. It was the negative image of the point of light that had given birth to the universe. Now, in its explosive expansion and consumption of the light, the speck’s hyperdensity became apparent: nothing was denser than death. And how tired he was of running from it. All he had to do was lie down on the ground and wait. He was so malnourished and exhausted, the cold would quickly do the rest—he knew this; could feel it. The dark negative that had replaced his rationality was equally rational, everything equally clear in its antithesis of light.

But the body wasn’t rational. What the body’s nervous system wanted, absurdly, at this moment, was more drug. His money had been stolen but not his canisters.

He jumped up and down to warm himself, he did deep knee bends until he couldn’t breathe, and then, clumsily, with stiffened fingers, he got a canister open and conveyed the saturated wads of toilet paper to his gums.

Though malign and sickening, the boost was a boost. Though everything was inverted, his rationality now reduced to a floater against a black infinity of death, the light hadn’t entirely left his mind. Stumbling, falling, dropping the flashlight, picking it up, he made his way back to the dirt road.

Where he’d formerly entertained a thousand thoughts while taking a single step, he now had to take a thousand steps to complete one thought.

His first thousand steps yielded the thought that he was walking only to warm up.

A thousand steps later, he thought that warming up would restore enough manual dexterity to take a proper whiff from his thumb.

Farther down the road, he thought he was in trouble.

Later yet, after reaching a fork and randomly bearing right, he understood that he couldn’t report his money stolen without revealing that he’d taken it from Clem.

Still later, he realized that he was tasting only toilet paper, which he might as well spit out.

The moment he stopped to spit, his chest was gripped with chills. He was getting no warmer, and the flashlight’s batteries had failed to the point where he could see no worse by turning it off.

This was a thought and his last one. His mind went dark with the flashlight, and then there was only a frigid blackness, its only features a slightly less black sky, a matchingly less black passage forward. The passage seemed eternal, but by and by it developed an incline. At the top of the incline, the sky lightened to reveal a boxy shape in the distance, darker than the road, higher than the horizon.

He was still trudging toward this shape after flames had engulfed it.

He still wasn’t there when he’d been there for a while.

Even as he stood clear of the inferno and toasted himself, he was still on his way to it.

A thing that hadn’t happened yet had happened. A large wooden building with a metal roof and wide doors had been broken into. The frozen metal of the tractors it contained, the deep chill of its concrete floor, had made the inside even colder than the outside, but the totality of the darkness had made even a dim flashlight useful, and there had been a box of matches. There had been a tower of wooden pallets. Gasoline. A splash of gasoline, just enough to kindle one pallet for some warmth. And then a blue flame snaking with terrible speed.

A bird blazing yellow, an oriole, was singing in a palm tree. In the background, around the pool at the apartment complex, she could hear the cheeping of smaller birds, the clacking of hedge clippers, the sighing of the megalopolis. Somewhere in the night, her third in Los Angeles, she’d regained an acuity of hearing that she hadn’t noticed losing. A similar thing had happened toward the end of her confinement in Rancho Los Amigos. A return of ordinary presence.

Of the city she remembered, only the mild weather and the palm trees hadn’t changed. East of Santa Monica, where the streetcar had run, there was now a freeway ten lanes wide, an elevated immensity of automotive glare. Driving from the airport, she’d been tailgated, veered in front of, honked at. Formerly orienting mountains had vanished in a claustrophobic smog. The buildings that loomed up in it, mile after mile, were like players in some cancerous game of trying to be the largest. The city no longer invited her mind to be sky-wide. She was just a frazzled tourist from Chicago, an ordinary mother who was lucky that her boy could read a road map.