I return to the car, get in and, at the first sane speed I"ve driven in three days and a thousand miles, head back the direction I came, the perfect Stuttering Fool of the American Tarot.
I cross the Idaho-Utah line and I don"t stop, because even if I had the money for a motel room, I"m not stopping anyway. Out of utter fatigue I pull over just shy of Nevada and sleep an hour, and then continue, pa.s.sing Vegas a little before noon. A little after noon I"m back in California, Station 3 just beginning to filter in at the far end of the radio, and in a daze I take myself on into Los Angeles, nearly seventeen hours after leaving Craters of the Moon. Far past exhaustion, far past adrenaline, without a reason for being back, without a single reason to take me across one black ring after another into the bull"s-eye of Hollywood and then through the Black Pa.s.sages on the other side, through Beverly Hills and out along the border of Black Clock Park into the Palisades, I pull my car off Sunset Boulevard and drive up to the same bluff where I went the morning after Viv and I kidnapped Sahara from the Cathode Flower, just in time to see the sun fall into the sea.
From the bluff I have the same view of the whole bay, the smoking ruins of Malibu to the north and, to the south, the paramilitary outposts of Palos Verdes. At sea the hundreds of Chinese junks that sail out this time each month depart with their mystery cargo.
Listen. I"m going to try one more time. I don"t promise anything will come of it, or that I won"t try to put it off for as long as possible, or that in the meantime I may not have to do something sensible first, like find Viv for instance. I don"t promise that the deep fault line that runs from my psyche through my brain out my front door and down the street won"t run all the way from L.A. to America and beyond, all the way from memory to the moment and back, splitting me up the middle and leaving half of me on one side and half of me on the other. Not far from this very bluff where I am now is the beach where I once told a woman about talking to myself; actually I can almost see the very place, right down there. Now, just for a while, we"re going to pretend that I"m talking to myself again, like I used to. Now, just for a while, we"re going to pretend-don"t take this personally-that you"re not here at all. Most of the best things I"ve ever said, the most fluid, stutterless, sonorous things, were to myself, and now I"m going to try one more time to say everything I can find in me that might be worth saying, and hope that whatever I find in me to say is only the road, and not the place to where the road is going. And then when I"m finished, perhaps I"ll be finished for good. There"s always the off-chance that, from another bluff, I"ll actually be able to see the place to where the road is going and that, having seen it, I"ll find that nothing else needs to be said. But there"s also the chance that, having seen it, I"ll find something entirely new that needs to be said, something I never knew before that I could say. And then, having tried one last time, perhaps I will try once more.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author"s imagination or are used fict.i.tiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1996 by Steve Erickson.
cover design by Jason Gabbert.
978-1-4804-1025-1.