He was pointing at the western horizon, where a gently curving silver line arced through five degrees of the night sky. It looked as if someone had scratched an enormous, shallow letter C out of the blackness.
'Maybe a condensation trail,' I said. 'A military jet.'
'At night? Not at night.'
'Then I don't know what it is, Simon. Come on, get in— we don't have time to waste.'
* * * * *
We made better time than I expected. We reached the medical supply warehouse, a numbered unit in a dreary industrial park, with time to spare before sunrise. I presented my ID to the nervous National Guardsman posted at the entrance; he handed me over to another Guardsman and a civilian employee who walked me through the aisles of shelving. I found what I needed and a third Guardsman helped me carry it to the car, though he backed off quickly when he saw Diane gasping in the backseat. 'Luck to you,' he said, his voice shaking a little.
I took the time to set up an IV drip, the bag jury-rigged to the jacket hanger in the car, and showed Simon how to monitor the flow and make sure she didn't snag the line in her sleep. (She didn't wake even when I put the needle in her arm.)
Simon waited until we were back on the road before he asked, 'Is she dying?'
I gripped the wheel a little tighter. 'Not if I can help it.'
'Where are we taking her?'
'We're taking her home.'
'What, all the way across country? To Carol and E.D.'s house?'
'Right.'
'Why there?'
'Because I can help her there.'
'That's a long drive. I mean, the way things are.'
'Yes. It might be a long drive.'
I glanced into the backseat. He stroked her head, gently. Her hair was limp and matted with perspiration. His hands were pale where he had washed off the blood.
'I don't deserve to be with her,' he said. 'I know this is my fault. I could have left the ranch when Teddy did. I could have gotten help.'
Yes, I thought. You could have.
'But I believed in what we were doing. Probably you don't understand that. But it wasn't just the red calf, Tyler. I was certain we'd be raised up imperishable. That in the end we'd be rewarded.'
'Rewarded for what?'
'Faith. Perseverance. Because from the very first time I set eyes on Diane I had a powerful feeling we'd be part of something spectacular, even if I didn't wholly comprehend it. That one day we'd stand together before the throne of God—no less than that. 'This generation shall not pass away till all be fulfilled.' Our generation, even if we took a wrong turn at first. I admit, things happened at those New Kingdom rallies that seem shameful to me now. Drunkenness, lechery, lies. We turned our backs on that, which was good; but it seemed like the world got a little smaller when we weren't among people who were trying to build the chiliasm, however imperfectly. As if we'd lost a family. And I thought, well, if you look for the cleanest and simplest path, that should take you in the right direction. 'In your patience possess ye your souls.''
'Jordan Tabernacle,' I said.
'It's easy to set prophecy against the Spin. Signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars, it says in Luke. Well, here we are. The powers of heaven shaken. But it isn't—it isn't—'
He seemed to lose the thought.
'How's her breathing back there?' But I didn't really need to ask. I could hear every breath she took, labored but regular. I just wanted to distract him.
'She's not in distress,' Simon said. Then he said, 'Please, Tyler. Stop and let me out.'
We were traveling east. There was surprisingly little traffic on the interstate. Colin Hinz had warned me about congestion around Sky Harbor airport, but we'd bypassed that. Out here we'd encountered only a few passenger cars, though there were a good many vehicles abandoned on the shoulder. 'That's not a good idea,' I said.
I looked in the mirror and saw Simon knuckling tears out of his eyes. At that moment he looked as vulnerable and bewildered as a ten-year-old at a funeral.
'I only ever had two signposts in my life,' he said. 'God and Diane. And I betrayed them both. I waited too long. You're kind to deny it, but she's dying.'
'Not necessarily.'
'I don't want to be with her and know I could have prevented this. I would as soon die in the desert. I mean it, Tyler. I want to get out.'
The sky was growing light again, an ugly violet glow more like the arc in a malfunctioning fluorescent lamp than anything wholesome or natural.
'I don't care,' I said.
Simon gave me a startled look. 'What?'
'I don't care how you feel. The reason you should stay with Diane is that we have a difficult drive ahead of us and I can't take care of her and steer at the same time. And I'm going to have to sleep sooner or later. If you take the wheel once in a while we won't have to stop except for food and fuel.' If we could find any. 'If you drop out it'll double the travel time.'
'Does it matter?'
'She may not be dying, Simon, but she's exactly as sick as you think she is, and she will die if she doesn't get help. And the only help I know about is a couple of thousand miles from here.'
'Heaven and earth are passing away. We're all going to die.'
'I can't speak for heaven and earth. I refuse to let her die as long as I have a choice.'
'I envy you that,' Simon said quietly.
'What? What could you possibly envy?'
'Your faith,' he said.
* * * * *
A certain kind of optimism was still possible, but only at night. It wilted by daylight.
I drove into the Hiroshima of the rising sun. I had stopped worrying that the light itself would kill me, though it probably wasn't doing me any good. That any of us had survived the first day was a mystery—a miracle, Simon might have said. It encouraged a certain rough practicality: I pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and tried to keep my eyes on the road instead of on the hemisphere of orange fire levitating out of the horizon.
The day grew hotter. So did the interior of the car, despite the overworked air-conditioning. (I was running it hard in an effort to keep Diane's body temperature under control.) Somewhere between Albuquerque and Tucumcari a great wave of fatigue washed over me. My eyelids drifted closed and I nearly ran the car into a mile marker. At which point I pulled over and turned off the engine. I told Simon to fill the tank from the jericans and get ready to take the wheel. He nodded reluctantly.
We were making better time than I'd anticipated. Traffic had been light to nearly nonexistent, maybe because people were afraid of being on the road by themselves. While Simon put gas in the car I said, 'What did you bring for food?'
'Only what I could grab from the kitchen. I had to hurry. See for yourself.'
I found a cardboard box among the dented jericans and packaged medical supplies and loose bottles of mineral water in the trunk. It contained three boxes of Cheerios, two cans of corned beef, and a bottle of Diet Pepsi. 'Jesus, Simon.'
He winced at what I had to remind myself he considered a blasphemy. 'That was all I could find.'
And no bowls or spoons. But I was as hungry as I was sleep deprived. I told Simon we ought to let the engine cool off, and while it did we sat in the shade of the car, windows rolled down, a gritty breeze coming off the desert, the sun suspended in the sky like high noon on the surface of Mercury. We used the torn-off bottoms of empty plastic bottles as makeshift cups and ate Cheerios moistened with tepid water. It looked and tasted like mucilage.
I briefed Simon on the next leg of the trip, reminded him to turn on the air-conditioning once we were
