responsible for unnamed tragedies that lie in each moment beyond the high beam, he smiles.
I remember roller coasters…
Concentrate! You must pay attention now.
Still, I am glad she is having fun.
At the bottom of the steep and never-seeming-to-end slide, the tank lands and the Old Man yanks it sideways into a skid and finally a halt.
An avalanche of falling dust shrouds them for a moment.
The Old Man is shaking. Sweating.
“Poppa?”
When the Old Man speaks, he hears the fear in his own voice. The age too. “Yes?”
“That was fun! I hope there’s more.” And she is giggling and laughing and the Old Man laughs too, though he doesn’t know what he is laughing at.
You are laughing at yourself.
No, not because of that. I am laughing, because for another moment, we are still alive, despite all my failures.
Yes.
And I am laughing also because of the sound of her laughter. My granddaughter’s laughter is a good thing.
The best thing.
AT DAWN THE Old Man saw the rubble of a wide and tall hacienda set within the crevice of a hill by a road leading up out of the far side of Death Valley.
It has been a long night.
Longer than the night you walked after the motel and the moon went down and you were all alone in the dark?
Yes, it feels longer than that one.
The journey down into the bowl of the deepest desert hadn’t ended at that teetering ledge. For hours, the Old Man had coaxed the giant tank down through wadis and ravines and hills that may have been as steep as that first, terrifying, almost-drop.
She’d laughed all the way.
At the bottom, they’d gotten out to stretch their legs and feel the cool of the night drying the sweat on their bodies.
Even the temperature gauge was back to normal.
The road at the bottom disappeared underneath the drifting desert, and the Old Man thought, ‘Surely this must be the bottom.’
But it wasn’t.
No.
They’d crossed the valley and climbed a road that was mostly intact as it wound its way up through wicked formations of wind-carved rock.
Then down again.
By that time, his granddaughter and the Boy had been asleep.
Then it was just me. Alone in the night and crossing the desert.
Like before.
The tank rolled across the bottom of the ancient ocean.
In the night, the Old Man spied the skeletal remains of sunken RVs drowning amid the sand and rock.
The blackened frames of buildings clustered by the side of the road and the Old Man wondered what their story of salvage was.
Old habits die hard.
I think you should keep that habit. The fuel you’ll need is more than what you have. You have a long way to go before this is done. Far beyond tonight, my friend.
Yes.
In time, the rolling motion of the tank and the Old Man’s concentration on the mere rumors of road that lay buried beneath the mercurial sand lulled him into a thoughtlessness where even his constant memories could not find him.
I am too tired to remember.
When he came to the bottom of the desert, he found something in its center he had not expected to find. Clusters of feathery green trees, clutching at the lowest point of the desert, drifting like remembered seaweed in the moonlight. Moving slightly in some soft breeze that had wandered far and long to arrive here on this late night.
Like us.
In the center, at the bottom of Death Valley, next to a wide swath of dry alkali flats, there was life.
The Old Man shut down the tank and crossed the thin sands alone to feel the feathery branches and touch the soft white bark of the trees.
A strong breeze came up and the branches whispered all around him.
There was once an ocean here and this was its bottom.
I have seen its shores far up near where we obtained fuel from the old spaceship runway. Since then we have fallen and fallen into its dry depths.
As though sinking, my friend.
Yes, as though we were sinking.
‘And underneath this tree,’ the Old Man thought to himself, feeling its soft bark, ‘is what remains of that long-ago ocean.’
SOON HE IS back aboard the tank and rolling on toward the east; his granddaughter and the Boy remained undisturbed by his stop in the night. By the last of the moon’s light, the Old Man watched the white alkali flats spread away to the south.
What lost things lie within you?
What are your memories?
Blankness surrounded him and there was nothing but the road and the night long after the moon had crossed the sky and fallen into the shadows of spiky mountains on the far horizon.
Just before dawn, when the Old Man suspected there might be something, some structure within the rocks ahead, he rubbed his tired eyes and thought of oceans buried deep beneath the desert.
Those alien creatures that had lived within it and along its shores must have thought their world would never end. That the sea and their islands would always be there, long after even they had gone.
Just as we did before the bombs.
And…
One day, will we be just a few savages alongside a ravine at the bottom of our history, clutching at the remains of what once was?
Like those soft feathery trees in the moonlight at the bottom of a dead ocean.
Can we ever be forgiven for what we did?
IN THE GRAY light of first morning, the Old Man shut down the tank in the shadow of an ancient pile that rose up from the desert floor.
The hacienda had once been a hotel or a desert resort.
There might even be salvage within, but I am too tired to think about that right now.
He waited through the morning silence for his granddaughter and the Boy to finish their sleep. He watched the daylight rise and turn to gold, sweeping away the long night.
My life since the bombs has been like those trees at the bottom of the ancient ocean.
And yet, you are still here, my friend.
Yes.
