Golden State

ground again, blood pouring from my nose. “We’re in danger,” I say, and he kicks me again, a hard one, again in the center of my stomach, and I moan “Danger,” and he says “Liar,” and then the driver catches me in the small of the back—“Liar!”—and the other one does, and then both of them together, over and over, and the individual words begin to blur and rise together, into the single word, loud as anything, true as doors on houses, louder and stronger: “Liar! Liar! Liar!”

And then they move swiftly back up the steps onto the truck to escape from the air, which is already baking me inside the suit.

A blur of sounds—“Liarliarliarliar”—a whirl of inward-collapsing sound, which rings in my ears and hangs in the air and mingles with the retreating hum of the bus, driving back to the good and golden world, leaving me here in the sand.

25.

This is what it’s like outside the Golden State.

Now I know. A new piece of truth to add to my personal store, to carry along with me for however long it is before I collapse out here and die.

The fate of the exiled is unknown and unknowable, until you are added to their number. Until you get put on a truck and kicked off the truck in the hot, empty air of the world outside the world. The fate of the exiled is unknown until the knowledge is all around you like a carpet of heat, shifting under your footsteps like burning sand, stinging your eyes like windblown grit.

I gotta get up. That’s the first thing. Get up. Rise, you dumb brute, rise.

So I do, I struggle up, arrange my feet underneath me, shake off the pulse of pain in my kidneys and in my shoulder and my head, and start to walk. The air is fiery yellow, it’s ash-streaked gray, it’s billows of angry red at the horizon’s furthest edge.

I walk along the road that is just a strip of asphalt through an endless landscape of hardscrabble dirt and desert sand.

Every direction I look the air is warped and shimmering with heat.

This is what it’s like. This is what we have protected ourselves from, in there, at home, but now I’m out here. I’m gone from home and I have to get back.

So I go. I walk. One step and then another one and then one more. It hurts but I go. Back toward home.

Because I fucked up. I fucked it all up and now I have to get home and put it right. Save the State.

Past brown desert plants, dead or dying. Through low drifts of sand that come across the road in dry rivulets. Clutching my side, wincing, breathing hard. Past stands of bent cactus and clusters of rocks in tottering piles, crusted with old dirt.

I’m walking, I am, but it’s not easy. Staying upright, staying ambulatory. The basic mechanics of forward motion. Not easy at all.

I am following the road. I was trying to pay attention, the whole ride out here, trying to stay in tune with the motion of the truck, so I could retrace my steps. So I could get back.

The sky is a constant yellow glare that makes it hard to hold up my head, so I don’t, I stare at my feet while I walk, keep my head hung, my chin pressed into my clavicle. I clear my throat and spit on the ground, or actually what happens is I try to spit and manage only a thin clot of dried-out mucus, which dribbles from my lower lip into my beard. There is a steady pulse of pain from my wounded shoulder, and I keep falling into the pulses’ cadence, walking to the miserable rhythm, one footfall for every angry throb. My kidneys hurt bad, from where the men’s boots slammed into me, so I clutch my side and walk stooped, bent, one step after the other, feeling individual drops of blood form and fall from my nose.

I think one of my eyes has come loose. That’s what it feels like, like it’s loose or swollen somehow. I can feel it getting bigger inside the socket, threatening to burst.

About a half mile from where I got tossed off the truck the road is blocked by an old highway sign, green with white detailing, fallen from its mooring and covering the road, bent up at a sharp angle and shimmering with heat lines from the unceasing sun.

I try to step over the broken sign and misjudge it severely, because I can’t see because of my fucking eye, and I scrape my shin on the sign’s edge as I pitch forward onto its face, sliding forward like an awkward kid on a playground slide, down the blistering hot surface of the sign until I land in a heap at the bottom.

I get up. I keep going.

I’ve gotta get home, that’s all. Get back.

Although first what I’d really love is a drink of water. My tongue is fat inside my mouth, and my throat is burning, bristly, thick with sand and dirt.

I keep thinking I hear laughing voices, or cars coming, or my radio singing out, but I’m always wrong. I carry no radio. I have no identifications.

I stop walking and stand still in the heat. Shakily I raise a hand to my brow, try to block the sun from scouring my eyeballs. I wipe blood and phlegm out of my beard. I just gotta stop a second, that’s all. Try to get my bearings. Make sure I’m walking in the right direction.

I’m not. I’m walking in the wrong direction. Fuck.

I got fooled. I got turned around. When I fell across the downed sign, or maybe earlier, maybe all along. There’s just no way to tell anything. The sky is all one sky, all one ugly swirling pale gray, a color that is no color. The air is tremulous, coruscated at its edges. It’s like—it’s like