She drops the cigarette. It spins end over end from her two fingers to the floor and by some miracle doesn’t land in the gas, but bounces and continues to burn, harmless, on the floor.
So Ms. Wells crouches, squints at the butt like she is inspecting a small insect, and then gives it a small push with one finger, and in an instant the convenience store turns red with living fire, flames bursting up in the center of the store and rushing out in all directions. I scream. The fire spreads with astonishing force, racing along the floors and up the walls, consuming the cheap plastic shelves in an instant. I see Ms. Wells with her arms up, wincing, shaking her head from side to side and dancing at the center of the fire, see her disappearing inside it like curtains are closing around her. What is she—what the fuck?
I run up to the building and then back away, shielding my eyes, turning my face away from the inferno. When I’m able to look again I can still see her, just barely, standing perfectly still in the center of the fire as it engulfs her, and it is her own deliberate doing, I watched her do it, but I can’t just turn away. She is a person born of flesh, as am I. I left my identifications on the hot dog truck but I’m still a person, and so I start to cast about, spin around in a desperate circle. I see a pile of buckets beside the row of gas pumps, buckets full of squeegees for windshields, a thousand years old.
I grab the topmost bucket and dump the squeegees out onto the ground. I jam the bucket onto my head and I choke at the miniature rain shower of dust that sprinkles into my eyes and mouth even as I bear down and run toward the building, head bent forward, hurling myself like a truck, like a missile, like a bear with his head inside a bucket, and slam into the glass.
I am flown backward by the impact, and I land, grunting, on the ground. I sit up, groaning, lift the bucket off my head, and Ms. Wells is not on fire but she is about to be, so I put the bucket back on and I start from further back. I give out a wild animal yell, making of myself a battering ram, hurtling toward the glass, and this time it smashes open. I hurl the bucket off my head, kicking through the broken glass while the fire is billowing out, gathering force as it feeds on the rush of oxygen from out here in the rest of the universe, and I find the lady, Ms. Wells, just as the fire reaches her, and I grab her and I carry her, unprotesting, from the fire and out into the slightly lesser heat of the rest of the world.
Then, for a long time, we are on the ground, lying beside each other and breathing, still as lizards. Baking in the heat.
Ms. Wells sprawls beside me, I don’t know how she is still living. She should have died in the fire, but then again, so should have I.
“Are you a hologram?” I ask her.
“No.”
“I had a friend,” I tell her, “who said he was a hologram.
“Oh, yeah?”
“I killed him.”
“Whoa,” she says. Her eyes are closed. My eyes are also closed. “That’s crazy.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Come on,” I say. I open one eye to look at her and find that she has also opened one eye to look at me. “Why did you almost kill yourself? Set yourself on fire. Were you—what, were you testing me?”
“Do you think I was?”
“Yes. Did I pass?”
“Well. Let’s see.” She tugs on her hair, and then nods, satisfied. “I’m alive. Look. It was important to see if you were still human. I don’t mean, are you a hologram? Or a robot, or—anything like that. I mean, ‘Is he still human?’ Like, possessed of a good and golden heart. I thought you were, we thought you were, but—” She sighs. “I had to see.”
The word “we” catches me. I open my other eye. She is still talking, on and on, with no trace left of madness in her voice or mien. “A lot of people, you know, they lose their identity, they are decoupled from the truth, and something happens to them. Everything gets—burned away. You, on the other hand, you appeared to me as remaining still essentially… present. Still human.”
“But what if I failed the test? You would have died.”
“I was very confident in my analysis.”
“Come on. Come on. Can’t you talk straight for one second?”
“Oh, you mean like they talk straight in there? Twelve and twelve is twenty-four, and north is the opposite of south, and all of that? All of that ‘truth’?”
I’m ready to say yes, exactly, all of that truth, but she isn’t stopping.
“There is truth in scripture,” Ms. Wells tells me. “There is truth in the Brothers Grimm. There is truth in any old map you find. Any old mooted map, with a skull for a compass rose, ‘Beyond here there be dragons’ and all of that. You got truth in that too.”
She’s up now, animated, pacing back and forth. Behind us is the wreck of the Flying J, which has more or less finished burning down and stands as a desiccated hulk, a black and irradiated heap adding new lines of heat to the wavering world around it. I trot clumsily in the wake of Ms. Wells, staggering to keep up with her, my feet burning on the sand. Now we’ve arrived at a small car, bright green, reflecting viciously bright beams of sunlight from all its chromed edges. The car says “VW” above the rear license plate, and it is painted with flowers and speckled with rust.
“Is this your car?”
