The plains fade into dirt and scrub as they cross the Panhandle, passing Childress, Amarillo, and Glenrio, then rise into New Mexico, through Tucumcari, and turn off the interstate north. Mountains lift in the distance, a gray line of humps growing larger against the horizon, leviathans bobbing ponderously in their pod. The car’s mostly quiet today, each actor settling into an individual holding pattern, accumulating haze. Five days on the road now and despite the drama they’ve got something of a routine, an established set of codes and prefixes. They know generally what’s happening and what’s expected. There’s a bodily, animal pack-being, and they can sit together for miles in total silence. The road takes a meditative shape, the Valiant a still point on a rolling highway, the wide, wrinkled world around them and the hum of the wheels, and they find themselves lost in thought.

Or maybe they don’t know what to say. Maybe the drama had upset things too much. Jim seemed closed in on himself, unwilling to engage, snappish, dark eyed. Remy, turning monkish and deferential, revealed that his ties to Jim were still stronger than any intimacy he’d established with Suzie. Suzie was shaken by the sudden plunge into memory, the unexpected turn to Altus and what seemed like a narrow escape, what was that Faulkner quote about the past? Or was it Joyce? Something something never wake up? She felt her hands moving through ghosts, the car driving through ghosts, her mind caught in a web of ghost voices, I’m still your mother and you can’t take that away from me . . . She felt far, far away from Remy and Jim and the present, no longer caring about the game being played but feeling trapped in a lifetime’s worth of bad decisions, trapped in a stupid car driving across a stupid fascist country.

She’d had to get out, she’d had to get out of Oklahoma and away, she’d had no choice—if she’d stayed or even just kept in touch they would have entangled her, strangled her, dragged her down into some state of being she couldn’t be, something un-her, some anti-Suzie, for fuck’s sake couldn’t they see she didn’t have a choice? It was a matter of survival. And from that initial no, which had been the only way she could see to say yes, things rolled out in a series of half-baked reckless zags, lunging through life as if in a drunken skid, trying to grab hold of something solid until, finally, battered back and forth between bad situations escaped from and lame fuckarounds she’d had to rise above, she found herself here, fucking one guy to fuck with another, getting paid to ride in a kitsch car and write bullshit, trapped in one more half-assed dodge, another too-dearly-bought moment of liberation from her precarious New York life, from Steve the Cat and her job and her so-called friends, her bullshit creative writing courses at the bullshit New School with all the other bullshit bullshitters, and this, too, what was this but a distraction and a fantasy? Even more than usual, because it was a vacation and had to end. No better than a fucking novel. It was the kind of temporary release we all seek, an unreality binge, the kind of release we seek from our daily life to make it bearable, a new show, an affair, an election, and now, realizing how far she’d come and how little ground she’d covered, she decided maybe it wasn’t enough. Maybe a whole new something wasn’t just a mythology they were deterritorializing, but something she needed to do, to find—break the pattern for real, really start over somehow real next time for real.

She watched the scenery roll by, the western horizon out the window flat like a line drawn through space, edged by distant purple angles. You could draw a line through anything, she thought, lighting a cigarette. You draw a line and a point and that’s it, that’s life, all the way into it.

Remy watched her from the back, watched her smoke in digits counting up through the camera, wondering what she was thinking. She must be deciding what to do, he thought, about Jim and me. Or maybe she’s watching the dusty, wounded shacks by the road and thinking about her flyover girlhood in Altus. Or who knows, really, what people think, or if they even do, properly so called. Do any of us really? Think? Or do we just invent narratives ex post facto, rationalizations framing the act, explanations to make sense of the images we’re left with?

Up ahead he saw a rusted neon sign stripped raw in the wind, reading western motel. He turned the camera to track it going by.

“That’s our sign,” Suzie said, gesturing with her cigarette.

“What sign?” Jim asked.

“What the sign said. That’s us.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

Suzie smiled. “Don’t worry, Gene. We’re almost there.”

“Sure,” Jim said, perplexed. “Speaking of which, next time we stop, we need to get some sandwiches. I want to get to Trementina before the sun sets, which means we don’t really have time to sit down and eat.”

The desert rolled by like so much scenery.