Rosy-lipped dawn kissed the canyon’s edge, smearing it pink and bronze, while, still, all below rose and fell in a tumult of monochrome blue, a faded photo burning out along one edge studded with black burs, juniper, and creosote. It’s rock, not sand, rock and a thin layer of cryptobiotic soil knotted like scar tissue ripped apart eons ago in long-forgotten geological holocausts, archaic renditions in Wingate sandstone dating to the Late Triassic, Cutler torn from the Early Permian.

Jim’s breath caught: the awesome grandeur. No other words for it. Sweeping. Awesome. Spectacular. Awesome. Sublime. Sublime. Beyond human comprehension. Tasting the words on his tongue. A whole herd of men, a Grand Central Station riot of thousands, tens of thousands, a hundred thousand humans and their robot cars cascading over the plateau and off the edge, bodies falling in clumps and pairs and singles, would be the merest trickle breaking against the unyielding stone, a temporary organic bounty, water, carbon, and nutrients. That’s how much we mean here, and even less. Even less because nothing was good to eat, water was scarce and usually poisonous. One saw here with undeniable lucidity that God had not made the earth for man, but to sate unknowable alien desires.

Jim already knew we were only animals, like polar bears or sea slugs, but the land before him cut to the bone of it, peeled back the skin of his species’ existence. Man, woman, Republican, Democrat, artist, banker, cuck, bitch, none of it mattered here. You were a bipedal savanna primate, an animal caught in the open. You huddled squatting on the mesa in the morning chill, grunting like a chump, watching the sun come up and smoking one of Suzie’s Parliaments as the red-orange curtain fell down the wall of the canyon and slowly faded, turning everything light.

A fox came up over the edge of the rise where he sat and crossed before him, upwind, unseeing. Jim inhaled smoke and the fox spun at the quiet burning crackle of paper and tobacco, tail level, curling on one plane as it hissed, narrow muzzle baring teeth. Then as quickly as it appeared it was gone, back over the edge of the rise. Jim thought again how glad he was he’d left Suzie and Remy at the hotel. The idea had just come to him, a clear solution, and he took it. The car had been weighing him down, the camera, the script, all that artifactual scaffolding. Art was reality and reality had no audience. Here was the thing itself: deep surface. This was it, this moment, not all that confabulation. Right now. This sentence. These three words.

Once the sun was fully up, he crammed his sleeping bag in its stuff sack and, lifting his carry-on, walked back the half mile to the highway, where he waited, thumb at the ready. He was passed by two semis, three SUVs, and a hatchback before an Indian in a pickup truck pulled over.

“Thanks,” Jim said as he got in the cab.

The Indian was in his early sixties, a ropy, sunburned workingman wearing at the edges. He wore a cowboy hat over a gray mullet. A Diné College parking pass hung from his rearview mirror.

“Ya’at’eh,” he said. “Where you headed?”

Jim pointed up the road.

The man grunted. “How far?”

Jim put his hands up. “I’ll be honest, man, I don’t know. I’m just going.”

“Okay,” the man said, accelerating back onto the highway.

“I’m not gonna do anything, if you’re worried,” Jim said. “I’m just traveling. I’m not running from the law or anything.”

The man smiled grimly. “Maybe you’re the one oughta be worried.”

Jim laughed. “Maybe I should. You gonna do something?”

“Naw,” the man said. “Not if I don’t need to. I’d scalp ya, but nowadays they just throw you in jail for scalping white boys. Not like the good old days, hey?”

Jim laughed again, and the old man’s smile warmed.

“Tell you what,” he went on, “I’m going as far as Monticello. Going to see my sweetheart. Now so long as you don’t tell my old lady, I’ll let you ride that far, okay?”

“Sounds good,” Jim said. His heart felt light out here, riding these many miles. Everything was easy.

“You’re a long way from nowhere,” the Indian said after a minute. “You out camping?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“What’s ‘sorta’ mean? I see you ain’t got no backpack, just that rollie bag. You jump out of a plane somewhere?”

“I was on a trip with some people,” he said, “and I decided to split off on my own. Filling out the pattern required a kind of fractal divergence that wasn’t possible at the level of collective meaning, and there was no way forward that didn’t move right back into the cycle of reaction, because that particular system led only to certain end states, no matter how much turbulence you put into it. So in order to phase shift to the next level of emergent self-organization, I had to disrupt the socius not only at the level of semiotic production but also at the level of the real itself. The only way forward, as it were, was to break out of teleological progression altogether, which was impossible within that particular assemblage of affects and wills. I’m still on the trip; I just let them keep the car. Long story short, I’m making a movie.”

The Indian nodded. “A movie, hey? Where’s your camera?”

“Right here,” Jim said, tapping his mirrorshades.

“Those Google glasses?” the Indian asked, suddenly suspicious.

“No,” Jim said. “I mean me. My eyes. I’m the camera. Reality has no audience.”

“Eyyyy,” the Indian said, relaxing. “Pretty clever. So what’s your movie about, hey?”

“It’s about America and the idea of starting over and the problem of narrative, the way we get trapped in stories, the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about revolution and utopia and climate change and violence and guns and the Civil War and cowboys and Indians and space. Homo sapiens, the greatest of apes, mere geology. It’s points, lines, and space. It’s about me and you and all this.”

The wheels thrummed on the blacktop. The La Sal Mountains rose purple and gray in the distance. The Indian took a drink from his giant plastic travel mug. “So how’s the movie end, hey?” he asked.

“That, my friend, is the million-dollar question. Because it’s the end that makes the story, right? I mean, the difference between comedy and tragedy is all in the punchline. A wedding or a death? A bang or a whimper? Laughing or crying? I don’t know. All I know is I have to keep going until the end finds me.”

“You got no plan, then?”

“Nope. I had one, before this, but then . . . I was planning too much. I had to do this and that and the other, and it was all getting very rigid. Too binary, too dialectical. I had to get rhizomatic again. The essence of the road movie idea, see, is in transgressing the normative constraints on our choices, breaking through negation to total autonomy, but as long as I kept sticking to the plan, the algorithm kept getting locked into a feedback loop. Suzie taught me that, weirdly enough, with Altus. I realized that conflict works against the whole idea. Planning works against the whole idea. Form itself is the problem. I had to, you know, derange myself. Disrupt the program.”

“You sure you ain’t on drugs, hey?”

“Just tobacco,” Jim said. “I haven’t even had any coffee.”

“Well, there’s coffee there in the thermos by your feet. You help yourself.”

“Thank you. Ah, thank you—?” Jim held out his hand.

“Marvin,” the Indian said, shaking Jim’s hand.

“Thank you, Marvin. My name’s Jack.”

“Nice to meet you, Jack. Hope your movie turns out all right. Maybe you give me a screen credit, ey, like Third Indian from the Left.”

“Absolutely,” Jim said, unscrewing the cup on top of the thermos, resting the cup on his knee, then unscrewing the top of the thermos and pouring coffee into the cup. “I have to say, it’s all going pretty well right now. What kind of town is Monticello, anyway? You think I can get a backpack there?”

“Nope, I don’t reckon you can get no backpack in Monticello. But you can probably catch a ride to Moab and get you one there, at Pagan Mountaineering or Gearheads. Them are both right on Main Street.” Marvin hawked and spit out the window. “Tell you what, you sure picked some rough country to hitch through, Jack. You’re really taking your life in your hands.”

“It’s all right,” Jim said. “I don’t have anything else to do now but wait, watch the road, and make my movie. Another ride always comes along.”