3.

The secret to the driving, much like the living, was to get enough air. If a car overtook me and pulled back in front, my radiator would starve and the temperature gauge rise. I’d have to slow down or move across lanes to catch air left uninterrupted. Most of the time only one option presented itself in traffic, but occasionally I was given neither. If two trucks sat side by side ahead of me on a two-lane highway, there was no choice but to drop way back. A good speed couldn’t be averaged like that and the engine didn’t have the gusto to accelerate around them before it became an issue.

I soon took to slotting the Miata’s front bumper in the space between the trucks’ rear wheels to scavenge any air pulled through. It was terrifying at first, having those metallic behemoths swaying left and right in gusts of desert wind, so close they almost took the dirt off my panels, but I quickly adapted to the way they moved and even to the confused, angry looks from other motorists. It was nice to drive east again. The sun would pass like some stranger travelling the opposite direction down some indifferent highway, neither of us taking much notice of the other.

I passed Flagstaff and Winslow, covering a section of Route 66 to reach Holbrook. The first motel I pulled into had a balcony; maybe the one from the letter, maybe not. I wandered the sidewalks, dust of the desert blown onto them crunching under my boots. Shrubs freckled the dry, empty land. There wasn’t much happening. A motel’s sign asked if I’d slept in a Wigwam lately and I couldn’t say I had.

Almost all of the storefronts paid homage to Route 66 like some deity. A clerk sold me cigarettes and told me the town had been busier before the bypass went in.

Americans celebrated everything they could, even a road. In my mind, Australians didn’t take as much pride in anything they had. I guessed it was because, to Americans, Route 66 wasn’t just a road. It was an idea; some notion of greener pastures, better lives, the traversing of some great frontier. Constructed of dreams incarnate, not tarmac, stretched out across the land. But the American Dream was a farce, and just as imagination cannot be tamed into reality, a dream no longer exists once it has been attained. So then, it seemed to me, you either let your dreams run free like wild horses, watching their beauty from afar and accepting you’ll never stroke them with your palm, or you catch them, break them in, own them, and know that in doing so you have dulled their fire in an irreparable way. The American Dream was just pornography for the soul, and anybody convinced it could be held in their hands was a fool.

I pushed the door of a bar on Navajo Boulevard in and stepped through. I ordered a drink, lit a cigarette, and felt alright. People really do go to remarkable lengths to feel a little better, ingesting ideals or diet pills or god, when all it really takes can be found inside any bar on any street in any town.

I drank into the night. Few letters remained – the thought of being without them, and what might come after, almost too much to bear. So many of my days had been spent living with the unanswered and the unknown that I’d become accustomed to them. In many ways, they were easy company, able to become whatever I imagined them to be, and nothing and nobody could tell me I was wrong. I ordered another drink, getting the feeling it was later than it seemed. The bartender shook his head, miming the slitting of his throat with straightened fingers.

‘Well, shit, what does that mean?’ I asked.

‘Oowie! I’ve been drinking here twenty years and I’ve never seen someone get cut off before,’ said a woman on the next stool.

‘Yeah? What’s the prize?’

‘There ain’t one. Your wallet’s a little heavier tomorrow, I suppose.’

I stepped out onto the sidewalk and hobbled in the direction of my motel, making it halfway before I had to rest. I sat on a bench, then fell from it. Placing a cigarette between my lips, I shuffled backwards on my ass towards a shopfront instead.

There was an immense weight to the sky that night. It placed its hands against my shoulders and pushed down. I sat slouched against the wall, sucking breath in through my lips and pushing smoke out through my nose, looking up to it with an overwhelming sense of anticipation, as if it were a tidal wave or an explosion frozen above, readying itself to consume everything below.

I wondered what had stopped that from happening for so long. How this world contained all the happiness and the sadness; the good and the evil; the love and the hate. How each day there was more of it than the one before, and where it all went. It had to go somewhere, surely. It couldn’t just dissipate into nothing, or there’d be no point to it at all.

Did it push back? Was that what held the sky up? Stars appeared like pinholes; maybe there to vent the pressure of this world’s collective soul to some great, bright beyond. They throbbed as if barely able to control it. I wondered if the space taken up by just one more new mother’s joy or widow’s sorrow would become too much. That some cosmic seesaw might tip – rips spreading across the sky from star to star. That it might pop and expose that great beyond, flooding in and sweeping us away to salvation or crushing us under the weight of it all. That breaking point had never felt closer to me.

There was a tap against my boot. A man holding two large paper bags full of groceries stood beside me. He looked down his long nose.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just sitting.’

‘Why don’t you get up?’

‘Can’t. Sky’s too heavy. Don’t you feel it?’

‘Everything alright, son?’

I frowned and shook my head and blew smoke out through my nose.

‘No, what a ridiculous thing to say.’

‘How do you figure?’

‘Some things are awful and some things are brilliant, and that’s the way it is. I would never say everything is just okay.’

‘I think you should go home. Do you need a ride?’

‘No, I need another drink, but I was cut off,’ I said, mimicking the gesture of the slit throat. ‘Hey, did you hear? I’m the first person to be cut off here in twenty years. That means this town ain’t seen a drinker like me in a long time.’

‘You must be very proud.’

‘Yes, sir, I am.’

‘Get yourself home safe.’

I made a sloppy army salute. The man rolled his upper lip, pushing his white moustache into his nostrils, then disappeared down the street. A few more people passed, but no one else stopped. I sat for a while longer then walked back to my room.