It is either midnight or noon on the Nevada highway, which means Noma is driving by sight or by love. They grapple with the wheel, attempting to straddle the beating yellow line at the road’s center, instead ricocheting in a series of hazardous diagonals between the broken edges of the road. They’re super fucked up on Tox, as am I, as are the other two (or possibly five) people in the car, the number of occupants varying from one moment to the next as our bags extend appendages and wave plaintively before resuming their existence as inanimate objects. It’s either noon or midnight, and we’re going to be late for our next performance.

“Ten miles left,” I say. This is not the distance to the next outpost, which is so far away that we can’t even pick up its radio station, but the range left on the car’s battery. We’ll eventually roll to a stop in the desert and die, so high on the toxins swirling between the settlements that we’ll barely experience a suitable dose of existential dread.

We’re running out of time and space, but more importantly, we’ve run out of things to talk about. The tires have been singing on the warm pavement for a hundred silent miles.

“Let’s play the game,” Noma says.

I nod, and I wonder how we would make the sound of a nod in one of the radio plays we perform in the outposts. An agreeable rustle, a stack of papers with “yes” printed on every page.

A mile shivers and vanishes under us. “Foot crushed under a tire,” Noma says at last. We used to pass the time this way while driving between gigs, back when silence shimmered like heat between us, and didn’t pool in the low, quiet spots, as sinister as Tox.

“Hmm,” I give it some thought. “Celery breaking, plus something a little wet. Maybe squeeze a grape.”

“Celery is great for the long bones,” they agree. “But the metatarsals are shorter and relatively thicker. You’re right about the need for something a little squishy in there. Watermelon,” they say. The car shudders as we diagonal off the edge of the highway and slither in the dust before Noma brings us back to the pavement.

“Watermelon,” they say, possibly for the second time. “You get a crack as the skin breaks, but also the flesh parting, a softer sound, and a little more prolonged. It’s wet inside, like a body, and if you listen really carefully you can hear the way it pulls apart at the seeds with faint pops, the way people do.”

“Have you ever heard a person pulled apart?” I laugh, but Noma doesn’t laugh.

“I’m a person,” they say.

“Fifteen miles,” I say after a while. “We should ditch the hitchhikers.” The two passengers slump amidst our foley gear in the back seat. They fell into a stupor shortly after we left the last outpost, knocked out by Tox exposure. Most people are like this: doomed to huddle in squat settlements around radio towers, as if sheltering out a storm under a tree, stuck on islands of toxin-free land.

Noma and I aren’t like most people. Our tolerance to Tox is ridiculously high. We can venture into the shimmering wilderness of the road and breathe the dust of the smashed world, suffering only mild to moderate to severe hallucinatory effects. Our shared bond has kept us together through the long miles, the endless string of performances at one station after another, under the warm, settling clouds of everything that was.

I prefer my passengers to remain unconscious. Hitchhikers who stay awake have a habit of shrieking, begging us to stop, and pleading to be let out. Most people have an even lower tolerance for Noma’s driving than they do for Tox.

If we leave the riders behind, we might eke out a few extra miles before the battery dies. They would perish in the desert, but only if they’re actual people, and I might be imagining them. What are the implications of killing a fictional person? Noma and I routinely kill off characters in our radio plays, accompanying the dramatic moments with the most grotesque sound effects we can muster using available foods and farm implements. We never mourn those deaths.

On the other hand, these might not be the kind of ghosts found in Tox-saturated places. They could exist in the reality found near the outposts, which is to say, real, in which case we would be murdering them. Alternately, Tox may be altering the rules of time and space, which it can do. It’s hard to know.

Another problem with dumping them is that I’m having difficulty distinguishing between our guests and our luggage, which is again reaching for me and moaning inarticulately, like a bear attempting human speech. If we throw out the hitchhikers, in our condition, we might inadvertently leave half our gear on the side of the road. Also, I’m not sure how to describe the process of slowing the car to Noma, who is barely negotiating the act of driving, and who has begun to resemble a large construction of playing cards in the front seat, a careful assemblage that might explode into its component parts at the slightest provocation.

“I know the way it feels when I’m pulled apart,” Noma says. “I know the sound of the sound of the feeling of being pulled apart.”

I blink. It must be daytime. I can see everything with complete clarity, if everything is the stutter of the yellow line in a patch of reality directly in front of us. The headlights caress the bare desert like the flickering warmth of love, so blinding that you keep thinking you see it after it’s gone, indistinguishable from its own after-image.

“New game,” I say. “What noises can you make with playing cards?”

“We’re not going to make it,” Noma says, and I don’t know if they’re talking about the car, or us.

“I need some air,” I say, rolling down the window and resting my head on the cool sill, knowing it will only fill my lungs with a blast of more airborne nightmares. I want to warp time and space, to come unglued from the limitations of car batteries, the boundaries of the landscape beyond the edge of the headlights, where even love can’t reach.

“Do you know what’s horrible about cracking open a watermelon?” Noma asks. “It sounds just like you imagine a foot being crushed would sound like, but it also sounds delicious. It’s enough to make you hate watermelon.”

“I love watermelon,” I say. Bringing my head back into the car feels like reeling in a fish.

“That’s because you’re the one breaking it,” they reply.

“Thirty miles,” I say after a while. “New game. What’s the most awful sound you love?”

“Hey,” says one of the hitchhikers, or possibly a piece of luggage.

“Oh, hey,” I answer, nervously moving to block his view of the windshield and the wandering road. “Awake already?”

“I was never asleep,” he says. “I’m Time. This is Space.” Space nods from the darkness of the back seat. She seems very far away, but I suppose Space would do that.

“I might be imagining you,” I tell him.

“You are,” he says. “So is everyone.”

“I was thinking about leaving you on the side of the road.”

He nods. “You can’t keep us here forever. Eventually, we’ll come between you.”

Space leans in, as distant and pale as a drive-in movie screen. “Nothing lasts,” she says. “Not this road. Not this world. Not this love.”

I roll my eyes. Real or not, they’re going to find themselves on the side of the road if they keep talking like that.

“Do you know,” Noma says, “that there are different kinds of silence?”

I shake my head, as does Space, and Time.

“You can’t just be perfectly quiet on the radio,” Noma says. “The audience will think the station has gone dark, and they’ll turn off their receivers. So you make this noise, so everyone knows that what they’re hearing is silence.”

“What noise?” I ask.

They let go of the steering wheel. The old tires kiss the wasted earth, and I hear the sound of the feeling of right now, not a dead channel but a quiet microphone, waiting for the performance to begin.

“How would you make that sound?” Noma asks.

I play the game. “I’d rub the outside of a peach while humming and slicing my hand open on a saw blade.”

“Close,” they smile. “Cry over an old photo while a dog whines and someone shuffles a deck of cards.”

The road drones its reassuring song of endless wear and tear, a hard lullaby, a sound like staying together.

“I don’t hear anything,” says a voice from the backseat.

“The luggage is talking again,” I tell Noma.

Noma shrugs. “You know how hitchhikers are. Always telling us to stop.”

The night opens for us, radiant with stored sunlight and the songs of distant outposts, and we do not stop.