As for Samantha’s greetings to the pedestrians, truck drivers, and other travelers when they passed by the Honey Route as she was doing her nails on the porch at midafternoon, that hour when clients were yet to show up and the dancing girls were not yet smattered with saliva, it should be said that all she wanted was to wish them a nice trip, confirming for herself the existence of a world beyond her nails, beyond the porch—and that really was all. That’s why when a Ford Scorpio screeched to a halt and the man got out, took Samantha by the hand, and said how beautiful she was, she blushed and nearly shed a tear onto the red nail varnish, which, also due to the strong emotion she experienced, had gone all over the floor. Taking a seat next to her and ordering a drink, he told her his name was Pat, Pat Garrett, and it wasn’t long before the pair were kissing, and just as quickly they made their way to bed. Samantha had never taken a man back at that hour. Then suddenly, like another life, Pat had a hobby: He collected found photographs. Anything as long as they were found and featured a human figure; he went around with a full suitcase. When they were lying in bed together, as he gazed up at the wall he told her how he’d worked in a bank in L.A. before unexpectedly coming into an inheritance, at which point he’d quit. His penchant for the photos came from his time at the bank, from seeing so many people; he always found himself imagining what their faces would be like, and their bodies, in a context beyond the teller window—itself somewhat akin to the frame of a photograph. But after receiving the inheritance money, his other penchant, gambling, had seen him lose almost the entire sum. Now he was headed east, to New York, in search of more photos. Here in the West, he said, it’s all about landscapes, but there it’s the portrait. He opened the suitcase and began handing her photos, which she looked at one by one, absentmindedly but at the same time straining to understand. At one point he said to her, as he pointed to a photo of a group of schoolchildren, See this girl here? She’s so pretty it could be you! Samantha then became confused, imagining for a moment all these emulsified lives she was handling—but in her confusion, for that moment she also believed herself to be part of an enormous family, beyond the girls she worked with at the brothel, beyond the men of the road. She collapsed on Pat’s chest and held him tight. I’m gonna take you to New York, he said to her. He stayed on for a long time after that, her preparing his food, neither of them leaving the room. The night Pat left, the sound of the Ford engine woke her. She didn’t get out of bed, but she lay awake from then until dawn, and when morning came, having discarded the possibility of him going to Carson City for tobacco, she sat on the porch to do her nails again, putting the whole thing behind her, and said hi to a young guy walking in the direction of U.S. Route 50 with an army rucksack on his back, calling out: If you see a guy on his own in a red Ford Scorpio, and he’s going to New York, you tell him to get back here! He doesn’t even turn to look at her. And now there will be two suitcases full of photos, deposited in two different locations in the desert. Faces, families, potential couples, all now only theoretical, portraits in a pair of suitcases that no one will ever find.