We made it to the first rest stop along Bright Angel Trail before turning around. There was a long line for the porta potty, a long line for the water spigot and big groups of people trying to get spherical squirrels to take their apple cores. The splashing water and some scrappy ponderosa pines made the air cool again but we never got a turn at the spigot, only got to watch loud children running through the stream and spraying water until there wasn’t a drop left for the entire canyon.
There’s something deeply unmagical about crowded places that were once sacred, neon fanny packs, nuclear family photos, wild animals that have forgotten how to feed themselves. There’s a campground along the Colorado that’s only accessible by foot or emergency helicopter. You have to book a site months in advance.
I wanted to keep going, but Ezra dissuaded me from taking on the 10-mile, 118-degree hike to the Colorado River by pulling up information such as: more people die from charging unprepared into the belly of the canyon than by pitching over the edge, a fate I’d worried would befall the many tourists who were taking one-legged selfies with their heels edging thousand-foot drops. Ezra told me if I was so bothered by it, I should take some caution with my own life, too.
She always made decisions based off of statistics rather than emotions. Granted, she has personal reasons to distrust them. As for me, there are deaths that are scary to think about and there are others that are too slow to set off primal alarm bells.
On the way back up we clung to the starfish-red rock as the rest stop fell way down below, re-absorbed into the rocky labyrinth. It was like a coral reef or the folds of a brain. Our breaths ran out fast. We’d been sitting in a car for days. To encourage ourselves, we chanted, “We are young… and beautiful! Young… and beautiful!” with every gasp of dry air as old men with name-brand walking sticks filed past us. We had to sit down at every switchback.
At dusk the canyon glowed red. I would have cried if I wasn’t so scared of heights. I would have kissed her if we hadn’t been walled in by other canyongazers. She squeezed my hand under the folds of my jacket.
When every facet of the canyon had been exploited as far as our suburban-soft muscles would allow, we piled back in the car among the suitcases and realized now that we had conquered our original destination, there was nowhere to go. If we wanted to stay there another day it would cost us $30.
It had not occurred to us that having a final destination in mind didn’t mean the trip would end there. We couldn’t go back—me having dropped out of college, and her, expelled for cheating on her THEA 80L: Muppet Magic midterm—and all that lay ahead of us was the dry, empty, red road.
So we drove. During the days we breathed red rock and exhausted every album we had pirated before we’d left. During the nights our car was surrounded by ghosts. We’d be okay if we kept the windows closed but sometimes the security guards who circled the Walmart Supercenter parking lots would get bored and we’d have to roll down a window so they could tell us to get lost. That’s how the ghosts got in. There were ghosts in the water cooler, in our laundry, in my hair, and when we turned on the car every morning ghosts came out of the exhaust pipe.
Every lived-in place has its ghosts, but only we could see them. They can be body-shaped or they can be clouds of smoke. They drift down busy and deserted roads alike. They talk, sometimes, but most of them don’t talk in a human language anymore.
No place is more haunted than the Strip in Las Vegas. We went there completely by accident and lost all memory of ever deciding to do so. The casinos must throw out invisible signals that attract thrillseeking suckers to their blinding yellow lights like moths.
When we arrived it was dark out, so every light was blaring. Ezra was overwhelmed and she clutched her head and tucked it under the window. At the wheel, I barely acknowledged the road ahead, too enchanted by the money-soaked scenery, the casinos like pastiches of culture stuffed in pockets, a roller coaster blasting through the Statue of Liberty, advertisements floating high overhead: promises of riches, nearly nude women, Wife won’t shut up? Call DIVORCE LAWYER Tim Hendrick at 702…
No free parking to speak of. Ezra sorted through our money stash, separated it into two piles: one to cover 24 hours of parking, and what was left over. Of the second pile she said, “If we can double this then we can park for one more day.” We wandered into the nearest casino and immediately blew it all at the slot machines. It was a glitzy place that sparkled like a palace and smelled like an ashtray. Once the money was gone we just kept walking deeper into the neon, the far wall never appearing, the distance receding no matter how far we went. We downed every abandoned drink we saw, even sampling those that belonged to people whose backs were turned, until it was hard to walk. Drunk was the only way to be in that place, really.
After a while we waded out of the sea of poker tables and pushed through a thickening crowd. We soon found out why everyone was gathered: the casino opened up into a ballroom, only it wasn’t a ballroom anymore, it had been transformed into a kind of drugged wonderland. Stained glass rained light patterns down onto a bed of bloodred carnations. In the center of the flowers lounged two gigantic tigers. Even sitting down they were twenty feet tall.
“I think those tigers are alive,” Ezra whispered.
It had not occurred to me that the tigers might not be alive, but at second glance they were animatronics, their heads swiveling back and forth on a repeating track, their eyes slow-blinking exactly every ten seconds. At third glance they were real again; they couldn’t not be: their walleyed stares saw everything.
One of the tigers stood up, towering above the crowd. “Get on my back,” it said. “I’ll bust you guys out of here.”
“No, thanks,” Ezra said. “We’re doing pretty good, actually.”
“No, yeah, we’ll go with you,” I said, taking her by the wrist. She giggled with surprise and people turned to glare at the overgrown puppy lovers who were shoving them into strangers. We ran to the tiger, crunching carnations underfoot, and it bent down to let us climb on its back. For a beautiful brief moment we were both sitting astride the tiger, thinking that such a magnificent creature must know of greener and untouched pastures.
Then someone shouted, a camera flashed, and security was rushing us much faster than we’d anticipated. They wrestled us off the tiger, trampling far more flowers than necessary as they pinned our arms behind our backs. They didn’t talk, didn’t even look angry, just led us away from the exhibit. When I looked over my shoulder, both tigers were sitting with their flanks touching, blinking rhythmically.
We expected to be arrested or at least for a sum of money to be demanded but they just threw us out onto the steps and told us not to come back. We were on the Strip. Ezra asked a passerby for a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked cigarettes,” I said.
“I don’t, but I felt like I needed one anyway.” She didn’t have her lighter on her, so she just sat there spinning the cigarette between her fingers. She looked so serene, neon lights blinking on the curve of her cheek, like she wasn’t sitting on a grimy stairwell surrounded by gum and hair. Each chunk of her twiglike hair that stuck out under her beanie looked like it had been put there on purpose. The slight furrow in her brow convinced me that she was thinking two steps ahead, and, well, we only really needed one of us to know what was going on.
“There must have been something bonkers in those drinks,” I said. “Have you ever hallucinated like that from just alcohol?”
“I’m not drunk.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m not. Smell my breath.”
I leaned over. “I can’t. This whole place reeks—I can’t not smell alcohol.”
“Well, I didn’t drink anything. Are you feeling sick? I told you not to touch those drinks, dumbass.”
“No, no. I feel fine. Did the tigers talk to us, or not?”
“It was just the one tiger that talked.” She crushed the unlit cigarette with her heel. “See, it’s messing with your memory now.”
We sampled oranges at a farmer’s market crunched between casinos. Though we never littered otherwise, we left orange peels on the floor of the Strip because it felt like the right thing to do.
We turned a corner and found ourselves on the Strip: the cement had been mixed with glitter, making it sparkle like Disneyland, and the ceiling was a 3D screen that went on for miles. At first it was playing one of those ads where a skinny woman is orgasming all over her hamburger but as we walked further it escalated into bonafide pornography. The actors’ Instagram and Twitter handles were displayed next to their faces, bobbing a little with each gyration. You could hear the audio playing just barely under the noise of all the people. There were so many people. There were street performers and businessmen, crackheads and corporations, all treating each other with respectful disregard. And, yes, there were ghosts: reaching for money from people who couldn’t see them, trailing after lovers who’d long forgotten them, clawing at heels even though no one could feel them. There was a smear of ghost coating the entire floor of the Strip at least two feet thick.
Las Vegas is what theme parks are preparing children for. It’s an escape, or more accurately, a parody of what everyone is trying to escape. The sadness is exposed like a dying beetle stuck on its back and we’re all in mad love with it. It’s the frankest lie ever told.
We were approached by a street performer on stilts who was wearing a tasselled tuxedo bikini. She gathered my shoulders in the hook of a gentleman’s cane and asked us, “You ladies wanna see something unlike anything you’ve ever seen before?”
I began, “I want—” and the world opened up before me. I saw the luscious jewels and ball gowns, men and women falling to their knees at the flash of a wallet, bottomless banquet seafood dinners—cracking buttery lobster shells over beds of oyster, sucking out the meat—what did I want? There was something more valuable. “I want to see the bottom of the Grand Canyon,” I said.
“You can just say you’re broke,” the street performer said, momentarily flashing white as a ghost passed through her.
At night we sank into each other until the world went away. We could ward off the spirits for a bit. When we finished the thoughts came rushing back, and so did the bitter chill, a hint of the approaching autumn. We always got a little sad afterwards, not because the sex was bad or anything, but for reasons that felt purely chemical and out of our control. Then as the night progressed we spiraled off into our respective nightmares. Ezra curled into a ball as gravity forced a heavy palm up into her spine. Meanwhile I was so far away I couldn’t hear her speak. We held hands: it steadied her, and though my fingers were numb, the action reminded me that they were there. We were two balloons tied to a string, pulling toward opposite skies. Our respective storms tried to tear us apart. When hers passed, she picked up the line and reeled me back in.
I came to in her arms. We emerged from the scratchy quilt kicking, panting, and sweating, and we settled across from each other with our legs tangled. Floodlights sloshed in and pinned her shadow against the car door. It was not her; there were too many heads. Maybe it was a weird angle.
Eventually the sun stopped coming up. We wrote “ESCAPE SOCIETY OR BUST” on the back of the car, newlywed-style, and kept going on, thrust into total darkness save the few hundred feet carved out by our high beams. Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, home fell far behind us. Our parents were footprints in drying mud. Our high school transcripts never existed. The road ahead was bleak, but there was nothing to be found behind us, either. Once we had had many questions. It gradually became apparent that no one was going to give us the answers. So, as the landscape rolled by, we came up with new questions.
“What do you call an Italian gay person?” I said to Ezra.
“You’ve told me this one a million times,” she said.
“A spaghét. Now bear with me. What do you call a French gay person?”
She paused, pondered, then turned toward the window. “You’re going to hell.”
“It’s called reclamation. Everyone does it.”
“Are you Italian? Or French?”
“Probably. All white people are Italian or French.”
“Well, besides, I’m pretty sure that word is almost exclusively used on guys.”
“Gender isn’t real,” I countered. “Got ya.”
At first when she didn’t reply I assumed it was because I hadn’t said anything that merited a response. As it turned out, she was brooding.
“Yeah, no,” she said. “You can’t ever get rid of social construct. There’s no such thing as a blank slate.”
“Okay, Socrates,” I said, probably getting the philosopher wrong.
“Hey, listen to me. You can tell yourself, like, ‘gender is fake!’ as much as you want but when it comes to reality, gender is a thing that shapes who people are and affects how history plays out, and yeah, it hurts us! Society has already manhandled our fragile little bodies and warped us into things we wouldn’t be otherwise. We’ll never, ever get away from that.”
Outside the window, pale, wispy fields unfolded for our car. I reached across the center console and patted her arm. “Nah.”
“Nah, what?”
“To everything you said.”
“So, what, you’re just gonna fantasize away the entirety of human civilization?”
“Hell yeah. The world starts and ends at our headlights, baby.”
Then, without even a warning flicker, the headlights went out. Ezra yelled incoherently as we plummeted in pure darkness for a few moments. I stopped the car and pulled it to the side of the road.
“Try the brights,” said Ezra.
I pulled the lever back. No response.
“Jesus,” she said. “Fuck. I thought we’d at least run out of gas first. Do you even know what state we’re in?”
“A panicked one,” I said. Thankfully, she laughed this time.
We decided to leave the car where it was and keep moving. We combed through the car, finding an emergency flashlight but no batteries, an expired can of peas, thirty-two cents, and a good luck charm that doubled as a marijuana leaf air freshener. We stuffed everything in a backpack that we took turns carrying. We left, brandishing our lighters in front of us, not looking back once at the car gathering dust and cold and dark. In the light the grass field alongside the road was dreamy and blue, rising up to our waists. The tops of the grass stuck to our clothes and pricked our skin like they were covered in tiny barbs.
We walked for several days’ worth of hours. Our malnourished insides withered away. The fatigue started to mess with our heads, too. The field turned into sand, then rock. There was no moon and there were no cars. You might expect that even the most abandoned road in America gets at least more than no traffic, at least one lost car every few nights but it doesn’t, not when there is only one night.
By that point, though, we didn’t worry much about metrics like time. Once you fall off the grid, all your time is yours. As we walked, my mind wandered, and I imagined my life panning out a different way, and was just as satisfied as I would have been if I’d lived it through.
I was really a gold-star specimen in that brief life I lived. Ezra was there, too. The college thing worked out and we collected for ourselves a couple of careers and kids and a house in a suburb with lots of trees and no bugs. The house smelled like Clorox and pine. It had two stories and an attic. Our favorite family activity was filling out tax forms around the dinner table. Ezra got a job doing social work like she’d wanted, and we were able to stretch her salary to cover our living and the kids’ college funds. It was an honor, she said, and she’d say to anyone who would listen, to turn around and dedicate your life to helping the feeble stand on two legs while the system that got you to where you are is constantly forcing them back down on their knees. It was an honor to hold a minor role in keeping the deadly corporate wheel turning and even sweeter to feel special for it. As for me, I discovered a hidden talent for producing music using an on-the-rise computer application. I learned how to move people to tears using instruments that didn’t even exist. In my later years they gave me a Grammy, or a Tony, or whichever is the one that they give to musicians thirty years in the future. We displayed the award on a shelf in our living room. The kids came by every once in a while to dust it off for us. It shone like a burning sun. In the end, we were able to die smiling because we’d got off better than others.
For what? It was all nothing, nothing to me.
The road ended.
At some point the pavement had begun to crumble, fracture and drift apart. Parts of it were lying a hundred feet away. When we reached the end, a wall of sandstone cut off the tattered road. My heart quickened. I got the sense that spirits were moving just beyond the wall.
“Check it out. We can go up this way,” Ezra said to my right, indicating to where years of use had worn crude footholds into the rock. We scrambled up, but too fast—my head spun and I had such a hard time gripping the steps I felt like I was being pushed off course. Ezra nearly fell before she reached the top but I grabbed her hand just in time. Standing on the rock shelf that was at the top of the stairs, we both swayed with fatigue.
The darkness curved and deepened down the gaping cave in front of us. Our frail bodies couldn’t resist its pull. We stumbled in, dragging our lighters along the walls. The yellow flames distorted the marbled white-and-orange rock. The cave reeked of marijuana. The smell was like a stain. There were moths dying in the corners and rustling sounds in the sand. The walls told the stories of everyone who had come before us: Dakota was here, 2019. SS + BL forever, 2016. Alex and Jackie fucked here, 1998. Robin Zelous 1982. J 1961. CB 1904. 1850. 1800. The years peeled back the further we walked. The edges of our visibility fluttered with scattering ghosts. As we walked further, the ghosts got older and bolder, or oblivious, or apathetic, because they didn’t run away. They knelt in front of their inscriptions from long ago, muttering.
Of course we had to add our mark. With our collective effort we were able to scrape away a shallow line in the sandstone. Then Ezra got frustrated it was taking so long and plunged the keys into the rock. The keys went in like a knife in butter and they wouldn’t come out after that.
The effort of it all wore us out. We had to lean on each other to stay upright. We needed something to keep our strength up.
“I still have the peas,” I said, bringing forth the can.
“Great,” said Ezra. “We’re saved.” She slumped against the wall, breathing heavily.
“If we drink it we might be strong enough to finish our initials.”
“I’m not drinking that shit.”
“You’ll die if you don’t.”
“Then it will be a noble death.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, and drank the whole can on my own. It tasted rancid, like liquified bad breath, but it made me realize how thirsty I was, and the briny fluid the peas were suspended in made me even thirstier. I was able to hold it down for a few minutes before I threw it up all over the floor.
“That’s a shame,” said Ezra. She wiped some vomit off her pant leg.
My stomach wasn’t satisfied yet. It made some sounds, harsh at first, then softer. An ugly lullaby. I couldn’t resist being soothed to sleep. The nap could have been a blink. When I woke up I was sitting between Ezra and a ghost, an old woman or young child or middle-aged man. Ezra was mumbling something about returning to our hometown and getting jobs. She was probably joking, but her voice had lost all its inflection, so it was hard to tell.
“And husbands and houses and two-point-five kids,” I agreed.
Something peculiar was happening to my vision. Where I had only seen the thin outline of the cave’s contours, bright colors swirled and popped like fireworks. The names and dates peeled off the walls, the words breaking up into letters, the letters falling apart into lines. The skin on the extremities of my body was turning velcro. I was falling through many dreams, one after another. Fortunately, the ache that had wracked my insides had gone numb.
There was something in me like fear, but it wasn’t the usual fear that you sit inside. Instead, the fear sat next to me like it belonged naturally against the wall with our little crew. I think it was anticipating something horrible, and if I looked at it then I would know what that was. I couldn’t get myself to look.
“Whoa,” said Ezra. “This is really it, isn’t it?”
I reached over. Her hand was thin and so cold. It was like holding hands with a salamander.
“So, what now?” said the ghost. Its eyes stared with either a youthful spark or weathered wisdom. Wrinkles flickered across its cheeks, then smoothed over into a childlike plumpness, as if it couldn’t decide what face to put on for us.
“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” I said. I tried to bring Ezra closer to me, a final desperate act to protect her. Her arm barely even moved when I pulled on it.
“It’s too bad,” said the ghost. “You two are oozing with potential. You ought to have some goals or you won’t ever do anything worthwhile at all.” It got up and left us there on the cave floor.
There was a trickle of light coming into the cave still. Maybe we were still close enough to the entrance for the stars to poke through. Or there were cracks in the cave walls somewhere. Or the names, the dates, the sand, Ezra, or the ghosts were glowing. Whatever it was, it was enough for my eyes to adjust to. I imagined the trickle growing steadily. There was a rumbling sound and then light flooded the cave and the cave opened up, the ceiling rising and breaking open. The Colorado River came in, gurgling and bubbling like springtime, and it left dry spots where our feet were. The way the light hit the water was really something biblical.
Willow Gelphman 