Carnival of Souls

In the late afternoon, we were heading toward Ely, in surprisingly hilly and verdant desert. The salt flats were pooling from fresh rain. Voices returned to my head, not the mechanical ones I had become used to, but the voices out there, in the desert. They were still there, and they could speak to the voices in here. How long had it been? Between Fallon and Austin, someone had carved the entire preamble of the United States Constitution into the embankment.

With my backpack, I walked across the highway and a sand lot to the Motel 6, then up to the night window. The pool had been drained and was lined with silt. I was given a second-floor room. There was no window for ventilation, just a fan fixed into the wall. The shower stall, a single piece of plastic, came with two bars of soap, no shampoo. The walls, furniture, and sheets were all orange.

In the morning I headed back across the highway for the included breakfast at a nicer hotel. I took the offerings from the buffet to the patio that overlooked a ditch and a scrub-covered hill. The only other person around was a middle-aged man in a cowboy hat, who just sat there smoking. “I need my coffee,” I said, to explain why I didn’t feel like talking.

“A-yuh.” 

The GPS showed I was heading north, amid smatterings of rain. Later, in the dry midday heat, I had a salad on a picnic table next to a soldiers’ memorial in a town square. On the other side of the fence were kids playing with hoses and trampolines. 

Regret? It was just the diffusion of the tension that had been building for weeks, during which time my spirit had left my body. When I finally returned to the place where I had lost it, on the side of the highway, I slowed down and called it back, as I had been instructed to do. It may have just been my imagination, but I could feel it click, like a joint popping back into its socket.