Like overindulgence inverted, the Fury’s smooth sailing gave way to spine-crunching turbulence. On a narrow dirt road whose craters were inky in the headlights, the cousin maintained a speed inviting reassessment of his intelligence. One needed both hands to steady oneself, three further hands to ensure that the two film canisters and the folded envelope of cash weren’t falling from one’s pockets. A chalky-tasting powder filled the passenger compartment, and the road went on and on. One could only hope that they were rushing to meet an impatient seller at some appointed hour; that the return drive could be taken at lower velocity. Beneath the physical pain of being battered by armrest and door and one’s own flying limbs, a deeper kind of pain began to grow, but the accelerations and counteraccelerations were so unpredictable and violent that to open a canister was out of the question …
The Fury stopped.
No longer the best of buddies, the scar-faced fellow turned and put his elbow on the backrest. “Give me the money and wait here.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather go with you.”
“Wait here. He doesn’t know you.”
This made enough sense to be construed as foreordained necessity. The fellow took the envelope of money, and his cousin cut the engine and the lights. The sky must have clouded over the moon. After the door had opened and closed, the only light was from the fellow’s flashlight. Its beam, crisply defined by the dust the car had raised, caught barbed-wire fencing, a corroded cattle guard, pale weeds along a rocky driveway, before it receded into negligibility. The cousin lit a cigarette and inhaled like a gusting wind. There was much to say and nothing that could be said. The speck of dark matter was malignant, and yet its darkness was tempting. One became so very tired of the brightness of one’s mind …
The flashlight beam bobbed back into view. The back door opened.
“He’s got the peyote, but he wants to talk to you.”
As cold as the air in Many Farms had been, it was twice as cold in the dark of nowhere. The flashlight beam kindly pointed out stones and holes to be avoided on the driveway. Ahead, in its incident light, a stone structure became visible, a fence of bleached wood, the rear end of a skeletal truck. The fellow kicked open a sagging gate in the fence. “Go on,” he said.
It was difficult to speak with jaws clenched against the chattering of teeth. “Give me the money.”
“Cliff’s got it. He’s counting it.”
“Who’s Cliff?”
“Flint. He wants to talk to you.”
Deep pain and brutal cold, a shuddering of chest muscles. He’d still had his wits in the warmth of the car. The thing he’d always had was wits, but now they’d abandoned him. He was stone-cold stupid.
“Go on. Take the flashlight.”
He took the flashlight and proceeded through the gate. Stupidity had reduced him to hoping for the best. Hope was the refuge of the stupid. A paddle-limbed cactus loomed up, a nest of rust-eaten oblong cans, ragged sheets of unidentifiable building material, a charred tree stump. The signs of abandonment were unmistakable, but he went around to the back of the stone structure.
There was no back of it. Only the edges of a wall that had collapsed into rubble.
He heard a sound as familiar as his father’s voice, the whinny and rumble of a Fury wagon’s engine starting up. He heard wheels spinning, an automatic transmission shifting gears.
He was too cold to be angry, too shaky-limbed to run.
The speck of dark matter had been tiny only in spatial dimension. It was the negative image of the point of light that had given birth to the universe. Now, in its explosive expansion and consumption of the light, the speck’s hyperdensity became apparent: nothing was denser than death. And how tired he was of running from it. All he had to do was lie down on the ground and wait. He was so malnourished and exhausted, the cold would quickly do the rest—he knew this; could feel it. The dark negative that had replaced his rationality was equally rational, everything equally clear in its antithesis of light.
But the body wasn’t rational. What the body’s nervous system wanted, absurdly, at this moment, was more drug. His money had been stolen but not his canisters.
He jumped up and down to warm himself, he did deep knee bends until he couldn’t breathe, and then, clumsily, with stiffened fingers, he got a canister open and conveyed the saturated wads of toilet paper to his gums.
Though malign and sickening, the boost was a boost. Though everything was inverted, his rationality now reduced to a floater against a black infinity of death, the light hadn’t entirely left his mind. Stumbling, falling, dropping the flashlight, picking it up, he made his way back to the dirt road.