“Are you sure?” I ask. Orli and his nurse are helping him into a wheelchair. He wants to visit some ghost town hours away. “We could just go to a museum. Maybe the zoo?”
“What’s the point of prolonging the inevitable, if I can’t really live?”
His nurse gives me the number of the nearest hospital, somewhere outside of Yosemite, reminds Laird not to overexert himself.
“Yeah,” Laird says sarcastically. “Wouldn’t want to die.”
As we leave civilization behind in a rented Subaru, Laird and I continue to work our way through the alphabet. I see Orli in the rearview mirror, resting her head against the window as we sing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Her ears might be ringing, but she’s also smiling. I’m happy to give her this gift of a moment, being with her brother. We don’t want to blow through all our songs at once and decide to check the radio, except the only stations we can find are filled with evangelical preachers shouting about how climate change is a lie or punishment for our sins. In the long stretches of desert, I sense Laird looking at me. I turn my head to catch him a couple of times. He pretends to study some spot along the horizon.
“Can you tell me what will happen to me?” he asks without warning.
“Are you sure?” I say.
“Might as well know. Besides, I think we’ve run out of radio stations.”
“In the first twenty-four hours, depending on the temperature, the body will have reached full rigor mortis,” I explain. “The face will have lost many of its distinguishing features. A greenish-blue hue spreads across the body.”
“It’s okay to say ‘your body,’” he says. We pass an antique barn, an abandoned cherry stand, a sign that says LAST CHANCE FOR GAS before returning to the monotony of sunburned hills.
“Can we talk about something else?” I ask.
“Please, I want to know more,” he says. I can tell he’s tired. I know he needs me to give him the answers.
“Your body will start to smell like rotting meat.”
“Let’s play a little more music,” he says.
“More Queen?”
“Queens of the Stone Age. And then what?”
By the time we reach Bodie State Historic Park, it’s nearly noon. There’s only one other car parked in the dirt overlooking the ghost town. Laird climbs out and snaps a photo of a pasture littered with early-twentieth-century trucks.
“You know there were people living here all the way up to the forties, until the gold and silver mines closed down,” Laird says as I offer him his wheelchair.
Our first stop is a general store museum, stocked with antique tonic bottles, oil lanterns, and burlap sacks that once contained wheat or flour. There are boxes of bullets near the register, a mannequin wearing a cowboy hat. Glass cases run through the store’s interior displaying photos of the town’s golden age.
“Whoa, whoa, Nellie,” Laird says as I push him through the cluttered aisles. “Let’s take a closer look at this.” We stop to read the faded Reno Gazette article mounted on the wall about the town’s final residents—a man who shot his wife and who was, in turn, murdered by three other men. Soon we’re panning for gold with a tour guide, coming up with tiny specks of light in a glass vial. We eat gas station sandwiches on the pews of the old-timey church and walk the grounds of a long-perished Chinatown. We’re about to explore a cemetery when I look back and see that Laird is falling asleep in his wheelchair.
“Do you want to head out?” I ask him. He shudders awake, adjusts himself in his chair.
“Can’t you see I’m having the time of my damn life?” he answers. Laird takes out a harmonica he must have bought for the trip and blows an uneven rendering of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
We return to civilization late that evening. I drop Laird off at the hospital. I feel like I need to shower the long-drive sweat and old West from my body. I’m slipping off my shoes in our living room when Tatsu calls.
“Yo, some guys from work and I are headed to Extreme Wingz BBQ,” he says. It sounds like he’s been drinking. He tends to transform into an adolescent surfer dude when he’s drunk, slinging out hellas with reckless abandon, filled with false confidence. “You should come with.”
I really want to say no, but it’s rare for Tatsu to socialize. I look at the calendar on my phone and see all the dates and dinners and movies with him that I’ve put off or canceled.