Here, on the eastern route, the asphalt is not black but a worn sun-beaten silver color and the yellow center line is so faded sometimes you cannot even see it. In some places sand drifts over the highway and you cannot tell exactly where the desert starts and finishes. The towns I pass through are small. Tumbleweed and sheets of sand traverse their streets and bounce off signs that look like they have not been changed since the fifties: Mobil gas signs with the winged horse; men’s clothing stores advertising Stetson hats and Wrangler jeans; coffee shops with cardboard squares inside the windows displaying handwritten specials. They are the sort of places my cousin Matt and his Jewish girlfriend like to go to, dragging along their enormous cameras and tripods, to take pictures of people they would not be caught dead hanging out with, but apparently like to look at. Through the fogged windows you can see people inside huddled over their cups, smoking. Noon comes and with it the heat of day. After driving all day I am hungry, but the diners all seem to know each other so I decide to wait for a fast-food place. Night falls, but I do not see any.

After the sun shrivels into the desert, everything below the stars turns black. In the dark, all I see is the desert and asphalt moving beneath my headlights. I do not go by any towns and so begin to worry about finding gas, but there are no cross streets so I do not know exactly where I am on the map. It shows a blank stretch of highway, and I am afraid I might be in it, though probably I am lost. This sort of a place is not supposed to be in California. There are no towns, no malls, no crowds of people, no nothing. No anything. On the black horizon I cannot even tell the difference between the ground and the sky. When I park to pee in the desert, it is so dark I cannot even see my hand before me, nor my shoes. It feels strange and with the howl of wind around me I start imagining coyotes or some other kinds of animals out here, and I wet my hands rushing to zip up and get back into the car.

II

Finally a dome of light swells above the horizon, and I wonder if it is a town or a car approaching from the opposite lane, the first in over an hour.

The first things I see are the lit fifties-era signs of motels and gas stations. One motel has a green and red sign and colored Christmas lights strung along the windows. I fill up with gas and look around for a motel because I am too scared to sleep in the car out in the dark. You never know what the locals might think if they found some stranger sleeping parked on their streets.