"Louis–"

"Listen. Listen. Walk the way we were driving. It'll be a halfhour or so. You'll find a motel down that way, a motor lodge, it's like a… a series of bungalows. There's a gas station and a bar. You keep walking, you'll find it. But get off the road. You don't know what kind of weirdoes are out here at one o'clock in the morning."

"I know what kind of weirdoes are out here," she says, because she's one of them. Miriam takes the money. She looks into Louis's eyes: He's trying to be firm, but even now the anger is melting, the scab drying up and flaking away.

"You going to be okay?" he asks.

"I'm always okay," she says. "You best forget you ever met me."

Miriam pulls away from him and walks off. Head down. Don't look back, dummy.

She needs a drink.

INTERLUDE

The Interview

"The first rule," Miriam says, "is that I only see what I see when skin touches skin. If I touch your elbow and you're wearing a shirt, then nothing. If I wear gloves – and I used to, because I didn't want to bear witness to all this craziness – then it prevents the vision from happening."

"That must be horrible," Paul says. "I mean – sorry. I just mean, over and over again, you can never get close to somebody, I mean–"

"Relax, Paul. I can take it. I'm a big girl. But this speaks to rule number two. Or maybe number three. I should really write them down. The rule is, it's one and done. I get the vision once. It doesn't keep happening over and over again – though, I'll tell you, some of the really bad ones will keep a girl up at night." She pauses and tries not to think of any. In her mind's eye, so much blood, so much suffering, so many last moments play out. Theater of the macabre, the curtain forever open. Dancing skeletons. Chattering skulls.

"So, what is it that you see?" Paul asks. "You're like, what, an angel floating above the scene? Or are you the person who's dying?"

"An angel. That's funny. Me with my wings." She rubs some sleep boogers from the corner of her eye. "This speaks to the next rule. I'm the impartial observer. My viewpoint hovers above the whole thing, or maybe off to the side. I'm privy to certain details but not others. I know how the person tap-step-shuffles off this mortal coil, for one. Intimately. Death isn't always obvious, you know – a guy clutches his head and falls over, could be a lot of things. But I know what it is. I know if it's a brain tumor or a blood clot or a bumblebee that's burrowed its way into his cerebral cortex.

"I also know when. Year, day, hour, minute, second. It's a red pushpin stuck in the great timeline of the universe, and I can see it. The pushpin I can't see, oddly, is where. The location remains a mystery. Outside visual cues, of course. I see a chick's head explode in the parking lot of a McDonald's with street signs at the corner of Asshole Boulevard and Shitbird Lane and she's wearing a 'Don't Mess with Texas' T-shirt, then I can use my Sherlock Holmesian deductive reasoning to figure out that pesky riddle. Or I just use Google. I fucking love Google."