It went like that for a few minutes. I never saw, not once, Anita Dayal flash up. Then the phone blackened. I had no charger. And I was still going, driving not southwest to Sunnyvale but instead wailing northeast on 680, approaching Berkeley, then passing it. Behind me the sky and the highway, that mingling of blue and gray that had always been the Georgia horizon, too, twined south, running the spine of the state all the way to Los Angeles. This endlessly striving state at the end of America, where everyone was always going somewhere, and fast.

11.

I took a seventy-dollar motel room outside Marysville. I’d zoomed there on instinct, as if toward some holy ground. I could not go home, where I might be found so easily. The motel seemed the thing to do. The owners, I was disappointed to discover, were Gujaratis, and gave me that knowing one-two sweep of brown on brown.

In my room, I stalked the grainy local news channels and found nothing about shots fired at a desi bridal expo. No talk of a mass shooting, certainly. But I refused myself optimism. The events at a parochial convention in Santa Clara might simply have been forgotten. Especially amid the nonstop election coverage: leaked emails, leaked tapes. I turned off the TV, took a walk to a corner store a half mile away, bought Jim Beam and a phone charger, began drinking from the bottle.

Somewhere nearby was a river that I’d once imagined saving my gold digger, turning him from an outlaw to a man at home in America. Somewhere nearby, a story of this country I’d wanted to believe in. But the magic I’d dreamt up had been carried downstream with the arrival of that news clipping in my wire mailbox.

I didn’t plug in my phone. I sat on the floor of the motel room and ran my hands along the rough carpeting—ridiculously, I thought, Good, my prints are being callused away. I listened to the raspy air-conditioning unit and the pipes full of other people’s fluids swishing through the thin walls. I stared at the drawn drapes, expecting them to become suddenly illumined with kaleidoscopically spinning red and blue lights as sirens sounded and law enforcement screeched in. In the back of their vehicle I would watch the red and blue fall in long columns along the rippled cornfields and the apricot orchards.

But no lights came, no yowl of sirens.

I drank, drank more.