The first few lizards surprised me, but then I came to want them around. I liked watching them doing their funny push-ups. The desert was full of partridges with their little feather hats, jackrabbits, the shivering sound of a rattle (I didn’t like that at all), and more lizards scattering among the pieces of quartz lodged in the sand.

There were other things, too. Unnatural things half covered by the sand, like pieces of sun-bleached carpet and scattered tires. The muted shine of broken bottles and rusting propane tanks shot through with bullet holes.

I pressed on, turning around periodically, feeling as though someone was following me, the dull anxiety of being watched. But no one was there. It was just me, alone, with the sun beating down and the lonesome cooing of doves. Here I thought of all the people looking for answers—those of us who could not piece together a sense of order in any other way.

The people at the afterlife convention wanted to hear that they were good, that they were okay, that they would be reunited with the people they loved who had passed on. And the psychics who had congregated there handed out assurances so casually: Of course you’re going to see your mother again. And Of course your son knows you always loved him. He’s watching you right now. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. What shit, I thought as I walked past nubby shingles peeking out from the sand, pieces of porcelain toilets broken in shards by some rocks. I wanted to know who was leaving pieces of their homes all over the desert. How could it be that so many pieces so foreign to the terrain could have just ended up here? Was this wasteland once a subdivision of homes that the desert pressed over year after year? Where was all the life connected to it?

I finally came upon a single white, weather-beaten sofa sitting in the middle of a wide expanse of ATV tracks. There was nothing else around, but it was full of bullet holes, and some springs had begun to show. Though it seemed impossible that this had made its way out here, nearly a mile from any kind of visible road, the sofa looked like it had been put to use.

“A sex couch,” I said, under my breath. Or worse.

I looked over my shoulder and walked toward the sofa and kicked around spent shell casings.