The parking lot in front of the hotel is empty, but at reception a young Navajo claims that all the rooms are taken, apart from one special one that costs $380 a night. Impossible! That’s outrageously expensive, I say. The parking lot is empty, but he insists that this is the only room. It can’t be that this boy is punishing me because in his eyes I’m a white male, a tourist in his country. “Young man, I haven’t slept for two nights, the hotel is empty, and I just want a bed where I can close my eyes!” He shakes his head, there aren’t any empty beds. It’s impossible that he sees me that way and is punishing me accordingly. And then I say: “Look at me, young man! I’m not white!” Drawn by our conversation, hotel workers begin to gather behind him, smiling awkwardly. I go outside. But how else can I say it? I’m not a white man! Always, on every continent, I’m an endangered minority. For Europeans, I’m Muslim. For Asians, I’m European. For Americans . . . I’ve been told several times here “Go back to Russia!” and that’s the mildest form of identity rebuke. Why am I forever being punished for other people’s sins? Always out in the open, with no shelter, prepared in advance for blows. And I carry with me the remnants of all the shells that have fallen on the houses where I have lived, like a confirmation of survival, and as a warning. That was a sudden, brief attack of self-pity. And do I have the right to self-pity, in this place?

I haven’t slept for two nights, it’s drizzling, I’m sadder than I’m prepared to admit. We’re in a desert, the so-called high desert, and it’s cold.

I want to fall asleep in the comfort of a motel bed, but my son is against that, asking: What greater comfort is there than sleep under the open sky, under the stars? Not that long ago, on a journey like this one, a few hours before dawn, we fell asleep in this car in a parking lot somewhere in West Virginia. In the morning my neck was completely stiff. It’s good that I quickly forget pain. I remember that I was in pain that morning. And I remember watching, barely awake, as a young man at dawn changed the text on the advertising board of the restaurant across the road. It was a large board on a high post, and he was skillfully using a long pole made for the purpose to place magnetic letters and arrange them into a short text, giving the price and menu for breakfast that day. It was a dreary day, and he was lifting up the letters, constantly gazing high up at the board, whose top touched a cloud. Watching him made me tired. And I thought: If I had to do his job, with the pain I was currently feeling, I would not have the strength to look up at the sky and place letters above my head. Letters had never seemed so heavy to me as then, that morning in a little town called Fayetteville.