It was still light when we reached Phoenix, three hours before my flight; we had enough time to go back once more to “our” apartment. The sun was going down, so the evening light above the city was orange. In the parking lot in front of the complex, we found a free space. We went through the narrow door into the courtyard between the six buildings, linked by iron fences. The light of the setting sun no longer penetrated here, and suddenly it was dusk; lamps were being lit in the windows of the ground-floor apartments, and as we walked I glanced into the rooms in the hope of possibly seeing a familiar face. At a stone table beside the empty swimming pool a girl was sitting in the company of three men who paid no attention to us. She was very young, and I thought that at the time when we lived here she hadn’t yet been born. The empty beer bottles and the blue canvas chair faded in the sun were still beside the door of our apartment. The windows were dark, either there was no one there or the tenant had fallen asleep. I sat down on the canvas chair. “There’s no point in taking your photograph now,” said Harun. “The light’s not good enough.” I sat on the canvas chair, which I may have brought here twenty years earlier, looking at the empty bottles of Miller Lite beer, which I might have left behind, and waited for something to happen. It couldn’t be that I’d come back and this place had no response to my return. I sat on the canvas chair after a week spent on the road, after troubled dreams in cheap motels and deserts under the starry sky. And I had felt more or less at home everywhere, apart from here, at the address 1601 Camelback Road, no. 201! Here I am most foreign. And now I can calmly forget everything.

“Let’s go!” says Harun.

“Just one more minute,” I say. And then we wait for that minute to pass.

But what is most important always remains unsaid! We parted in haste, a quick hug, meager words still hovered in the air, your red pickup had already disappeared among the other vehicles in the dusk, and I wanted to say:

“Son, I came finally to free you of myself! There, you’re free, go off into your desert!”

Son,