Small wonder the road had become the symbol. On the road, everyone was unencumbered, powerful, fearless. On the road, everyone was an American. What unnerved him, Thomas realized, was the destination.

Neil Cassidy.

His morning revelation had been a reprieve of sorts. Before, Neil had seemed something elemental, more principle than human being. Every year Thomas began his freshman courses by reading aloud from The Iliad and pointing out that Hector, the great hero of Troy, wasn't struck down by Achilles' hand as most people assumed, but rather at Achilles' hand by blazing-eyed Athena. For the ancients, he would explain, you did not own your words and actions—at least not the way freshmen college students thought they monopolized theirs. For the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians, what have you, one was as much a waystation as a point of departure, a channel through which the acts of other, more elusive agencies might be expressed. This was why they regarded madness with as much awe as ridicule. Some madmen were fools certainly, but some were prophets as well. Some spoke in the god's own voice.

This was what Neil had seemed to Thomas: a madman in the ancient sense.

Someone possessed.

Neil had embraced the implacable truth of his existence, and by embracing this truth, he had embraced not only the materiality upon which all experience depended, but all the processes, evolutionary, geophysical, cosmological, that had compelled that materiality. He became the expression of a billion suns winking out, the manifestation of a million wailing births over a million unwitnessed years. He became the conduit of something utterly aimless, indifferent, and incalculably vast.

Before, Neil had seemed the terminus of a line that reached back beyond the limits of the observable universe—to the very beginning. A man at one with his myriad and mindless conditions.

A delinquent and horrifying communication: thou art false.

And now? Now he simply seemed a sad and dangerous fool.

Or so Thomas told himself.

Most signs—highway, street, storefront—dissolved into the rat-race humdrum of day-to-day life. Everything was For Sale or Next Left or 65 Maximum; everything had a finger you could follow. But for some reason,

EXIT 21-B

CLIMAX

2 MILES

scored in white across generic green, seemed altogether different to Thomas. Not simply ambiguous or fraught with associations, like an ancient parable, or graffiti above a urinal, but slippery in the manner of things sentient and cynical. If it had possessed eyes, he was certain it would have winked.