In the morning Melissa is in the kitchen and there is the smell of coffee. When she asks me if I have slept well I say I have.

‘Mikey, Iggy’s going to want to go looking for our dog. There’s no sign of him. Will you go with him? Watch his back.’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Maybe it’s just chasing jack rabbits.’

‘I hope so.’

Donovan appears and we eat breakfast at the kitchen table. He seems more gaunt in the harsh light of morning, his cheeks sunken and the shamrock on his skinny arm withered and leached of colour. He hasn’t shaved and the grey stubble coating his face looks like a layer of dust. He is quiet, seemingly preoccupied, but from time to time I am aware of him glancing at me, perhaps to register the changes that time has also wrought in me, perhaps because he is wondering what I am thinking about the things he said last night. Then when we finish Donovan fetches his rifle and hands me the other one.

‘If it helps, think of it as just for show,’ he says and I remember that last car ride with him through the collapsing chaos of Saigon, when I sat in the passenger’s seat riding shotgun as we sped on our final journey together through a city whose walls were tumbling and everything that our intervention had sought to build was turning to dust before our eyes.

Melissa tells us to be careful and when Donovan opens the door I blink in the sudden flare of light and heat. A cloudless sky stretches taut and boundless and as I step out on to the porch everything conspires to make us seem small, stick men, whose few brief steps of a life will leave no print on the fierce supremacy of the landscape. My hired car is coated in a fine veneer of dust, as if it was abandoned a long time ago, and as I walk a few steps behind Donovan my attempts to scan the terrain are made difficult by the need to constantly shield my eyes from the reflected brightness that radiates from everything flung before us: rocks scattered like moon debris, a slew of larger boulders, and straggly vegetation that despite its thorns is briefly softer to look at. Donovan doesn’t speak at first but stops from time to time to survey his wilderness kingdom. His shirt hangs loosely on him, as if unable to find the body inside it, and sweat glistens on the bald orb of his head.

‘They must have thrown from over there,’ he says, pointing with his rifle to a boulder field with exclamation marks of tall thin cacti. ‘And be careful, Mikey, you don’t stand on a snake. It’s a long way to a hospital.’

As we walk I finally admit to myself that coming to Canaan has been a mistake, a foolishness that could never provide me with whatever it was I was looking for. With each step I resolve to take my leave as soon as we have finished the search and even the basic comforts of shabby roadside motels seem increasingly attractive compared to this trek through an inhospitable wilderness. I already know that I would never have made an original pioneer and from childhood I wanted only to escape the tyranny of vast spaces, sought to find some future intersection of love and a life of quiet happiness, books rather than a map acting as my compass. I try to make a silent joke with myself about serpents in the garden and the resulting knowledge of good and evil but it deconstructs itself into dust with every stumbling step through the twists of brush.