The next day we drove west. Sometimes the highway led us over long bridges, or in loops above and below other highways, through the backyards of cities; and we saw only crumbling roads, deserted parking lots, boarded-up houses, trash, and beyond, the silhouette of skyscrapers. Sometimes it would leave us in the middle of a city, at a crossing with traffic lights, honking cars, rushing pedestrians, offices and shops. Over farmlands it spun out like a broad ribbon, flat, or gently rising and falling, far from the towns and villages named on the road signs, far from farmhouses and factories too. We saw forests, cornfields, pastures, a couple of cattle on the pastures here and there, behind the cornfields maybe a silo, or a smoking chimney, or a steaming tower. On the third day all we saw were wheat fields. Under the huge sky, they stretched to the horizon; your eye lost itself in the distance. The music on the radio changed, we heard banjo and fiddle, accordion and harmonica, catchy songs about women and love, simple ballads about struggle and death. The news reported on rodeos, quarrels and fistfights, births, deaths, school and church fairs, run-over dogs, runaway cats, false alarms, and that Jesus loves us. The highway had narrowed into a two-lane road, and the heat shimmered on the asphalt.

We drove slowly, and Irene put her seat back, rolled the window down and stretched her legs out. After the first verse she knew the melody of a song and would hum along with the rest. From time to time, something on the news would trigger her imagination and she would spin it into a story. How John Dempsey caught the biggest fish of the summer. What the patrons at Crossroads Café had started fighting over. Why Catalina Fisk didn’t call the ambulance, although she could have been saved.

“Are you afraid of death?”

Irene thought about it so long, eyes closed, that I wondered if she had forgotten my question or even fallen asleep. It happened more and more that in the middle of a conversation she lost herself to other thoughts, or to the fatigue that was her constant companion. “The things I missed out on…Is that fear of death, that things will forever be unsaid, undone, unlived? But really, they already are now, and have been for a while. The time to put things right has long since passed.”

Should I keep asking questions? Had Parsifal asked the old man more questions after the first? Where does compassion end and intrusion begin? “What would you like to put right? What you did with dyed hair and sunglasses?”