A Thousand Miles from Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page A

stared at the screen until dawn, until he noticed the line of light at the edge of the room’s heavy curtains, then he turned off the television and stepped outside, out onto the parking lot, the asphalt glistening, the few cars and pickup trucks there shining with dew. Where was he? How had he wound up here? There was no one, not a single person on this earth, who knew where he was, what had become of him.
    No, there was this one person, a complete stranger: Latangi. L as in library, a asin love. A as in love ? T as in flowering telegraph lines ?
    Nothing made sense anymore.
    Henry looked beyond the motel’s gray walls and flat roof to the mountains, but the air was misty, and the mountains seemed to have disappeared overnight, seemed as though they had simply been erased.
    He stepped back into his room, lay down on the bed in his dirty clothes, closed his eyes, and slept.

Two
    AS USUAL, his sleep was fitful, littered with the fragments of dreams, each with the same absurd, entirely predictable theme—that he was lost, that the world lay in ruins around him. In each he appeared as a sort of shadowy figure, a phantom or nomad. Or worse: a tourist who had misread his guidebook and had wandered into a neighborhood or across a border where he wasn’t supposed to stray.
    One moment he shuffled unnoticed through a bustling, dusty market somewhere in Senegal; in the next he bent above a legless Armenian beggar to hear the plaintive strains of a reeded duduk. At a Shinto shrine in Nara, the ancient Japanese capital—a place he’d actually visited with Amy—he knelt on a carpet of cherry blossoms before a mural depicting the sun goddess’s brother Susano, the god of storms, brandishing his sword above the roiling waves to slay an eight-headed dragon.
    Like a portentous National Geographic Channel special, these fragments of dreams were accompanied by an interminable narration, a relentless litany of woes intoned in a weary, measured cadence. The world is irreparably in thrall to violence, the voice declared. Everywhere soldiers flash their rifles and spit curses. Men, women, and children cower in the street. Villages burn, cities collapse, cars explode into blossoms of bright shrapnel and black flames. Somalia. Yemen. Sierra Leone. Iraq. All is chaos, misrule. All is fury and vanity and desire.
    How is it, the narrator pondered, that this man who would throw away his life has survived? Why hasn’t he been shot or captured and held for ransom or beheaded? This man who no longer believes in luck, in providence, in blessedness or good fortune? This squanderer? This coward? This louse?
    The dreams went on, a turgid and wearying documentary, inexpertly spliced, the narrator’s voice a caricature of Henry’s own, his baritone deepened to a bottomless bass. Henry watched himself shoving his way through teeming streets, past young girls twirling in the last tatters of taffeta dresses, past boys who bared their scrawny chests and flexed their withered arms as though their bodies were made of steel. Henry saw himself crossing deserts and traversing mountains, braving listing buses and smoke-spewing trains. He had no idea where, in these dreams, he was trying to get to, where it was he thought he was going. He was lost. He was always lost. He didn’t need these dreams to tell him that.
    And then the girl appeared, as she always did now, and Henry was struck once again by the sheer desolation of his desire. The downy swell of her abdomen, the torturous landscape of still-ripening breasts and thighs. Her delicate hands, the nails jagged, gnawed, unpainted. The melancholy smile, the schoolgirl shrug of her shoulders, the clack of a peppermint, the sweetly indecipherable scent of her skin. The images descended into the obscene, a jumbled litany of erotic enumeration: lithe folds of labia, dark areolae of breasts, ass and calf and snatch —all of it tawdry and overwrought, as if the words had been stolen from some slathering poet: the