Lost Signals Read Online Free PDF

stayed too long at his last stop. He had gotten lazy, and worse than that he had gotten hopeful, figuring roots would sprout from the bottoms of his shoes if he just loitered in the same place long enough. Anchoring him to a piece of ground at last. But the roots never came. Only rot. And that’s when he knew he had to get out. That night. That second. By whatever means necessary no matter what collection of beards and bows were in his way.
    And so he did.
    It made no difference that he had a belly full of poison and eighty-seven dollars to his name. He just knew it was time. And so it was.
    And so he went.
    Max would keep moving this time, for as far as his shitty late model Dodge would take him. He was pretty sure he had hurt some people pretty badly, maybe even fatally, during his abrupt exit from the blur two nights ago, so going backwards wasn’t an option at this point. He just had to keep his head down and keep grinding that wheel, fueled by the last hope of finding his destiny out yonder under western skies, as so many eastern souls had done before him. Get his hands on a bit of true clarity in the fairytale hills. He’d change his name, maybe grow his hair into Viking braids and take up surfing. But most importantly, he lose himself in the crowded anonymity of the city of nearsighted angels, where everyone is too busy squinting into the mirror to spot the disheveled fugitive sitting across the bar.
    It wasn’t his fault, this wanderlust. It was congenital, ancestral, born out of a thirsty Caucasian soul and dissatisfaction with nearly everything around him, combined with the certainty that new lands conquered would quell all inadequacies and establish contrived dominance in one fell swoop. So Max became a human tumbleweed from the first time he learned how to thumb a ride, spinning from city to hamlet to dusty campsite, in search of something bigger than himself to tie him down and make him want to stay, to become part of something outside of himself. Some people looked for God. Some quested for love. Max just searched for meaning, starting with the self and working outward from there if he had time. All of everything that was and would someday be. There had to be a point—a greater purpose—to the entirety of this terribly self-important but most likely utterly meaningless nonsense, and the answer had to be out there somewhere, around the next bend, over the next rise in the road.
    But he never found it. Not yet. In all those miles and all those late hours, he’d just found more of the same. He just found more blur.
    So here he was, knifing down Highway 50 west of McGill, Nevada, as the last two days and nights—hell, the last thirty-two years—melted into just another portion of an unbroken line of bleary days and blurry nights spent doing nothing with a thousand nameless nobodies, all bored to panicked tears hidden behind masks of sardonic bullshit. Somehow, without knowing exactly where or exactly why, Max had drifted off of I-80, that great tentacle of government-issue cement that stretched the length of this vast, savage land. But it didn’t matter. His cheap plastic compass assured him that he was heading west, and that was good enough for Max. That certainty was enough for now. Small victories in the war against the unknown.
    Exhaling a small nimbus cloud of smoke into the windshield, Max sat back, and for the first time in what felt like forever, he relaxed and opened the window, allowing the cool dry air to clean out the car. The blur had begun to recede, which allowed him a smile. He was moving again, had been for two sunrises, and the road behind him was growing longer. He was carving a proud wound into the hide of the central Nevada desert, and no one could force him to do otherwise. Max had regained his footing about the time he hit the Rockies, and with the great peaks of the continental divide doing just that between where he currently was and what he had left behind, he found himself feeling