Smoking long drags below the overpass, ashes grey like TV static in the same shade of fuzzing emptiness as the snow flurrying in all directions. Cars pass overhead in a long droning hum that sounds like the blizzard if it had a voice, A bitch cries in the cold backseat as Texas to North Dakota’s second Mississippi, the continent unfolding around the car in endless plains to horizons stacking upon horizons of the frigid steppe. After a stretch it comes to the desert, where it draws down to the sunrise.
The horizon met the red sun after a long Vegas night, the neon and electricity shining hours upon hours into that swallowing dark of desert cold until daybreak - the sun arouse bloody over the emptiness as we awoke from our hangovers to look upon the bed of a dried ocean and see a landscape of bones, our own souls hitting the bottom of their reservoirs.
The beige drywall turns into static in fuzz around the edges of the dimming bulb. Wrappers litter the floor, the crackling electricity and bubble of fermented grain carbonating out of a paper bag, a man uneasy indebted to the game that blurred into the background, a woman always half-present, spaced out.
Below a bridge we find a man who sunk into the path of wetness. Black curled hair mats to his body from swamp water clinging in a slimy film over the skin worked in every last pock and hole with dirt and mud. A bar above the river’s playing classic rock - we’ve been back to the establishment after the snow and felt it. The watery ecstasy turned to a jägernocht where trophies and corpses lined the walls and each man leered with the promise of a self-made hell waiting in his stove-heated cabin.
All along every line of driving, we find these houses - little highwayside rural homes, the kind kids get abused in, without a soul inside. Police follow the news and cut rectangular holes into the plaster to let bagged obese men fall out of the structure and onto the stained carpet and old linoleum. The latest record is forty-four, though rumors abound of a friend of a friend of a friend, who knows one they’re still using, at well over a hundred.
I’m in a hotel, ground floor, comatose into the bedding as the street blurs in noise and light outside the shuttered plastic blinds. My head is pounding, my stomach already emptied twice. The cartoon on the television has an argument - Peggy exclaims there’s no damn sun. Hank looks to the sky at the burning sun. In the blue sky, the television renders a solid field as a blur of noise. Someone is outside in the summer pool, fat and dying on a float, boiling red under the heat of the motel courtyard.
In a mountain pass the radio cuts out and turns to wild motion of particles.
On the steppe, I look over the crust of snow frozen to make a soft ice over the dry crystalline powder, as the wind begins to pick up. The dunes and rolls of dirt and snow are thrown into frenzy as snow comes from above and is churned up from below. The wind is violent, tearing at my clothes and skin, holes exposing dry bone. The ground loses its distinction with the air as all turns to a uniform mass of movement, a sea with no surface or floor, of snow dense like smoke and ashes.
As energy dissipates, water settles to the top and sediment to the bottom, a newly blank slate born from the sun that rises along the horizon.
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