Degringolade

1.
So it fell.

So it fell unseen, dropped from a pocket or satchel.  The thumb-drive lay on a side-walk, near an intersection, under the feet of people hurrying about their business.  How long it was lost, undisturbed amidst the rest of the world’s trash in that Asian metropolis is unknown and unknowable, because the drive is permanently lost now, destroyed, although innumerable copies of the code on that device (as we all know) exist and have been transmitted and broadcast and analyzed ad infinitum.  What is known is that some someone, noticing the thumb drive fallen to the ground, retrieved the thing and carried it home and out of the idle curiosity that, as we know kills the cat, inserted the drive into his or her or their or its computer with the result that the malicious virus harbored in that device contaminated first that computer, then, other computers with which it was networked, spreading at the rate of 6 to 11 megabytes per second through the World Wide Web until almost every computer in the world was infected, then, making the leap onto cell-phones, I-pads, voice-mail messaging systems, programmable toasters and coffee-makers, Siri and Alexa systems, home security networks including surveillance equipment, camera-eye door-bells, computerized HVAC, and, at last, medical devices including implantable difibrillators and pace-makers, and, thus, becoming the first cybernotic disease, arcing across the man-machine interface into the human population where the virus spread inexorably although much less efficiently because machines made of lymph, muscle, and bone are far less effective in the transmission of data than their computer counterparts.

This is not to say that you couldn’t catch the virus from human-to-human contact.  In fact, I think I was infected the old fashion way – that is, by opening a malicious program on my laptop, providing some identifiers that I should have kept confidential, and, then, clicking on the wrong icon.  Once the disease infects the system, there’s no predicting how you will get it.

2.
The nascent phase of the infection lasts, at least, eighteen days, in some instances twice that amount of time.  During the first half of the incubation period, the victim is asymptomatic although virulently infectious.  Later, a headache manifests, then, sniffles, and a sore throat with coughing.  Dramatic pathology doesn’t present until the last quarter of the incubation phase.  Mortality rates are significant although many survive.  The disease is almost unknown among infants, children, and, even, adolescents.  Plastic effects of the pathology necessarily require adult bone structure and muscle/soft tissue distributions to sculpt the victim in accord with the disease’s code.

The progression of the disease is idiosyncratic and unpredictable.  No single account should be deemed definitive.  Therefore, you should read this narrative with caution.

3.
Our town is twenty miles beyond the mountain pass on the edge of the Red Rock desert.  The desert begins to the north of where we live, at the higher altitudes in the basin.  Industrious pioneers irrigated the basin’s lower elevation south of town.  In season, the land is green with a patchwork of fields criss-crossed by canal.  The canals are the width of a sidewalk, lined with cement with mossy bottoms about four feet below grade.  An intricate system of weirs and overflow channels conveys snow-melt from the mountains into the irrigation system.  Since the town is dry with no on-sale booze on offer, road crossings in the cultivate area are adorned with small supper clubs with liquor bars and roadhouses.  Our town was founded by Mormons, or more properly stated, the Latter Day Saints and there are enough parish wards in the city to warrant a “stake” as it is called – a larger Church with white columns and an equally white pointed steeple aimed like a needle at the sky.

Before I became sick, I drove a delivery truck in the basin.  My routes took me most everywhere between the parallel ranges of mountains that define our valley.  Eight mile from town, amidst the barren buttes and canyons of the red rock desert, the army maintains a proving ground, although there haven’t been any tests in that place for several decades.  Beyond the proving ground, the roads degrade to gravel and, then, the gravel turns to dirt tracks in the foothills where the Wild Horse Range is located.  You can drive a jeep into the stony hills and hunt antelope on the flanks of the escarpment.  I traveled there often when I was younger.

One afternoon, driving with some parcels for the military post, I encountered a dozen khaki-colored bulldozers flattening out an eroded pinkish hillside.  Where the bulldozers had completed their work, a fleet of olive green dump trucks were pouring concrete, as if making a broad runway on an airport in the desert.  I asked a couple workers what they were doing, but the men told me it was “very hush-hush.”  A few days later, the concrete slabs were in place and cranes were lifting pre-fabricated walls into place, setting the pale yellow and blue panels into slots in the cement.  Many men in fatigues were working at the site and turquoise-colored porta-potties were arranged at intervals near the construction.  Closer to town, the bulldozers and dump trucks were installing more slabs, but this time, in fact, as a long narrow runway.  I knew that the concrete was intended for planes because already there were orange air-socks mounted on steel poles and inflated by the wind and, at the end of the construction site, a make-shift control tower with thick conduits of electrical wire running from a dozen big diesel generators protected by high fences topped with coils of razor-wire.  Along the road, I passed ranks and ranks of planter boxes, each cradling a scoop of gravel and a single green, heart-shaped succulent plant.  The little plants were livid green and looked artificial but when I stopped to inspect, I could see that they were real, moist with thick rubbery leaves like an artichoke.  An officer in a jeep stopped by my truck and asked if he could help me.  “What are the plants for?” I asked.  “Each bay in the field hospital will have a house plant,” the officer said, blinking at me through his sunglasses.  “It’ll make the rooms more appealing,” the officer said.  Then, he put his jeep in gear and drove away.

No one was saying much about the epidemic at that point.  Apparently, the big cities were hard hit, but the nature of the disease was still mostly vague to us.  The officials didn’t want anyone to panic.

4.
Then, the jets began to land, military transports by the look of things.  The wall of mountains forced the planes to descend steeply, plunging like meteors out of the sky.  Nose-down the planes dropped on us, pulling up at the last moment to skid along the desert tarmac.  Slipstream from the transport jets kicked up eddies of red desert that the wind molded into little dust devils.  Ranks of limousines were waiting along the runway, long black vehicles with sleek silhouettes, and this fleet of cars chauffeured the people from the planes, no doubt shaken-up by the dive into the basin, out to the pre-fab field hospital.  Suddenly, there were military doctors in town, mostly Indians with round horn-rim glasses, but also a few Black women.  We saw them fueling up at the gas stations and, sometimes, eating steak at one of the road-houses in the irrigated part of the county.  The doctors kept to themselves and, even if you bought them drinks or shots of tequila, they were close-mouthed about the contagion.  It was all mysterious but good for the local economy and the merchants in town, the Target and the Walmart were all flush with cash.

A delivery took me out past the improvised hospital, along the graded gravel road to the trailer and quonset hut on Wild Horse Range.  Returning across the red rock desert, I met a hitchhiker slouching at the side of the freshly poured asphalt lane to the medical facility.  It was late afternoon and the shadows were lengthening and the man next to the road was dressed in black so that, from a distance, it wasn’t clear where his dark boots ended and his long, slender shadow began.  The man’s head was blurry with black whiskers close-cropped on his chin and his sideburns bushy and flared down his cheeks which seemed hollow, although this was, perhaps, just a trick of the oblique light in the stubble on the side of his face.  The hitchhiker beckoned and I pulled onto the shoulder of the road.  Although the red rock desert radiates heat like an oven, wiggly thermals over the blacktop, the air was cool above the ground even a little chilly.  The man looked familiar to me – his eyes were narrow, as if squinting in the sunlight, although this was just the way his eyelids were constructed, a hint of the Asian east in his face and slight snarl of his lips.  Where had I seen this man before?  I couldn’t exactly place him, although he seemed to me to be a movie star.  He muttered something to me, and pointed vaguely into the distance where the blue foothills marched up to the snowy escarpment.  Curiously, his voice was high-pitched, warbling a little.  I looked into his familiar face and wondered why the voice didn’t match the masculine features, the stubble of whiskers, the handsome jaw and the wolf man sideburns.  There was no doubt, that he spoke with a woman’s voice, fruity and seductive.

I was disconcerted and said that I would get help and, then, told him to wait until someone came to pick him up.  The incongruity of his male features and breathy woman’s voice made me uncomfortable.  “Mulholland,” he trilled.  “Which way is Mulholland?”  Then, he curtsied to me as I drove away, watching him twist his torso a little and, then, slump his broad shoulder once again as he stood at the edge of the road.

At the checkpoint for the hospital, I pulled up to the booth and said that a patient was standing on the road to town, about a mile from the facility.  I had placed the actor while driving away from him, but couldn’t think of the name.  “It’s the dude from The Matrix, I said, you know that John Wick guy,” I told the guard.  “Keanu Reeves,” the guard said.  “They all look like Keanu Reeves or Madonna.”  He waved me back from the fence enclosing the hospital.  In the distance, near the building with its pale walls low-slung across the desert, I saw a half dozen people in Kleenex-blue hospital gowns.  Some of them had dark heads, furry like the man I had encountered on the roadside, others showed platinum blonde beehives of hair.

I drove back to the warehouse.  I thought I should have asked for Mr. Reeves’ signature as an autograph.  But, undoubtedly, the actor was very sick.  I looked him up on Wikipedia using my cell-phone.  Yes, that confirmed the identification.

“Listen guys,” I said to the others who were washing their delivery vans.  “I don’t want to start rumors but, you know, at the hospital, one of the patients is Keanu Reeves.”

“Reeves?”  Someone asked.  “Who’s that?”  The man was a Mormon and didn’t go to the movies much.

“Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” I said, “Point Break..”

“I seen those flicks,” the Latter-Day Saint said.

“Keanu Reeves and Madonna too.”

“Madonna?”

“You bet,” I said.  “But don’t go starting rumors.”

The Saint pretended that his pointer finger was a key, locked his lips, and, then, threw the key away.

5.
A few days later, I had a slight fever and my eyes felt as if they were congested with particles of the red rock desert that I couldn’t wash out of them.  At night, my body ached and I couldn’t find a comfortable position in bed, although during the day, I was just a little bit stiff and sore.  I kept thinking of how I had used my cell-phone to look up Keanu Reeves.  The phone seemed filthy to me and so I swabbed it down with moist, disinfectant towelette.

I made some deliveries to the road-houses in the green part of the basin.  The spring snow-melt had filled all the canals so that rippling water caught the mid-day sun and the irrigation ditches were like golden laces suturing up the brown furrowed fields.  My vision was better, more clear, with objects standing out in space as if sculpted – everything seemed more three-dimensional and, when I removed my glasses, I could see even more clearly.  My eyesight was more acutely binocular as if my eyes were migrating to be farther apart and, therefore, more adept at perceiving contours.  I found myself driving at high speeds, lured into greater velocity by my much improved vision and proprioception.  The distant mountain ranges rising above the basin were shaped by deep blue shadow and remote pinnacles that I saw as if through a telescope – it had been years since I had seen the mountains with such clarity and I was stunned by their ornate, chiseled beauty.  My GPS wasn’t functioning exactly as intended and I couldn’t find the addresses that I was seeking.  I had to look at old paper maps that were yellow and torn where the paper folded and, then, re-folded.  At a couple of the taverns marking the intersections in the irrigated land, the owners, who had known me for many years, seemed cool and remote, as if I were a stranger.

That night, my wife told me that I was the most handsome man that she had ever seen, that the years had just made me more desirable and that she loved me passionately.  While we were having sex, she moaned that my cock had become enormous.  The next morning, she begged me to call in sick so that we could spend the morning in bed.  I did as she told me.  “You make love to me,” she said, “just like a movie star.”

By early afternoon, she was exhausted and had fallen asleep.  I went out onto the porch behind the house and looked up at the mountains which were now my delight.  Each shingle, each siding board, each eaves-trough and gutter seemed a distinct thing, a sort of miracle.  My senses were wonderfully acute.  I could hear field mice in tall weeds behind the garage, a mother bat squeaking to her baby in a  hollow oak, the slither of a snake in a dusty ravine a quarter-mile away.  I was full of energy, not tired in the least, and so I called my agent at the delivery warehouse and said that I was feeling better, much better, and asked him for a route.  My agent said that if I stopped at the office, he would have an assignment for me.

I drove the van over to the warehouse, picked up some parcels, programming the addresses into my GPS console.  Apparently, there were some areas in the basin that were no longer connected to the grid – it had something to do with the contagion.  My agent said that I should write down the addresses on a note-pad in case I couldn’t find them on the internet maps.  He asked me if I had done something to change my grooming.  “Dude,” he said, “you look pretty great.”  “I feel great too,” I replied.  I had doused myself in cologne and the stubble of my beard itched a little.

I drove north into the red rock desert.  Planes were landing on the new runway.  The wind had changed and the planes couldn’t simply dive-bomb down onto the tarmac.  Instead, they sailed over the pass, floated over the acres of military hospital and, then, spiraled down, circling at lower and lower elevations out over the sea.  I had trouble locating my drop-offs – my agent was right: there was no service in the more remote parts of the basin and I didn’t recognize the terrain.  The escarpment with its peaks like white, remote clouds over the high rim riven by deep canyons looked unfamiliar.  It seemed that I had come into a part of the San Fernando or Simi valley that was strangely desolate and unpopulated.  I found the addresses that I was seeking by sheer accident.  A big fan of debris washed down from the peaks spread across the basin near the gravel road where I was driving.  Boulders as large as school buses had rolled to distances four or five miles from the elevated mouths of the pour-offs.  The road ended at a shallow wash full of crystalline, pale sand.  I parked my vehicle.  I had to use a toilet, but no toilets were anywhere near me, and, so, I wandered out among the field of boulders, each of them standing apart from the others like great, carved mausoleums.  I squatted in the shade of one of the rocks.  A lizard watched me with a baleful, unblinking eye.  Then, I was nauseated and vomited.  My limbs began to tremble and, when I stood, I felt as if I were about to faint and, so, I crawled a dozen yards away from the noisome mess I had made and lay down in the grey, dusty shadow.  My skin tingled as if ants were crawling over me and my face felt like an ill-fitting mask.  I clawed at my hairy cheeks to see if I could yank the mask off, but it wouldn’t budge.  Then, I fell asleep.

Green dusk enveloped me when I opened my eyes.  The dry chaparral was indistinct and I was surprised to see my car parked on the edge of a ravine a quarter of a mile away.  Someone had been sick near the place where I had napped.  A large black bird swept by overhead.

There was something wrong with my Lamborghini.  It rode rough, like a panel truck.  In the distance, an intersection was marked by a white metal scaffolding bearing aloft a glowing shield advertising gasoline.  I thought that the gas station in the desert had clean lines and was well-lit.  The place would make a good location for a film.  The car was low on gas and the pumps didn’t offer the premium fuel that I ordinarily used.  I went into the station to pay with a card – the card-reader at the pump wasn’t working.  The clerk was a pretty young girl.  She asked me sign the credit card receipt.  Then, she blushed and admitted: “You really didn’t have to sign, Mr. Reeves.  I just wanted your autograph.”  I flashed a grin at her.  “No worries,” I said.  It’s the price of fame.

Most of the city seemed blacked-out, probably because of the virus.  From Mulholland, I could see the red flashing lights of planes circling LAX, but great swaths of the basin were dark.  I found Cahuenga Boulevard and, from there, I could see that the 101 was strangely deserted.  I merged onto the freeway, found an empty lane, and wound out the Lamborghini’s engine a little.  The tires must have been misaligned because the vehicle was still running rough, even at 90 miles per hour.  I exited in the Hollywood Hills and drove to the AFI Silver Theater at Los Feliz and Western.  The traffic remained sparse, accommodating – the night was lush and immense and smelled of eucalyptus and, everything seemed devised for my comfort and pleasure.  The cocktail party at the theater was lavish and I saw many of my friends.  The occasion was the premiere of a documentary film produced by someone that I knew.  I didn’t stay for the screening – I could see the picture later at the producer’s house.  He made that promise to me, beaming with joy that I had come for the premiere.  Some paparazzi took my picture with my arm thrown around my buddy’s shoulder.  Some girls posed with me also and I smiled for the camera.  In this business, you have to be seen or people will forget you.

I didn’t seem to have any small bills in my wallet for the valet who brought my car.  I shrugged and kissed the kid on the cheek.  “I’ll get you next time,” I told the young man.  “No worries, Mr. Reeves,” he said.  I was embarrassed about not having suitable cash.  “You can call me, Keanu,” I said.  The kid gestured at a long black limousine double-parked in the AFI lot.  “Perhaps, you would like to take the limousine,” the young man said.  “Oh no,” I said.  “It’s a nice night for driving and I have deliveries to make on my route.”  The moon had come out and, because the City was mostly dark, the sky was radiant with its silvery light.

Sunset Boulevard was, also, deserted.  Sometimes, at the traffic semaphores, I waited alone for the lights to change.  A few yellow taxis slipped away from the avenue, exploring side streets where restaurants and bars glittered.  The sultry breezes whispering down the canyons were overwhelmed with the scent of eucalyptus.  I found the Gallery where there was a gala opening.  Again, I surrendered the Lamborghini to the attendant at the postage-stamp-sized parking lot next to the gallery.  The artist had ingeniously remade the place (it had been night-club before) to look like a roadhouse out in the country.  The installation was perfect, simulating a supper club in a rural part Kansas or Manitoba.  The place was crawling with agents pushing various properties.  I spoke with several of them and, then, the manager of the place posed with me.  His wife, a younger man with Sanskrit letters tattooed on his throat under his ear, came from behind the bar, whispered in the manager’s ear, and, then, presented his cheek to me.  I kissed him there while people took cell-phone pictures that made bright sparks in the gloom.  The tattooed man was wearing some kind of dangly earring that interceded between my lips and his cheek.  As I stood under the awning, beckoning to the valet, I licked blood off my lower lip.  I felt as if someone had punched me, but, how could this have happened?  It must have been an encounter with that sharp, pendulous earring.  Again, I had no cash to tip, the valet.  “I’ll get you next time,” I told the young man.  He grinned at me.  “No worries, Mr. Reeves,” he said.  A big black limousine glided from the shadows.  The chauffeur got out and extended his hand to me.  I was confused but shook it.  “Did you want to ride?” he asked with a Russian accent. “No,” I said.  “I have my car.”  The chauffeur looked sad.  He reached up and tapped his finger to the brim of his cap as a kind of salute.

The Glenlivet in my belly made me feel a little dizzy and I was ravenous.  Except for a couple of shrimp at the AFI premiere, I hadn’t eaten anything.  For some reason, there had been no hors d’oeuvres at the art gallery opening.  I was supposed to meet Madonna at a seafood place in Malibu, the Patio café on the pier.  There was still plenty of time and the moon was high overhead singing to me sweetly and the odor of eucalyptus was so intense that, when I closed my eyes while driving, it seemed that I could navigate by scent alone, keeping the great perfumed trees equidistant on both sides of my Porsche or Lamborghini or whatever it was.  I followed Sunset into Santa Monica, took the roller-coaster hill down below the seaside dirt-cliffs, and, then, turned right on the Pacific Coastal Highway.  No one was driving tonight.  The planes circled lazily in the sky over the airport and a couple of joggers were trotting along the side of the road, a dangerous place to run in this gloom.  I winged one of them with the left front of my car and watched him spinning like a top in my rear-view mirror.  It was his fault and there was no reason to stop for a minor accident.

I knew Malibu Seafood and the Patio Café from a trip to the West Coast with my parents when I was a boy.  The place looked different from what I recalled – an austere building on stilts over the sounding sea.  The facade had white pillars and there was a pointed steeple over the entrance.  The parking lot was empty and there were no lines of tourists waiting to be seated near the front door.  As soon as I pulled into the lot, where there were many spaces, a valet materialized in front of me, standing like cherub with a flaming sword in the high-beam of my lights.  “I’ll have to park this for you,” the cherub said.  “Can I put your tip on the restaurant bill?” I asked.  “I’m not carrying any cash.”  “Sure, Mr. Reeves,” the young man said.  “Just write down my name next to the figure.”  “Okay,” I said as I handed the keys to him.  He said that his name was Tommy or Billy or Jimmy or something like that.  A couple of long black limousines were parked near the edge of the lot where some wooden steps dropped down to the sandy slope of the beach.  The tide must have been low because the sea was so far away that I couldn’t hear the pounding surf – indeed, it was profoundly silent.  Inside the restaurant, I said that I had come to see the woman who was dining in the reserved room.  The maitre de nodded, gave me an insolent wink, and, then, directed me along a private corridor behind a door next to an oil painting of Jesus with doe-eyes praying at the foot of a pyramid among Red Indians.  It was an odd painting and I thought that the place must be under new management.  Jesus was handsome but I was more handsome and, undoubtedly had a bigger cock.  Madonna was waiting for me in a small room overlooking the vast and deserted beach.  Moonlight shimmered on the dunes.  She looked fabulous, much younger than her actual age with a complexion like porcelain, and she was sipping a cocktail in which a green olive rolled its eye toward her own violet eyes, electric with light.  Her driver was a big bald thug, sipping a Fresca, and, when I was ushered into the room, she made a dismissive gesture and he quietly vanished.  I wondered if I would have sex with her.  It seemed a possibility and, then, I thought that I should have masturbated in the car at the stoplights on Sunset Boulevard so that I wouldn’t come so quickly and could please her with my huge cock.  She extended her pale, cool hand to me and I kissed it.  I ordered a martini like the one that she was drinking – “it’s a dirty martini,” she said, winking at me.  The drink was very strong and I don’t recall what happened next.  Then, someone was helping me stay on my feet in the parking lot.  The valet said that he thought that I should take the long, black limousine home to my place in Topanga Canyon.  ‘No,” I said.  “Let me drive.”  I was sweating heavily and my face was ill-fitting and so I tried to peel it off my skull, but succeeded only in tearing the skin under my ears.  Reluctantly, the cherub with the flaming sword found my panel truck, drove it under my nose, and, then, opened the door for me.  I got in and shut off the car.  “No, no,” the kid said.  “I had left the car running.”  “No worries,” I said.  I fumbled with my keys and tried to insert them into the data-port.  The kid leaned across me and turned on the car.  “Mr. Reeves, I think you should take the limousine,” he said.  “No, I’m fine,” I told him.  “Did you tip me, you know, on the bill?”  “I think so,” I said.  He blinked at me sadly, as if trying to squeeze some tears out of his eyes and, then, I put the car in gear and eased out onto the highway, but I was going the wrong direction and so I had to make a u-turn but there was a median so that I jumped the concrete island and knocked down some stanchions marked with amber reflectors and, then, drove down the road with the cars all honking at me and swerving to the right or left so that I sideswiped several of them and saw sparks shooting up where the metal scraped metal and, then, my vehicle went sideways and crashed into something and I looked down and saw what had happened – I was masturbating, trying to prepare my huge cock for sex with Madonna and, of course, I didn’t want to embarrass myself in the sack with her and, so, the giant thing was in my hands and the car was wrecked on the side of the road and, then, there were kindly-looking cops all around and a man dressed like a paramedic wearing a pale blue surgical mask and he said: “Mr. Reeves, Mr. Reeves, you will have to come with me...” and he lifted me out of the panel van and pushed my penis back in my trousers and I saw a long, black limousine with smoked windows waiting just for me on the side of the road. 

6.
As it turned out, the virus went everywhere it could and spread the contagion across the world.  In the United States and Canada, where the virus sculpted the sick to resemble Madonna or Keanu Reeves, many died.  Men who had the misfortune to be transformed into Madonna, perhaps due to some secret predilection, died at a rate of about 60%.  Women did better – their morbidity was around 30%.  Both men and women shaped by the virus to look like Keanu Reeves did much better – their death rate was 18%.  This was attributed to the fact that Reeves’ was in excellent shape – his athletic performance as the assassin John Wick was instrumental in saving many lives.  After a few months, Google developed a patch for the virus and stopped its spread through computers and cell-phones.  I don’t know exactly how the patch was designed.  I was in a medically induced coma when things improved.

7.
I had been looking for a long time without seeing, looking so long that my eyes were dull and dry from being open for so many hours.  But, then, I started to see and, at first, there was nothing in front of me but a little green plant in a pot with pink gravel, a succulent like a miniature rubber tree.

A deep voice moaned nearby.  The cubicle opened onto the desert and a light bulb blazed above a plank walkway.  Madonna was writhing on a cot next to me, squirming in some kind of sexual ecstasy.  She was burly with merchant marine tattoos on her biceps and pointed breasts.  Beyond the light bulb, there were dark stains on the slick-looking rocks.  The air smelled of rain.

The latches on the buckles binding me were loose and I slipped them off.  Madonna opened her eyes very wide and wheezed.  She reminded me a little of a truck driver that I had known in town.  Her feet and ankles were shoved out from under the sheets and her toe nails were thick, cracked and yellow.  I sat up and felt very dizzy.  I wasn’t sure my legs would support me, but they did and, so, I found some slippers and stepped out onto the veranda, a walkway extending in both directions for several hundred yards, lit intermittently by naked light bulbs screwed into sockets on a long wire strung atop aluminum tent poles.  No one was stirring among these cubicles, although I saw figures in Haz-Mat suits moving like robots in slow-motion closer to the center of the camp where there were more lights, rows of black limousines and jeeps and floodlights splashing beams down on several platforms where I could see computer terminals and battered metal carts of the kind that stewardesses push on airplanes.  In the other direction, someone was coming, heavily masked with an oxygen pack.  I stepped sideways into another cubicle where it was silent except for the faint hum of a respirator.  Two figures, features obscured by plastic masks shaped like shells or bedpan urinals lay motionless in the shadows.  I thought of the fat Madonna undulating next to my bed and, suddenly, I was outside, breathing heavily as I walked away into the desert.

The raw scintillating lights of the compound dropped below a fin-shaped ridge of eroded red rock.  The dark basin spread out before me vast and black in its bowl of mountains.  I followed a jeep track to a sandy place where the ground was disturbed.  The air smelled bad and there was a wire fence wrapped around an aluminum platform stacked with man-sized rubber cocoons.  Three coyotes were scratching at the loose sand, trying to uncover what was buried there.

It was too much to bear.  I tried to run but my legs were too weak.  After falling several times and cutting my knee, I crawled up a steep slope to a grassy terrace where I rested.

Something large and warm was above me.  I opened my eyes.  A horse bent over to nuzzle me.  Several other horses with thick winter manes stood in the wet grass.  The peaks of the mountains were glowing with pale rose light.

I found the gravel road to the headquarter trailer for the Wild Horse Range.  It was still early and no one was at the office.  I sat on the door-stoop until the park ranger arrived in her battered SUV.  She seemed to recognize me.  I stood up and she called me by a name that I abandoned long ago.

8.
A month later, after my recovery, I drove through the green fields to make some deliveries.  The oily- green soybean plants were knee-high and, among the vegetables, work crews were bent over the crops behind old pick-up trucks with their tailgates down.  The day was sweet and fresh and I was happy to be alive.

After my delivery, I stopped to buy a Mountain Dew and use the restroom at a Kwik Trip.  Some steel grain bins lined a railroad track and, beside the gas station, there was a shuttered bar behind a false-front decorated with a bucking bronco.  Another failed tavern was marked with Spanish-language signs inviting passers-by to Pentecostal worship with la Senda Antigua.

I looked at myself in the restroom mirror.  I had lost twenty pounds, but my face fit squarely on my head once more and my shoulders were no longer broad but now round, even a little hunched.  The last vestiges of the sickness were six-pack abs tacked to my scrawny belly like a decal.

The Kwik Trip rented DVDs and I glanced at them.  The movies starring Keanu Reeves had mostly been removed from the shelves.  However, I saw a copy of The Matrix Revisited displayed next to the counter where a girl was making pizzas to be frozen and sold.  The girl’s face was crumpled-up like a crushed kleenex.

Driving back toward town, I suddenly remembered Mulholland Drive and the Silver Theater and, then, the candle-lit private dining room overlooking the Pacific at Malibu Beach.  Deep, painful longing blurred my eyes and I had to pull over to the side of the road as I wept for my lost glamour.

9.
The infected brain is the only tool with which we can survey the disease and its ravages and measure whether we have reached maximum medical improvement.  I have felt a slight fever as I write these words.  Therefore, it is not entirely certain that I am healed.  You will have to be the judge of that.