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By Root 2382 0

of our car to replenish its lifeblood, and then we drained our throbbing bladders into the toilets of their grimy bathrooms, and then in parting Lydia would buy me a candy bar. Outside, the chilly wind snapped and sang across the barren prairies that stretched vanishing into the distance all around us, blowing rippling waves through the dead cornstalks in the brown fields, and the shadows of the clouds above raced across the hills. Then we were off again! And again, my face was pressed to the glass—more birds!—more barns!—more fences!—more cows!—more telephone poles!—more and more and more space! My heart filled to bursting with the excitement of all this newness, the adventure of it, all the shallow hills sloping and rising along with our rapid traversal of the land, the sky meeting the visible edges of the earth in every direction! Look! This is the world!

I could not understand why Lydia seemed so bored.

After we had spent the whole day sitting in the car traversing the earth, and the sun had long ago set, and the character of the geography beneath our wheels had dramatically shifted several times, we came to a certain area, somewhere in the plains, where there was a cluster of lights and buildings—though the buildings were nowhere near as tall and closely situated as the many buildings in Chicago, and the lights not as bright. We entered a stark ugly white slab of a building. We dragged our fat brown suitcases rolling and banging on the thin orange carpets of the hallways behind us as we passed one identical closed door after another. Lydia inserted a key into the lock of one of these doors. She pushed the door open and led me into a sterile and affectless imitation of a human dwelling, containing a bathroom, a chair, a table, a TV, and a big dry cake of a bed sealed in an envelope of scratchy, starchy sheets tucked so tightly under the mattress that they had to be completely yanked out and tousled around a bit to loosen them up before comfortable sleeping could occur between them. My limbs were antsy with atrophy from a long day of inactivity. Taking a very long trip by car discombobulates the soul for this reason: on the one hand, you have actually just traveled farther across the earth in one day than your poor primate’s grasp of time and space could allow your mind to truly comprehend, and yet, perversely, your body has not physically moved from the same spot all day. And don’t even get me started on air travel. Modern modes of transportation pollute and corrupt the reverent relationship our minds and bodies might once have had with the geographical space in which we live. And yet they’re so damn convenient, so why not? The sacredness of the physical world is one of the many things that we have sacrificed to mere convenience. That’s how the old gods die. It turns out the Tower of Babel is not vertical, but horizontal.

I was so jumpy, I wanted to jump on the bed. It was a very pliant and responsive bed, poor perhaps for sleeping but grade A for bouncing. The one Lydia and I had at home—yes, I still thought of it as “home”—was nowhere near so conducive to bouncing. Now there was one monkey, jumping on the bed. However, Dr. Lydia Littlemore (she had a Ph.D.) prescribed that there should be no monkeys jumping on the bed. So I stopped. Lydia sat on the edge of the bed, exhausted to the core of her being, squinting, and with her forefinger and thumb massaging the place where the bridge of her nose reached her brow. She complained of a headache. She picked up the phone and ordered food, which in due time was magically brought to us. We ate it on the bed and watched the TV. Lydia fell asleep in her clothes, on top of the quilt, with the TV still chattering and aglow. I turned it off and curled up beside her. The night came and went. I listened to trucks rumbling past us on the nearby highway all night.

In the morning we got back in the car and more or less repeated exactly what we had done the day before. Another long day of land scrolling past us. The character of the landscape changed and changed again. The temperature