(draft)

Phoenix, Arizona   ||   May 10, 1994

C H A P T E R   O N E

By sunset Nicholas’s vision had been reduced to garish ribbons of color. He thought that as one sense dimmed the others should grow stronger, but perhaps that took time. For now the steering wheel wormed incandescent beneath his fingertips, the air tasted of a thousand dead cigarettes, his head was a tangle of ghost murmurings and faraway alarm bells.

As he drove, memories of the day played like an old newsreel fed backwards through the projector, color-stained and wobbly and sequenced in reverse. Most immediately he recalled leading Socks down the mountain. He passed a few hikers, some who paused to talk to the dog. Most looked through Nicholas like he wasn’t there.

Before that he stood still on the mountain for a time. Hours, maybe. He was watching the airport and his eyes watered and burned.

Nicholas liked his particular place on the mountain. The trail bent sharply once and quickly again, angling past a throne of red sandstone, a quirk of erosion that left a waist-high bench of rock joined to the sheer cliff wall behind. Of course, he was hardly first to discover the site: MIKEY CLASS OF '87 had been here, as had CINDY LOVES JAY, and METALLICA RULES and JOHNNY SUCKS DICK and FUCK YOU SUE, too. Nicholas had sketched ideas for his own tag, but with little enthusiasm for the results.

Today he set only his backpack on the throne, abdicating in favor of a small outcropping of rock on the opposite edge of the trail. The perch was a precarious one, especially with Socks by his side, but the reward was a dizzying view of the city over the rust-colored rocks, the cactus and the creosote that blanketed the mountain.

The airport lay at his feet, to the southeast. Nicholas couldn’t help the way his heart fluttered with every jet that took to the sky, sank with each landing. Maybe he hated the airport, the futility of recapture endlessly following escape. But then, why keep returning here? Maybe he needed a place to think. It could be something important was on his mind, all that time spent staring at the planes, but it was long gone now. All that remained was a memory of that obnoxious kid, the one who approached Nicholas earlier that afternoon, back when his body faced away from the airport, to the west, towards the sun.

“Hey mister.”

“Hey mister.”

“Hey mister.”

The kid called and called and Nicholas ignored him as long as possible. A solar eclipse was due this afternoon and it beckoned to Nicholas and he was here to see. The eclipse was once and it was now and he faced it head-on, everything, the sun livid and the moon stone dead and the sky enormous and hot and flat like a mirror, perfect everywhere but the horizon, where its clean slate blue cracked into a cloudy piss yellow. The sky was eternal and its ruin was the triumph of the modern Western city, the combined passions of a million drivers in a million cars poured across a million miles of asphalt. If the drivers, the noiseless pilots of these humble death machines, were to pause a moment to look up, they might see Nicholas, looming on the mountain like a gaunt teenaged Cristo Redentor overlooking the city. The drivers wouldn’t stop though, not ever. The cars plunged on and on into the filthy horizon and the sun remained high above, for now shedding little of its terrible brilliance. Nicholas imagined he saw the sun ringed by a thick black halo, though it was hard to say whether the cause was the eclipse or the strain on his eyesight.

“Hey mister. Whatcha doin’?”

The kid was tugging at his sleeve now. Nicholas responded without looking.

“Teaching Socks here a trick.”

“What kinda trick?”

“Seeing eye dog.”

“He don’t look like a seeing eye dog to me.” The boy reached down to pet Socks, who tilted his head happily. “You call him Socks? Like the president’s cat?”

Nicholas, blinking hard, looked at the boy for the first time. The kid’s face was an irritating pink smear. “Huh?”

“The president’s cat is named Socks.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Hey mister. How come you were staring at the sun?”

“I’m watching the eclipse.”

“My dad says don’t look at the sun, even when there’s an eclipse. You never heard that, mister?”

“What’s with calling me mister? I’m eighteen. Barely.”

“I bet your eyes hurt.”

Nicholas sighed. He pulled his sunglasses and a stick of gum from his shirt pocket.

“Look kid, why don’t you get the fu–I mean, leave me alone. Go bug someone else.”

The boy petted Socks once more, then scampered around the bend in the trail and out of sight. Nicholas was left alone to study the airport, to hike back down the mountain, to find his car and drive it home with his eyesight newly compromised.

He was behind the wheel now and he was actually driving, but his scarred vision gave his surroundings a dreamlike quality. He drove the car and he thought of a dream he once had of airplanes. He saw himself as a kid, alone, kicking a ball aimlessly around his backyard. Suddenly he heard a roaring overhead, and looked up to see two jumbo jets collide in midair, producing a fireball to rival the noonday sun in size and intensity. Though the walls of his yard stood high, he somehow knew the neighbors all saw. Yet no one screamed, no one moved. People just watched.

The explosion realistically should have left no survivors, but this was a dream: men and women floated down slowly, held aloft by invisible parachutes. As the people drifted closer, Nicholas saw they had no faces, and they fell headfirst, tumbling softly onto the featureless planes of skin where their eyes and noses and mouths should have been. Some bodies landed in the gravel, some in the palo verde trees, some in the swimming pool; yet they caused no splash, raised no dust, whispered no sound.

Socks barked from the passenger seat and Nicholas returned his attention to the present. He was using tiny suburban roads rather than major avenues, to avoid the traffic and to get away with driving half-blind. What’s to see? A yellow sign warning him to WATCH FOR CHILDREN when there weren’t any. Quiet homes, manicured lawns, silvery cars at rest in long arced driveways. There were men in each doorway – overfed men, groaning and scratching like bears, bathed in the flickering backlight of living room TV sets. It was trash night in the suburbs, and the men rolled heavy containers to the curb with the lumbering, arrhythmic gait of the undead. And Nicholas was nearly home.