In an empty room overlooking a city she doesn't remember, the sun goes down slowly and she sweats. The night brings her a cool breeze to suck on. She stands, slowly rolling the fat of her cheek back and forth against the window. The voices from the apartment below rise. She draws back her hand and with one sharp movement thrusts it forward into the glass. She looks out and watches the pieces arc into the sidewalk. The noises from a kickball game float past her. She feels like cloth as it dries in the sun. Her thoughts disintegrate into echoes.

The Next Day
Her routine has circled in tight. She wants to do something completely irrevocable. She lets a hardcore band use the room for practice. The music crowds everything. She leaves them the apartment taking an image of young sweaty bodies with her. She walks, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, remembering a cowboy from Montana who said she could arrive anytime. Wondering what he does with his long nights she reaches the greyhound station and buys a ticket in the opposite direction.

One Week Later
She sleeps on the roof of a building in San Francisco. Every morning she pauses, looking out past the edge of the city, over the ocean. No one knows she's here. Space unfolding. She uses her days learning all the public transportation routes through the city. She rides until they close. Once night she takes a shortcut back to the roof. She enters a tunnel that goes down, into the earth. For the first half mile there are lights and graffiti to examine but then she rounds a bend, the lights are gone, it's pitch black. She stands motionless for five minutes hoping her eyes will adjust to the dark. They don't but she begins slowly, using her feet to feel the way. She leaves herself as she inches through the darkness. The movements of her feet become her entire world. After an unknown amount of time she sees a tiny flickering in the distance. Coming closer she realizes it's a fire. The two old men hidden for the night stare, open mouthed, as the apparition nods and walks past them, out into the street.

She has no schedule but knows she won't stay. Loneliness touches her rarely, she is content. One morning as she waits for a city bus she watches a man leave the bar across the street and weave his way through traffic. He stops next to her and they stand silently together. He lights a Pall Mall and says "the bus coming". Then he looks her directly in the eyes and a grin spreads slowly, inching across his dirty face. He tells her he just did crack in the bathroom of the bar. His glee at this revelation is immense. The bus pulls up, she boards, thinking he's behind her. She sees him through the window, still on the corner, moving back and forth in a pattern that reminds her of bees.

The buses have stopped for the night, she's on the Oakland side of the bay. She walks through miles of deserted cement roads. She turns a corner and there is a small man on top of a huge truck filled with trash. The scene is lit with yellow lights which remind her of sulfur. She watches him as he slowly and meticulously untangles a long black plastic tube and drops it, inch by inch, over the side of the truck. His progress is labored, he concentrates completely on his task. There is a heavy stillness in the air that she can't deny. She thinks about the time spent here. She realizes she's memorized every route through the city. She heads for the greyhound station.

She waits for the midnight express, people swarming. Like flies circling shit. Soldiers everywhere on their way home. She sits in one of the chairs that has a TV but watches people. She eats her sandwich swinging her legs so her heels hit the metal frame of the chair, one at a time. The sandwich tastes like yesterday. The bus its packed, she sits near the front hoping for sleep. The long lanky cowboy she had seen earlier drops next to her. He's so long he doesn't fit into the seats. He carefully arranges his legs in the aisle. She covertly examines his dusty brown boots. He offers her a sip of his bottle, she takes it to help kill the image. He finishes his drink before they reach the outskirts of the city and is slightly snoring. She listens to the sounds of people trying to sleep in a space that's too small as she watches the road move.

Afternoon
She walks a cliff next to the ocean in Northern California. She climbs down to a shelf of rocks. Jagged and steep. Moving out inch by inch on her ass, finally she is directly above the water. The waves are high, every so often one washes up over her. She lays back as the sun moves. She smells the salt. She waits for the sun to dry her clothes. Something inside pulls at her. She thinks of rivers and heads East.

Night
In Chicago she gets a ride with someone on their way to New York City. They rarely stop, each sleeping while the other drives. She's at the wheel, its about 4 am, she's in a long series of woods, Pennsylvania mountain roads. She has the road to herself. Its been half an hour since she passed an exit, its that feeling like you are repeating scenery and time is stretching. She hits 70, 80, 90 miles an hour. Suddenly her headlights illuminate an old man standing by the side of the road. One complete slowly expanding movement. His thumb is out, he has a red milk crate and wears a beat up white cowboy hat. Then she's passed him - he's miles back. Its another half an hour before they reach an exit, she wonders if he ever stops.

In Manhattan, she meets some musicians. They have an apartment on East 22nd crammed with equipment and people. One of them has a map of the city in his head. He gives her rides in the band's bus. Knowing every street he drives super fast, trying to impress her with how close he can get to parked cars. She keeps to herself, sleeping alone on the bus.

They find a small after hours bar. It opens at 4 am. You knock and someone peeks out a small hole to see who you are. The bouncer is a 6' black man with a cowboy hat. She nods and he buys her a Budweiser. Her friend spends the night doing coke off the table top and she plays pool with the cowboy. When they leave its 8 am daylight summer morning in the east village. People are out jogging and walking their dogs. She wishes she had sunglasses and thinks its time to move on.

Fall
She decides to go far north. She finds the name of the bus company that can take her to the airport and gets there just in time. She hasn't slept in 2 days and wants nothing more. A guy sits down next to her and starts talking. He tells her all about his daughter in college and that he and his wife are moving. She falls asleep in the middle of his story. Waking to hear the crash of the bus as another car pulls out in front of it at the airport. Everyone has to climb out of the window to get off. Only she and an old businessman find this amusing.

She lands in a country where the earth has holes everywhere. Huge lumps of rock have been vomited up and arbitrarily placed around. Iceland is full of moss - a growth that is lush and heat comes from the ground. They sleep in a car by a cemetery, it never turns into night. They pass a sulfur lake, chairs in the middle of blue pale silver smoking water. Lunar landscape with a fine fringe. They walk slowly back into the woods through this island country each lost in their own thoughts. The birds get louder as they move. They reach the edge of the trees, a huge wall of rock overtakes all else.

She passes through a small eastern European city. She sits in a park watching for that moment when situations unfold into a discernable pattern. Small people in really colorful clothes are standing next to a very large tree (seen from a distance). She walks past a small child that is counting under his breath. The numbers follow her. She stretches her fingers as she looks for words but she finds none. Pausing in a doorway she tries to suspend the moment for as long as possible but it's empty. She meets some friends and they take her to a thin river. They sit on the rocks late into the night drinking cognac. They walk her to the train station where she catches the midnight train.

Standing on a ferry in the middle of the Baltic Sea she thinks of rooftops. The boat glides through a channel slowly making its way into the open space of the sea. A man explains the scene as they pull away from shore. He tells her his life and repetitions. He points out the history that is visible if you only know where to look. He shows her that the signs on the shore indicate prosperity on one side of the image and despair on the other.

Winter
At a party at 5am she meets a German cowboy. He tells her jokes about the wild, wild, west, ride that horse into the ground. But at this moment she's hard and molded plastic. The air becomes thick. The electronic music makes her body twitch. She can't find her way through this, no way to ride out the night with a cowboy met at a boring party. Weeks later she meets him again at a party at 5am. She's happy to see him. As he talks to her in German and she doesn't understand she becomes painfully shy. His face is pressed up tight next to hers and this makes her step back. He walks away. She leaves alone.

Border passports. Arrival with no sleep, only an address which she can't seem to find. A stranger offers her coffee and tries so hard to make a date that she finally bursts out laughing. She walks in two days late but just in time for Christmas dinner. Soon she finds herself only watching as they move around the city. He makes her laugh. He wants to be a rock and roll star. Black hair with body nonexistent. They are uneasy with each other. She watches him watching beautiful women and sees no way to enter. A bottle of scotch sits between them and she conveniently uses it to create a distance. That's all she's after. Distance. She's decided that her words come from chaos and destruction and she makes sure that there are none left behind. She's woken with a sudden offer of a ride back to Germany from a beautiful woman. She accepts and wakes him to say good-bye. They make it through the mountains with no windshield wipers. They make it through customs in their old fucked up car. And they stop for coffee and hit the tree and the car is dead and its borrowed and they are a long way from where they want. She sits and drinks shots with this guy who has to be in the Mafia and the beautiful woman finds them a ride all the way to her little town. The night goes on and on in adventures and ends near dawn with that familiar bitter taste which is so very sweet.

Looking at a map she realizes she has just completed a slow, elegant arc through the landscape. Like when you arch your back, slowly, slowly, and your vertebrae crack one by one. A popping noise.

Several Years Earlier
(She holds her memories tight to her chest.)

One
Texas always makes her think of cowboys and UFOs. They were standing on the edge of the road in the dark. No ride. No ride. They see a figure walking the thin line between the grass and the road. He comes slowly towards them in the darkness, a silhouette against fast food. When he reaches them he begins to talk. He says his name is Kilgore Trout which they know is from a book but the night is so long they think he might be right. After asking for a cigarette he walks away, off into the dark. The police stop and ask for ID, if they have gang affiliations or tattoos but will not give them a ride. They spend the night under an overpass, with her back to the wall she sleeps fitfully. It rains and water leaks through the cement, their feet get wet. He curls closer. When she leaves he keeps the blanket for as long as it smells like her.

Two
She stands on the corner and sees a car pass. She is hitch-hiking alone in the rain. The driver does a U-turn and steps on the gas. He drives directly into a cement divider in the road. She watches the speed turn into slow motion. A direct hit. The car flips and momentarily rides the edge of the divider, sparks of metal against cement light the way down the street. The sound of metal stretches down beside her. A pause as it lands, the explosion is glorious. From where she stood it looked like a completely rational decision.

Three
She's slowly walking by the river watching tourists. She's thinking about food, at this moment a constant obsession. She wanders into a cowboy from Montana. She had met him earlier, a figure that stood out against the day. He has been searching for her (or at least he tells her so). They sit together under a bush near the big arch. The 'Gateway To The West'. And that's where they fuck, all night long.

The Following Year
She gets off the bus in a fog, having no idea what town she's in, not caring enough to find out. She thinks briefly about running to the liquor store with those other two guys to get a small bottle of something that'll make the ride go faster. But the 3 runaway kids on the bus talked all night long and she wants to find a quiet place to take a nap. She sits in the quiet shade of a tree. When she wakes the bus is gone. She walks around the small town wondering where she wants to go next. She meets a guy with a car and time on his hands. He has an idea for his life but no way to say it. She takes him to a motel. They get very drunk and made a boat. Turning the table upside down they ride the shiny plastic carpet around the room, taking turns pushing each other, laughing. They drive all night to the next city. The road stretches out, infinitely in the night. But the tire begins to announce itself. They stop at a garage to see, it is not a flat but soon could be. She sits in the grass by the highway looking at nothing. She digs with her fingers down until she finds the moist dirt place underneath the dry grass. Her stomach is sour and she moves without thought. She digs with each finger separately until just the tip is resting in a cool darkness. The cars pass her, somewhere around her head, but she is lost in her fingers.

When she's hitchhiking the world consists of only herself. The landscape is static. She walks or stands as the cars move past. She never knows when the moving lights will stop; space contracting down to a single point of focus.

The semi has a crucifix hanging from the mirror. Driver says, "Man, you a girl, hitchhiking out here by yourself. Thought you were a guy when I picked you up. Don't you know its dangerous to hitchhike?" He talks on and on. He mentions every mass murderer that has ever lived. She sits inside herself as he talks, his stories dripping blood. All she knows for sure is that everything can shift in one singe moment into a change that it will take years to try and reconcile.

She remembers a night in a small town in Ohio as she sticks out her thumb in the desert. No cars. Too early. No food. Goddamn this day. But the memory takes shape and she feels the snow on that night when she walked and she was young. Through the winter woods, no leaves, all is silent, even footsteps are muffled. All she hears is the labored breathing through cloth wrapped around her neck. She finds a stick to poke holes in the snow and slides down into a small gully filled with rocks and one trickle of water. The river has contracted. Snow falls so thickly with the illusion of warmth. Walking was slow and she laughed with the pleasure of being alone in the night.

The smell of lipstick. She wonders how to pray. She calls a lover from her past from a payphone on the highway. The silence on the end of the phone is so loud that a feeling of complete dislocation envelopes her. She thinks about the sticky sweet honey stuff that orchids excrete. So why can't she find just one sweet girl with a skirt wrapped tight around her ass and some money in her pocket and some time on her hands. Beautiful girl let's take a ride into paradise. She hangs up the phone and cries over lost communication. She walks for several hours, she sees glimpses of kitchens through windows. She learns the idea of time passing.

Small fat children riding the quarter pony ride outside of the supermarket while their mother smokes staring off, into the parking lot. This woman could be her but is not and never will be. Is this dislocation or recognition? She doesn't know or care.

Later
A girl walks up and tells her it's the first day of summer. She is extremely precise; like a finely tuned car. In the same moment a guy rides by on his bike. Really fast, the pedals squeak, he's wearing a winter coat and hat. He stops to ask directions from the woman with the radio. They stand talking in the center of the road for a long time. They walk into her house, laughing.

She is at the house on the corner near the railroad on the way out of town. She knows now it's the first day of summer. She sits on the porch smoking as the day turns into night. A drunken friend comes walking along laughing, asking her to dance. They do a lazy waltz around the yard. She talks to him about the road moving as you watch, about time stretching open before you, of unexpected meetings in the night. Of moments seen like images, each separate, clear and distinct. She says let's walk the tracks until dawn. Let's step onto the highway and flag down a car going anywhere. He kisses her and says he has to go home, she doesn't say goodbye.