How High We Go in the Dark(49)

“Are you sure?” I say.

“Might as well know. Besides, I think we’ve run out of radio stations.”

“In the first twenty-four hours, depending on the temperature, the body will have reached full rigor mortis,” I explain. “The face will have lost many of its distinguishing features. A greenish-blue hue spreads across the body.”

“It’s okay to say ‘your body,’” he says. We pass an antique barn, an abandoned cherry stand, a sign that says LAST CHANCE FOR GAS before returning to the monotony of sunburned hills.

“Can we talk about something else?” I ask.

“Please, I want to know more,” he says. I can tell he’s tired. I know he needs me to give him the answers.

“Your body will start to smell like rotting meat.”

“Let’s play a little more music,” he says.

“More Queen?”

“Queens of the Stone Age. And then what?”

By the time we reach Bodie State Historic Park, it’s nearly noon. There’s only one other car parked in the dirt overlooking the ghost town. Laird climbs out and snaps a photo of a pasture littered with early-twentieth-century trucks.

“You know there were people living here all the way up to the forties, until the gold and silver mines closed down,” Laird says as I offer him his wheelchair.

Our first stop is a general store museum, stocked with antique tonic bottles, oil lanterns, and burlap sacks that once contained wheat or flour. There are boxes of bullets near the register, a mannequin wearing a cowboy hat. Glass cases run through the store’s interior displaying photos of the town’s golden age.

“Whoa, whoa, Nellie,” Laird says as I push him through the cluttered aisles. “Let’s take a closer look at this.” We stop to read the faded Reno Gazette article mounted on the wall about the town’s final residents—a man who shot his wife and who was, in turn, murdered by three other men. Soon we’re panning for gold with a tour guide, coming up with tiny specks of light in a glass vial. We eat gas station sandwiches on the pews of the old-timey church and walk the grounds of a long-perished Chinatown. We’re about to explore a cemetery when I look back and see that Laird is falling asleep in his wheelchair.

“Do you want to head out?” I ask him. He shudders awake, adjusts himself in his chair.

“Can’t you see I’m having the time of my damn life?” he answers. Laird takes out a harmonica he must have bought for the trip and blows an uneven rendering of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

We return to civilization late that evening. I drop Laird off at the hospital. I feel like I need to shower the long-drive sweat and old West from my body. I’m slipping off my shoes in our living room when Tatsu calls.

“Yo, some guys from work and I are headed to Extreme Wingz BBQ,” he says. It sounds like he’s been drinking. He tends to transform into an adolescent surfer dude when he’s drunk, slinging out hellas with reckless abandon, filled with false confidence. “You should come with.”

I really want to say no, but it’s rare for Tatsu to socialize. I look at the calendar on my phone and see all the dates and dinners and movies with him that I’ve put off or canceled.

“Okay, but I’m not hanging out all night,” I say. “Appetizers and a drink and that’s it.”

Two Long Island iced teas later I find myself listening silently as Tatsu ingratiates himself with his much younger colleagues, all strapping twentysomethings who don’t seem to believe his early-plague EMT war stories, or the number of exotic women he’s dated. One of the men glances over at me.

“You cool with all this?” he asks.

I wave away the comment. “It’s fine,” I say. “He’s full of shit.”

The table erupts in laughter.

Tatsu pulls me close and I participate in the charade, kiss him like we have some fairy-tale relationship.

The boys order another pitcher. I take this as my cue to leave.

In my car, I activate the self-driving mode and recline my seat. I can see Tatsu still laughing it up with his coworkers inside. I wonder if it’s all an act or if he’s really happy in this moment.

“Please indicate destination,” the car says in an Englishwoman’s voice.

“Anywhere,” I say. “Just drive.”

“That is not a valid destination.”

“Shit, piss off to Half Moon Bay, then,” I say, trying to think of a place far enough for me to get through an album without being too inconvenient a trip. “Play Ghost Days by Syd Matters.” I pass hospital vans lined up outside elegy hotels before my car veers onto the freeway. I see a homeless man with a cardboard sign warning us that the end times are here, think maybe somebody should have listened to him a long time ago. I text Laird: Are you up? We’re on the S bands. I figure he’s probably sleeping or in a morphine-induced haze. An hour later, as I’m listening to the waves crash against the shore, he texts me back: Santana, obviously. What else?

“We have arrived at your destination,” my car says.

“Okay, cool. Now let’s go back. San Jose General Hospital.”

I thought Orli would be there when I arrived, but it’s only Laird, watching a late-night talk show. He picks up his harmonica from the table next to his bed and blows a weak tune. His food tray remains untouched and he’s situated on a bedpan, legs arched under the sheet as if he’s in labor.