We kept the door to her bedroom closed.

He began to resemble a recluse who might live in a shack on an abandoned mining site, unwashed old man, shaky, stubbled, caution in his eyes, a fear from one step to the next that someone or something is waiting.

He referred to her now as Jessica, the real name, the birth name. He spoke in fragments, opening and closing his hand. I could watch him being driven insistently inward. The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he'd always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past. But now it made him feel enclosed and I understood this, hemmed in, pressed tight. We stood outside and felt the desert bearing in. Sterile thunder seemed to hang over the hills, stormlight washing toward us. A hundred childhoods, he said obscurely. Meaning what, the thunder maybe, a soft evocative rumble sounding down the years.

He asked me for the first time what had happened. Not what I thought or guessed or envisioned. What happened, Jimmy? I didn't know what to tell him. Nothing I might say to him was more or less likely than something else. It had happened, whatever it was, and there was no point thinking back into it, although we would of course, or I would. He had the intimate past to think back to, his and hers and her mother's. This is what he was left with, lost times and places, the true life, over and over.

A call late one night, the mother.

"I think I know his name."

"You think you know."

"I was sleeping. Then I wake up with his name. It is Dennis."

"You think it is Dennis."

"It is Dennis, for sure."

"First name Dennis."

"This is all I heard, first name. I wake up, just now, it is Dennis," she said.

At night the rooms were clocks. The stillness was nearly complete, bare walls, plank floors, time here and out there, on the high trails, every passing minute a function of our waiting. I was drinking, he was not. I wouldn't let him drink and he didn't seem to care. Sunsets were nothing more than dying light now, the dimming of chance. For weeks there had been nothing to do but talk. Now nothing to say.

The name sounded ominous, Jessica, sounded like formal surrender. I was the man who'd stood in the dark watching while she lay in bed. Whatever Elster's sense of implication, the nature of his guilt and failure, I shared it. He sat opening and closing his hand. When he heard helicopters beating down out of the sun, he looked up, surprised, always, then remembered why they were there.

We were often testing locations for cell phone reception, one of us facing one way, one of us the other, inside the house, outside, calling and getting calls, phone to one ear, free hand to the other, he is on the deck, I am forty yards down the path. I tried not to watch us when we did this. I wanted to stay within it, where the dance was a practical matter. I wanted to be free of seeing.

I began to use the old handweights he'd found earlier. I stood in my room lifting and counting. I called the park rangers and the sheriff. I could not forget what the sheriff had said. People come to the desert to commit suicide. I knew I had to ask Elster if she'd ever showed tendencies. Jessica. Was she seeing a doctor? Did she take antidepressants? Her airline kit was still in the bathroom we'd shared. I found nothing, talked to her father, called her mother, learned nothing from either that might indicate a drift in that direction.

I lifted the handweights one at a time, then both at once, twenty reps one way, ten the other, lifting and counting, on and on.

I led him out to the deck and put him in a chair. He was in pajamas and old tennis shoes, unlaced, his eyes seeming to trace a single thought. This is where he fixed his gaze now, not on objects but thoughts. I stood behind him with a pair of scissors and a comb and told him it was time for a haircut.

He turned his head slightly, in inquiry, but I repositioned it and began to trim his sideburns. I talked as I worked. I talked in a kind of audiostream, combing and cutting through the tangled strands on one side of his head. I told him this was different from shaving. The day would come when he'd want to shave and he'd have to do it himself but the hair on his head was a question of morale, his and mine. I said many empty things that morning, matter-of-factly, half believing. I removed the wormy rubberband from the weave of braided hair at the back of his neck and tried to comb and trim. I kept skipping to other parts of the head. He spoke about Jessie's mother, her face and eyes, his admiration, voice trailing off, low and hoarse. I felt compelled to trim the hair in his ears, long white fibers curling out of the dark. I tried to unsnarl every inch of matted vegetation before I cut. He spoke about his sons. You don't know this, he said. I have two sons from the first marriage. Their mother was a paleontologist. Then he said it again. Their mother was a paleontologist. He was remembering her, seeing her in the word. She loved this place and so did the boys. I did not, he said. But this changed over the years. He began to look forward to his time here, he said, and then the marriage broke up and the boys were young men and that was all he was able to say.

I stood to the side, head tilted, and studied my handiwork. I'd forgotten to drape a towel over his upper body and there were cuttings everywhere, hair on his face, neck, lap and shoulders, hair in his pajamas. I said nothing about the sons. I just kept cutting. If I had to give him a shower, I'd give him a shower. I'd stick his head in the kitchen sink and wash his hair. I'd scrub out the sour odor he carried with him. I told him I was almost done but I wasn't almost done. Then I realized there was something else I'd forgotten, some sort of brush to whisk away all this hair. But I didn't go inside to find one. I just kept cutting, combing out and cutting.

The call came early. Searchers had found a knife in a deep ravine not far from an expanse of land called the Impact Area, entry prohibited, a former bombing range littered with unexploded shells. They'd secured a perimeter around the object and were expanding the search. The ranger was careful not to refer to the knife as a weapon. Could be a hiker's or camper's, any number of uses. He set the approximate location of a dirt road that approached the site and when we finished talking I found Elster's map and quickly spotted the Impact Area, a large swatch of geometry with squared-off borders. There were thin wavery lines to the west-canyons, washes and mine roads.

Elster was in his room sleeping and I leaned over the bed and listened to him breathe. I don't know why I closed my eyes when I did this. Then I checked his medicine cabinet to make sure the number of pills and tablets in various bottles had not diminished by a noticeable amount. I made coffee, set a place for him and left a note saying I'd gone into town.

Blade seemed free of blood, the ranger had said.

I drove toward town and then veered east for a time and finally down toward the area in question. I left the paved road and followed a rutted track into a long sandy wash. Soon there were tall seamed cliff walls crowding the car and it wasn't long before I reached a vehicle dead end. I put on my hat, got out and felt the heat, the brunt, the force of it. I opened the trunk and raised the top of the cooler where a couple of water bottles lay in melted ice. I didn't know how far I was from the search site and tried to call the ranger but there was no signal. I moved around squat boulders dislodged from the heights by flash flooding or seismic events. The rough path here looked and felt like crumbled granite. Every so often I'd stop and look up and see a sky that seemed confined, compressed. I spent long moments looking. The sky was stretched taut between cliff edges, it was narrowed and lowered, that was the strange thing, the sky right there, scale the rocks and you can touch it. I started walking again and came to the end of the tight passage and into an open space choked at ground level with brush and stony debris and I half crawled to the top of a high rubble mound and there was the whole scorched world.