"I wasn't finished talking about my novel," Brand said.

Pike was exploring his ear with a toothpick wrapped in tissue paper. When he was done he went up front to drive.

It was dusk now, bent rust powdering the western sky, neon-blooming motels, the dull sulfuric cast of roadlights, a jalopy abandoned in a field, hood raised like the peak of a baseball cap, a scene from the rural thirties. Sullivan hummed a medley of what appeared to be antiwar tunes. Brand was curled up with his British-made rolling machine and Zig-Zag cigarette paper. We seemed to be passing a resort area now. There were the white toy cottages with pink shutters from Hansel and Gretel and the filling stations of the back streets of small towns with a lone old pump and a dog asleep in grease. I remembered to turn off the tape recorder. Then I turned on the radio. Ali Akbar Khan was performing an evening raga, a sad liquid joy spilling from the strings of his sarod, and I thought of a blind Bengali walking a tightrope over nothing. I began in the dark and would no doubt end the same way. But somewhere between beginning and end there would have to be an attempt to explain the darkness, if only to myself, no matter how strange a form the explanation would take, and regardless of consequence. Maybe it was her hair. Maybe it was the way she moved as she cut the hedge, with the beautifully stylized bearing of a child who knows she is being watched. Sullivan kept on humming. A police helicopter appeared over the trees and went beating past us down the highway. Brand sucked smoke deep into his body.

"Where the fuck have all the flowers gone," he sang, hurrying the words to make them fit.

Pike turned onto a side road and eventually pulled into an A amp;P parking lot, fitting the camper between two station wagons waiting to be gorged. We entered by the great glass omniscient door, which knew we were coming and opened of itself. Brand and I peeled off from the others and followed a dark attractive woman down a side aisle to the peaches and plums. Her fingers skipped among the peaches, testing and prodding, and we moved alongside, our cart nudging her cart.

"Peaches," Brand said.

She gave us no sign.

"Look at the word come out of my mouth all moist and fuzzy. Peaches. It's the perfect word for the perfect thing. Now we're all standing here. If we all watch my lips, we'll all see it come out. Peaches. What do you think, miss, if that's your name. Should we pick up a pound or two? We're just a couple of good-looking guys from the East Coast, especially him. Listen, I've got some grass back at the plastic bitch."

She moved over to the plums and we followed. She was tall and her hips swung terrifically behind the shopping cart.

"Come on back to the truck with us and let loose for a while. We'll eat plums and smoke dope. I'm writing a novel using the direct interior monologue technique."

She looked around for a rescuer and I studied the plum in her fine Mediterranean hand. She was the kind of woman you imagine meeting in Port Said, older, wiser than you, pig-mented of earth and made of many bloods, amused at your blond boyish Yankee ways, dispensing shattering truth in short sentences, and here she was, incredibly, among the plums of Middle America.

"Air is not invisible," Brand said.

She soon vanished. We put our cart into reverse. The shelves were long and brilliant, and I thought of my father. This was his spangled ark, cans of dessert-whip with squiggly pricklike tops, mythology and thunderbolts, the green giant's loins, buckets of power and white beyond white, trauma in the rectangles of evangelistic writ. (You have to move the merch off the shelves.) A baby sat in a grocery cart, crying; his mother gave him a stalk of celery to play with and he was content. "Who loves mommy," she said. "Say who loves her, stinky-pants. Baby loves mommy. Yes, baby loves mommy. Say it, stinky-pants. Baby loves mommy. Yes, yes, yes." Women put their heads into monstrous freezers and came out alive. Checkout girls moved their hips against the cash registers. An old lady fell down.

In time we came to a town called Fort Curtis. I was alone up front, driving slowly, wearing my green shades and a pair of old khaki trousers with huge back pockets that might have been designed to conceal rope, flashlights and barbwire cutters. It was late afternoon, an unseasonably warm day, bug juice all over the windshield, an idle insect hum coming from the tall grass by the river. The river might have been the Wabash or the Ohio or the Mississippi for all I knew. I drove slowly through the town's shady dead streets. Brick and frame houses stood under large elms. The porches had carved posts. There were lilac bushes in the gardens, moss at the base of telephone poles and a bandstand in the park at the edge of town. I drove around a little longer and then stopped in front of a three-story white frame hotel. We needed baths.

There were four elderly people sitting in the lobby, turning the pages of identical magazines. I got a room with a bath and then went back out to the camper. Brand and Sullivan were asleep on cots. Pike was sitting at the table in his World War I side-button shorts, drinking bourbon and smelling his armpits. I woke up Sullivan. She put some things into an overnight bag and went into the hotel. I waited ten minutes and went up to the room. As I reached for the doorknob I heard water running in the tub. The door was open. Some of her clothes were on the bed. I studied the plain brown robe, an item suitable for Lenten mortification. The room was painted a surly municipal green. Dust, paper clips and scraps of plaster had been swept into a corner. There was no TV set. The fabric on the armchair was thinning out. I heard Sullivan sink into the tub.

"Those dear old things in the lobby," she said. "What's the name of this place-the Menopause Hilton?"

"How did you know I was here?"

"My secret will die with me, Igor."

"Listen," I said. "When you wash your legs, do you lift one leg way up out of the water and sort of scrub it slowly and sensually like the models in TV commercials?"

"No."

"Can I come in and watch?"

"No, she said."

"Why not? We're adults."

"Exactly."

"If I promise to keep one hand over my eyes, can I come in and scrub your back?"

"Where are you sitting?"

"On the bed."

"See if you can find my cigarettes."

"They're not here," I said. "Want me to go down and get them?"

"Don't bother."

I tossed the cigarettes and matches under the bed.

"Sully, would you mind if we stayed around this town for a couple of days?"

"For your movie?"

"I'll look around this evening and then decide."

"What's so special about this place?"

"It seems old and simple and dull."

"I don't mind. Have you asked the others?"

"I think they'll go along with it. Everybody's pretty exhausted. We can use a few days of rest."

"Where are we anyway?" she said.

"It could be Indiana. But it could be Illinois or Kentucky. I'm not sure."

"I guess it doesn't matter. I don't know why I ask, but what's west of here?"

"Iowa, I think. Although maybe Iowa is further north. I'm trying to remember what's below Iowa."

"Never mind. It doesn't matter. I don't know why I asked."

I sat on the bed listening to the room tone, or general background noise, and filming in my mind a line of light and shade across the armchair. The room seemed beyond time, beyond present tense at any rate, in tone, in appearance, in the very quality of its light and air. I thought of it as the kind of room which, years before, or decades, had little purpose but to await the hardware salesman and his whisky flings.

Most likely the room had looked as shabby then as it did now. Maybe that was the dream in those days, a touch of cluttered lust, long gone now, for a new image had awakened our instincts, brides and bawds and gunmen of the West, an image to fit our ascetic scheme, the rise of the low motel, neat and clean at ground zero, electronic rabbit at the end of the bed. An arm and breast hung from the open door of the bathroom. I picked her robe off the bed and tossed it toward her wrist. The room's mood was dead. It was thirty years or more dead and gone.