Consider Kansas, LuAnn. You only know Georgia, but for a moment consider Kansas. Miles of corn, and the dusty wind whipping off the plains. Growing up in a town with 953 inhabitants. Give us this day our daily death, O Lord. The wind, the dust, the highway, the thin sharp faces. You want to see a movie? You drive half a day to Emporia. You want to buy a book? I guess you go to Topeka for that. Chinese food? Pizza? Enchiladas? Don’t be funny. Your school has eight grades and nineteen students. One teacher. He doesn’t know much, he grew up around here, too; too sickly to farm, he got a job teaching. The dust, LuAnn. The waving corn. The long summer afternoons. Sex. Sex isn’t a mystery there, LuAnn, it’s a necessity. Thirteen years old, you go behind the barn, you go to the far side of the creek. It’s the only game there is. We all played it. Christa pulls down her jeans; how strange she looks, she’s got nothing between her legs but yellow curls. Now you show me yours, she says. Here, get on top of me. Is it a thrill, LuAnn? It’s no thrill. You’re desperate, so you do it, and all the girls are pregnant by the time they’re sixteen, and the wheel keeps turning. It’s death, LuAnn, death in life. I couldn’t take it. I had to escape. Not to Wichita, not to Kansas City, but east, to the real world, the world on the TV. Do you know how hard I worked to get out of Kansas? Saving to buy books. Sixty miles twice a day to get to high school and back. The whole Abe Lincoln bit, yes, because I was living the one and irreplaceable life of Oliver Marshall, and I couldn’t afford to waste it raising corn. Fine, a scholarship to an Ivy League school. Fine, straight-A average in the pre-med program. I’m a climber, LuAnn, the devil’s burning my tail and I have to keep going higher. But for what? For what? For thirty or forty or fifty pretty decent years, and then the exit? No. No. I reject that. Death may have been good enough for Beethoven and Jesus and President Eisenhower, but, meaning no offense, I’m different, I can’t just lie down and go. Why is it all so short? Why does it come so soon? Why can’t we drink the universe? Death’s been hovering over me all my life. My father, he died at thirty-six, stomach cancer, he coughed blood one day and said, Hon, I think I’ve been losing a lot of weight lately, and ten days later he looked like a skeleton, and ten days after that he was a skeleton. They let him have thirty-six years. What kind of life is that? I was eleven when he died. I had a dog, the dog died, muzzle turning gray, ears going limp, tail hanging, good-bye. I had grandparents once, just like you, four of them, they died, one two three four, the leathery faces, the gravestones in the dust. Why? Why? Why? I want to see so much, LuAnn! Africa and Asia and the South Pole, and Mars, and the planets out by Alpha Centauri! I want to watch the sunrise the day the twenty-first century starts, and the twenty-second century, too. Am I greedy? Yes, I’m greedy. I have it now. I have it all. I’m scheduled to lose it all, just like everyone else, and I refuse to surrender. So I drive west with the morning sun at my back and Timothy snoring next to me and Ned writing poetry back there, and Eli brooding about the girl Timothy wouldn’t let him keep, and I think all this to you, LuAnn, these things I couldn’t explain. Oliver Marshall’s Meditation on Death. Soon we’ll be in Arizona. Then will come the disappointment and the disillusionment, and we’ll have some beers and tell ourselves the whole thing was obviously a crock, and we’ll drive east to resume the process of dying. But maybe not, LuAnn, maybe not. The chance exists. The barest merest chance that Eli’s book is legitimate.

The chance exists.

We have driven four or five or six hundred miles so far today, and hardly a word has been spoken since early morning. Patterns of tension rivet us and hold us apart. Eli angry at Timothy; myself angry at Timothy; Timothy annoyed with Eli and me; Oliver bothered by all of us. Eli is angry at Timothy for not permitting him to bring with us that little dark-haired girl he picked up last night. My sympathies are with Eli; I know how hard it is for him to find women who are simpatico, and what anguish he must have felt at having to part with her. Yet Timothy was right: to take her along was unthinkable. I have my own grudge with Timothy for his interference in my sex life at the singles bar; he could just as easily let me go with that boy to his pad and picked me up there in the morning. But no, Timothy was afraid I’d get beaten to death in the night — you know how it is, Ned, they always beat queers to death sooner or later — and so he wouldn’t let me out of his sight. What is it to him if I’m beaten to death while pursuring my dirty pleasures? It would shatter the mandala, is what. The four-cornered framework, the holy diamond. Three could not present themselves to the Keepers of the Skulls; I am the necessary fourth. So Timothy, who makes it very clear that he believes scarcely a shred of the skullhouse mythos, nevertheless is sternly determined to shepherd the group intact to the shrine. I like that determination of his: it has the proper contradictory resonances, the appropriate ring of clashing absurdities. This is a half-assed trip, says Timothy, but I’m going to go through with it and by crap you guys are going to go through with it too!

There are other tensions this morning. Timothy is sullen and withdrawn, I suppose because he dislikes the paternal/schoolmastery role he had to play last night and resents our having forced it on him. (He surely thinks we deliberately set him up to it.) Also, I suspect Timothy is subliminally peeved at me for having bestowed my favors on sad bestial Mary, gay is gay, in Tim’s book, and he believes, probably correctly, that I’m simply jeering at straights when I dabble in ugly-girl heterosex.

And Oliver is even more quiet than usual. I guess we seem frivolous to him and he detests us for it. Poor purposeful Oliver! A self-made man, as he reminds us now and then by implicit rather than explicit disapproval of our attitudes — a consciously Lincolnesque figure who has pulled himself up out of the corny wastelands of Kansas to attain the lofty status of a pre-med student at the nation’s most tradition-encrusted college, bar one or two, and who through some fluke of fate has found himself sharing an apartment and a destiny with: (1) a poetic pansy, (2) a member of the idle rich, (3) a neurotic Jewish scholastic. While Oliver dedicates himself to preserving lives through the rites of Asklepios, I am content to scribble contemporary incomprehensibilities, Eli is content to translate and elucidate ancient and forgotten incomprehensibilities, and Timothy is content to clip coupons and play polo. You alone, Oliver, have social relevance, you who have vowed to be a healer of mankind. Ha! What if Eli’s temple really does exist and we are granted what we seek? Where’s your healing art then, Oliver? Why be a doctor if mumbo jumbo can let you live forever? Ah, then! Farewell! Oliver’s occupation’s gone!

We are in western Pennsylvania, now, or else eastern Ohio, I forget which. Tonight’s destination is Chicago. The miles click by; one turnpike looks like another. We are flanked by barren wintry hills. A pale sun. A bleached sky. Occasionally a filling station, a restaurant, the hint of a drab, soulless town behind the woods. Oliver drove for two silent hours and tossed the keys to Timothy; Timothy drove half an hour, grew bored, asked me to take over. I am the Richard Nixon of the automobile — tense, over-eager, bumptious, forever miscalculating and apologizing, ultimately incompetent. Despite his handicaps of the soul, Nixon became president; despite my lapses of coordination and attention, I have a driver’s license, Eli has a theory that all American males can be divided into two moieties, those capable of driving and those who cannot drive, the former being suitable only for breeding and manual labor, the latter embodying the true genius of the race. He regards me as a traitor to the clerisy because I know which foot to put on the brake and which on the accelerator, but I think after experiencing an hour of my driving he’s begun to revise his harsh placement of me. I am no driver, I merely masquerade. Timothy’s Lincoln Continental is like a bus to me; I oversteer, I wobble. Give me a VW and I’ll show my stuff. Oliver, never a good passenger, eventually lost his nerve and told me he’d take over the wheel again. There he sits now, our golden charioteer, flogging us toward sundown.