I can’t tell you what a thing it is to see our first stop glimmering, tiny, in the distance, finally, the place where I can begin to kill him: the Clown Motel.

“There it is,” I interrupt him mid-rant about his host at the Monte Carlo.

He drums his backpack, happy dog. And he tells me he has been here before—he has been everywhere, I get it—but this is my first time and it’s the greatest thing I’ve seen in the west so far. It’s the Wild Wild West I wanted. The blue-and-white motel is decked out with clown signs, and the giant Nevada lettering above the building is straight out of a ghost town or a Tarantino movie: welcome to the clown motel. The lobby is supposed to be a tightly packed swarm of clown dolls from different eras, but I won’t get to see it because I’m going to murder Forty today, so I can’t very well go into the fucking lobby.

Forty is finally calm and his backpack is closed and he puts his baggie away. He checks himself in the mirror and he says this was a good call. “I love clowns,” he says, and of course he loves clowns. He’s an imbecile, a clown himself, with his puffy red nose and his wild swath of dirty hair, his belly fat jiggling in his turquoise shorts; a nightmarish thing that frightens Love, haunting her, weighing her down, the thing that she’s supposed to love, the way the world initially instructs children to love clowns even though we all know deep down that they’re creepy, old, puffy men in masks leering at children.

“Hey, Forty,” I say. “You should look online to make sure they have rooms.”

“Old Sport, you and me are for sure shooting something here.” He sighs. “That will be aces. We could even call it Aces. Like Ocean’s Eleven but with Saw and the clowns are the victims and the bad guys are those fucking tourists, the fucking little boyfriend and girlfriend holding hands and shit.”

“Right,” I say. “So the clowns are the good guys.”

“Exactly,” he says. “The couple gets here and the girl is like I hate clowns and the doofus boyfriend is like I do too and they complain and then eventually, they get a machine gun and just spray the clowns.”

“Forty,” I snap. “Did you look to see if they have rooms?”

He ignores me. “You know,” he says. “Last time I was here, it was with Love and Michael Michael.”

I feign surprise, as if I didn’t already know this, as if we aren’t here because I know this. Love posted a #ThrowbackThursday photo a few months ago, harkening back to another era, when she did drugs and had a tongue piercing and eyeliner below her eyes, not above. The three of them came here on the way to Burning Man—God, am I glad I didn’t know her then. The comments told a story: Love and Forty and Michael Michael Motorcycle traveled here, lured in by the gigantic clown boards promising FREE WIFI and WELCOME BIKERS. Forty disappeared with the car. He showed up a month later. He didn’t apologize.

In minutes we are there. I pull into the parking lot and drive around to the back, the part of this tourist trap that I wanted to see most: the early American cemetery.

“Do you know what a travesty it is that we have no shrooms?” Forty asks. “You can’t be in this cemetery without shrooms.”

“Fuck, yes,” I lie. I park in the farthest corner. I don’t see any cameras but the mug of piss I left in Rhode Island is with me at times like this.

“Solid,” he says. “You know, Old Sport, I knew you had it in you, the cool.”

I offer him a hundred-dollar bill, my Vegas winnings. “If you use a credit card in there, your whole fam-damn-ily is gonna show up.”

“You think I’m an amateur?” He laughs and whips out a fake ID. “I’m Monty Baldwin, motherfucker! Get it? The lost Baldwin brother. Fuck yeah.”

And, of course, that would be Forty’s dream in life: to be a Baldwin brother, surrounded by brothers instead of Love. “This Baldwin will be back,” he says. He jogs toward the manger’s office, his backpack bouncing, and I remember that first night at Chateau when I wondered if he and Joaq Phoenix were buddies.

I get out of the car and walk into the cemetery. The sun beats down on me and the dead people are nothing but bones under the dirt. The causes of death are listed: suicide, gunshot, plague. The cause of Forty’s death will be me, but it won’t say that on his tombstone and I wonder how many of these stories are true.

There’s a shovel against the side of the motel. I wish I could bury him here, but there are too many people around: truck drivers, hippies with GoPro cameras, a family fighting over whether this is too much for the kids. I just need Forty to check in, to talk with the manager. I read about the manager online and he’s the kind of guy that remembers everyone. He will remember Monty Baldwin. He will confirm that he seemed on something. Even if he says Forty was talking with someone in the parking lot, I am unrecognizable in my baggy clothes and Colts jersey and rental car.

I trudge back to the car, keeping my head down. I take out five Percocets. I mash them down and dump them into a bottle of water I bought at the gas station. As I shake, Forty emerges from the manager’s office and returns to the car.

“Want to check out the hot springs?” I suggest when he slips into his seat. I Googled the springs when I was learning about the Clown Motel. It’s true. You really can kill people in the desert. “They sound pretty crazy.”

“Alkali,” he says. “Fuck, yes. I have some iowaska and oh, Old Sport, you haven’t lived until you get in that water and you just see shit. This is what we were missing.” He belts up. “Just straight-up road trip, writing all Kerouac and what’s the guy, the one with Johnny Depp, the one in Vegas with the backpack and the drugs and the sunglasses.”

Jesus fucking Christ. “Hunter S. Thompson.”

He claps. “Hunter S. Thompson.”

“Yeah,” I say, and I can’t get out of this parking lot fast enough. I hand him a bottle. “Here,” I say. “We gotta hydrate before we trip.”

He tears off the cap. He didn’t notice the broken seal. He gulps. “Old Sport,” he says. “I like the new you. Fuck all that shit in Hollywood and the family and the pressure and the nonsense. We’re artists, man. My sister isn’t. God bless her but she’s not, you know.”

He turns on the music, my Pitch Perfect pool mash-up. He laughs at me and says my horrible taste in music is proof of my creative genius. “This is it,” he says. “Freedom.”

I put the car in reverse. “Yeah,” I manage. “Freedom.”

He unzips his backpack and takes out a butter knife and dips the soft-edged blade into a bag of blow. He sniffs and this might be another Fincher occasion. I might not have to kill Forty. At this rate, he’ll do it to himself.

44

THE alkali springs are disgusting, just two brown holes in the desert, like something you’d see in Little House on the Prairie or some Charles Manson documentary. It’s disgusting in every way you can imagine. There’s a fucking Magnum condom on the ground nearby, used, crusty. The wrapper is here too, along with a can of Bud.

Forty swipes the can and sips—I might vomit—and he strips down and there’s blood on his shirt—somehow he managed to cut himself with his butter knife—and I turn away. I never wanted to see him naked but I did want to see him here, alone, in the middle of nowhere, near Area 51, nothingness filling the land for miles.

He screams and pounds his chest as he steps into the water. “There it is!” he cheers. “Fucking springs, baby! Woo!”

He drank the Percocet water on the way here and not only is he still alive, but he talked the entire car ride here. He’s not Henderson and apparently it takes a pharmacy to kill a pharmaceutically enhanced person like Forty. I hope I have enough.