Albuquerque

Simon went ahead, because he preferred to walk to the ferry terminal.

I thought it was a foolish thing to do. He didn’t know the route, nor the distance, but I watched him take the road to the right. I think he still cared about the mission, but he is a strong-headed, my-way-or-the-highway man.

The truck driver had three dogs, which sat with him up front, so I made do sitting on bed of the truck. One of the dogs came back and inspected us and found us wanting. It was warm, dry – a desert wind – so I didn’t mind sitting in the open bed of the truck, nor did the rest of the crew, though they seem uninterested in everything, like they’d already checked out.

The warm wind on my face came to me, blessed.

The driver took the same route as Simon, but we must have passed Simon without noticing, or he had made more progress than seemed possible. I envied him the long sweeping boulevard, the ocean breaking against the rocks to the right, the white houses on the hills to his left. The taverna and restaurants were empty but inviting.

My crew, my faithful friends abandoned the journey; the were people that I might have died for, and who might have died for me, though I didn’t know their names. I vaguely understood that this was not their journey, but mine, and the driver’s. The driver was doing it for the money. I was doing it because it was urgent and I had no choice.

In New Mexico, the road narrowed, and then the blacktop ended and it was a single lane that cut through the red desert, scrubland on either side. The red dirt desert, in the dusk, beneath an indigo sky, the sun was gone, but it was day in night, so I could see clearly when we rode into town, and the roadside became crowded, with brown-skinned men, and cattle with heads that were longer than their bodies, and when they tried to stand they fell forwards into the road and we narrowly missed crashing into one of the bow-headed cows, its head stripped of flesh it looked as much a whale as anything. It stumbled stupidly into the road, and we only narrowly avoided colliding with it, and I wondered why it felt the urgent need to greet us, and the peasants and the monkeys and the cows and the desert cacti and gorse were so cramped together that we could barely make headway, and Simon was already gone.

And then things become fragmented and blurry and no longer made sense. 

I only know that Simon was probably still walking, which probably gave  him time to reflect upon the mission.

I only know that the steps going down into the ferry terminal were easier to run down than to walk down just so long as you guessed the rhythm in advance.

I only know that the Ferry Terminal in Albuquerque is hard, hard place.