Driving into Phoenix is always more and less than Shenar expects. She’s returned many times, from many directions. This time she streaks south on I-5 and merges left onto I-10 in Los Angeles.

She has planned to split the drive into two thirteen hour days. The morning of the first day, though, she is up and out at 4:00 a.m., hurtling through the black, transparent vacuum that is Puget Sound’s take on morning before the fog or the traffic engulf the shore. Just north of Sacramento by five that afternoon, she calculates that with a light meal at Denny’s she could make Buttonwillow before the evening mist sets in over California’s Central Valley. Nearing Buttonwillow, the night is still clear and bracingly cold. With her window down, she could make the LA outskirts by eleven, she decides, sleep through morning rush hour and the harsh desert sunrise, then head across the Sonoran with the sun blocked to the rear by her hood and the San Bernardinos.

Midnight passes. She tosses on the sunken mattress at the motel in Ventura. Her destination is beckoning. She thinks about her pelvic tension, in the car, earlier, about how she stirred it, how she rubbed herself, enhancing the vibrations from the wheels’ rpms. Knowing she needs at least a few hours of sleep, she rolls onto her back and begins brushing her fingers against the grain of her skin, playing with her anxiety, turning it into arousal...

She awakens a half hour later. She remembers someone, although she is sure her post-coital exhaustion was dreamless. Maybe she was someone else’s sexual specter, maybe she spent some time in someone else’s reverie. She thinks about her mental voyeur and tries to pleasure herself again.

She really didn’t want to come. Didn’t want to be aroused, wanted no desire, no ticking, but she continued.

At 4:00 a.m., once again, Shenar pulls onto the freeway. She sits out the worst glinting of the sunrise at another Denny’s in Indio, gasses up and commences her final leg.

She passes the northern ridge of the Maricopa Mountains and drops into the Sonoran basin. The sun beats fiercely on the scrubby landscape, even as fall subsides. The wind, corrupted with heat waves rippling off the sandy, unprotected soil and the blunt blacktop, suck Shenar dry. She buys a six pack of iced beer in Blythe. Somewhere in the Basin, she pops her third can.

In panorama, the crest of the Superstitions Mountains suddenly rolls away from her and disappears into the horizon, like a sunburnt man lowering himself, head first, onto a bed. The mirage lasts no more than a few seconds.

Shenar’s vision clouds. Her shoulders heave. She inhales loudly, roughly, through both her nose and mouth. That was Ralph, she thinks. This was his land. He survived it. He taught her to love it, even at its most cruel. Now, united with it, buried in the middle of its largest oasis, he is beckoning her back to the desert; he isn’t finished with her. Turning her back on Seattle hadn’t been her decision.

She hadn’t understood why she felt compelled back to Phoenix when she drove south, away from Lake Washington. It had felt like an instinctual move. Her only reason for going back to the desert was dead.

She had never sought to have part of her essence overtaken by the desert. She remembered, though, how she knew it would be valuable to her. Now, she needed the refining heat and the unbroken path leading across a barren, sandy floor into the plaits of land that become mountains. She regrets that this is the only way they can be together, but it soothes her to know where he is, that as she absorbs the desert and confronts her role in his life, he’ll be with her, until she understands.

She edges the rpm a little higher and mentally incants her prayer...

Text & Graphics © 1999 by Gail Rae Hudson

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