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That is the love of letting things go for now.
The day that follows is hot and dusty.
They pass through the crumbling remains of eastern Southern California.
All day long they maneuver through scattered debris, time-frozen traffic jams, and long-collapsed overpasses while the Old Man scans the western horizon.
I was raised over there, beyond those mountains that stand in the way, near the sea. Like you, Santiago.
I have not thought of those places since the bombs. Which is not true.
In the days after, I thought of them all the time.
And then you married your wife and forgot them, my friend.
Yes. There was the work of salvage and you had to concentrate to dig out its story. There was no time for where I had come from. There was no time to think of where I could never go again. There was salvage. My wife. Our shack. My son. His family. My granddaughter. They were my salvage and they replaced all those burned-up places that were gone.
“Grandpa, how will we know where the 395 is?”
I thought only of them, my new family, in the days that followed the bombs.
“Roads lead to roads,” he said. “If we follow this big road, we will find another road. In time we will find this little highway once called the 395.”
The dull hum of the tank’s communications system.
“Some always leads to more, right, Grandpa?”
“Right.”
Some always leads to more.
That night they camp near the off-ramp at the intersection where the big highway spends itself into the untouchable west and the little ribbon of road the map names the 395 drops off into the lowest places of the earth. Death Valley.
They eat rations heated in the Old Man’s blue percolator and sit around a campfire made of ancient wood pulled from the wreckage of a fallen house built long before the bombs and well before the science that would reveal their terribleness.
Yucca trees, spiky and dark, alien against the fading light, surround them and the silent tank.
The Old Man thinks of the fuel gauge and its needle just below the halfway point.
The drums atop the tank are empty.
If you think all night you will not sleep, my friend.
Natalie says there will be fuel, of a sort, in China Lake.
General Watt.
Natalie.
She sounds old. Like me. “Grandpa, why do they call it the Death Valley?”
She has been quiet for most of the afternoon. Her questions have been few, as though the place that makes all her questions is overwhelmed by the road and our adventure upon it.
Maybe the world is bigger than she ever imagined, my friend.
“It was called Death Valley even before I was born.”
“So not because of the bombs?”
“No. When people first crossed this country I guess they didn’t like Death Valley, so they chose a bad name for it.”
“Did everyone avoid it?”
The Old Man tries to remember.
Instead, he remembers other things.
Ice cream.
A place he worked at.
Steam.
The beach.
“No, I remember people went there on vacation. It was a place people needed to go and see what was there.”
She watches the fire.
He can see each question forming deep within her.
I can almost snatch them out of the air above her head.
Tonight, when I sleep, I would like to really sleep. Only sleep, and no nightmares.
Especially the one nightmare.
Yes.
The one in which she is calling you as you die, as you abandon her.
As you fall.
As you leave, my friend.
Yes. That one.
No, Grandpa, I need you.
Yes.
“Will it be dangerous there?” she asks.
The Old Man searches the night for one of Natalie’s satellites.
“No. No more than any other place we have been.”
“I’m not afraid, Grandpa. Just the name, it’s a little scary.”
“Yes. Just a little.”
She laughs.
I know what it is like to be afraid of a name and also a nameless thing. My sleeping nightmare is like Death Valley to her.
“Since we might be the first people to cross Death Valley in a long time, we could give it a new name. One that isn’t so scary.”
She stops chewing and he watches the machine inside her turn. The machine that makes an endless supply of questions. The gears and cogs that labor constantly so that she becomes who she will become in each moment and the next.
Sometimes she is so exact.
It might be against her rules to change the name.
To change the game.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
I would change that if I could.
“What could we call it?” she asks.
She is willing to rewrite history. Willing to make something new. Willing to change the rules of the game.
“I don’t know. I guess … when we get there we could see what we think of it and then come up with a new name. What do you say about that?”
They both hear a bat crossing the lonely desert, flying up the desolate highway, beating its leathery wings in the twilight.
Tomorrow we will follow him beyond those rocks and down into the desert at the bottom of the world.
“I would like that, Grandpa. Yes.”
In the dark, the Old Man is falling into even darker depths.
I was falling.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
Yes.
The nightmare.
If only I could change it like we’re going to change the name of Death Valley.
The Old Man drinks cold water from his canteen.
His granddaughter sleeps, her face peaceful.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
The Old Man lies back and considers the night above, though his mind is really thinking of, and trying to forget, the nightmare all at once.
I wish I were free of it.
I wish I could change the rules of its game.
If she called me by another name, then the nightmare wouldn’t frighten me anymore. Then, I would remember in the dream that she calls me by another name and I could hold on to that.
And thinking of names, his eyes close and the sky above marches on and turns toward dawn.
Chapter Sixteen (#ulink_ac6961e5-ce3a-598e-aa8b-5ed92c54a81c)
The morning sky is a clean, almost electric bright and burning blue. The desert is wide, stretching toward the east and the north. Small rocky hills loom alongside the road.
They have finished their breakfast and make ready to leave.
The Old Man starts the auxiliary power unit and a moment later, the tank. He watches the needles and gauges.
What could I do if there was a problem with any one of them?
Natalie might know something.
We should get as close to Death Valley as we can today. Then cross it tomorrow.
He watches his granddaughter lower herself into the driver’s seat. She smiles and waves from underneath the oversize helmet and a moment later her high soprano voice is in his ear.
“Can I drive today, Grandpa?”
“Stay on the road and when we come to an obstacle, like a burned-up car or a truck that has flipped across the lanes, stop and I’ll tell you which way to go around, okay?”
“Okay, Grandpa.”
They cross onto the highway and she pivots the tank left and toward the north. She overcorrects and for a moment they are off-road.
“Sorry, Grandpa!”
“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”
She gets them back on the road and the tank bumps forward with a sudden burst of acceleration as she adjusts her grip.
