I woke up feeling strangled, my heart beating so fast I could hardly shove my sleeping bag off of me, and open the window. My dehydrated body spun motionless on the car seat until the long gulps of water migrated out to my fingers and toes, and I wished it hadn't been so cold I'd needed to bury myself in the bag in the first place. Still, I hadn't had to pay anyone to sleep that night.

On a whim, ten or twenty miles down that same highway, I turned off to see the Hoover Dam, inching through long lines of cars only to find that a huge wall of concrete pretty much looks like a huge wall of concrete. I couldn't believe anyone would rather look at that gray wall than the mountains on either side, which at least had some color to recommend them.

Or maybe I just wasn't in the mood to be wowed by some gild splashed on the lily by the U.S. government, and then sold back to us as a magnet for little clusters of cameras symbiotically bonded to midwestern or asian tourists.

Return traffic clogged the only route leading back to the interstate, and I stared out the window, ready for a break, when I saw this one casino off by itself, literally in the middle of the desert. I'd never been inside a casino, so I disappeared into the deafening clatter and ching of carpeted air-conditioning, and dropped a quarter in the first machine I saw, pulled the lever and the combination of fruit meant I got my quarter back. So I dropped it in again, and it disappeared forever.

And then I left, involuntarily laughing out loud at all the polyster-clad rats still busily pulling their food pellet bars as I breezed out the double doors in a blast of freezing air.

Driving out through the edges of Las Vegas, each subdivision of gleaming white condos spread out over enough land for an international airport, the screaming billboards even more ridiculous looming so close to the naked ground. I filled the tank and bought more water and a frozen fruit bar at the last gas station of Las Vegas, and then into the tail end of the journey into the heart of the dream, the part after everything's over.

I was driving through the desert, but it wasn't even hot anymore. Entirely safe and disappointing. I let a ridiculous song play all the way through on the radio while I sped up, no longer bound by my previous economies, and veered through the traffic, over-taking a white Cabriolet filled by four sorority sisters streaming their indentical blond hair behind them. I couldn't let them beat us now, me, my undead passenger, and I didn't.

I stopped in Barstow, a handful of buildings for which the road didn't even bother to widen, and watched a few swollen hot dogs rotate forlornly on their wire cage while my burrito heated itself in the store's microwave. The owner behind the counter continued yelling into his phone at his employee for skipping out on their shift yet again, as I hit the sunshine. An unfenced junk yard right there on the sand across the street beckoned to me and I walked over and sat on a truck tire the wind and sand had rounded away into a shapeless ring.

I smoked a couple hits on my roach, feeling out in the open and vaguely uneasy. Just beyond the empty shells of dead automobiles, people were herding their cars through a burger drive-through. There was a sign on the window, 'now hiring.' Where were these people supposed to come from, anyway? At least I would never be stuck there. I got back on the freeway, as decompressed and mild as I could remember, all the way through the desert.

Driving down into the valley was like crawling under a translucent brown shower curtain. I thought I was in a smog joke. Right then, I thought, I am not living here. Not on purpose. Not very long, anyway. I stopped to call Liz and get the freeways straightened out. Or at least in the right order. I got the car to Liz's house, four, five blocks from the off-ramp, and I put my boots in the closet.

I met the housemates like a good guest, went outside to pet the dog and see the pool, and stood there in the washed-out sunset as the rumble of truck tires along the freeway rippled the water.