I felt outside my body as I drove the white car to its new master, in some backwater of south Los Angeles, the freeways pulling me to the address printed on the white paper in my lap. The white paper promised a shipping company would appear, buried in the folded guts of an industrial park, and I drove there until it did. Feeling a slight shiver of loss, I slipped the skull mask off the passenger headrest and tucked it into my backpack. I signed and someone else signed and then the mechanical container which had brought me here faded into just another machine among forklifts and stacks of coiled gleaming wire. The clock had struck midnight, and the mice scurried away from the empty pumpkin for the last time.

Afterward, waiting on the manicured, professionally poisoned lawn, reading the philandering Sexus, one or two sentences a time, I kept looking up, hoping soon that Liz's other housemate would arrive. I had no idea what shape the car would be, but its color would be gray.

As I read, a clockworks goblin whispered to me that letters within words within stories, atoms within molecules within animals, embedded into time to unravel in only one direction, must one day be broken and reassembled. I can see you on the other side of the glass, dark, lying in the snow, your camera up to the mirror. Neither able to answer. Not each other.

The hard ground pressed the things in my pockets against me uncomfortably, and the sun gradually stretched away from me, from over the street to behind the buildings, until I felt cold. The departing cars rolling over the manholes craned their heads at me, now that I was no longer one of them. That was the moment. I felt like I should yell down into the earth, or walk until I was frighteningly lost, or lie on my face in the middle of the street.

Neckties walked to their cars and left the parking lot, while I remained, not knowing why. I didn't know how to erase my thoughts, and I envied the neckties their knowledge. I knew only that they would press down and crush me until I gave them an answer. 'I don't know,' I told the shrinking brake lights, and they turned away.

Later I would look through the newspapers of Los Angeles, and think about applying for one of the jobs listed inside, but nothing matched; everything required a car, five years previous experience weaving baskets underwater, whatever.

I slept on Liz's couch for a handful of days, and my dreams slipped into the air. I called up Daya in Berkeley and said I wanted to stay for a while, if he could let me. He didn't ask me why, but I knew anyway. If I stayed any longer, I would never escape that concrete tangle, with the freeway demons sucking on my dreams that way.