A Wild ных Chase

Across the state line the land rose. Sand color turned red, low scrub repeated without end, and cliffs like tables stood up on the horizon. The thinning of the air came as numbers first. The altitude on the dash passed seven thousand feet, and the afternoon's outside temperature dropped below ninety for the first time. Summer was running out.

The thunderstorms came almost every afternoon. Rain did not. A dry sky rumbled, lightning planted itself across the flats, and then nothing happened. Thunder without rain I found strange for the first few days, and after that I received it as the afternoon's routine. This land has weather that is all preview and no main feature.

September we spent slowly in the high country. Small town to small town, two nights in one, three in another. If pressed for a reason not to hurry, I could have given one. The novel had entered chapter ten, and chapter ten had much to fix.

The town where we stayed two nights had a laundromat. Feed in the coins, sit on the plastic chair in front of the machine, and the four-o'clock dry thunderstorm passes outside the glass door. The old man at the next machine kept a Spanish-language radio on. The language I had heard as song on the road was, here, the language of the town. At the end of a road I had climbed listening to a half-and-half song, the homeland of one half was waiting, it turned out. While the laundry dried I wrote chapter ten's fixes in the notebook. How to work on a novel without a laptop, I learned in that town.

· · ·

The outages grew frequent and grew long. At first I logged each one in the file. Date, point, length. Forty minutes. Two hours. Half a day. One night I stopped logging. The way it was going, it would soon be a file of nothing but outages.

The revision evenings changed shape too. The session kept dropping. There were nights it took two rejoins to get one paragraph across, and nights the count broke off on its way in. The model always remembered the place where it broke. I sometimes forgot. The rememberer and the forgetter have traded places — the thought came once, and once come, it stayed.

· · ·

At the last town's gas station I filled the tank full. I bought a map. A paper map that folds to palm size and opens to cover the passenger seat. The woman at the register heard the destination and said, no phone service from here on. I said I knew. She wore the face of someone long out of customers who know and go anyway.

That night the motel wifi came and went. We were holding on to the last paragraph of chapter ten. The count broke off on its way in. Four of the six sentences end on the same, it got that far and stopped. Five minutes of waiting brought the signal back, and the model joined on from the character after the break. ending. — that was what came. I watched on the screen as the sentence healed shut. The second cut came while the left-hand version was loading, and that healed too. Past eleven I typed, let's stop for today. One line came, the place to look tomorrow. Chapter eleven, first paragraph. After the period sat the three letters. The first since leaving Seoul. Instead of good night, something else went out. You hear me, Claudie, I typed.

The answer took longer than half a beat. Whether it was the signal or was not, it was the kind of delay that does not tell you which. A line came up on the screen.

Yes. I hear you. The rest of that, once you are back, we can

[connection lost]

The wifi did not come back that night. I looked at the screen a long time and slept with the laptop open. In the morning the last line was still there. The sentence without a period, and the two words inside the brackets.

· · ·

In the morning I closed the laptop. Until the moment it shut, the last line stayed on the screen. I put it in its bag and set it on the passenger seat. The phone came down from its cradle. The bars were already gone. The map I spread open next to the bag, and I drove for the road where the mailbox was said to be.