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pine for bloody laurels while ascending to the Halls of Valhalla after being split in two on the field of battle. But this wasn’t that country. Thanks to Rome, then Columbus and Cabot and Cortez, pious Americans from every bloodline under the mongrel sun got the longhaired peacenik from Galilee as their redeemer, who Max surmised was more dope smoking flower child than gun wielding capitalist. Luck of the historical draw, as all the books that mattered to posterity were written by the victors. How many times had Max roared some version of this half-baked pundit screed into various living rooms and barroom bathrooms the past ten years like a C-list Beatnik   ? How many times had no one given a solitary fuck what he was saying   ? Gospels aside, the Son of Man probably experienced the very same thing, albeit to a better tanned crowd.
    Max pushed himself back from his annoying existential meander just in time for the signal fade from the Bible thump. He sighed and pressed scan again, starting the lottery anew.
    Outside his bug-painted windshield, the sign for “Fallon, NV—30 Miles” whizzed past. Max barely glanced, concerned only with how far he was from the Pacific, where his future would be made or broken on the chewed coastline of California. The place of childhood soft drink commercials and 80s beach comedies. Paradise under an eternal sun that didn’t burn or wither but lit everyone to camera-ready perfection. He just needed to get through the desert, and he’d be fine. The answers would be waiting for him at the water’s edge. They had to be. What was the meaning of life for a flyover boy   ? California, your honor.
    As the radio scan continued to cycle through dead air, Max looked out into the night around him. The range of his headlights hinted at an endless stretch of dried-out nothingness, colonized by scrub grass, creosote bush, cacti, and probably a fair share of bleached bones of varying size and species. Forty days and forty nights in all direction. This wasn’t land that had recently gone dry. It looked like it was born dry, shot malformed from the ocean to land under a misanthropic sky that refused to grant it any relief, any taste of that wet place where it was formed.
    This backcountry was broken by the occasional squatty house, built low and set far back from the highway, as if the structure itself was trying to run from civilization and—reaching the end of its tether—collapsed glumly onto the dusty ground in defeat. Max could never figure out why anyone or anything with any sort of viable option would choose to live in such a God forsaken environment. No appreciable water, daytime heat that could kill a man, and a bloodthirsty landscape populated entirely by flora and fauna that was either poisonous or covered in deleterious thorns, or both   ; a brutal ecosystem crafted with an eye on repelling or murdering any non-native species that was stupid enough to wander into the neighborhood. And yet, softheads came out in droves to parched places such as this to restart their ridiculous lives, pumped in borrowed water, set up artificial air conditioning, and hunkered down inside their suburban pillboxes, waiting out each day as if they lost a bet.
    The radio found a tether and stopped on a fuzzy station espousing the tourist attractions of the area. “—orthern Nevada, some of the most accessible examples of these mysterious petroglyphs can be found at Grimes Point, about twelve miles east of Fallon on Highway—” And just like that, the signal was gone again. Scan . . .
    Max was pondering the important issue of how petrogylphs differed from hieroglyphs when the radio halted its roll at the very far end of the electronic dial. After a brief silence, the weak signal transmitted indistinct sounds, like whispers, intermingled with an odd chanting that faded in and out like a spectral dirge. Intrigued by this strange combination, and hoping for a broadcast of a lonely Indian powwow, Max turned