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they ought to, or asked us why we were so few and growing fewer while they were so many and ever multiplying, we'd smile at them in the way that people smile when they want others to ask them why they're smiling—as though we knew something they didn't, something obvious.
    I just hoped my partner could tell them what it was.

On our seventh night away from Bluff we parked and locked the green Dodge camper van that we were supposed to sleep in to save money, paid for a motel room near the interstate by raiding the box of rubber-banded dollars presented to us by the lady Crafts Fair magnates, ordered by phone two tubs of cayenne chicken wings and two Dr Pepper soft drinks in barrel-size cups that advertised a movie called
The Flip Off
, and then lay on our stomachs on our queen-size beds, our neckties flipped onto the backs of our white shirts and our discount-store dress shoes kicked off on our pillows, and watched TV for the first time in our lives—seven hours of TV, without a break—until we were satisfied we'd been told the truth and had indeed come to a land of disapprovers.
    â€œYou watch,” Elder Stark said, “she'll pick the federal marshall. Mustache, sidearm, badge—he has it all.”
    â€œNot the professional golfer?”
    â€œHe wears pink slacks.”
    â€œHe's rich, though. He owns a boat.”
    â€œIt doesn't matter. These women out here want killers. They want menace.”
    The show was one of those real-life dating programs that we hadn't known existed until that night but had now seen three of and couldn't turn off. The women wore blue jeans slung low around their hip bones and kept glancing down at their candy-colored toenails as they strolled along white beaches in floppy sandals, kicking up sand to display their playful natures, followed by panting nippy little dogs that they clapped at now and then to hurry up even though the dogs' tongues were hanging out. The men were suntanned brutes in pretty shirts, with dull, narrow eyes, blond hair peaked up with hair spray, and mouths that didn't quite open when they spoke or fully close again when they finished speaking. They were actual people, supposedly, not actors, but they moved and pulled faces as I imagined actors might.
    â€œWe haven't discussed the teacher,” Elder Stark said.
    â€œNot going to win. Too serious. Too stiff.”
    â€œToo much like us, you mean.”
    â€œWe improved today. Especially at the end there. We relaxed.”
    Elder Stark crossed his ankles on the pillow and returned his attention to the program, the last in a series of twelve, apparently, and the one where the woman would select a mate. Decision making fascinated my partner. He'd grown up in a bedroom that shared a flimsy wall with his mother's spiritual counseling office, where she interpreted her patients' dreams, adjusted their diets, and heard out the regrets that AFAs are encouraged not to have but still need a kind ear for when they do. He'd learned a lot through the Sheetrock—too much, he told me—and the main thing was that we're strangers to ourselves, pointed from birth toward outcomes we resist, even though we've obscurely chosen them. He said that his years of spying had revealed to him the key to happiness and satisfaction: rush at high speed toward wherever you're headed anyway. “Momentum, Mason. It's everything,” he said. “Frustration comes from fighting your own momentum.”
    As he sucked the wet meat from another chicken wing, I went to the bathroom and peeled a sheet of cling wrap off a water glass. At the bottom lay a curled dead spider. The motel's staff was a band of red-eyed wrecks, like stragglers from a disbanded traveling circus, and I suspected they'd placed the creature there as a tiny act of vengeance on people who weren't as yet in such bad shape. At check-in a girl with a faded neck tattoo depicting a pair of strangling male hands had blown her nose on the shoulder of