Hari Kunzru - Gods Without Men

How long did he drive for? Three, maybe four hours. The car didn’t have air-conditioning and the wind blasting through the open window was hot and gritty. His brain was starting to sizzle in his skull like an egg in a pan, so he pulled in at a petrol station, stuck another sixty dollars into the tank and bought a big jug of water, most of which he poured over his head. As his poor swollen gray cells relaxed back to their normal size, he looked at the phone. Eleven missed calls. Several from Terry, a couple from Jimmy, even one from Noah. He didn’t bother listening to the messages.

Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t about the band. The only person he wanted to hear from was Anouk. He willed the phone to ring again, for her number to appear on the screen.

Call me, babe.

Come and get me.

The gaps between the junk towns grew bigger. Soon the only signs of life were rows of giant white wind turbines and billboards advertising casino resorts. An outlet mall rose up at the roadside like a mirage. Then nothing. Miles of rock and scrubby bushes. Eventually the light began to fade. Sparks were darting about at the edges of his vision, little comets he kept mistaking for overtaking cars or bats flying towards the windscreen. He was coming into a town whose name he hadn’t caught when he saw a motel sign. There were dozens of these shabby places along the route. Desert this and palm that. This one was called the Drop Inn . He was too tired to go any farther.

Reception was no bigger than a cupboard, a little box with a desk, a bell, a rack of postcards and a clattering screen door. The woman who emerged from the back room had bigger hair than he’d seen on a real person since he was thirteen and found his mum’s cache of eighties workout videos. She was wearing a purple jumpsuit, which might have been hot (or at least ironic) on a twenty-year-old, but on her it was sort of sad, an outfit fixed at the fashion moment when its wearer last felt beautiful. He couldn’t tell how old she was. Forty-five? Her mouth had little lines round it. When she wasn’t talking, it shaped itself into a tired grimace, as if she’d spent too much of her life saying things she didn’t mean.

She told him to call her Dawn and insisted on giving him the full tour. He said he was tired, hoping she’d just give him the room key, but she was having none of it. She chattered away as if he was the most exciting visitor she’d had in months (which might have been true), pointing out all the details, the “touches.” The “rec room” had a coffee machine, a shelf of dog-eared books and a board with takeaway menus pinned to it. Outside, the “landscaping” consisted of a few flowering bushes poking up out of the dust, sheltering some little plaster foxes and bunnies. All the animals were painted purple. The corrugated-iron fence which screened the kidney-shaped pool was purple too. So were the fraying covers on the loungers, the doors to the rooms and the tiles sunk into the dirt to make a border for the concrete paths. “We turn the spa pool on between five-thirty and ten,” she told him, as if this was information which might influence his decision to stay. He nodded, trying to keep his eyes open.

As Dawn demonstrated the spa pool’s various jets, he looked out beyond the peeling fence. It was hard to say where the motel property ended. It sort of petered out. Behind the pool was a shed and a couple of plastic lawn chairs lying on their sides in the dirt. Behind the chairs, the broken ground stretched away into the distance until it hit a line of barren hills, a jagged black outline against the evening sky. He wondered what it would be like to climb them. Impossible during the day. Scrambling, panting, the sun beating down. It would be a penance, a quick way to kill yourself.

“We don’t serve breakfast here,” said Dawn. “But you can get coffee in the rec room anytime you like.”

“Can I see my room now?”

“Sure.”

She didn’t move, just stood there, staring up at the sky, her arms folded across her chest as if she was suddenly feeling cold.

“You can see a lot out here,” she said eventually.

“The room?”

“Oh, pardon me. This way.”

Later he lay on a bed that stank of lavender-scented detergent, listening to the sound of cars going by on the highway. His body felt like lead. His stomach was growling and he had a headache. The room throbbed with purples of various shades and intensities. Mauve bedclothes, lilac carpet, violet curtains. It was like being trapped inside a bruise. He dozed for a while, the TV jabbering in the background, occasionally jolting him awake with canned laughter or sudden bursts of gunfire. He finally had to admit he wasn’t going to sleep until he’d eaten. He peeled himself up, put on his trainers and went to the office. The woman didn’t answer the bell. Eventually he found her out the back near the pool, sitting in one of the lawn chairs, peering up at the stars through a telescope.

“What are you looking at?”

“Oh, nothing in particular.”

He told her he wanted to get something to eat and asked where to go.

“There’s a diner just a mile or two down the road. You can’t miss it. It’s all lit up.”

He didn’t leave immediately. Her mouth hung open slightly as she screwed one eye against the telescope. She seemed tense, expectant. He had a sudden picture of what she might have looked like as a child. Happy, optimistic. She sensed him watching her and frowned.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you out here looking for lights?”

“No. Well, yeah, I suppose. Maybe. I’m just trying to get away from things, you know?”

She gave him an appraising look and turned back to the telescope. He went to get his car keys.

Driving into town, he passed a sign marking the turnoff for a Marine base. A grid of lights glowed in the distance, covering an area much bigger than the little strip of Main Street. A video shop, a 7-Eleven, an off-license, a couple of bars. There was a barber offering “military and civilian haircuts” and a house with three neon signs in the front window, one saying NAILS, a second MASSAGE and a third offering CHINESE FOOD. The diner was easy enough to spot. Like Dawn said, it was lit up. She hadn’t mentioned that it was also built in the shape of a flying saucer. He parked outside and went through the door, up a little concrete ramp that had once been painted to look like metal. The UFO Diner had seen better days. Its curved plaster walls were cracked, and sections were dark in the band of red neon decorating the saucer’s rim. The leatherette booths and battered chrome stools must have been there for at least thirty years. On the walls were posters from sci-fi movies, faded by the sun to pastel blues and yellows. Darth Vader was a ghost, E.T. the faintest fetal outline. Nicky was shown to a table by a fat teenager who handed him a menu and went back to chatting up some lads who were hunched up in one of the booths. Five of them, tattoos, buzz cuts, all staring at him, and not in a good way. It was possible that lemon-yellow skinnies, a cutoff T-shirt and spray-painted eighties high-tops weren’t a look most residents favored out in San wherever the fuck this was.

Nicky tried to act nonchalant as he sipped his Coke. He wasn’t a fussy eater. On tour he happily scarfed down greasy-spoon meals that would turn most people’s stomachs — fried eggs swimming in fat, sausages made from bits of pig they didn’t even have names for. But however bad the food was in Britain, at least they didn’t put sugar in everything. He’d ordered the Mothership Chicken Basket, and the whole lot — meat, bread roll, chips, salad dressing, even the lettuce, far as he could tell — was sweetened. No wonder the waitress was a pig. He got some of it down — he was hungry — then had to give in. He pushed his chair back and slapped a twenty on the table. The young Marines gave him the evil eye all the way to the door.