He walked out past the last of the stores and into the brown hills where the scrub grew sparse and the wind came constant from the west. He carried nothing. He had left the car with its keys in the ignition at a rest stop outside Barstow and he did not look back.

The sun lay flat and white on the land. He walked.

In his mind still the numbers. The way a man’s worth could be rendered to decimals. He had been the one who rendered. This was called necessary. This was called how things work.

By evening he came to a waterhole ringed with creosote and a dead coyote bloated at the edge. He knelt and drank anyway.

An old man sat on a stone on the far side. He had not been there and then he was. He wore a suit jacket over bare skin and his eyes were the color of smoke.

You aint the first, the old man said.

First what.

The old man just watched him.

He drank again from the fouled water and wiped his mouth. The old man had not moved.

My grandfather come out here, the old man said. His grandfather too probably. They all thought there was some country past the country. Some ordinary place where a man could just be what he was.

What happened to them.

What do you think happened.

He stood and walked past the old man into the dark.

For three days he walked. He ate nothing. He drank from cattle tanks scummed with algae. At night he lay on his back and watched the satellites cross. The emptiness was not empty. It hummed.

On the fourth day he came to a town. Six buildings. A gas station. He stood at the edge of the asphalt and watched a woman inside ring up a man’s purchase. The man paid. The woman gave change. The little bell.

He watched his own hand reach into his pocket. He watched himself cross the lot. The glass door opened and the cool air touched his face and he was already counting the coins before he knew he was counting.

The woman smiled at him.

Have a good one, she said.

He stepped back into the sun. Sat on the curb. The trucks passed carrying things to people who would pay for them.

After a while he stood and put out his thumb.

A sedan pulled over. The driver was a woman about his age. She looked at him and she looked at the nothing he carried.

Where you headed, she said.

He didnt answer.

Get in, she said. We’ll figure it out.

He got in. The car pulled onto the highway and the country rushed past and the old hum was in the engine and in his blood and in the distance between things and he watched the woman’s hands on the wheel and wondered if she heard it too.