They continued through flannelbush and dwarf pine until they came to the managed trees and shrubs leached up from the aquifer. Everywhere they saw disconsolates hawking their harvests at sidings and crossroads, for there is a duplicity in the fecund richness of land that leads custodians to seek rather than to apprehend the bounty of their proximal estates. Pillars of dust showed where men worked the land with machines.
At midday they paused at a gathering of buildings that might have been drawn together from the dust by the will of passing travellers to find repass. Signs described cuisines from such states and countries as existed beyond the rim of their world but the bland dimness of the servings spoke only of tediousness and anonymity. These cookhouses testified against themselves for they came of no country and yet could only exist here, in this form and at this very time for them. As they left the man sipped a coffee thin and insipid and he watched the country ascend around him as they rose with it towards the dark mural of the mountains.
From an apex ridge scarred with arroyos and heucherella they looked down, suzerains of a short dynasty and a world conceding a city vast and incohesive and unctuous in its magnitude, so captivated by its varying polarities that it choked and twitched even as they watched it. The child slept and in his unformed dreams the smoke of the territory billowed and coalesced into forms that he did not understand because he could not. The man drove and the smeared reflections on the glass were also the reflections in his eyes.
Their route was a triage through the hemorrhaging arterials of that municipality. The father sang songs to keep the child quieted, some of them passed on from his father and some of his own devising in that moment, and he wondered if the words and tunes might be etched into the cells of his progeny and echo in their cloisters, for it is in the will of every man to rebuild himself not only physically but discarnately and so leave some intangible portion wrought of his spirit behind.
The tangled skein conveyed them far to the south where they looked for shelter in a community of adobe and wood, the streets austerely angled as though chronicling on the desert's crust the skeleton of something vast and terrible slumbering a short ways beneath. The light from the opening door was a heliograph to both man and boy and in the exhaustion of movement they unlade their chattels, the child already disburdened of consciousness and the father nourishing the hope to join him soon.
The child was quieted by gaudy trinkets and bagatelles.
