“If you see a guy’s a bad tipper, or he doesn’t tip, it’s a red flag,” he said. “That guy will lie to you and cheat on you and never do anything good.”
“I’ve got some experience with that,” I said. “I wish I’d paid more attention to that from the start.”
The bike riders approached us as we walked down the dusty street, just enough space between them to indicate they might not know each other, though they rode parallel and at matched pace.
The woman introduced herself across the gap, then held out her hand.
“You can call me Axel,” said the man as their bikes floated past us. I turned and watched as he reached across the space, took her hand, and held it while they rode away.
I approached from behind while he stood engrossed in the monument. I skirted him in the dark and climbed the ladder to the top of the structure, then looked down at his head.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “I thought I heard someone jingling around me.”
The belly dancing scarves made me a poor stalker.
“I hope I didn’t startle you,” I said.
“Not at all,” he said. “You’re just in time to hear my sentence.”
“You might find just what you’re looking for up there,” said the blanket-wrapped man at the foot of the 60-foot ladder.
I looked toward the crow’s nest atop the dome. “I’m most worried about getting back down.”
“You’ll get cold eventually,” he said.
It only took 13 rungs before my confidence wavered as hard as the ladder rocked. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I looked down and realized he’d come over to hold the ladder still. He released it and shrugged.
“Do what you have to do,” he said. “It’s your loss.”
We tired of the steady diet of normal, so we left for the desert, where cars digest and regurgitate fire and even the sunrise offers more nourishment than the ones seen outside the gates. We gorged on bass and lasers, drank our fill of dust and rickety structures rising from the earth, and cleansed our palates for the other 51 weeks. We are sated for the moment, but the hunger will return sooner than we expect.
On that very morning, he noticed the sign in the window above the restaurant:
I miss you. I like it when you miss me.
Though he didn’t know who put the sign in the window, he let himself think of her again, the way she touched her fingertips to his forehead, the time she ran across the busy street impulsively, the last phone call before she slipped from his life as if she’d just been a strange interlude, a dream, a figment.
I will miss you, she’d said.
I would rather you just stayed, he’d replied.
Like Anna Karenina, she was drawn to trains. She imagined lying under them as they raced over her. She imagined feeling the heat of the metal wheels against the track.
That whistle, she said. Do you hear what it says?
He never paid attention to such things.
It says goodbye, she said. And it says mercy. And it says freedom.
100 Proof 