The motel stands alone in the wilderness. It’s seen its share of serial killers, rapists, runaway brides, temporary lovers, immigrant families, door-to-door salesmen masturbating away their loneliness into the night, drive-by prostitutes with the occasional crucifix, more often than not resting on a bony chest, stuffed animals waiting for them on the bed back home, secrets contained within plywood walls, multiple scenes of futility bathed in dim neon lights. 

But tonight, behind the door of Room 7, past the twin bed with the brown comforter, past the nightstand and its dusty top drawer Bible, just beyond the faint outline of a memorable stain from 1984, on the cracked tiles of the bathroom, stands a phoenix, reborn through fire. 

Behold my face, noble in its youth. Its contours crafted with the careless precision of the gods, the impossible precision that fools and madmen chase after their entire lives. I am indescribable shades of hair and skin and eyes. Look at my lips, how they curve, their line determined eons ago in some parallel universe. The plane of my forehead, smooth and unspoiled by the prying fingers of life. A neck worthy of its load, tendons twitching at the slightest inclination, veins plump with that vital liquid. I run two fingers along the biggest one now, marveling at its tautness, the skin that covers it so soft I can barely feel it under my fingertips. 

As I lean forward to meet my reflection in the speckled bathroom mirror, I am amazed at my corpulence, the fact that I am present, occupying thin air with my being, all of it reflected back at me. But I don’t need something so vulgar as a trick of light to know what I am. I can feel it. I feel it every time I push myself up, every time I take a girl into my arms, every time I run, smile, close my eyes. She doesn’t know, I haven’t told her. Out of pity perhaps. 

Back in the room, through the parted blinds the rising sun has cast its orange spell on the remains of our four day tryst. The cheap furnishings, the fake paintings hanging at crooked angles, lingering cigarette smoke, alternating strips of light and shadow clinging to forgotten angles, curves and lines. She lays tangled in the wrinkled sheets while dust dances in the air.

She doesn’t know it yet, but my beauty will outlive hers. 

I lay down by the sticky warmth of her body, its sweaty halo. Every day, her heart, programmed to beat until the bitter end, keeps her alive. And so she lives. Day after day, repeating the same actions endlessly, yet hoping for a different result. That’s what they call faith and she’s got enough of it to fuel an entire army of blind soldiers. 

It’s what I call madness. 

All the while, her faith compelling her to go through life, pushing her boulder to the top of the hill ad nauseam, only to see it roll away, until like Sisyphus she becomes worn, stooped, sapped of colour, of life. Old.  

She was only pretending to sleep and now she turns to him, a Venetian-red fringe, brown eyes, freckles, in that order.

She kisses him and says for the second time that day, “Your eyes are pretty. They’re green. Like ma cousin Bobby’s.” A smile, “I’m thirsty baby, will you please go get me a soda from the machine?” 

“I’m immortal”, he tells her. She frowns at him and wrinkles up her little nose.

“What?”

“I said, I’m immortal.” She laughs, throws her head back down on the pillow, teeth glistening (but for how long?).

“Oh baby, you been out in the sun too long! Now why’nt you go get me that soda?”

He’ll never become like Sisyphus. He’ll burn instead, leaving no trail. A splendid blaze of wasted youth, his beauty growing everyday in her memory. When the curve of his lips begin to fade, her mind, faithful as it is will find another line, more beautiful than the last with which to replace it. The day that she takes her last breath, he will have become divine. Idealised, the face that she will have searched for in strangers her entire life, that boy she knew for fours days before time became sparse. On that day, elsewhere another cycle will begin. 

A smile will do for now, I think to myself as I get up for the last time. She’ll spend the rest of her days slowly realising. Goodbye, putrid carcass. 

✞

The wheels leave dry welts in the desert earth, fragments of stone exploding under his weight, ricocheting madly. Escorted by a retinue of dust and exhaust fumes, he drives into the void, a trespasser in this graveyard of legends and nobodies. Before him the horizon jolts up and down through the windscreen of the green pickup truck he stole a few hours ago, on the radio the guitar strings of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and just under them the groaning hum of the engine. 

His foot condemns the gas pedal to the floor. If he lifts it there’ll be no going back. But the thought neither tempts him, nor does it scare him - he knows that won’t happen. There is an assurance in his gestures that betrays nothing to his audience. For although the emptiness stretches for miles all round, he knows that the eyes of the world, of all things dead that ever lived, the very eye of providence itself, are on him. 

The suffocating smell of kerosene fills his nostrils and the back of his throat. He can feel its dampness soaking into his jeans and back from the seat. Stains slowly expanding, inching forward thread by thread, cell by cell, absorbing his death wish. 

The midday sun, impassive, continues to scorch all that stand in his way, indiscriminately.   

At 6o mph, his hands come off the wheel as if on cue and reach for the zippo on the dashboard. Still the voice sings. 

A flick of the thumb sets the object in motion, a domino of consequence. Flint on flint and the flame appears, contagious, flickering with intent. 

Eyes closed, I drop it on the floor. It only takes a few seconds.

A deaf detonation. Blinding light, saturated in intensity, strips of flesh, bone and grey matter being torn apart by invisible forces, hurtling through the air at an unimaginable speed.

I explode from within, the violent force and impact of creation and destruction contained within my being.

All that could have been and all that was, suddenly omnipresent.

And for a split second, I am the Alpha the Omega, the first and the last.