Tyler Calls Seven Times

1. "Hey."

2. "You there?"

3. "Hello?"

4. "Hey."

5. "I'm sorry."

6. "Remember that time when we just...callmebackman."

7. "I know about the desert."

Shovel and Shotgun

The winds are coming down off the Colorado Plateau in cool, sweeping gusts. Desert sand cyclones around the campfire, and the moon is a thumbnail in the west. We are surrounded by organ-pipe, giant saguaro, and cholla. The smell of sweet cactus blossom fills the midnight air. The lights of Sedona twinkle below us, down in Oak Creek Canyon. Loweman is digging a grave, four feet deep. He finishes, and looks up at me, tired and exasperated from my shouted instructions. Loweman throws the shovel up onto the desert sand, and starts to crawl out of the hole. I tell him to stop. He does.

I pour sand over the fire.

I aim the Mossburg 500 at his face.

Loweman: No, please don--

After: People appear from the shadows and do the rest, burying him, erasing him.


I Uber back to Los Angeles.

Dead Drop

Stan Loweman is ferrying me across the Mojave desert in his 2018 Porche Macan. We are moving fast. I take three Ambien. Confuse the reflectorization of freeway signs for trooper lights. Music plays. We pass an El Pollo Loco, which explodes, erupting into flames, turning the night sky to day. We are bound for something buried. Something I left behind.

From Cajon Pass we travel to the southwesternmost route through the California Mojave.

Barstow east to Needles and into western Arizona.

Hesperia and the Victor Valley, north to Mono Lake and Bodie.

Barstow west through the desert and up the southern Sierra Nevada to Tehachap.

Baker north to Death Valley Junction and Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

What Loweman says when we reach State Route 190: "Let's turn back."

Me: I don't know what that is.

Stan Loweman

Loweman: You're trending.

Me: I don't know...what that is.

Loweman: Well, I have requests coming in, left and right. Fallon, The View, Fallon.

Me: What is "Fallon"?

Loweman: It's the Tonight Show, Dorren.

Me: Tonight? No. I have plans. Getty Villa. With...Jaxx.

Loweman: Then Sirius XM.

Me: What?

Loweman: Ok, strike that. A car dealership appearance in Simi Valley?

Me: Kool And The Gang.

Loweman: What?

Me: Too Hot.

Loweman: Ok. There's a taste-testing on Barrington this Sunday (dials his phone, whispers, confirms, ends the call) Little girl. Popsicles.

Me:

Loweman: Podcasts then.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Loweman: Radio shows, but on the Internet.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Loweman: I can get you on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Loweman: Not for nothing, Dorren, but you're standing in the way of yourself.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Loweman: Fine.

Me: I don't know what that is.

Large Megellanic

This is not a story. My eyes see everything. An empty Captain Crunch box, the prize stolen by a sibling. Finding my first and only wife dead, an overdose. Two-a-day practices for the East Valley Falcons during the summer of 1980, so intense that one teenager died from heat exhaustion. This is not a story. The ant crawling across my bathroom mirror that survived the pesticide from yesterday’s spraying. An unconquerable web of freeway traffic. A man driving a tractor trailer with someone tied up in his cabin. A mother strung out on Ambien, sleeping on the couch, her four-year-old boy, curious, roaming. A loaded shotgun, hidden away in the back of some closet. This is not a story. Married people, together, but silent, looking at smartphones, on computers, alone in their Bluetooth headphones. Never knowing anything. But always hoping. For something that resembles “the best.” There is a fear and hopelessness so great in the world that it makes us happy when we feel something that drives us toward madness. A broad pancake of stars, deep within the disk of the Milky Way. A swath of space gas hanging like a spider’s web, entangling all the heavens within and without. This is not a story. My eyes see everything: A spread out carpet of light existing in the giant black ink of space. 

Forever in the process of self-destruction.

Taylor calls: "Just saw 'Life of the Party.' Loved it." 

Les Yeux Sans Visage

Say your prayers.

Taylor Calls

Message 1: "'Sup, bro."

Message 2: "Shhhhhhhh."

Message 3: "He's young. He's rich. He's available. He's Iranian. Lemme know."

Message 4: "Meet me on Little Santa Monica. Hello?"

Message 5: "Hey I--"

Message 6: (panicked, sobbing) "I'm on the deck and I can hear the waves and the sea gulls crying out and I can hear the hum of phones and wires and flatscreen TVs and I can feel the sun shining down on me and I'm listening to the sound of the trees shuffling in the warm wind and the screams of a young girl coming from a room or a television. I can't tell which is what. She's saying 'help me.'"

Message 7 (whispers): "I am the dream in your coma."