"I think there's a free Costco a bit further up the shore," I told them, the two fully-naked quasi-dykes, hopping from boulder to boulder, looking for food. Appreciative laughter. I joined in, not knowing why it was so hilarious, but finding it the most hilarious thing ever all the same. The idea of a free Costco. By the shore. As a recommended place for naked nomads to find food. Yeah, I guessed it was a good zinger. There must have been a free something further up the shore, and I was being no help in making jokes, but I guess providing some levity was a point in my favor. Not enough to keep anything together though. The diatomic molecule drifted into the distance, blithely overlooking a litter of ground scores, promising vials, trails of pills discarded by the pharmaceutically wealthy, baggies, some as much as a quarter full of something, no doubt something worth a bioassay, a blind experiment, a savory mystery. But I was suppressed at the moment, I couldn't bare to be seen examining things on the ground, not right now, even though this is where I came a night or two a week, where I went after sleep: on this particular occasion, the arrow lakes branch of the shambles circuit.

Further up the shore, at the base of a cliff, I ran into one of them again, now a single atom, in her element. The thing to do seemed to be to get to the top of the cliff. It was a real fuck-off cliff, bare, leaden, unfriendly to flora. Must have been that the big smelter was beyond the ridge, but the smelter built character. We got to the top, but then it seemed impossible to get down from any angle. I got out my phone, fearing we were surely in a dead zone, but I called 911, and if anything, the reception was better than anywhere. I was hoping for a helicopter rescue, although I wasn't quite sure how that would work. Ropes? Would they go to all that trouble? It would really drain the search and rescue coffers, wouldn't it?

It ended in death, not Trail, but an outskirt, Folsom Prison, Empire of Dirt, a spectacular wagon plunge from thousands of feet, it was never going to work out, was it? She was smeared across rocks, but I made it okay, riding out survivor guilt.

Or if it was that branching dream fragment, it ended in a Signal-Hill like series of cliff-etched steps that led down to the town of my dead grandma, where I was supposed to start some classes in their junior high school. Or if it was that, then it was this, the people stalking her house, me inside on my God Chair, dodgy relatives skulking around, taking inventory of the cupboards, Grandma's ol' lil' dishwasher, the perpetual super-frozen bucket of vanilla ice cream, the bugles and the first association with the warm smell of cigarette smoke hanging.