He tipped the old man for the medical attention and for handling the windshield for him while he straightened things out with his insurance company. He drove on for another twenty minutes until a sudden metamorphosis gave his paranoia a frenzied set of wings. He wanted to count the money and examine the jeweled artifact again. In the next town, a copy of the previous ones with a grain elevator and a traffic light, bookended by convenience stores, in the relative privacy of a diner parking lot, he counted the cash to a disheartening estimate of $180,000. Clancey’s sword had vivisected several of the bundles. Then he unwrapped the egg from the single layer of bubble wrap in which he’d found it and examined its gaudiness, turning the weight in his hand, the gold on gold, the tiny clock infested with filigree and the sapphires and the diamonds set against an ivory candy shell. Again, he struggled to comprehend how he could have come to possess it. It can’t be real, he told himself again. Denied by whatever misleading power in his head, he couldn’t form a nexus between the object in his hand and the images he downloaded from various sites even though the evidence struck clear.
He sensed dangerous emanations. This was a foreign object to him, an incubating new life form laid in his hand by powers of such strange origin that he almost couldn’t look at it for fear that whatever lurked beneath its smooth chryselephantine skin might awaken and hatch with a hunger. But it had already attacked him, hadn’t it? It had already changed everything without a single hint of animation.
He found himself in hypnotic gaze.
I could throw the goddamn thing in a dumpster. I could toss it out the window at seventy miles per hour and never think of it again. No. This is how things are. I can’t fight this thing. I have to find a way to barter with it or at the least find someone who can actually handle it. Translate it. Don’t try to rationalize the absurdity of it. I’m in possession of it and that’s where to begin.
His hand shook beneath it as he tucked it back into the remnants of the bag along with the cash. He checked the swollen parts of his face with his forefinger then started the truck and continued south against the wind. Roads snaked hilly dunes as curtains of sand strained the breadth of them through towns like Seminole and Andrews, Odessa and Monahans, places that stunk of foul seepage. He passed mantis shaped oil pumps doing what mantises do; they sit and wait for a reason to move against the monochrome stretches of fuscous lands pocked with groupings of blue tanks or white tanks and strange antennae and square mile after square mile of Cyclopean wind generators standing in attack formation across unrealizable distances. A convenience store sign in Monahans alerted passing motorists that this store sold REAL ephedrine in 12 oz. bottles, by the case. The population grew browner and sparser as the landscape gave way to serrated mountain ranges stretching vast swaths of the planet, the ultra-fresh aroma of the copious creosote, the blue of the sky misting down between the mountains and his eyes as if it were a sentient substance, a legitimate participant in the structure of all things and the outcomes of all actions. He stopped the truck to photograph everything allowable by time.
He sensed dangerous emanations. This was a foreign object to him, an incubating new life form laid in his hand by powers of such strange origin that he almost couldn’t look at it for fear that whatever lurked beneath its smooth chryselephantine skin might awaken and hatch with a hunger. But it had already attacked him, hadn’t it? It had already changed everything without a single hint of animation.
He found himself in hypnotic gaze.
I could throw the goddamn thing in a dumpster. I could toss it out the window at seventy miles per hour and never think of it again. No. This is how things are. I can’t fight this thing. I have to find a way to barter with it or at the least find someone who can actually handle it. Translate it. Don’t try to rationalize the absurdity of it. I’m in possession of it and that’s where to begin.
His hand shook beneath it as he tucked it back into the remnants of the bag along with the cash. He checked the swollen parts of his face with his forefinger then started the truck and continued south against the wind. Roads snaked hilly dunes as curtains of sand strained the breadth of them through towns like Seminole and Andrews, Odessa and Monahans, places that stunk of foul seepage. He passed mantis shaped oil pumps doing what mantises do; they sit and wait for a reason to move against the monochrome stretches of fuscous lands pocked with groupings of blue tanks or white tanks and strange antennae and square mile after square mile of Cyclopean wind generators standing in attack formation across unrealizable distances. A convenience store sign in Monahans alerted passing motorists that this store sold REAL ephedrine in 12 oz. bottles, by the case. The population grew browner and sparser as the landscape gave way to serrated mountain ranges stretching vast swaths of the planet, the ultra-fresh aroma of the copious creosote, the blue of the sky misting down between the mountains and his eyes as if it were a sentient substance, a legitimate participant in the structure of all things and the outcomes of all actions. He stopped the truck to photograph everything allowable by time.
Edit 11.19.2018