Was I asleep?

Nive’s driving as you leave downtown, headed for the sprawling wrecked suburbs. Abandoned agoras of burnt-out big box shops and crumbling business parks. The orange highway bisects the horizon, bordered by dark hulking factories whose thin chimneys plume needles of flame. Nive pulls off at a gas station; she gets out to pump. The only other car there is a blue rocket car, designed for breaking speed records, for reaching velocities that strip off its red and white racing stripes. Follow Nive into the cramped, dank gas station store.

On a long-ago bus ride into ancient Athens, you and Nive together at the back of the bus, sharing food and headphones; you pecked at her décolletage, mesmerized by the fine down between her breasts. The bus barrelled through diesel-choked streets, past pedestrians missing pieces of their faces, past the fallen Acropolis. Flocks of tick-riddled warblers dropping onto the roads where tires ground them into brown paste. As dusk bruised the sky, Nive started and said Was I asleep? Because I just had the feeling that we’re all going to die.

In the beginning, everyone walked the highways that scar the city. Because you are sick of the dawn, no exit ramps or bridges invite you to appreciate their graffiti, survey their stone vistas. Now comes the time who lives to see ‘t, that going shall be used with feet. How depthless the darkness of a night without those strobes of red and white, heavy traffic’s hazard lights. As you left downtown, three men sat under an overpass like trolls, one of them balancing an empty grocery cart on the edge of the exit lane. Beautiful as the chance encounter of a shopping cart with your passenger door.

The gas station store has one narrow aisle, its shelves stacked floor to ceiling with dusty junk and junk food. At the back sits a crow-haired woman. Nive pays the woman for the gas and they start chatting in Armenian. You go to the car. Out by the pump you meet the rocket car driver, a big guy who reeks of rye. In the rocket car cockpit reclines his little boy, who has a fever and can’t speak. The man reaches down, turns his son over to show his sweaty back, on which three carved initials are scabbing over: B.E.A. The man says When you sit with meat you rot. Nive exits the store, comes over to you. The factories all still set fire to the soot-streaked sky. Now where?