Skinny black ants scurry across the concrete walkway leading to the rest stop bathrooms; he steps carefully across their path toward the structures ahead. An Indian woman sits in the shade of the pillared highway map silver bracelets and earrings spread before her on black velvet cloth. A long sigh escapes someone from an adjacent cubicle; water dripping somewhere reminds him that he's in the desert.
Back on the road he feels that he's on the brink--or perhaps past it--of an awareness that encompasses all possibilities, that brokers no harsh questioning judgments about anything, because all is laid out evenly, seen for what it is and loved, with something that seems almost to be a choice being given as to what will happen, but a choice made by that un-nameable agency that presides over the whole of it with love and can not in any way be imagined to make a mistake. To name that agency causes its immediate disappearance, and an acute sense of loss, unless it be named: himself.
Something seems to radiate from the region of his chest, not the hard bony abutment he could (and occasionally does) thump with his fist but an insubstantial felt presence that evades his attempts to focus on it, invites, in fact, his attention to become itself, at which time an opening to a non distinguishable objectless expanse most like a whispering at dusk occurs. Suffused with a feeling of the completion of desire. The sun lays a blazing white patch across the near half of the empty passenger seat beside him without however defeating his air conditioner.
*****
Back in his office he feels his identity slipping away from him, between his breaths, before each breath, after. A rushing like the movement of fast water. The breath is carried in it, carried again into the always appearing. It is as if there is absolutely nothing, always appearing. A finger seeks an itching spot beside his nose. A woman with shining black hair passes in the hallway outside his room.
