A cross, nestled in the burial of rocks up a red formation and the only way it might have got there is a drunk man, dilating carefully at the road, was overcome so at the pocks of the hurtling American statue that his gaze lingered and the straightness of his steer maintained through a curve and he crashed through a guardrail and died, at the bottom of that very pile of rocks. It was six hundred degrees. Darlene was telling me: when she was born, nuns hid behind her garage and stumbled out only when her parents arrived home with her swaddled in hand-knit rags, peeking around the corner with suspicion and glee. I myself had never been born. The holes in the striated rocks at the nib of the desert were cusped inward like eggs and I saw the dead Navajo clustered there next to a fire that was suffocating them and then I saw myself and Darlene inside those holes. I looked at her. I saw, suddenly, someone whom I could never be far enough away from, my anti-matter, the strictest interpretation of hell. The mountains had become desert. The desert had become formations, whisked unbalanced by the air. And then the moment was over, and her face was soft again. She told me that the nuns had emerged shyly from behind the garage and said that although they did not wish to bother us, they had come with fresh linens. Fresh linens from the store. Woven so tightly as to let nothing slip through.