Solid. Early in the morning and she’s feeling solid. The sky. What is it about it? Big — it’s so big. Massive. Actually, grand. The sky compels one. Especially now, too, because it’s pinker than pink. Pink like grapefruit and sort of cut open like one, too. Her car is rolling over the highway. Bound east. Bound south. Rolling, making a soft hum on the highway with all the other cars and trucks humming, too. In community with one another, with the road, bound east. A bevy, a flock, a school, all diving into the pink sky with absolute certainty. Maybe, she thought, it was a false certainty, but if so, no one could tell. The car is sturdy, straight, strong, and reliable seems a certain thing. It’s unmovable, no, it’s immutable and responsive. Despite hesitations — the gawky, ugly, irrational, or tragic dispositions of those inside — the car stays certain. Press the thing, and it’ll go, and someone else — someone richer, smarter, someone with charisma, with intuition, well, for the most part — they’ll go the same as you go. They’ll roll past Pyramid Lake under an American sunrise, the same as you do now. Yes! That feels right to her. An equalizing force. Everything aside now (or should she say inside, ha!) because we are all together journeying. Thinking about it now, these are smart thoughts, valuable thoughts. Thoughts worth words. They should be made real. 

“Honey? Don’t you think cars make us equal?” 

Oh, he was still sleeping, looking all like; head pressed against the passenger side window, top hat clutched between legs, hands folded on lap, mouth open, sort of a snore but more of a tough breath, a cracked breath. Whatever — she didn’t need to say it to him. Well, actually, yes, she did want to say it to him. She was bored; discussion was in the air, outside the car, in the sky and coming from the sun now that it had risen. It didn’t make sense why her only son couldn’t do this with her. She rubbed his leg and shook it a bit to wake him up, to spark what would be the flame of their great democratic discussion. He would be reminded that yes, she went to college. She was a great student. Magna cum… summa cum… Dean’s List, something or other. Professors told her as much, and the advisors told her the same. Really, honestly, she was an individual. And to think, she once dreamed of being a lawyer. Thank God she wasn’t one; she hated all of those bastards for futzing with the truth like they did, with the laws like they did, ruining what was sacred. 

She woke him up and said, “I have a cool couple of ideas.” 

He replied, “What?”

“I have a cool couple of ideas about cars, about equality. Some stuff about my time in college, too.” 

“OK. What are they?”

While she spoke, he adjusted his bowtie in the fold-down mirror. It was red and bright and had that material that made it shiny and smooth. Red with a glimmer and embroidered in black were his initials. It was almost charming. His jacket was matte black and stony. It didn’t glimmer; it assured you if you’d only let it. This was not the case with the lapel, which was made of some sort of film which was noisy when he adjusted it. His top hat was a hundred dollars off the internet. It had to be shipped somewhere from the East Coast and it was, to her, a top hat: tall and firm. Good quality and what have you, but that was it. When he put it on for the first time, she maybe felt proud, on top of all of the other emotions that piled and clawed around the initial embarrassment. Like a child with an action figure, he would toss it around and catch it, spin it, hold it out, and stare at it — clean it, shine it, break it in, and rub his fingers across the brim. He just wanted to use it, to feel its material and feel that it belonged to him. She understood; it was how she felt when she got this car, which went away but returned to her today, briefly, while riding on the freeway. Aside from this, the pants were tuxedo pants, and the shirt was a white tuxedo shirt, and that was all there was to it.  

“OK, but I don’t think I’ll have anything to say. This kind of stuff is your field, not mine. I’m not sure how I can help you.”

“It’s a good thing that I don’t need your help,” she said, smiling because she always felt clever making someone else’s words hers. “I just need you. Say how you feel. Say what you think. That’ll be more than enough, honey, believe me. You’re a bright boy.”

“But I probably won’t think much of it. Won’t have much to do with what you say.” He put his top hat on, sitting on his head a couple centimeters away from the car’s ceiling. 

“Not with that mindset. Listen, don’t you think cars are kind of an equalizing force?”

“Sure, I guess.” The road got rough and, tudtudtd, his hat hit the roof. He took it off and put it back between his legs. 

“Well, what do you mean, ‘sure’? You don’t even know my reasoning yet. You’re just agreeing with me to shut me up. You actually have to listen, OK? Listen and think.” 

“I do listen. This is your domain, though. I don’t get into conversations like these. Aren’t you happy I don’t step on your toes?”

“Step on my toes? No such thing. We ought to put our brains together and really do this thing.” 

“Mine doesn’t think like that.” He flicked the AC vent and fidgeted with it a couple of times until it moved air his way.

“Okay, honey.”

The road moved into the car. Really, it was the car that kept feeding itself road to eat; then, it would spit it back out the rearview mirror. Well, here’s fun thought number two, she thought: The car was hungry. No, the car was needing food that wasn’t just fuel. Food that is road. So the car has an eating and defecating mechanism. The car as animal — or rather, animal as machine. Things are alive in our possession. Has anyone ever tried to explain that?

They pulled over to fill up at a gas station somewhere in Nevada, somewhere random, somewhere east and south. Everything was buzzing and hot, and the sun poked around despite its every right to be there. She gave him an order to get some peanuts, chips, and maybe some soda and water from the shop. He grumbled, and though he could have been grumbly about any number of things, she felt his insolence like a slide burn on her chest. 

“Can you open the trunk?” He was unsticking his shirt from where it clung to the skin of his back and his pants from where they stuck on his legs. 

A black cane — one end white, the other red — had been rolling around in the trunk for eighty-something miles now. A black cane she implored him not to bring, her reason being its vagueness as a long black pole, which might lead to it being confused as a weapon if there were ever a stop and search. To this, he would always respond with something he had been taught, something he had heard: A magician is never complete. Nor, by the way, should they be. Nor, by the way, should anyone be. However, we try… no, that was too… too passive. We must pretend to be. That pretending, he would say, makes us the only people in this country who do not pretend. Lost was written all over her face.

Did her son know it? Probably. This was a somewhat informal recitation of what the United American Magician Association goons repeated to him over and over. So he repeated it to her over and over. And she knew it over and over, inside and out, through and around. It felt like she was now connected to this association, linked intimately in its chain. Maybe that’s it. Damn it, that’s what she wanted to say — to liberate him from bondage, to free him from magic. Please use your mind for something else: something greater, something great, something real, something only you could do. Do you like to live, or should she say, want to live, or should she say the word “only” as well, so it would be something like: Do you want to live your only life as a link? If he were done away with, they would just replace him. He wasn’t at all like this as a kid or even really in his 20s. But now it was all about the association. Adhering to their mission. They were everywhere. 

They who sent him here today to perform on the strip, to audition for a show, to scout for the association. It was like this: tasks, the phone rings late, hard and mean whispers, cash for road-trips, sedans with strange men parked in front of the house for days, magicians’ parties swarming the living room with cigar smoke, his rent check slid under her door, the TV on full volume playing the news, and he says he didn’t do it. She was sick — she was honestly sick and didn’t want to do it anymore. Her home was not supposed to be this way. She had imagined big windows with pouring light. It was supposed to mean freedom, not obfuscation — talking and laughing, not shadowy, slippery men darting past her and tapping a patterned knock on his door. Her life was no longer the kind of TV she watched but the disgusting kind of TV that would play while she slept. The kind of TV she would sometimes catch when she was up late and wandered into the living room for water. 

And here she was, at once, before she even realized what she was doing, in the American sunlight, in a Nevada morning’s heat, at a gas station, screaming at her son. Saying mean things, calling him names. He was a loser, and he was a child, and he was scary — he scared her, the scary loser child — and she asked him, she specifically asked him not to bring the cane. Worst of all, he didn’t listen; he didn’t care about her. There was nothing he cared about except the UAMA and they used him. This country was a means, she was a means, his belongings were a means — everything was a stop along the way. To where? She didn’t even know. She hated that! So there she was, crying and pleading for him to come back to her, to come back here. Here, he was yelling back things about obligations, about duties, about how it was all bigger than either of them could ever imagine. Not only were these things — and he always called them things — bigger than what she or he could handle, but they were beyond them. Beyond her time and even his. The UAMA is getting closer to the far away, or sometimes he would say, 

“We are making the far away now.”

And she would say, “Making it what? closer?”

“No. The far away always remains far away, but it cannot just happen without us.”

“Of course it does. Of course it happens without us. It happens no matter what.” And sometimes after this, she would say, “Right?” She liked him talking, even angry, even hand-wavy and sweaty, at least he was talking.

“No! No, not at all, no. We are a part — can you not see? Can you not look around and see that you are a part? And if not, maybe you should be. Maybe you really ought to think about what you should be.”

“That’s awful. I wouldn’t want to see anything like that.”

“It’s amazing. It’s amazing because it has to be. Because it can’t be any other way.”

“I just don’t see this, honey, I just don’t see what you see. I don’t think many people do. Which is why I don’t think you should waste your time with the association, with these little things you always do. Well, not little. I’m sorry you know I didn’t mean little. I just mean... I want to say, I guess, you should write or something or draw or I don’t know. Remember when you used to make those comic books? They were always so great and funny.”

“My time is not being wasted. I can’t either way. Too busy, too much on the horizon. That would be a true waste of time.” 

And she would say, “I understand,” or “I know,” or “OK, honey,” or just nod. 

But today, no. It all came together, because today, it was foot down, and measures were to be taken. If the end was beyond her, the means would have to be, too. She wasn’t going to drive him. There was a pause in their debate; they wiped the sweat from the foreheads and mixed it in with the tears in their eyes.

“I can’t drive you,” she said.

“What if you drop me off? You can drop me off, at least, and then you can be done with this. Done with all of it.”

“I don’t think so.”

His head was in all out panic, as far as she could tell. She had never seen him this red and hot before. His hair was soaked, his back had an oval of wet, his bowtie was undid, buttons were down, he was coming undone. She had this horrible thought: This was really what incomplete looked like. She thought about telling him; she thought about telling him that she loved him but that all his preaching of the perfectly-okay-incompleteness has got to come in handy now. He could talk and talk, but now is the practice of his theory. A magician is never incomplete, and nor should he be. 

Well, good, she thought. He isn’t. I’m looking at him right now, and he isn’t.

He came to her for a hug. He came to her in moments. Moment one: His head was down, and he had decided on moving. Moment two: his arms were out, and he was close to her. They were hugging, and he told her he understood. Understood what? It didn’t really matter; that was really nice of him to say. This is really nice now. A couple moments later, she was gone.