Solid. Early in the morning and she’s feeling solid. The sky. What is it about it? Big, it’s so big. Massive. No, grand. It compels one. Especially now, too, because it’s pinker than pink. Pink like a 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 and all are bound east. A bevy, a flock, a school, all diving into the pink sky with absolute certainty. Maybe false certainty, but if so, no one could know because the car, which is sturdy, straight, strong, and reliable, is a certain thing. It’s unmovable, immutable, and responsive. And so with all this in mind, no matter the hesitations, the gawky, awkward, emotional, irrational, or tragic dispositions of those inside, the car is certain. Press the thing and it’ll go and and someone else, someone much richer, smarter, someone with charisma, with intuition, well they’ll go the same as you go for the most part. They’ll roll past Pyramid Lake under the American sunrise, the same as you do now. Yes! That feels right to her. An equalizing force. Everything aside, all the stuff aside now, because we are all together on our journeys. Thinking about it now, these are smart thoughts, intelligent thoughts. Thoughts worth words. They should be made real. 

“Cars make us all equal.” 

He was still sleeping, looking all like; head pressed against the passenger side window, tophat clutched between legs, hands folded on lap, mouth open, sort of a snore but more of a tough breath, a hard breath. But she didn’t need to say it to him. Well, actually, yes, she did want to say it to him. Discussion was in the air. It was her freedom to debate, to discuss, to elaborate together with her boy, for the truth. Why couldn’t he do this with her? She rubbed his leg and shook it a bit to wake him up to tell him these new ideas and to spark what would be the flame of their great democratic discussion. He would be reminded: yes, she went to college. She was a great student. Magna cum… summa cum… deans list. Something or other. She could hold her own, that's for sure. Professors told her as much, and the advisors told her the same. Really, honestly, she was an individual. They told her she was all good, all squared, because she could handle it. She had the mind for it, the hands for it, could control it and manipulate it. But of course she didn’t manipulate it because she always valued how pure it was anyway. That’s why she wasn’t a lawyer; she hated all 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.” 

“Okay. What are they?”

“Well, for starters. Wait, I don't want you to just listen. I mean, I do want you to listen but actively and I want to hear what you think. I want you to take a side. If it’s mine, then that’s great, let’s elaborate on it, flesh it out. If it’s not that good, too, let's figure out which one is right. Which makes sense and that’s the one we will choose to adopt.”

He was adjusting 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, red with charm and embroidered in black were his initials. His jacket was matte black and stony. It didn’t glimmer, it assured you if you let it. It stood where it was in the black that it was. This was not the case with the lapel, which was made of some sort of film and 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’s that. When he put it on for the first time, she felt maybe even 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 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 got it, she understood. It’s maybe 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’s all there was to it.  

“Okay, 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.”

“I don’t need your help,” she said, smiling because she always felt clever when she made 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.”

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

“Sure, I guess.” He was drumming his fingers on the top hat 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, okay? 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 can put our brains together and really think.” 

“Mine doesn’t think like that.” He flicked the AC event and fidgeted with it a couple of times so it would move air his way.

“Okay, honey.”

The road moved into the car. Really, it was the car that kept feeding itself road to eat and then it would spit it back out the rearview mirror. Well, here’s fun thought number two, she thought: the car as hungry. No, the car as needing food that isn’t just fuel. Food that is road. So the car as an eating and defecating mechanism. The car as animal, or rather, animal as machine. 

They filled up at a gas station somewhere in Nevada, somewhere random, somewhere east and south. Everything was buzzing and hot and the sun was sharp. She gave an order to get some peanuts, chips, maybe some soda and water from the shop. 

“Can you open the trunk?” He was unsticking his shirt from where it clung to his back skin and his pants from where they were 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. Her lost was written all over her face. Did her son know it? Probably. All this was a somewhat informal recitation of what the United American Magician Association (UAMA) repeated to him over and over. Their mission statement. They were everywhere.

They who sent him here today to perform on the strip, to audition for the 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, friends’ birthday parties filling the living room with a swarm of cigar smoke, the 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 be 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 when she was sleeping. 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 the Nevada 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 — and she asked him, she specifically asked him, not to bring the cane. So worst of all he didn’t listen, he didn’t care about her. There was nothing he cared about except 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. 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 beyond and bigger than either of them could ever imagine. Fine then, that was it, foot was 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 the debate, they wiped the sweat from the foreheads and rubbed around the tears from their eyes.

“I can’t drive you,”

“Well, well no. What am I supposed to do?”

“I’m not sure, honey, we can book a train or there must be a bus.”

“When? Where? Where is there a bus?”

“I’m not sure. But we’ll find one we’ll pull over somewhere for a little and we’ll find one. Then I can turn around and go home.