As the sun went down, the high cirrus clouds split the sky into bands of gold and blue, as the old van rumbled over what was left of the highway. It had been hours since its occupants had seen any ruins at all, but the Driver knew where they were. He said, "This is where Thomas Anderson was born." The Rider, half asleep looked out the window at the devastated landscape where even the grass refused to grow, and said, "Where?"
"Some little town that was around here. In the summer of The Purple People Eater. The Mercury years."
"It's hard to believe that anything lived here," said the Rider, "even the air is poison."
"Well, some things thrive in poison, of course; but back in the old times this might've been a place of tire swings, Mustang convertibles, the smell of steaks on backyard grills. A place of drive-in movies and wooden swords.
"He wrote songs and recorded them. No one knows who he sang them for. But somehow those songs traveled 'round the world. And this was his home. No one even knows where he's buried."
"They prided themselves on their art," said the Rider, "and they handed songs and paintings to one another like greeting cards. I'm tempted to call it their language."
"Well, it couldn't save them," replied the Driver. "It speaks to us even now, its beauty and its longing. But the electric guitars are long gone. Anderson lived here; he wrote songs about angels and murderers, old men in iron lungs and girls living in blocks of ice. The hypocrisy of little towns and the wonder of strange lights in the sky."
"It's good to be reminded of those things," said the Rider. "I'd like to shake his hand."
"Not too likely," chuckled the Driver, heading back down the old road, "besides, it's not too healthy to stay around here."
So they moved on into the west, still hundreds of miles from the cobalt mountains where friends awaited them, with the last rays of the dying sun gleaming in the cold steel of their insect-like eyes.
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