In the silent expanse of the desert night, Lil Ol’ Blue wound down through hills and cruised across plains. Sparkling towns and refineries drifted past, tendrils coruscating like Old Testament angels or glittering mechanical octopods. Occasional flames flashed in the sky. The Paiute had lived there once, until Mormon settlers and missionaries occupied their water-sources, built farms, drove away their game, and eventually relocated them. The Paiute wove grasses to make nets, baskets, and duck decoys. They gathered bitterroot, wild carrot and onion, chokeberries, and waada seeds. They hunted rabbit and sheep. They farmed maize, squash, and wheat. They died in the silver mines of Fran?ois Louis Alfred Pioche, after whom a town was named. Soldiers forced their children into American schools. The Paiute still lived in that valley, scattered around the peripheries of incandescent metalworks, exiled to small reservations, thousands of fluorescent apartments.

  Blake and Mohammed stopped at a casino for the buffet and ate frybread and beef. Heat rippled on the plains, beat on the roof of the car. The air conditioner barely helped. Neither of them could bear to drive, but it was too hot to sleep. They lay in the shade for hours around noon and sweated, groaning like wounded animals. At night, they drove, sleeping in shifts. Blake was desperately tired, longing for the ocean. His soul was made for rivers and forests, he claimed. Each moment without shade made him older.

  “I’ve been thinking about power,” said Blake. “I don’t know if I need more power or less. I mean, I think I’m righteous.” (They were reading Three Kingdoms.) “I think I’m righteous, so I should have the power to do something with my righteousness. But power is the main problem with the world. People have too much power and it corrupts them. People who crave power are evil. And power acts autonomously, reinforcing, consolidating, expanding. It builds systems: religions and empires. Power wants me. It wants to occupy me and use me. Power doesn’t serve us; we serve it. And yet we can’t defeat these power-structures… without power of our own. Then we end up building new structures. So I don’t know. What do you think? Should I want more power, or less?”

  Mohammed barely paused to think. He replied, “I think you need more endurance.” That was a reference to Morrowind, where Endurance governs a character’s Health and Fatigue. Mohammed knew all about survival.

  That night, they came down from the mountains into Las Vegas, a pile of crystalline monuments leaking pools of amber floodlight into the desert. Every boulevard clogged with impatient tourist traffic, every parking-lot overfilled and overpriced, they wandered in search of gas and food. Every street they drove seemed fortified with three-story malls and slick boutique markets. Mark Knopfler sang, “Give us this day our daily bread and gasoline.”

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  Eventually they found a fast-food restaurant on the outskirts of town, the kind where every employee hated their job, and they left Lil Ol’ Blue in the dark behind the drive-through. “They probably won’t tow her,” grumbled Blake. “They probably won’t even notice.” He felt miserable with his rage, glowering at every inch of confident, cheerful neon advertising. He felt slouched and wicked, gritting his teeth. They were headed to The Strip.

  “I don’t want to gamble,” said Blake. “I don’t want to give them a single goddamn dollar. I just need to see it. I heard you can get free drinks. I want to get drunk.”

  “Hold-em,” said Mohammed. “Slots. Roulette.”

  “‘Red multiphrenia,’” said Blake. “You remember you wrote that in college?”

  “No,” said Mohammed. “What’s multiphrenia?”

  “It’s the feeling of being pulled apart by too many conflicting truths. Too many religions and philosophies, too much advertising and propaganda. It’s impossible to know what’s true. Multiphrenia is like schizophrenia, except it’s caused by society, not biology.”

  “Sounds terrible.”

  “But it’s our natural condition, at least in the modern age. Religion can give you firm answers, but only if you can trust a preacher completely. Science can make good guesses. In the end, you have to trust your instincts and act with incomplete information, like piloting a canoe down a river. Otherwise, you get caught up in some ideology that claims to explain everything, or some lifestyle to make yourself comfortable.”

  “So why’s it red, this multiphrenia?”

  “I don’t know. You wrote the poem, not me.”

  “There was a poem called ‘Red Multiphrenia?’”

  “No, that was just one line. I don’t know why I remember it. I guess it was pretty good.”

  Mohammed played roulette and gambled on red every time. He won $200, then lost it. Blake tried to get free drinks, but he didn’t have any luck. They wandered from casino to casino, LED walkways and black marble, plastic jungles and drywall Rome. Every block had its own Elvis impersonator. Sacks of ruddy flesh sat vacantly transfixed by games like ‘Indian Gold’ and ‘Cleopatra’s Banquet.’ Blake’s face slouched into a permanent frown of exhaustion, horror, and tragedy. He ran out of things to say.

  They went to a chain restaurant and ate dinner. Some girls who were leaving gave them coupons for free drinks. Blake smiled. He’d finally won. They both had Shirley Temples. By that point, they were too tired for alcohol.

  As rays of blue dawn rose behind the mountain, a wave of ominous sweltering rippled through the city. They went back to the car and Mohammed fell asleep immediately. Blake bought an energy drink and started driving, grim-faced. Up to that point, he hadn’t spent a dollar, except on gas.