Part Two:
Apathy

MOLDING YOUNG MINDS

At the end of freshman year he came home for the summer, and he and Skylar returned to old ways as much as possible. She teased him about growing up so much while she herself was still in high school, but she had changed too, he noticed. Her hands gestured with less fondness for spectacle, and her voice, which he remembered as lightsome, like a songbird’s lilting morning chirp, had dropped half an octave, signaling, somehow, new seriousness, maturity. He’d just missed out on an internship in Rochester (his application arrived a day late), and was casting about a little. No way was he going to work construction with Cameron again, he told her, but the band—which was now called, in a Nirvana-like tribute, Apathy—already had a few paying gigs booked for July and August. Sometimes he worried the other guys lacked the intentional ferocity it took to make it in a real band, he confessed, and they were just in it for the girls, parties, bragging rights. But he was the songwriter, it was his guitar, his vocals, his ideas— As Professor Smith-Andonian, Angela, said, he was the one who wanted people to listen to what he had to say. He would hold Apathy together.

Their first gig was at a party in the basement of a kid’s house in Rochester—fifteen kids and a German Shepherd named Sally. As soon as they started playing, Eric, distracted by a couple girls, was all around the beat, like they’d never rehearsed. But Luke’s own singing, he soon realized, was a little rusty too, it sounded like they were doing Que Sera Sera or some shit, not to mention the mic kept cutting out, and he forgot the lyrics to one song entirely. His eyes closed for what seemed like minutes, before Eric tapped him on the shoulder and mouthed the words to him. That had never happened. Never. Yeah, yeah, he said to Eric, and stumbled through the song, fudging the lyrics he’d had in his head ever since he’d written them. For some reason, his heart wasn’t in it, and the audience, he could tell, was the kind that was into La Vida Loca, Christina Aguilera, pop crap, and he couldn’t get beyond the dullness of his brain and his hatred of that music. Earlier he’d been thinking, of all the crazy things, what it would be like if he quit Stout, went back to Pine Island forever, got a paying job, if he and Skylar got married, whatever, a little house, shrubs in the front yard. Like Cameron and his mother. That’s exactly what was going on in his head while he was singing, Take your head from your inner race/ No disgrace/ There’s space all over your face, and a couple was absurdly slow dancing to it, Sally cowering, and three boys were wrestling on a beanbag chair.

Everyone must know/Vincent Van Gogh /Henry Thoreau/Why they see/Why they plea.…

Two feet from the amps, oblivious of the band’s imminent collapse, Skylar was frenziedly whipping back and forth, throwing her hair around, as if they were actually having a good night. The blue in her blond hair was long gone, but her rebel look had been salvaged by shaving the sides, leaving a Thor-like mullet-mane in the back, like the lesbos around Stout. Her arms twirled above her head in like stripes in a barber’s pole.

The night was slipping away, his personal powers, his sureness of his on-stage indomitability fading fast. He gazed at the few kids in front, who were nodding listlessly, who didn’t understand Apathy, didn’t understand anything about Luke’s music, or care to fake it. He loathed them, but in some weird way, some way he didn’t understand, he wanted to save them, force them to see how misguided, inadequate, their lives were. He wanted to fill them with awe. That was what Apathy was supposed to be. In the middle of another song he hit A, D, E, D, and for a single moment the band seemed to come together—totally together actually, shockingly— And Eric kicked into Wild Thing, the kind of pandering pop material that was everything Apathy stood against but Eric still loved those garage songs, bristling with the primal electric current of cheap cravings and stupid proclamations. But stepping away from the mic, Luke howled unironically, stretching the familiar I love you syllables into a declaration of his own survival, his claim to this moment in time. Yeah— Right in front of him, Skylar, wearing the plaid skirt, black t-shirt combination with the black Chuck Taylors that made her look like a secondhand store clerk, was bouncing up and down, her lesbo hair whipping around, beaming at him in jubilant celebration, as if she’d been reading his mind all night. He pounded the Tele, chords fuming out with little reference to the original tune, like he was Hendrix or something, and as all the other partygoers, lost in a wash of chords, tried to catch up to the tune, their bodies jerked like marionettes on strings, faces alight with sweat. Luke, grinning un-rock-star-like, danced a couple step then counted out the beats, one, two… and the band lurched and swayed to a rocky but glorious finish of spilling bass notes, stuttering toms, broken strings. The partygoers stared at the band, as if, following the dilapidated performance, they were stunned by what they’d heard. Luke stuttered, Thanks. For a moment, Apathy should have been called Gusto. Some fucking night it turned out to be.

In the weeks after the show he and Skylar stumbled, quite unexpectedly, into having a serious conversation about her future. As a rule, they stuck with familiar subjects, but occasionally, like when Luke tried to talk about Zoroastrianism, they’d stop, look for right words, unsure how to proceed. At an age when a small tremor might set off ripples the very seriousness of a conversation spelled worry. Skyler had applied to several colleges and been admitted to a few, including Stout and a school in an eastern state, she told him. But while Luke was away she’d also been promoted to assistant manager at Old Pine, and that too was a possibility for the fall, she said. Money was limited with her parents. College wasn’t wasn’t something they knew much about, she said, and she wasn’t sure she cared much about it either.

One afternoon she was walking by herself, and didn’t notice when Luke drove up in the Accord.

Hey, she said.

Come on.

What?

You want a ride?

Almost immediately the assistant manager position came up, as if it were the last thing either wanted to talk about but they couldn’t help it.

Nothing wrong working at the Old Pine, she said to him, her exposed knees tight against the plastic dash.

She slunk down in the seat, her mouth touchingly slackened with the effort of breathing in the closed-in space. Luke pressed the button to let down the window on her side, giving her a start. If she stayed, she might eventually manage Old Pine, she said. She could book Apathy there, she said with a ring of her old laughter, her easy swinging nature. Definitely. Apathy would be the best thing this dump has ever seen, she said. You’re better than this dump deserves.

Yeah, well, Apathy’s taking a break, I think. I’m writing a new album.

I didn’t know that.

I just decided.

When?

Now.

Oh. Congratulations.

His bravado was casual and caused no trace of embarrassment, nor did he seem to be thinking anything about the last show, which had bothered him for days afterwards. He reached for her hand, which had come to rest on his knee, but she withdrew it, or—he couldn’t be sure—maybe she’d already been in the process of taking it back.

Of course I love you, she said.

Of course.

Only—

Only?

Sometimes I think you’re not serious, you know what I mean? I mean you’re serious about stupid things. Not stupid. You know what I mean.

No.

Like Apathy.

What do you mean?

Like, I don’t know, you don’t take it as seriously as you think you do.

Fuck y—

Luke— I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, Apathy isn’t stupid. It’s a cool hobby.

You saw us. You said Apathy was great. I know you think we’re good.

Yeah, you’re great. The songs. Your playing has really improved. You can tell. The band’s good. Just try to care about something except Kurt Cobain and your religion talk sometime, she said. I want to talk about things sometime too. It would help if you listened. You’ll be much happier, Luke. I want you to be happy. Monks aren’t out to get you, you know.

MESSAGES FROM THE UNIVERSE

In September a premonitory chill hung in the air at Stout, cupped in the undersides of the rhododendron leaves and spread across the campus like an invisible veil. The new crop of freshmen, impossibly young looking, passed him, emanating labored cynicism, emanating their indelible youth and self-conceit. The profs too, ambling around campus like privileged but dithering storks, were vaguely older, closer to being supplanted by the tenure-greedy younger faculty members who lumbered and strutted everywhere they went, in Chuck Taylors and brand-new corduroy jackets.

He ran into Professor Smith-Andonian one afternoon in the personal care aisle at CVS in downtown Stout.

Oh, Lucas, she said to him, So good to see you, she said, and hugged him with a haste that seemed both a warning and vague come-on. Everything was feeling vague these days.

Her skin, grazing his cheek, seemed to possess its own grit, or grain, as if she’d had diphtheria or childhood acne or something, her pinkish eyeliner more misapplied than ever, with the peppy excess of a preteen girl. Her hair had been straightened and had a streak of gray at the temple he didn’t think he’d noticed last year.

You ok? she asked.

Yeah. Of course.

Just, well— Take care, Luke. Have a good semester.

Yeah, sure. You too Professor Smith-, he said.

Angela, she said. We’re not in class anymore.

Oh, ok.

OK, Luke.

He watched her take her shampoo and Tampax and orange juice to the checkout. Last year she might have been mistaken for a graduate student or youngish CIA operative, a holder of the secrets of the world. Now she had the distracted blitheness of someone on the periphery of things. He watched her getting into her car before he left the store with his toothpaste.

Life was changing. A bonafide sophomore, he carried himself with pride in the comparative success of surviving freshman year, and sat unabashedly closer to the front in his new classes, covetous of any scrap of information that might fall into his lap, filling his notebook with line upon line of notes, writing to himself in the margins. Don’t believe just because others say to, he wrote, but don’t not believe either just because others say to believe. He drew a portrait of himself under a beach umbrella, with a cartoon sun smiling down on him. There are messages from the universe, he wrote. There are messages from the universe.

The final breakup with Skylar in August had come as quite a relief actually. The night it happened he’d gone to her house—a bindweed-covered place at the end of a poplar-shaded road—and sat in her parents’ living room drinking pop. At the end of the night on the porch she had given him a kiss—light and fragrant, her lips on his mouth generously deft with old familiar moves, her tongue lazily finding his, as if they might kiss this way the rest of their lives. Her body was radiantly unreserved, cool, breaching the limits of their old friendship. Hadn’t he known a long time ago that the two of them weren’t right for each other? he thought. Maybe he hadn’t, maybe he’d led her on, or believed he could grow into loving her, or she led him on, but he knew at the instant he kissed her that night it was done. Driving home he basked in the sky’s long reach and understood with sorrow but no recrimination, no regret, he would never see her again. Still, in the top bunk in his room at Stout he continued, improbably, to dream of her (as Matt was probably still dreaming of Eleanor Sabelko in the bunk below), and he fondly—somewhat obsessively—recalled their first encounter on the football field two years ago, when an early flurry of snow was falling on the ground without leaving a trace of white on still-green grass. She had been a marching band clarinet player in maroon skirt and vest, her copper-flecked eyes with their uplifted corners like tandem paisleys intently focused on the sheet music in the clip, lips pursed around the instrument’s sympathetically vibrating reed, a mass of toffee colored hair blowing behind her. He had asked her to let him play her instrument, and right there on the field, in his football uniform, with her guidance, he managed a not terrible Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. She probably had another boyfriend already, he said to Matt. Girls like Skyler, for all their provocations, are seldom on the market more than a month, two tops. Matt, ever agreeable, agreed, which didn’t help. She’d decided after all, he heard through the grapevine, to stay with Old Pine, so his being back at Stout removed any temptation, however scant, he’d ever call her, stand on her porch again, under the overhead bulb that gave off yellow light and feeling his heart going like a piston. He wasn’t one to beg, he told himself. Those days, connected to a provincial life he was outgrowing, were over: Skyler’s job at Old Pine, the cheerleaders’ chants, the walled-off fortress of their legs and hair and skirts, driving to school with Cameron as snow came across the road. That life was now as irretrievable as it was undesired.

There are messages from the universe. There just are. People have to know that, Luke wrote in his notebook. People live entire lives closing door after door to the possibility of these communications, until they can finally grasp the minuscule world they’ve created. He was someone who threw open doors, he told himself, preparing himself spiritually to receive whatever message was revealed. Maybe people considered him unstable. Jesus Christ himself was labeled unstable, a lunatic, because he was receiving messages from the universe. Mohammed. Zoroaster. All opened doors. On his way to class one morning, a ragged scrap of paper blew across the path. He picked it up. Oranges, it read:

Oranges

Van G—

— essence

Delphy

The letters, splotchy from a rainstorm a couple nights ago, spilled across the page in big looping shapes that usually belonged to fourth grade girls with a fondness for self-advertisements. A grocery list? Enigmatic runes, a piece of a puzzle missing every other piece? Why would such a thing appear to him now, at the precise moment when he was looking for signs? Tell him that. It was something you didn’t say out loud. Doors that opened were not appreciated by the average person, or even noticed.

Oranges: orange is a color of determination. It described him, when he could rise to the occasion. The guy who walked to school with snow pounding across 515th Street, the guy who kept Apathy going through a bunch of mediocre gigs. Orange is the color of strength.

Van G—: There was a hippie kid in his Spanish class, with a big mopey grin, Van Gustavson or something. Minivan? Vincent van Gogh? He had a line from one of his songs: Everyone must know/Vincent Van Gogh /Henry Thoreau

All those tumultuous skies with messages in them.

— Essence: What or who was the essence of Luke Helder? Luke John Helder, born May 5, 1981,  a Taurus, in Pine Island, Minnesota, the kid who hated the way people crawled over each other to accumulate material junk, thinking more junk was going to make them happy. Luke Helder, student, singer/songwriter, son and brother, newly single guy, 17 handicap golfer, 19 years old, itinerant quester, believer in a greater power, who realized he wasn’t afraid of death because death was another plane of existence. His essentiality, the core of his being, the space he held on the planet.

Delphy: the word was smudged, barely readable. Doug, belfry, deity.… Maybe Monday…. Maybe Delphi, the seer, who consulted on all kinds of questions from the locals, the ultimate shaman priestess you’d come to for personal problems, questions about dream interpretations.

Whoever had scribbled this laundry list she was guided by interests other than his, but there was no doubt the universe was making a connection, maybe playing games but giving clues.

Stop taking drugs, said Matt, who had grown broader during the summer, his hair cut shorter than Luke remembered.

We’re eternal beings, you know. You just need to see it. Our place here is just to hold the space for others, then we’re off to a higher existence. Look around and you’re thinking you exist in a certain world just because you can measure it with your senses, but just as some parts of the physical world exist outside your knowledge of them, so does the world of shadows and spirits, unseeable from physically measurable space, exist on a plane of universal being.

You good, man? You good?

A few days later, he was leaving Menomonie Records in downtown Stout with a sackful of stuff, and sparked up a joint. He’d started smoking in public a little as a gesture of civic disobedience and vague generosity, sharing the aroma, like the medicine men and warriors in Dakota sweat lodges. Smoking, the waft of sweetly reassuring smoke wreathing his hair like a nimbus, helped him write songs, which he scribbled down as ideas, phrases, progressions, on scraps of paper later found in pants pockets, pages of his notebooks, CD covers. He was holding the joint between his fingers, as easily as he might have a guitar pick, and took a long toke, heading back toward campus for the afternoon. He felt a tapping his shoulder; a young guy, maybe a few years older than him, with small hands and a saddish gray smirk in a mask of razor-burned skin was staring at him. It took a moment. Cop. The cop’s gun had an elaborate holster that made a rude slap against his thigh, and it seemed to signal that the cop had used it (the gun) on occasion.

Hi there.

Hi.

What you got?

Nothing.

He took the sack from Luke.

Nuthin?

It had a couple Skin Yard and Screaming Trees CDs in it, another joint.

Yeah.

He examined the joint.

What kind of music’s that? Skin Yard?

I dunno.

I like AC/DC, he said, sniffing the joint then flicking it into a trashcan. You like AC/DC?

He pulled out a flip book, wrote in it without saying another word. Passed Luke a ticket.

$150.

It wasn’t the physical world he minded so much, he could tune that out, lift his body away from it, it was the idea that physical world didn’t understand it was only a single dimension. After the cop turned a corner, Luke said, Asshole, loud enough that a mother walking with her daughter on the other side of the street gave him a look.

Sorry, he said.

She didn’t look at him. She had an elaborately considered haircut, gold-trimmed mom sweatpants, and was wearing earrings that looked like they were from the 60s, the happy face.

For a paper in his Social Theory class, Luke wrote, You conform to society’s expectations because you will receive negative emotion/pain/death (jail/death penalty) if you don’t. The individual, the smallest unit within society, may resist larger social forces, but the forces against him will be willing to crush him for the sake of perpetuating its own power. If the individual feels free to express themself being free, then it comes down to who is going to prevail: the creative person or the institutions. Henry David Thoreau said, Just because a Democracy elects a government doesn’t mean the Government knows what it’s doing.

HISTORY OF THE SMILEY FACE

It is a graven image, of transcendental force and logic.

The color field is a simple matte yellow, circumscribed by an unobtrusive but graphically balancing band of black. The face itself minimally demarcated. Two oval eyes—the right, as you look at it, slightly larger—spaced too close together to be recognized as belonging to any human face you might have seen. The resemblance is to the eyes of a dog, or panda. The mouth—the ubiquitous generational telltale—isn’t quite symmetrical either. It’s like a slack string being pulled from the left, creating asymmetry in the mouth corners. Put your hand over one of the face’s eyes. It doesn’t read as a face now. But remove your hand and behold its humanity in three gnomic marks. The noseless face is sexless, ageless, raceless, stateless, unadulterated by cultural imperatives, the smile lifts provisionally in self-awareness, an offering of commiserative ruefulness, like a silent comedian’s at the end of the movie, shrugging at the audience.

An adman by the name of Harvey Ball, from Worcester, Massachusetts, came up with the Smiley Face in 1963, just a few weeks after John Kennedy was shot in Dallas and a month before the Beatles landed in New York. Ball’s Smiley Face was part of an internal propaganda campaign for State Mutual Life Assurance Company employees, in Worcester, MA, who were needing a metaphysical boost after a corporate merger. It took ten minutes to whip it up, fifteen tops. Harvey was paid $45 for his efforts, no residuals. Shortly after he sent the sketch off, the State Mutual Life Assurance Company’s walls were plastered with Smiley Face posters. Campaign-style buttons were issued to employees to wear around the office, and they must have felt, one imagines, slightly humiliated about their buttons smiling at one another in blissful accord, while the employees themselves went about their business in abashed corporate allegiance.

The Smiley Face graphic, like Warhol or Lichtenstein prints, was both commentary and provocation, a reduction and a promotion. The seeming banality of the image was, as Warhol or Lichtenstein hinted, an authentic response to the condition of living in the modern century, with its commonplace consumer artifacts, the rehearsed ennui, and the Smiley Face might have been the signature Warhol emblem if he’d come up with it himself.

In another sense, Harvey Ball’s Smiley Face is the twentieth century’s Mona Lisa. That is, it invites more scrutiny the more you look at it, it repays inspection with a promise of infinite depth “that by its indefiniteness,” as Melville once said, “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.” The Smiley Face’s yellow void is not, arguably, the annihilating all-color of Melville’s white depths, but, as the limbers and caissons bearing John Kennedy’s casket rolled toward St Matthew’s Cathedral, the Smiley Face’s sunniness did hint at a core of genuine annihilation. Soldiers in Vietnam, a bullet away from body bags, tucked the buttons in their helmet nets, exploring shifting meanings, sunny American exceptionalism and the deepest darkness.

Maybe graven images are always this way: space available for rent.

In any case, by the time the 70s rolled around, the image’s cultural moment was reaching its peak. Somehow Harvey’s image had escaped the confines of the classical revival office building of State Mutual Life Assurance Company, and was circulating in the world at large—a prodigal gone off seeking new fortunes. It appeared on magazine covers, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, t-shirts, in dorm rooms, in the helmets of infantrymen….

But something had definitely changed in the image. By 1970, the smile had become symmetrical. The eyes had become identical, and stared rather than inquired. What happened is that a couple brothers in Philadelphia had come across some of the original State Mutual pins, and, recognizing the image’s potential, scrubbed the face of its existential involutions, giving it a more assertive and enjoining expression. And, now readymade for the aggressively hedonistic and faddish era, marketed the hell out of it, adding exhortative slogans: Have a Happy Day, Have a Nice Day. By its peak in 1971, the Spain brothers sold some fifty million Smiley Face buttons, and the image’s ubiquity as a 70s icon matched only that of the mood ring (forty million in 1975).

But the Smiley Face was never really static anyway. It always moved backward and forward through epochs, with mobility and adaptability. It may have had ancient antecedents. At the Turkish and Syrian border, a water pitcher dating to 1700 B C was discovered not too long ago, showing quite decipherably two eyes and a lopsided smile, like a bemused self-portrait of some Hittite brewer. Seventeenth and eighteenth century letter writers employed proto-Smiley Face emojis in their epistolary signings off. Forward: unlike the mood ring, the Smiley Face didn’t vanish under the weight of absurdity after its original heyday, only the semiotics changed. As paean to 70s kitsch, you could wear a t-shirt unironically or ironically—your choice. Un-irony was almost uber-irony anyway. By the 90s the Smiley Face was offensive enough to certain species of consignetti that bands like Nirvana created their own version with crossed-out eyes and lolling tongue—the face of a guy staggering out of a bar fight. In the movie, Fight Club (1999), the Smiley Face was burned into the side of a skyscraper. Banksy street paintings of heavily armed cops with Smiley Face faces showed up in neighborhoods in Vienna, and London, and a Smiley Face Mona Lisa was hung at the Louvre. The Smiley Face was the face of acid house music, an assimilation of Have a Nice Day into churning rave culture. Who knows, one day there may be discovered in caves in France or Spain the rueful mouth and eyes of an ironically minded Neanderthal artist, or daubed in the sky by some future galactic artist. It might appear anywhere.

SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD

Luke sets out. It’s a Thursday, second of May. Almost his birthday. He has three classes today. Useless to think about classes. He’s missed every one the last two weeks. He pulls out of 17th Street, onto 12, south on 25. The wheel is light in his fingers. He unfolds the map on the passenger seat. He’s always been a good driver, good reactions, good vision, a sense of where other cars on the road are. He rolls down the window, it’s a warm day, warm for early May, t-shirt, jeans, it reminds him of being a kid, a free-and-easy back yard feel with new grass coming in in jagged patches. It’s critical people hear him. For their own good. He can tell you about the existence of shadows, ghosts. The astral plane as an intermediate world of light between heaven and earth, this plane of existence we occupy as temporal beings. He used to try talking to Skylar about such things. She’d bring him a bag of popcorn borrowed from the concession stand, and plop down next to him, drawing the semi-darkness closer between them, her hand exploring the top of his thigh. Prove it, she used to say, kissing him. Where was she now, he wonders. Prepping new hires at the Old Pine, rocking in the sprung chair on her porch that smelled of beer and candy wrappers? The Wisconsin countryside has a spanking new quality, all early morning gloss like it’s just been born. You sense life coming out of the land, like it must have been before the settlers started plowing everything for crops. There used to be buffalo and grizzly bear here, he thinks. He puts the Out of the Blue CD into the CD player, and blasts it at eyeball and tooth enamel annihilating volume, seriously doing harm to the Accord’s speakers. He is hovering outside himself, observing his physical body, seeing it in the driver’s seat.

He drives, not in a trance exactly. More like waking sleep. Like he is more himself than he’s ever been. He eats ravenously, as if food can’t possibly fill the cavernous emptiness in his body. McDonald’s objectively has the best food in the entire world, he says out loud. The sausage McMuffin is the closest to the promised land as breakfast food can be. He dares anyone to bite into a Big Mac and not feel you rule a mid-sized country. On the floor of the Accord are crumpled wrappers and a bag, the golden arches crushed into oblivion. He drains the last of the Coca-Cola.

The first mailbox he gets to he knows. It’s like Lightening Hopkins coming out of the sky, coming out of his pores. Black Ghost Blues. He slows to the stop, regarding it with a connoisseur’s eye. There’s a long driveway to a one-level house partly obscured by a bunch of cottonwoods. It should be an old mailbox but it looks practically brand new, only on an old wooden post.

A week from now, next Tuesday, there’s a stretch of highway in the Nevada desert, fifty miles east of Reno, Luke will down the last of a medium bag of french fries, he’ll check the rearview mirror once more for about a thousand cop lights going like three lemons in a slot machine, and he’ll slowly, slowly pull the Accord over onto the scruff and hold up his hands while they stick their revolvers five inches from his face, and they’ll say, Lucas John Helder… arrest for malicious destruction of property affecting interstate commerce…. They will have him, but it will have been he who’d practically dared them to catch him, practically told them how to find him and where to find him. He was so close to achieving something that would have enlightened the world, he will say to them, you know you ought not to fear death, he will say to their guns, death is life everlasting, he’ll say, it is an honest fact. Watches, cars, televisions, refrigerators, air conditioners are things belonging to the physical world, and it’s death fear that causes people to recklessly pursue these things, destroy lives, corrupt society, fuck up our essence, fuck up our freedom, as if in holding onto a watch or a refrigerator you might hold onto life itself. How can adults not see what he, now twenty-one years old, sees with the clarity of a prophet? It will be next Tuesday when they’ll wrench his arms behind his back like he’s a common criminal, clamp steel cuffs around his wrists, cutting off the circulation, he’ll get folded and banged into the back of a Nevada state cop car, he’ll gaze out at the Nevada countryside, the arroyo, scrub and creosote bushes, glinting parabolas of smashed bottles, shimmering entrails of coyote carcasses, astonished at how consciousness, in moments of clarity, unifies with the spiritual plane. One of the cops—the short one with the greasy little mustache and something vegetable stuck in his teeth—will keep swearing at him in the squad car, punk, asswipe, fuckface, and Luke will grin broadly, knowing everything, as if he’s hovering above the ground, a minor god, every single thought rendered into cosmic consciousness. He will be free. He will be free. He will be free. He will be free. He will be free. He will be free. He will be free. He will be free. He will be free. He will be free.