He laughed and went on about the addictive nature of the 360deg horizon as they left the Jindabyne Alpines and the snow peaks, the extensive pine forest flora of the wild outdoors by the mountain valleys. Larissa had to admit she couldn't imagine the place Kai was describing. Everything around Jindabyne was hilly and densely packed around the flowing rivers. Mungo sounded like an arid dustbowl to her, but what did she know? She hoped she was wrong. By his attraction to the area, she clearly was.

The drive on the two-lane narrow Snowy Mountain Highway was a slog. The foliage got spa.r.s.e and burnt, the land leveled out, and then grew green again and sloping, but the mountains had gone; it looked more like the American prairie. Until it didn't anymore, and was replaced by languid hills and patchy pine and eucalypt forest. They got stuck behind a car traveling leisurely and remained stuck for a hundred miles on the open road. Their cruiser was a st.u.r.dy vehicle and could withstand all kinds of terrain, but it couldn't overtake another car: it had no pick-up.

After a hundred and forty miles, they turned onto Stuart Highway, and around Gum Creek Larissa suddenly said, "Kai, there's nothing here." And there wasn't. No trees, no birds, no rivers. Nothing. Just a narrow road, and pebbly sand as far as her eye could see. It was oddly overcast.

"But imagine what this would look like when the sun is out," Kai said.

"I don't need to imagine. Much like this. Nothing. With the sun beating down on it." It was eerie, ghostly and otherworldly, peculiar and strange. There was no talking herself out of it: the barren bushland gave Larissa a stone-cold feeling, piled high on top of the other boulders that pressed down into the pit of her hungry gut. It's not going to be like this in Pooncarie? she wanted to ask Kai, but didn't. She couldn't imagine it would be. After all, ten miles can separate flatlands from forested alpine mountains and wine valleys from euca-lypt jungles. Anything could change in ten miles.

But Stuart Highway proved to be an entirely different kind of travel. The only thing that changed on it after ten miles and then two hundred miles was that the barrenness that came before was nothing, nothing, compared to the utter desolation now. The land became flatter, emptier, the sense of being absolutely nowhere grew staggering and suffocating. And the road just went on and on and on, through the uninhabited vastness.

"How long are we on this road for?" Larissa asked in a constricted voice. As if that were the important thing. It wasn't the road. It was where the road was taking them.

"Five hundred more miles."

Five hundred miles! "How does anyone live here?"

"No one lives here, as you see."

"But what if you break down?"

"Best not to."

"No kidding. Does your cell phone have a signal?"

He looked. "No."

Of course not. Why would it?

"The land is a blank slate," Kai said. "You need to imagine the things you want it to have, the things that were on it a thousand years ago."

"You mean before the sun burned them away?"

"Yeah. Imagine the water flowing into Lake Eyre, miles from here, the largest inland lake and the lowest point in Australia. Once all the rivers flowing from it were full, meandering through the abundant life."

"Is Lake Eyre full now?"

"The lake has only filled up a few times in the last two hundred years," Kai replied, whistling "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah." Zip-a-Dee-Ay.

"All right, Kai," Larissa said, closing her eyes to stop seeing the bleakness. "I'll imagine the cruise on the wetlands, the flightless birds, the giant marsupials." Bushriding through the scrub. How much longer? MaudeaYangaa Yanga was slightly more vegetated, and she became optimistic, but ten miles later by Benanee, it was back to the nothingness. Larissa glanced at Kai, to see if he could see what she could see. But he was tapping on the steering wheel, humming "Give a Little Whistle," eyes single-mindedly focused on the road. He didn't see.

In Monak, the earth acquired a red hue; "That's the red sand," Kai exclaimed. "Ain't it something?"

"Sure. Is there anywhere to stop?"

When they alighted for gas and an early dinner, he continued to regale her about the sunsets. The more cruel the heat, the more spectacular the sunsets, he said. Always something given, something lost. Larissa was so hot, too, on top of everything. There was no respite. Was something being lost now? In that case, what was being given? Oh, she thought, please let it not be wisdoma"by the awful grace of G.o.d.

"You don't think it will be cooler in Pooncarie?" She wiped her soaked face. She didn't eat; she had no appet.i.te.

"Twenty degrees hotter, I told you. It's in the basin."

Ah, basin. As opposed to this, an elevated b.u.t.te perhaps, or a vista-like winding pa.s.sage through the Alleghenys. She already missed the Alpine afternoon breeze of Jindabyne. She missed summer leaves that weren't brown. She missed noise and good music from young men and singing from the country girls, fueled by fermenting hops and darkness. She missed the things that were rampantly missing here. She was afraid of Pooncarie and couldn't say why. She hadn't been afraid of Paranaque.

Was this common to all human beings? No matter what you had, you always wished for what you didn't have? Every landscape, every season, the leaves, the views, the white moldings, the cool cold windows. The ice, the snow, the ocean. Saltbush, desert, bluebush, devegetated dunes. She felt a little bit like the last.

Larissa suspected it didn't always turn to nothing, though it was certainly hard to believe that now, driving through the nothingness. Vaguely she recalled Father Emilio and the dusky subdued room where Larissa sat with him every afternoon listening in comfort to his voice telling her that she was a witness to her own life, that G.o.d would bless her emptied-out soul if it needed Him, that He would not send the women to the tomb but that He Himself would come to the poor devegetated creature sitting in front of Him in sorrow, if only she would seek the comfort. Every minute of Father Emilio's day was given over to make heavy hearts a little lighter. She saw that on the faces of the orphans whose heads he patted as he strolled by. Well, that's why he is a priest, and I'm not, Larissa thought. He is a saint. And she'd said to him then that she didn't need comfort, not really. What she needed was answers.

But now she had neither. How is it best for me to live?

How much longer to drive? she asked Kai. It was going to get dark soon.

But Kai was telling her things and didn't reply. "I told Billy-O he should offer different types of tours," Kai was saying. "Half a day, a whole day, even a week-long tour all the way to Cairns or Uluru. Wouldn't that be something?"

"To Uluru on a horse?"

"No. In a cruiser. Like this one."

"Yeah, but," said Larissa pointedly, "where's Billy-O going to get a cruiser like this one?"

Kai didn't take the bait. "I told him he could ride out from Lake Munga all the way to Lake Eyre in a ten-man jungle vehicle. Sure, it's better if there's water there. Fly-fishing, kayaking. But still. Even without the water, tourists love an adventure. He could do what we do, make it a camping trip, with tents. A nice campfire, a potluck dinner. We'd sing songs, tell ghost stories of Australian outback horror. Ritual burials, wombats eating dingoes, that sort of thing." He laughed happily.

"We, Kai?"

"What?"

"You were talking about Billy-O, but you said we."

"I meant him. I misspoke." But after that he stopped smiling and stopped speaking.

Larissa grew irritated in the heat. "You're telling me Munga Lake is a salt flat, all fly-fishing joy evaporated by the red blaze, no rain, no rainbow trout, and you think the hapless tourists are going to fall for that? Sounds like a whole bunch of disappointment." She chuckled mirthlessly. "They should call it Lake Disappointment."

"Nah. There's already a Lake Disappointment way out west."

"I might like to see that," she said.

"If you wish, Larissa," Kai said. "Though do we really need to travel that far?" He was biting in his dry reticence, like arid beds, like the river that was a dirt road the seven months of summer. And now she didn't take the bait, falling quiet instead.

In Trentham Cliffs, the woods grew in patches in the sand, but by this time, Larissa felt so disconnected from civilization and all life that the trees did not impress her. She knew they were just cover to hide the emptiness. Under the trees was still desert. The road was called the Silver City Highway, which sounded romantic, almost inspirational! Silver, image of something sparkly, shiny, accessible, yet enigmatic. And city, of course, could be the shining city on a hill. Yetaafter Wentworth, the Silver City Highway became unnamed. It wasn't even the plodding Stuart Highway. Where they were going, the roads were unnamed. Good luck finding your way out. Was it any wonder that doom seeped inside her pores and settled in her aching bones?

Larissa withdrew from the conversation, detached herself from reality, which was not difficult, for reality had no landscape, imagined herself in the kitchen in San Agustin, making pandesal bread, evaporated milk, egg, sugar, salt, b.u.t.ter, yeast, breadcrumbs, and then sitting by the tall windows waiting for the bread to rise, watching the deluvial monsoon fill up the green yard like the monastery was an ark in the floodwaters.

Imagined herself after the afternoon rains at Blizzard Beach water park in central Florida, having the park all to themselves and running up the stairs over and over to go on the family tube ride, racing wet in their bathing suits a hundred and fifty steps to slide down in a huge round tube that bounced off the walls as it careened downward, all five of them, Larissa, Jared, Emily, Asher and Michelangelo, screeching and squealing, and finally the fifth time around, Michelangelo, who was about three, saying to her, "Go ahead, Mommy, hurry, go without me, save yourself. Because I have no feet left." And Larissa picking him up and carrying him up a hundred and fifty steps.

It was dark when Kai said quietly, out of the blue, "We're going nowhere."

Larissa opened her eyes. Closed them. "But we're going there together."

7.

Pooncarie

They ran out of gas a mile away from Tarcoola Street at midnight. Kai thought they would have enough. Of course, his cell phone had no signal. And who would he call anyway? Billy-O was in the bush.

"Well, how did he call you earlier then?" Larissa said, sitting in the cruiser, belatedly realizing a logical fallacy inherent in modern technology.

"Who?"

"Billy-O."

"What do you mean? He called on his cell."

"Yes, I know. But he's out in the red desert, where there isn't a single signal tower. We know. We haven't had signal for seven hundred miles. How in the world did he get a signal to call you?"

"I don't know Larissa. Do I run Telstra?" He locked the cruiser. "Come on. Take your purse. We'll come back for everything else in the morning."

"I thought we were going into the National Park in the morning?"

"We are. Clearly I'll have to do it before we go."

"Gas stations open that early around here?" she asked. "Much demand for gas at six in the morning, you think?"

He stared at her coldly from the road. "Are you coming?"

They walked one mile in silence. In the night the mile seemed like twenty. How long was it between her Bellevue house and the Summit train station? Was that also only one mile? She shuddered.

Billy-O's house, right off the main drag of Tarcoola Street, was locked from the front. "Don't worry," said Kai. "He usually leaves the back door open." But that was locked also.

"Now what?" said Larissa. "We have to be up in five hours. Can you call him? Maybe we'll get lucky and he has a signal again in the bush."

"He's probably sleeping."

"We're doing him a favor," said Larissa sharply. "Can you please call him?" She couldn't tell what Pooncarie looked like because at the moment it was darker than ink. Kai called Billy-O with no luck.

Two blocks away on Tarcoola Street there was a gas station, which was also a hotel and a beer garden. The gas station part was closed for the night, and the hotel was full. Full! As in "no vacancy." Why did Larissa find that not credible? But the beer garden was open till two, and Poon Pub was hopping, crowded like a Greenwich Village dance club on a Sat.u.r.day night.

Kai didn't want to go in, claiming sudden exhaustion, but she was thirsty and asked for a cold beer. They walked inside.

And because nothing was ever so bad that it couldn't get instantly worse, the first person Larissa spotted sitting at one of the tables talking to a group of other poorly dressed young girls, was Cleo Carew, the blonde-haired chick from Balcony Bar.

The opening chasm in the stomach came first, followed by recognition.

Sinking down at a small sticky table, Larissa stared at the back of Kai's head at the bar for the few minutes it took him to fist-pound the bartender and to buy two beers. Slack-jawed, she watched Cleo's face a few tables away, talking to her friends, yet raising her eyes as he turned around with the beer in his hands and acknowledging him with a nod and a smile. Kai acknowledged her with just a blink.

Larissa didn't know what to think. They had just driven over twelve hours across thirteen hundred bone-crunching kilometers to a hole-in-the-earth town with a hundred and fifty residents in the middle of a salty playa, a silver mining town, where they went ostensibly to do an emergency solid for Billy-O, and here at a nameless bara"in Pooncarie!a"was the girl that would not be named, nodding to Kai, as if to say, glad to see you finally arrived. Not, what are you doing here? Not, what a surprise. Not, I vaguely remember you from somewhere. But, finally. You're here. And the girl hadn't in any way acknowledged or greeted Larissa.

But what Kai didn't do was what people normally do when they see a vaguely familiar face. Oh, hi, it's youahow you doing, what's happening? What they don't do is pretend they barely know the person whose empty gla.s.s they refilled in another bar in another town.

Returning to her side, Kai pa.s.sed Larissa a cold beer, which she suddenly didn't want, and he asked her about food, which she didn't want either, though not five minutes earlier she had complained bitterly of hunger, but now there were so many other things to complain bitterly about. The girl, surrounded by natives, looked ludicrously young, barely out of high school, though looking stupid enough perhaps never to have gone to high school. She had a vapid drop-out look about her, and too loud a laugh in a public place, a self-conscious, stare-at-me laugh. Her clothes were slightly baggier, though, than at Balcony Bar, the relaxed-fit jeans, the empire waist top falling loose from the over-exposed ludicrous b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Turning her frozen gaze away from Cleo, Larissa leveled the stare into Kai's expressionless face. He drank, sat calmly, smiled at her politely.

Larissa downed her beer in five gulps. "Let's go."

"Go where?"

"Kai, what do you propose? That we sit in the bar all night till we have to go out in the morning? Let's go back, climb through the window or something. Or try Billy-O again. Maybe he'll pick up."

Kai was inscrutable. "I'll try him again. I'll go outside so I can hear. But I'm starved," he added. "I'm gonna get myself a sandwich. Sure you don't want anything?"

"No, Kai. But thank you." Always so polite. Larissa couldn't sit anymore so she stood up and leaned against the wall, waiting for him, watching his back, the shape of his head, the crew cut of the kinky hair that had been too hot to keep long, and now he looked like a soldier with his tall reedy build, his buzzed dome. He looked like a different man. Certainly he behaved like one.

Cleo got up! She got up and toddled over to the bar, twenty feet long, ten of it unoccupied, but of course she had to stand right next to Kai, motioning to the bartender. Their heads didn't bob or lean into each other as Larissa watched them from behind. It was noisy in the pub, sweaty and loud, and there was no tilting from them, no shoulder swaying, no recognition from their bodies. Kai was draped over the counter, beer in his hands, waiting for his sandwich, and she was standing sprightly, ordering another drink. If Larissa hadn't been struck by her presence in the town where there were barely any people, she would've sworn under oath the girl and Kai were strangers, who happened to be standing at the bar at the same time ordering food and drinks from the same waiter.

And yet.

Unmistakably, the silent language of their bodies looked familiar, not foreign. They didn't stand together like strangers. They stood together as though they were speaking without moving their heads.

Kai got his sandwich, paid, and returned to Larissa, food in hand. Their table had been taken so they stood by the wall. He offered her a bite, which she refused with arms crossed, and after he was finished, they left. In utter silence, they walked back to Billy's place, where the doors were still locked and the lights were out.

They sat on the porch steps, waiting in darkness. But for what?

Kai called Billy again. This time the phone was picked up! The two men spoke briefly in man code. What up, dude. I'm sitting in front of your house, and I can't get inside. He hung up the phone. "He'll be here in a sec."

"All the way from the outback, he'll be here in a sec?"

"He came back with three horses. But he's going back out again tomorrow morning."

"So tell me," Larissa said suddenly, "is that why you came here? For her?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Are you playing dumb with me?"

"No, I just don't know what you're talking about."