Three months out of the year I get to file for unemployment. I swim, I paint, and I try not to fuck things up. I have a real tendency to fuck my life up. Take last winter. My brother Noah invited me out to the country. That first morning I woke early to make a morning fire and to paint. My wild little nephew Bill, dressed like a cowboy, wanted to know how to build a fire. I taught him how a cowboy builds a fire out in the cold lonesome desert wilderness. I helped him feed the chickens, the neighbor’s boarded horses, the dog. That’s when I found Noah’s portrait leaning against a wall in the barn. Seeing it down there sparked a dark shift in my outlook. I worked hard on that painting. Noah’s wedding gift. Now it was covered in chicken shit. Wild Bill climbed up onto a bale of hay and practiced striking matches. The dude’s eyes had a dangerous twinkle. I knew that look. I should have given him a big fire safety speech, all those animals sheltered in there, but I didn’t. I didn’t say a word. What a mistake. Noah took me into town. The water wheel of an old sawmill rotated slowly through the ice, just for show. Open-mouthed tourists stopped to watch it turn. Noah told me about the trouble Wild Bill was having in school. Attention deficit. Acting out. I hadn’t had a drink since the previous spring, and I started to feel like my skin was peeling off. We drove farther down the mountain toward what looked to me like a lake. Noah said it was a manmade reservoir where the city gets half its water. “They flooded twelve towns to build it. Eminent domain. Try to fathom the politics of that. Barns, churches, all your favorite trees. Blam. Boomtown. Gone.” I tried to forget about the barn painting, but I couldn’t. I looked around the big oak table that night at Noah’s farmhouse and family, at his wife Lee and at my wild little nephew Bill, everybody laughing so happy in the lamplight, and I thought about all the love I’d thrown away for art, for art my own brother wouldn’t even hang inside his house. Lee nodded at me kindly. She poured me tiny cups of wine. How cold it is out there in the cold and lonesome world. Lee’s warmth made me think of Rose Shepherd, the longest girlfriend I ever had. We’d talked about making a family together. I got the idea that fucking things up with Rose had become the biggest mistake of my life. The thing to do now would be to go back out west and find her. Charm her into coming back to New York. I wanted what my brother had—the house, the barn, warmth. The family. The car. Happiness. 

Anytime I get consumed by a thought like this, by some burning idea about how to make things right, thereby ending all my pain, this is usually all the fuel I need to totally fuck up my life. Rose still lived way out in Nevada, where Noah and I were born. We hadn’t spoken in six years, maybe seven. But now I felt like it had to happen. After dinner I asked Noah if I could borrow The Dark Horse for the trip. That’s what we called Noah’s Volvo because it was painted black and beat to shit and had never let either of us down. “That’s three thousand miles,” Noah said. “You’re out of your goddamn mind.” I took The Dark Horse anyway. I took it in the middle of the night with the snowy wind wailing sideways against the barn. What a car. It tore through the night like a train through a tunnel. Noah’s portrait was in the backseat. The dog came along too. Sat right up front. I couldn’t even remember the dog’s name. Those courageous golden eyes, smiling. Who was I to stop him. 

It was wintertime in America. Icicles fell from the wheel wells of trucks and clung to the silos and churches. Winter birds landed in the silhouettes of trees. Snow fell silent in the endless yellow fields. Noah’s amphetamines had been hidden behind his bathroom mirror in the country. The bottle was now in my pocket. Life was easy going. The sun came up in Ohio and set again in Kansas. I stopped outside Topeka for gas. I bought a paper map and a warm case of beer. The radio was broken in the Volvo, but I was feeling good. I inhaled the wild rush of American highway air. I’d also taken our dead father’s watch. I drank the warm beer. The wheels turned and turned. We made it to Denver in record time. 

I parked on a corner in Capitol Hill where nobody would bother us while we slept in the car. It was cold and late and bleak in Denver. The dog got out to piss in the park. We’d stopped for gas just five times in thirty hours. My eyes throbbed, my jaw hurt. No stars over lonesome Denver. No moon. Noah and I had lived here, years ago, but I recognized nothing in the night. My bones ached. The dog brought me sticks while I finished off the beer. I found some camping equipment in the Volvo’s roof box. Sleeping bag and a tent. The dog wandered off to explore more of the dark. The roof box looked like a coffin. I wrapped myself in the bag. I was afraid to turn on my phone. I cowered under the tent in the car with the sticks. 

At dawn the dog was still gone and I’d lost all momentum in my sleep. Rose what? Nevada? Who? Noah had been right. None of it made any sense. His portrait was up in the driver’s seat. I avoided eye contact with its reflection in the mirror. The morning light on the mountainside was of a rosy bluish snowy wash, but the distance and scale were too daunting. I knew the fear would be on me bad. Out in the street I felt bewildered. I felt like that black painting by Goya—One Old Man and a Monk. I went to the library where people like me hide from the cold reality of the world. I washed up in the bathroom and used a computer to do my unemployment. It took me ten seconds and I made five hundred dollars. But the money wouldn’t be there until morning. I woke to a man pushing on my shoulder. I wasn’t allowed to sleep in the library, he said. And if I wanted to stay he’d need to confiscate my stick. I told him I understood. On my way out I looked through an art book full of sculptures of wild horses. Inside it someone had written: As Within, So Without. I left the library with the book. Went to a diner I used to frequent by the train station. I smelled terrible. The diner had changed a lot. Everywhere in America felt like the fucking mall. It was all the same to me. Things were looking up. Noah’s pills helped tremendously. I ate the last of them with some eggs in a red booth by myself and by noon I was doing pretty good. But I would need more. I remembered this guy who called himself Chicken Wing. We’d worked a gardening job together. Chicken Wing’s pills could make the clear air move. I backtracked to his building a little east of the city where Denver became the town of Aurora. The store on the corner was now a little café and all the apartments above it were condemned. As was I. The woman inside had never heard of Chicken Wing. I went back west toward Denver and drove around looking for Noah’s dog.  

I found the dog chasing birds in an alley off of Colfax. Barking with happiness as The Dark Horse pulled up. I’d never heard that dog bark about anything before. Happy dog digging the happy streets of the universe. I opened the door. The dog jumped right in. 

We were off again. On the way out of town I pawned off my father’s watch to buy a good cowboy coat for the desert cold. I bought the perfect coat and a case of warm champagne and a bag of dog food the size of a chicken feed bag. Life was easy going. I opened the bag lengthwise with a key and the dog food rolled and fell as we tore across the fenceless planes and up into the curving highway rock of the mountains. The Dark Horse drove itself. I sat in the back drinking warm champagne and looking at Noah’s portrait with the dog. I thought about the day Noah posed for me in his mountain garden. It was springtime. Our father had been dead not even a year and now Wild Bill was soon to be born. I painted Noah seated under an apple tree in his wide-brimmed hat, the barn on a hill behind him, a bouquet of wet cut flowers in his lap. The flowers opened out of the dark space of his suit in a watery burst of bluish-green and pink that I painted to look like stars, swirling liquid nebulas, astral designs you only see on television or drugs. When Noah saw the finished portrait he said he looked too much like our father. All these years later I finally saw what he meant. It was something I’d done in the eyes. That same dangerous twinkle I’d witnessed in Wild Bill. A look our father often got when he drank. Suddenly the portrait looked more to me like my nephew than it did Noah or our father. Something so tragically American about that look of his in the barn. Something so wild, fearless. Something so destructive and true. 

Before us the salt flats of Utah spread out in vast wintery mirages. The Dark Horse approached what I thought was a farmhouse burning down, but soon I saw it was the long rays of the red sun blazing through the siding of a fallen shed. Quickly it became a clear night. The sun set into an image of itself, and now the starlight shone below as finely as above, everything mirrored as if on thin water. The pills wore off slowly. Soon I was simply drunk off champagne. I daydreamed about Lake Tahoe in the summertime with Rose. Fireworks as big as ferris wheels turned in the starry waters of my mind. Rose in a wedding gown by the water. Rose undressing in our room. Rose pregnant. Utah came and went like that. The nameless dog ate and slept. The wheels of time turned and turned. 

The dog and I entered Nevada around midnight. Right away I remembered things I hadn’t remembered in a long time. There’d been that old drunk who lived in the barn behind our elementary school. Fancy rich families from town paid him to keep their horses. A bridle trail led to his barn through the hills behind our house, so Noah and I passed it every day on our way home from school. Some days the old man would let us climb through the fence to come see the horses, and other days we’d find him sleeping alone in the hay. First drink I ever took was of that old man’s whiskey while he slept. The horses always seemed so uneasy, I remembered. Especially the red one. It felt like the night sky to look up into the eyes of the red one. 

One day in winter Noah and I walked home from school with our friend Big Jim. Big Jim had just stolen a box of his mother’s matches. The three of us took turns trying to light fires in the brush outside the old man’s barn. But there was snow on the ground, and our hands got cold, and the night came on fast, so Noah and I went home. Three days later the horse barn exploded. Something happened to the stash of open-flame propane tanks the old man used for heat. All three of us—Noah and me and Big Jim—were sitting in class when it happened. I remembered the muffled ba-boom of the explosion, and then the alarms. The fields out back were where the teachers had been trained to take us during drills, so now kids were being led out toward the burning barn. The fire looked like a terrible mountain where you knew an old man was trapped in its caves. One of the horses broke free from the stable and tore off burning through the hills toward our house. It was terrible, terrible. The big fire rolled like a burning wheel through the snow and the snow melted in wide circles around the heat. The barn fell into itself. Everybody was screaming, crying, even the parents and teachers. 

Part of me always felt guilty about the old man and his horses. I remember lying awake at night feeling like a horse killer. What if the matches we struck had just taken a few nights to catch? Noah and I never spoke of it. But I had a feeling he felt guilty too. 

Soon the casino lights of Reno would smolder like coals in the high desert foothills. I’d see the Sierras purple and blue in the dark with Lake Tahoe way out beyond them. My hometown. Rose Shepherd. The Wild West. The Dark Horse’s engine knocked and roared and I pictured myself parking beside the Truckee River in the morning, putting everything I had on red. The slot machines would spray golden songs into the timeless silver smokey lights, and I would immediately double my good fortune. Boomtown. I pictured myself laughing, cheering, sleeping for centuries. I pictured myself waking reborn. 

The wheels of fortune turned and turned. Slowly I was unable to remember what Rose looked like. I couldn’t seem to hold a picture of her in my mind. What was I doing out here in the desert? What was I after? I thought about the planetarium we were taken to as kids. Huge and white and shining in the hills. In high school Noah and I would climb up its white sloped dome to drink beers and smoke cigarettes on the roof, all the stars of the universe above and below us. As Within, So Without. I struggled to picture Rose Shepherd again. I simply couldn’t do it. I had tears in my eyes. For even if I could see her, what would it matter? I knew it’s all she’d ever be to me now—a picture. 

Thirty miles outside Battle Mountain, between Elko and Winnemucca, just east of the Black Rock Desert, half asleep and coming down off Noah’s speed, the dog and I went sailing sideways through the black empty air with a blownout right rear tire. The Dark Horse roared and shook as it cranked sideways and scudded perpendicular to the road—and then it careened and screeched back the opposite way. I overcorrected. I did everything you’re not supposed to do. I slammed on the brakes, thrashed at the wheel. Everything boomed and buckled. The nights sky rose and fell and the force pressed us against the windows as we rolled down into the highway ditch and flipped back up onto the desert floor. 

The windshield had shattered in the drunk idiot night. Everything was silent and still. The radiator clicked, hissed. We’d landed on our wheels again. Smoke rose up swirling from the hood. The dog pawed at the window. The roof was caved in badly. But everything was okay. The dog was okay, I was okay. My door groaned as I shouldered it open. The dog tore out into the utter edgeless dark, barking at things I couldn’t see. I looked up as a truck boomed passed on the highway road above us. It didn’t see me. I felt some relief. At least I had time before someone stopped and called the cops. I didn’t want to go to jail. I would need to get up into the hills until morning. But it was cold. My hands shook so violent that my arms shook. My knee hurt. I turned up the collar of my coat against the howling cold. The roof box was gone. The Dark Horse looked dead. 

I got back into the driver’s seat where everything had been thrown around. I turned the key and the Volvo’s lights came on—but the engine itself wouldn’t turn. I tried again and again. Nothing. This fact came on suddenly, then slowly it remained a fact forever. I tried everything I could think to do. Nothing worked. I cried and screamed at the uncaring hills. I heard coyotes yip in the desert distance. I tried to call for the dog, but now nothing would come of my voice. The thought of my phone made me sick.

I had no choice but to camp in the hills. I’d have to act quickly. First I found the roof box flung out into the desert darkness, and by tying some tent rope to it I turned the open coffin into a kind of sled for the supplies. I filled the coffin with everything I could including the incriminating bottles of empty champagne. I had a tent, a sleeping bag, my cell phone, some dog food and sticks. I’d have to find something to burn in those hills if I wanted to live, which I did, I did. I took one more long good look at the map. This whole northern half of Nevada had once been a prehistoric lake. Lake Lahontan. I remembered learning about it with Noah in grade school. The Great Basin. No outlet to the ocean. No inlet either. Absorption. Evaporation. The largest lake in America disappeared, gone. I remember seeing fossils of prehistoric horses and the ghost town tours of our grade school days. Forgotten boomtowns from the silver mining times, nineteenth century settlements abandoned all throughout the desert. All of it unfolding under the starry dome of time. And now me. Unscrewing the license plates with numb fingers. Scraping vin numbers off the dash with a key. I said goodnight to The Dark Horse. I set out west for the hills with my supplies piled high on the roof box casket, and I saw my breath appear and disappear as I cried out hopelessly for the dog. 

I did my best to walk a straight line so I could find my way back to the highway in the morning. The weather was harsh as I worked my way out against the wind. Soon I saw snow in the starry light of the hills. I called out for the dog intermittently, but all I ever heard back was the yips of coyotes and the rush of the wind through the hills. The high desert winds drove hard against the snow and swept it up into towering shapes that twirled and entwined with the stars and sand as it crashed back down on the side of the highway behind me. Suddenly the immense clarity of the sky startled me awake. I had never seen such a clear night sky in my life. I stopped to piss in the desert snow brush. Up above I saw layers and layers of stars through space, some of them still, some of them turning, others fell and shot, and I saw a great blue drift of interstellar dust widen as it stretched and turned and searched through the black expanse of eternity. I was in awe of what I saw. For a moment I felt part of it all again. I hadn’t felt this way since I was a little kid. It reminded me again of the dead old man and his horses. The red horse. Those eyes. I took a deep breath of cold spacy air. I let my eyes blur and rest, and I almost fell asleep. The dog appeared out of the blackness at my side with a stick. Sheep dog bringing me my shepherd’s stick. My kindling. I knelt down and thanked him with scratches behind his ears. I walked on, limping. Eventually I came to a barbed wire fence run through wooden pilings, and beyond that an abandoned miner’s shed. Nobody had been anywhere near this place in a long time. I broke apart the shed for its wood and came upon a place to set up camp in the hills. I made three trips with the shed before I had enough wood to make it through the night. Wood as light as dust. I would need to burn the whole shed slowly, carefully. I dug a pit by a cave in the bank of the hills and started my fire with matches set to pages of the horse sculpture book. As Within, So Without. I contemplated these words before I balled them up and burned them. I got the fire good and hot and then I set up the rest of our camp. It was well after three when I finished. The dog laid down paw over paw in the dust. I squatted beside him. Picked some broken glass out of his hair. We looked into the fire together. Noah’s portrait really did look a lot like our father. Grandfather, father, child, I thought. All three stared through the heat from where I’d leaned them as one against the rocks. My whole life I’d searched for love and warmth outside of myself. Never once had I thought to search within. This was a new way of thinking for me. I felt sheltered by it. Protected. I stared at the portrait for a time. Stars fell behind the hills. The fire rose, spun, then gasped open to me in the wind. I stood, staggered a little. Soon dawn would be breaking behind the barn in New York where my brother kept his neighbors’ horses. My nephew would be the only one up. I could have called him right then, caught him on the landline, warned him before he went out to do his chores. Four boarded horses. I picked up the portrait of my brother. Wiped my eyes. I nestled it into the coals of the fire. I should have given Wild Bill that fire safety speech. And I could have still called him right then. Yes—I should have. But in the end I didn’t.