Sharon lived in Las Vegas.  What I had to tell her, I had to tell her so I could see her face after the telling.  And there was only one road to Las Vegas.

Along the way there were small white crosses, painted wooden memories of people who didn't make the drive the whole way.  Sometimes, when the weather was not too gaudy, there would be fresh-cut flowers and old photographs strewn around the crosses.  I thought about the people who brought them:  their tires followed the same tracks as those of their dead children and friends.  They made the trip every year to place the flowers and reinscribe the names that had been blurred out by the last twelve months of wind and rain and heat.  Treads on treads on blacktop, like a Buddhist prayer wheel spun by a hundred years of running water, buried their grief and loss into an impenetrable blackness only a few millimeters thick.  I wondered if anyone had ever died on the way to visit the crosses, making a new batch of their own, like dandelion seeds carried by a breeze.  Sometimes I'd see a whole cluster of crosses, seven or eight all grouped together:  probably a van full of people.  Sharon's nephew had been in a van when he died.  When I would see a cluster like that I'd wonder what the people in the van had been listening to on the radio, what they had been talking about, in the seconds before they died.  Then I'd wonder what I would want to be listening to if I knew it would be the last song I ever heard.  Sharon said I had this habit, of making every conversation about me.  I think probably everyone does it, though. 

When we used to drive this way together, before she moved, there was always a cafe we stopped at.  I would fuel up the car and she would order a glass of tea.  This time, when I got there, it was just me in the car, and I hoped there would be no one there who remembered, but there was.

"Where's your wife?", she asked.  She had one of those stocky sorts of kluged-together bodies, looking like she'd been assembled from spare parts.  Whoever made her forgot to use a neck.  There was the little wire rack of herbal teas.

"She wasn't my wife," I said.  I never knew how to explain it.  "We aren't together anymore."

"But you're still going to Las Vegas?" There wasn't anywhere else to go, nowhere but here.  No one would come here unless they were on their way to Las Vegas or back.  "Business or pleasure?"

"Neither," I said.

The highway was once numbered 666, and they called it the Beast.  It was named after the Great Beast in the Book of Revelations, the last in the Bible, the prophecy of the end times.  The Great Beast would aid the Anti-Christ in his quest for dominion over all the Earth.  Sharon didn't have any religion -- that's how she said it.  "I have no religion", the way that some people who were raised in another country would say "I have no English".  Her parents didn't raise her Christian, either -- they were hippies and didn't believe in any of that stuff.  They brought her up as a Marxist, I suppose.  I always found it hard to believe that she had never even heard of all that stuff in the Book of Revelations, though.  Whenever I would express that opinion she'd get very upset with me.

I had left very late at night.  I liked driving at night because there was no traffic.  Back then, when the highway was the Beast, there wasn't much light, either, and she would say that I would end up as one of the white crosses.  I told her I didn't understand how the Beast could stand all the crosses in its skin.  Why doesn't it spit them out, I asked?  It must be like garlic rubbed along the spine of a vampire.  I won't die here.  The earth would never take me.  I could talk like that because she was sleepy and didn't want to argue.  Soon enough she would fall asleep, and it would be very late, but always, in the odd building along the side of the road, there would be lights on:  who was in these buildings so late at night?  What were they doing?  I was obssesed with the question.  I even wrote a song about it, which Sharon didn't like.  She liked my songs that were about her. 

"This one's about you, too," I told her.  "All my songs are about you."

"God, I hope not," she said.

Probably it was only security guards in these buildings, or maybe not even that:  they just leave the lights on all night.  There was a perfectly ordinary explanation for it, there always was.  It made me angry.  I hated perfectly ordinary explanations.  They took all the mystery out of life.  I wanted there to be some kind of enigmatic and eerie reason for there to be lights on in a warehouse at 3AM a few hundred yards off of a highway that bore the number of the beast.  That's the world I wanted to live in, where that meant something. 

They don't call that highway the Beast anymore.  It has a different number now that doesn't mean anything.  Soon I will arrive in Las Vegas, where Sharon lives, and tell her what I have to tell her, and there will be one of two expressions on her face.  If it's the second, I will see this road again, soon, in the light of day, devoid of all its mystery, dotted with blossoming clusters of white crosses that cannot be seen in the night.

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"When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing." (Gertrude Stein)