If enough of the symptoms suited you, it meant you were a candidate for some new syndrome. A feeling of loss that has no referent, the man continued. The need to be invisible, perfect, or perfectly bad. High risk taking or the inability to take risks. The feeling of carrying an awful secret, the urge to tell, feeling oneself to be unreal and everyone else real, or vice versa. Lost memories, or blacking out a period of years…

Wade felt that way sometimes. It seemed he’d been to some colleges. He’d learned things and had brief affairs with the men who kept up the grounds. But he could remember it all if he really wanted to. The man driving the car pulled over at a rest stop. I need to check my e-mail, he explained.

Wade wasn’t sure how that was possible. The man sat at a picnic table and typed away at his laptop. They were somewhere in the desert, in transit from one dubious location to another. Their relationship was based on an accidental convergence of two paths of least resistance. They were both too lazy to try and change other people to suit their own preferences. Wade wandered off into the scrub. A dry gully twisted around through it and he could see how high the stream had been by the garbage that was stuck along the banks. Plastics and fast food cups and a surprising number of articles of clothing, shirts and rags and underwear, and bloodstained jeans. The desert was the worst place to hide evidence, because nothing decayed.

The land just went on. He was pretty sure there’d been human sacrifices around here, he could sense it. Blood had soaked into it. Blood was curdling and the sun was blazing. You couldn’t see the creatures, but they were out there, waiting and chewing each other for sure. They sucked up each other’s juices, he guessed. He walked haphazardly along the gully for some time, letting the heat and his thirst empty his mind. When he came to a barbed wire fence, he turned back. At the rest stop, the man was clicking his mouse and talking to him as if he’d been there next to him the whole time.

It really facilitates community, he was saying.

Wade guessed he was talking about the World Wide Web. This man thought everyone in the world together was turning into the planet’s brain. It had become the source of a mild but nearly constant irritation between them.

Not everyone has a computer, Wade said.

The man snorted.

I talk to people in Kenya, he said.

The man’s skin was dry, hair frazzled and bleached. He seemed crisped, a little bit fried around the edges, like an asteroid that had come through the atmosphere a few times too many. Wade knew that his time with this man was approaching its end. The sun was blazing out here and the electronic screen seemed grotesque. Wade thought there must a club of dictators or child murderers he was connecting with in Kenya. The man was wearing a stained undershirt and suit pants.

More evidence. Guilty, thought Wade, but surely nobody cared. He thought then that his mood was the same as America’s, or he thought that his mood was exactly "America". The man shivered in the heat, as if he was finally ready to move on, but then he continued clicking away, a sort of hopeless scratching noise under the sun. There was a weird hair or blue fiber there where the shirt, drenched with sweat, was sticking to the man’s back.

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