Part Forty Three

Worshipers search for Kerith Ravine like it’s Brigadoon or something. Preacher purposefully kept its location a secret, not wanting a bunch of ersatz pilgrims in there trashing the place. But it’s not really that hidden. A little bit of leg work, a little bit of research, and anyone could find it using public documents. I found it without too much difficulty. And I went there just to satisfy myself that Preacher didn’t go back there when he vanished. I didn’t think he would – it’s not like him to retrace his footsteps – and he hadn’t. I do think one or two others have found the place since Preacher left, though, because when I got there the windmill was still running smoothly, seven years since Preacher had serviced it last.

Kerith is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the Nevada-California line. And it’s not, technically, a ravine – it’s a caldera, a small geological bowl marking the spot where a volcano blew millennia ago. In the 1950s and early 1960s the US Geological Survey and the Agriculture Department sponsored a joint project on desert farming there. There was a tiny spring – not much more than a spot of damp ground – which had probably saved a few Indians foolish enough to get caught in the desert, and which had supplied water for a few other passers-by, too, miners, trappers, outlaws, whatever.

So the feds sank a pipe into the floor of the caldera and built a windmill to pump water the with state-of-the-art 1959 technology, and built a little shack for the research scientist assigned to that lonely duty, and for a few years they tried to prove that the desert could be made to bloom.
It apparently didn’t work and the post was abandoned early in the first Nixon administration. Tricky Dick had other things to worry about, one assumes.

Shortly after that a Korean War vet named David Valdez took up residence there. He was from a nearby town and had, apparently, been one of the local workers hired to set up the base. When it was empty Valdez happened to be sort of between homes – his ex-wife had thrown him out of his last abode some years back, and his veteran’s disability check was entirely committed to fortified wine, leaving no other discretionary income for housing. But when the Princeton-educated, government-employed, clip-board toting farmer moved out of the caldera, Valdez moved in. He showed up in town periodically after that but his benefits check mostly sat in the bank, as the desert seemed to have burned away his taste for alcohol. He would buy a new pair of boots every once in awhile. Some canned goods. Axle grease for the windmill. But he liked going into town less and less and so his visits got pretty sporadic. And then they stopped altogether. And by that time there was nobody left who really remembered where that caldera had been, anyhow.

So now you know what you need to know to find it. Or wait a few decades until the archive is opened, because the specific location is in there, too.

Since most of us have seen Dylan Finch films since 1998, that last blog entry didn’t really create much of a cliffhanger effect, did it? And if you are even a cursory reader of People or US or Entertainment or Premiere, you knew about him getting lost in the desert. You might not have known how close he came to dying, because – to his credit – he didn’t really milk the episode for as much publicity as he could have.

At any rate, when he woke up he was still hot and thirsty and everything still smelled like sand. But he didn’t think for a moment that he was dead because he didn’t think that Cass Harding would be in Hell with him, putting wet rags on his forehead.

“You’re awake,” she said, looking into his eyes. He tried to speak, failed, tried to cough, had a little more success.

“You need to drink,” she said. She helped him sit up and then she put a tin cup to his lips. He grabbed it with both hands and took a few weak swallows. It felt good running down his throat and expanding coolly in his stomach.

“Much better,” he croaked softly, looking around. He was in a small wooden shack and sunlight filtered through the spaces between the planks. The floor was wooden, too.

“We’ve been trying to give you water through a wet rag,” she said, holding onto the one that she’d been putting on his forehead.

“Where the hell are we?” he said. “And, um, where are my pants?"

“We’re in a canyon called Kerith Ravine,” she said, “and your pants are over there.” She pointed with her head and he saw his pant – the legs cut off just above the knees – draped over a dusty metal box that looked like an army footlocker. The footlocker and the green canvas cot were the only items of furniture in the dim shack.

“No offense, but this is the shittiest hospital room I’ve ever seen.” He took another gulp of water, his hands a little steadier on the cup at this point. It struck him that his right hand felt OK. He stretched it out and peered at it in the shadowy room.

She laughed. “You’re in the only bed for many miles around,” she said, “so relatively speaking, you’re in the lap of luxury here. No roads, no telephone, no radio, no electricity. Haywood says that when you’re strong enough to walk for eight hours, he’ll lead us to the highway where we can probably get a ride.”

“Haywood?”

“The man who’s bed you’re in. The man who saved our lives, too.”

“I was bitten by a snake.”

“He told me. Your arm was red and puffy before, but it looks OK now. How does it feel?”

“OK,” he said, surprised. But there was a pulsing ache in his right leg just above the ankle. A pain he was only then aware of. “But the leg still hurts.” He looked down. There were bruises and an ugly-looking scab where the bone had jutted through the skin. But in the gloom he couldn’t see the large bump where the break was.

As he looked at his leg the shack door opened, letting in a square of bright white daylight that hurt Finch’s eyes. He squinted at the figure who came in and the door closed quickly, quietly behind him.

“You must be Haywood,” Dylan said, proffering his hand and waiting for his eyes to readjust.
There was a pause and the other man hesitantly, clumsily took Finch’s hand and shook it. It was as if, Finch said, he’d never heard of shaking hands before. As if it was something he’d read in a book once a long time ago and wasn’t entirely sure how to execute.

“Dylan Finch,” Finch said into the silence.

The dazzle of daylight faded and Preacher Haywood came into Finch’s view. He was a little under six feet, rather thin, but not in a starved-hermit sort of way; just thin. His hair was long but he was beardless and looked reasonably clean and well-groomed. At the time Finch didn’t think anything of this, but later it struck him as incongruous.

“Preacher Haywood,” the man said, after a slight pause. To Dylan it again seemed as if Haywood had to struggle to remember the words, as if he hadn’t spoken English very recently.

“Thank you so much for… for bailing us out,” Finch said, feeling a little awkward at the way Haywood’s eyes searched his. Haywood stared at him a moment later, and then bent to look at the leg. He ran his callused hands lightly across the skin.

“There are still some bruises,” he said. “Don’t bang it when you get up.”

“I’m not planning on getting up anytime soon,” Finch said, lying back down on the cot. “It hurts like hell. I mean I saw it, before. I saw the bone coming through the skin.”

“Preacher set it while you were still out in the desert,” Cassidy offered.

“That needed a – what’s it called – a – I had a friend who broke his leg. Not nearly as bad. Something Reduction and Fixation,” Finch said. “Pins holding it together. X-rays to make sure it’s positioned right. No offense, Haywood, but the longer I wait to have that operation, the more work they’re going to have to do to get set right. I don’t want it healing crooked. I don’t want a limp.”

“It’s set right,” Preacher said, rather distractedly, tipping the tin cup up to Finch’s mouth. Dylan swallowed reflexively to avoid drowning.

“Are you an orthopedist?” Finch said, when he could breath again. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the sooner I can get this looked at, the better.”

Haywood shrugged. “Soon as you can walk to the road, I’ll show you the way.”

“How far is that?”

Preacher paused on this longer than usual. As if, Finch recalled, he was not only trying to recall the words, but also the concept of time.

“About as long the moon stays up,” he said finally.

“A night?” Finch said, sarcastically. To be fair, there is a difference -- moonrise to moonset can be less than an entire night.

Haywood shrugged again.

“I’m supposed to walk an entire night on a broken leg? Can’t you just walk out yourself and… and…” and he stopped talking. Then gasped. “Oh, hell, I have to…”

Preacher grabbed him under one arm and Cassidy grabbed him under the other and got him two steps out the door before his bladder let go. He didn’t pee much but it burned and it looked dark and cloudy running down his leg.

“Good thing I’m not the… modest sort,” he said, looking away from Cassidy. His good leg wobbled underneath him. He kept his bad leg bent up.

Around him he saw Kerith. It was a bowl set in the mountains, with a small garden plot and a windmill near the shack. Farther from the windmill the desert mingled back in with the green and the mountains around them seemed sere and lifeless. Finch had a sense of concentric circles going from green to brown, radiating out from the spring in the center.

The sky was blue and cloudless and hot.

“How long have you lived out here?” Finch said, as Preacher marched him wordlessly back to the shack.

“Not sure,” Haywood said slowly. “Cass said it was August of 1998. As near as I can tell, I got here in January of 1995.”

“Three and half years? What’s the nearest town?”

Haywood shrugged and eased Dylan back onto the couch.

“You don’t know?”

“Never been there,” Haywood said.

“Where do you go for supplies?”

Haywood said nothing, and Cass laughed. “I already had this conversation with him,” she said. “We’ve been saved by a genuine old-fashioned hermit. Hasn’t talked to another human being in over three years.”

“Horseshit,” Finch snapped.

“Solid food,” Haywood said. “When you’re strong enough, you can leave.”

Finch did suddenly feel exhausted. “Steak and eggs,” he said. “And… orange juice. And a latte. Skim milk.”

With that he fell asleep as if he’d been drugged.

Haywood drank from the tin cup.

“He’s not usually like that,” Harding apologized. Not that she would know. “But… I mean, he’s a movie star.”

Preacher said nothing.

“More water for him?” she said.


Two days earlier: she’d collapsed a hundred yards from the shack, and Preacher had scooped her up and carried her effortlessly to the trough – a 55-gallon drum cut in half, lengthwise. She had tried to tell him about Finch but he didn’t seem to hear her. Just carried her to the steel basin and dumped her in. The water was sun-warmed but clear and she could feel it rehydrating her one pore at a time. He took a crude clay cup from a hook on the nearest leg of the windmill and drew some cooler water from the spout, and helped her drink it. She gulped it greedily and then told him about Finch as the stomach cramps hit her. She struggled and managed to keep from vomiting and when the spasms passed he gave her another cup of water. Then he carried her into the shack, her dress sopping and clinging to her. He deposited her onto the cot in the welcome shade and disappeared. He returned a moment later with a ewer of water – made from the same unglazed red clay of the cup – and put it on the footlocker next to the cot.

“He’s by a tower of rocks,” she wheezed, referring to Finch. Haywood – although she didn’t know that was his name, yet -- turned and walked out without saying a word. It occurred to her that he hadn’t said anything at all the entire time.

If it was a hallucination, she thought, it came with the sweetest, clearest water she’d ever had.
She slept, and was awakened by the sound of a splash outside. It was still daylight, but the sun seeped through the chinks in the shack at a longer, lower angle. She sat and felt lightheaded, took another drink, and stood. She felt weak and thirsty and famished but all-in-all, much better. Her dress was dry, her long, dark hair was dry. How long, she thought, was I asleep? How long would it take me to dry out in this desert air?

She took a few steps toward the door and the man who’d saved her burst into the room with a soaking wet Dylan Finch in his arms. Even though Finch was the same height, and probably 20 pounds heavier, than the long-haired man, he carried the actor as if he were light as a feather.

“How…” she said, trying to decide which question to ask first. “Is he OK? How did you get him back here? Where are we? Who are you?”

The man placed Finch gently on the cot.

“He’ll… be… OK,” the man said, his voice even more halting and uncertain than it would be when Finch spoke to him later. “I… carried him back. You are in a caldera I call Kerith. And my name is Preacher Haywood.”

“You’re a preacher?” she said. She didn’t know why this was the first thing that popped out. Certainly she was more curious about how he’d managed to carry a man weighing 180 pounds across the desert – an expanse of desert that she’d nearly died crossing, unburdened.

There was a long pause. “No,” the man said. “That’s my name.”

She looked over his shoulder. Preacher had pushed up Finch’s pants leg and was running his hand along the black-and-blue expanse of his shin.

“How’s his leg?”

“Bad break,” Preacher said. “I reset it out there while he was still unconscious. Less… screaming that way.” He didn’t look as if he was making a joke.

“What happened to his arm?”

“Snake bite,” Preacher said. He stood. “Take his pants off.”

He came back in with a knife and cut the legs out. “Keep out of the sun,” he said to her. “I’ll bring you some food. Soak these rags and keep his skin moist. Use this bit of cloth to let him drink – keep it saturated, and he’ll suck on it reflexively.”

“How will I know when to stop?”

“When he wakes up, or stops sucking,” Preacher said.

And so the last two days. She nursed Finch, and Haywood seemed to keep to his own schedule – tending the garden, making food, and disappearing entirely for short periods.

“Is he going to be OK?” she said to him after Preacher shook his head “no” in response to her watering question.

“Yes. Leg and hand are fine, kidneys are working. He’s drinking on his own. A little food for strength, he’ll be fine.”

Cassidy was a little nervous still around Haywood. They hadn’t spoken much while nursing Finch. Initially, he said so little she wondered if he had some sort of mental disability. Later, she realized that he only spoke if he felt there was some important and non-obvious piece of information to give her – he would respond to direct questions, tersely, and usually with the most obvious and narrow answers imaginable.

But as time had gone by Haywood had seemed to remember the art of, well, if not conversation, at least speaking to other human beings. She had spent most of the time in the shack, and he had spent most of the time out of it; nights she spent sleeping on the floor with a rag pillow, days she spent keeping Finch as hydrated as possible. He worked in the rather dense and tangled garden mornings and evenings, avoiding the midday heat, and prepared two meals a day, and what he did at night was a mystery to her. She was aware of him sitting on the tiny plank deck in front of the shack – about three feet wide and uncovered, it was exaggerating to call it a porch, although he referred to it as such – when she woke up in the middle of the night the first night. And she was aware of his absence when the same thing happened the next night.
But she’d managed to get some information out of him when their paths crossed. That he was born in 1967. That he’d been there since 1995 without any outside contact. And sometimes – rarely – he spoke on his own. About living in the desert. About tending to his garden. About a growing awareness of being just a small link in a big chain.

Even about cooking. Her first night there he gave her a tamale that was exquisite. He showed her the stones he used as a mortar and pestle. She could see the corn stalks behind him. The twining vines of pumpkins and squash. Bean plants on trellises made of steel rebar, leftover from one of the prior occupants.

He told her his story of arriving at Kerith. An abbreviated version. He said, “I left Chicago with some demons. Decided to go back to San Diego. The closest thing I have to a home town. Catch up with some old friends, you know, try to figure out where things went wrong. Hitchhiked my way to a rest stop in Nevada and decided, what the hell, I’d take a little hike in the desert. Couple days later and I woke up face-down in about two inches of water in the trough. Leaky pipe. Saved my life. Of course I fixed it later. Probably shouldn’t have. Anyhow I got the hand-pump working – the windmill was nearly frozen – and went into the shack and found the previous owner. Been dead awhile, I guess. A few years. Pretty well mummified by the desert.” He stated this very matter-of-factly. Cassidy recalled that she had slept on that cot – the cot upon which, apparently, some guy had died, the cot upon which his remains had dry-rotted for a couple of years – and had a strong urge to go writhe in the sand until the cooties got off of her.

“At any rate,” he said, “there were some canned goods. All gone now, but enough to keep my alive then. And lots of seeds. And a garden gone wild, pretty parched. At one point there was some sort of drip-irrigation system to keep everything alive, which probably worked until the windmill seized up. I strip it down and lube it pretty good every six months or so, but I imagine that it ran for a year or two after the last guy died.”

“Lube it with what?”

“That other shed on the other side of the garden has all kinds of stuff. Most of it government issue, but not all of it. The axle grease is plain old Mobil, but none of the cans are dated. I think the last person here probably had a little more contact with the outside world than I do. Maybe not, because nobody came looking for him when he died... but I think he was getting supplies from somewhere.”

There was more. About living in the desert. About feeling connected to the natural world, and at the same time being acutely aware of his intellect – of self-awareness setting him apart qualitatively from everything around him, even as he felt so physically interconnected with it. I can’t tell you, he said, why the corn grows, or how. It is a sort of natural miracle. But the corn wouldn’t be planted at all if I wasn’t here to do it. It wouldn’t get the water it needs to sprout if I didn’t direct it there. When it sprouts and produces kernels of its own its genetic survival is not ensured unless I agree to help – and the trade-off is, I will eat most of the kernels it produces. So do I exist because of the corn? Does the corn exist because of me? Both. But I am aware of this. The corn isn’t.

The next morning Finch awoke with the sunrise, just as Cassidy did. She brought him a thin corn gruel.

It wasn’t bad, Dylan had to admit. The gruel, that is. There were little bits of fire-roasted squash in it, and salt, and some sort of desert sorrel. Plus, he said to Harding, I am so damn hungry that I am ready to start eating the cot.

But within 30 minutes he has Cassidy and Haywood help him hobble to the little lean-to outhouse a couple hundred feet from the house.

Haywood insisted that Finch’s leg was fine. Finch just needed food and water for a couple of days to get his strength back. Finch disagreed. His leg had been badly broken and he needed professional medical help. Haywood didn’t argue with him. But he didn’t give in, either. Just walked away. Came back with a bent piece of rebar that was left from the windmill construction. “Cane,” he said. “Use it, if you want.”

Finch spent his first awake-day inside the shack. Gruel for breakfast, panbread for lunch, some sort of tamale for dinner. He was convinced that it wasn’t actually delicious. That its deliciousness was an illusion caused by his hunger.

Harding was a little more accepting. “This guy,” she said, “is like the hermit Wolfgang Puck. He’s got a cast iron skillet, a big stew pot, and his garden. That’s it. I don’t know how he does it. But everything he makes has been delicious.”

“He’s full of shit,” Finch opined as he finished dinner. “There is salt in that. And some sort of seasoning. Where does he get salt unless he goes into town? Leftover salt from three years ago?”

“Salt lick in the hills, over there,” Haywood said. They hadn’t known he could hear them. “All natural. Got a little potassium in it, I suspect.”

He sat down on the narrow deck with them outside the shack.

“So how do you stay out here for three and a half years without getting completely nuts?” Finch said, rather accusingly. He figured if he was obnoxious enough, Haywood would go get help just to be rid of him.

“Do you know if you’re nuts?” Haywood countered. “If I was really nuts, I probably wouldn’t realize it. For all I know, you two are hallucinations.”

Finch and Harding looked at each other nervously and Preacher laughed. It was the first time either of them had heard it, a full, deep, cheerful laugh. Rather infectious; Cassidy laughed with him, and even Finch smiled.

“The truth is that I was worried about that when I got here, too,” Haywood said. “I thought about the fact that there are two types of hermits – the ones who get wiser and the ones who get crazy. I wasn’t so much searching for wisdom as I was trying to avoid psychosis. And it occurred to me that the ones who didn’t go nuts had one thing in common, which was a very disciplined, tightly scheduled approach to each day. You know, latins, matins, vespers, nones – the religious hermits worked hard, had prayers at regular hours, adhered to a strict rule. And it seemed to help them keep from getting nuts. At least I thought it did.”

“Are you religious?” Finch said. “I thought you said Preacher was just your name.”

“No, I’m not particularly religious,” Haywood said. “But I admired that discipline. So I adopted my own schedule. Gardening, washing, cooking, things like that. And time for meditation during the day. I tried to stick to the schedule and it helped. It helped keep me focused on the tasks at hand and… and it didn’t keep the demons at bay so much as it forced them to approach in single file. Where I had a better chance against them.”

Finch wasn’t sure they were all defeated. Haywood seemed more than a little weird.
The next afternoon he opened the footlocker and found Haywood’s wallet. There was a dust outline around it. Inside was an expired Florida driver’s license and $120 in small bills. None of them were dated later than 1993.

No photos. An expired insurance card from the federal government.

Almost against his will he started to be convinced.

When Preacher said they would be walking out to the road in two days neither of them believed him, because Finch was still leaning heavily on the cane. And both Finch and Harding remembered the desert too vividly. Feared it too much, still.

But the night he said that, he and Harding sat up talking until the moon was high overhead, and whatever they spoke about changed her mind. When Finch awoke and came outside he found Cass wandering around the entire valley in a sort of euphoric daze that he found more than a little unsettling.

“Did she find some peyote or something?” Finch asked, as he and Haywood ate a breakfast of beans and corn tortillas.

“It’s an epiphany,” Haywood said, not paying much attention to her. “I’m going to take the windmill down and service it. It’s a few weeks ahead of schedule but it should be done before I go.”

“You can do it when you get back. We don’t want to mess up your sanity-saving schedule.”

There was a pause.

“I might not come back,” he said. “It’s time. It’s time to go.”

Finch didn't know how to respond to that. So he looked out across the caldera. Cassidy walked languidly between the cornstalks, letting her fingers trail upon the leaves. They could hear her laughing.

“Seriously, what’s wrong with her?”

“It’s an epiphany,” Haywood repeated. “A sudden awareness of the presence of the Divine. She doesn’t have that one-ness, yet, but she can sense that it’s nearby. All around her. It’s good. She’s not ready to understand that she’s it, too.”

“What the hell are you babbling about?” Finch said.

Haywood laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “Just babbling.”

He went out into the garden while the morning sun was still manageable and gently hoed away weeds and let the irrigation tubes drip small amounts of water onto the plants before the scorching sun was high enough to evaporate it instantly. Finch sat there in front of the shack looking at them both suspiciously. I think, he thought, that I need to get better fast, or Cassidy will be as crazy as he is.

Finch’s classical education was… well, lacking. For a graduate of Akron’s public school system it wasn’t too bad, I suppose, but it wasn’t good enough for him to instantly think of the lotus-eaters. He thought, instead, wasn’t there that story, about that Greek guy, where they ate something and wanted to stay on the desert island?

Close enough.

Cassidy sat down next to him with a beatific smile.

“What are you so delighted about?” Finch asked her.

“Everything,” she said. “Let me tell you, I don’t know if it was the near-death experience, or the fresh air, or the healthy diet, but I am seeing things a lot more clearly now.”

“I can tell,” Finch said. “Haywood thinks you can see God.”

“No,” she said, “but I can feel Him holding me at the moment. I mean… I mean look. Look.” She pointed at what seemed to be random spots around the caldera.

“I think your sunstroke has returned,” Finch said.

In the end the best she could explain it is this:

“Preacher says,” she said, “that when you realize that there is no distinction between the Divine and the non-Divine, then you realize that your every action should be an act of worship. And right after he said it I took a breath and then suddenly all this was obvious.”

I double-checked this. Dylan Finch distinctly remembers that she told him that. She remembers telling him that, and remembers that Preacher told her that. The semi-official motto of the Worshipers is “let every act be an act of worship,” and as near as I can figure, that started with a throw-away line he laid on Cassidy Harding when she was still under the effects of dehydration and sunstroke back in 1998.

For what it’s worth, I guess this makes Cassidy Harding was the first Worshipper. Before anyone called it that.

Finch was the second, of course. Much more reluctantly.

Part Forty Two

In Las Vegas, Nevada, in August of 1998, there was a lavish party to mark the premiere of a big-budget heist picture.

One of the people there was Dylan Finch. He had finished shooting a big-budget thriller of his own, called Ravens. Ever seen it? Sucks. But in August of 1998 nobody knew that yet. Well, Finch might have suspected, but he was paid handsomely to appear in the picture so he didn’t admit that it sucked. Plus, it was still in editing at the time of the party, so one could always argue that he didn’t yet know it sucked.

(Right. The Magnificent Ambersons was ruined in editing. Ravens was doomed from the beginning.)

At any rate, appearing at film premieres was a sort of pre-promotional effort on behalf of Ravens. He wasn’t officially plugging the film yet. It was scheduled for release the day after Thanksgiving. He was just sort of… reminding people that he existed. It had been a year since he was named one of People’s Sexiest and almost two years since his last picture. Of course it had been five years since he did work he could be proud of, but that’s another story entirely.

I’m an alcoholic ex-history professor, not a film critic. What the hell do I know?

At any rate, Finch went to be photographed and he went to get out of LA. And he went to get away from his ever-swelling entourage. He only told two people where he was going – his manager and his personal assistant. And he swore them both to secrecy, saying, if anybody I know shows up at this thing, I will know you told, and you might as well not even be here when I get back.

He drove.

It takes about four and a half hours to get from Malibu to Las Vegas. The easiest part is also the longest, that big stretch of I-15. Finch noticed a little hesitation in his Range Rover when he was moving out of traffic heading east-north-east on the highway. It struck him then that it was a bit absurd for him to have four cars. He thought that he might get rid of everything but the Porsche when he got back. Movie star with the Carrera, he thought. What a cliché. But then again so was the SUV and the entourage. Those he would gladly give up. The Porsche… he liked driving the Porsche too much.

He arrived. Got his picture taken. No starlet on his arm, this time.

At the party – before Finch’s fashionably late entrance – was a woman named Cassidy Harding. She was there on time – which is to say, early – because she didn’t know any better. She was there, period, because she had done some work for the studio, designing specialized software, and they were so happy with her work that they offered her the trip and an invitation to the premiere.

She knew nothing at all about the film, and didn’t care to.

It was unlike her to be at a party in Vegas wearing a little black dress. All three of those things were unlike her – party, Vegas, dress. She worked too hard, she never went away (her home and office were in San Francisco), she favored jeans and tee-shirts.

She was petite and very pretty with fair skin from her Irish father and jet-black hair and eyes from her Argentine mother. She was 28 and in 1998 (as now), a dot-com millionaire. Several times over. Despite the fact that she had an annoying habit of mostly refusing to work for stock options, and when she did accept them, she almost always turned around and sold them within a few months.

Finch saw her early. She pretended she didn’t recognize him. Then she allowed that she might have seen Dogs Of War, a film he’s made five years earlier, the one that put him on the map, the last real bit of acting he did before doing three successive high-paying “blow things up” films. Including Ravens.

He pretended to understand her when she said she designed user interfaces for software applications. Which was sort of like saying that Bobby Orr ice-skated.

Anyhow they talked and they flirted and she made him work harder than he usually had to, which he appreciated.

She knew that he would.

And it turned out that they both like blues music, or at least she did and he was willing to fudge it a little bit, and so around midnight they took it into their heads to leave the party and hop in his car and drive all the way to Bakersfield, California, to see BB King.

All the while silently patting themselves on the back for being wild and impetuous and free. Finch was just glad to finally be by himself, and was all the more determined to purge himself of a few hangers-on when he got back.

Harding just wanted a little more time before deciding if she wanted to sleep with him or not.

They stopped at a Circle K and bought bottled water and she got a Snickers bar. And Finch asked the night clerk for “back country” directions into California. He felt self-conscious about the fact that he’d driven a car that got 10 miles to the gallon from Malibu to Vegas. She didn’t say anything but he thought that she thought that…

Dylan Finch, the actor, the movie star, had done a lot of scenes that were rewritten even as the cameras were being positioned. And he paid careful attention to the directions the night clerk gave him. So I don’t think he got the directions wrong. I think the night clerk at the Circle K on Boulder and Sahara Avenue was just an idiot.

But regardless, country highways turned into country roads turned into dirt roads turned into mining access roads turned into, by the time the sun came up, a broad expanse of arid wasteland marked by the occasional tire track. The occasional skinny tire-track of an ATV, not even genuine wheel-ruts.

They both knew he was lost.

Just before noon, he admitted it. “I’ll just follow the GPS west until we find a highway, or a fence, or a building,” he said.

The Foo Fighters were in the CD player. She took another pull on her bottle of water, smiled, tapped her fingers to the music, said nothing. She thought to herself “too bad they don’t put longitude and latitude on Texaco roadmaps,” but she said nothing.

Just after noon, as the big SUV lumbered down an incline, the engine suddenly revved higher while the vehicle slowed down. Finch pushed down on the gas pedal and the engine roared but the car continued to freewheel. They drifted toward the bottom of the hill.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He frowned at the dashboard. “Don’t know,” he said. “Think it’s the transmission. The engine’s running but the wheels aren’t getting any power." He thought back to that little hesitation he’d felt in the car when pulling out of traffic on I-15 earlier.

They rolled to a stop. He downshifted into both low settings, turned off the four wheel drive – nothing.

“Put it in reverse,” she said. “My father used to have an old truck and when the transmission got so bad we couldn’t climb hills anymore, he used to put the thing in reverse to get going.”

Finch moved the gearshift to “R” and stepped on the gas gingerly. The wheels engaged for perhaps two revolutions and then stopped, and the engine revved higher again.

They sat, motionless, and watched the shimmer of the midday heat bounce off the hard-pack around them.

“Now what?” she said.

“Now we use the cell phone and the GPS and get someone out here,” he said. He took out his cell phone.

“I can’t get a signal,” she said, staring at hers. His was to his ear. “Anything?” she asked.

After a second or two he shook his head. He was just the kind of person who would try it even when it showed no signal. She, on the other hand, was the kind of person who wouldn’t even try if the display showed no signal.

Incongruously and utterly inappropriately, it was at that moment she realized she wasn’t going to sleep with him, no matter how soon they were picked up.

“I’m going to try the top of that hill,” he said, gesturing with his head to the top of the incline they’d just rolled down.

“Take mine, try them both,” she said, handing him her cell.

He left the engine running and was gone longer than she would have guessed. Long enough that she got nervous and climbed out on the running board and squinted up to see him.

Jesus, it was hot.

When he made it back she said, “well?”

“Nothing,” he said. They sat in silence for another moment.

“So now what,” he said to her.

She liked the fact that he asked her opinion. Not that she wouldn’t have given it anyhow.

“So we sit here with the AC running and wait for someone to come along. There were tire tracks not far back. If nobody’s here before it gets dark, we put out your emergency flares. They should show pretty far from the top of the hill, out here in the desert.”

“No flares,” he said. “I had a flat tire on the freeway a couple of weeks ago.” It was more like six months ago. He’d just never bothered to replace them.

The Gin Blossoms were playing on the CD player.

“Well, then, when it gets dark we walk out of here. Like you said, if we walk in a straight line we’re bound to hit something sooner or later.”

He looked over at her in her little black dress and fuck-me pumps.

“How far can civilization be?” she said, reading his mind.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said. “You might want to save the last of that water.”

“Nope,” she said. “So long as I don’t drink so much I have to pee. Hydrated is hydrated. I’d rather carry it inside me than in the bottle.”

Later, before the sun had dipped below the horizon, she went into the back of the SUV and pulled out the little tool-kit and used a screwdriver to pry the heels off of the shoes. They weren’t really her style anyhow. Her friend and office manager Desiree had helped her pick them out. While she was back there she picked up a baseball cap.

“Ravens,” she read aloud. “Is this from the football team?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a film I just finished.”

“What’s it about?” she asked, mostly because the silence was unbearable.

“There’s this… secret security force that works for the UN,” he said, “and we have to stop a plot to blow up the UN buildings in New York and The Hague. And, um, Geneva.”

“That must have been fun, working in Europe,” she said.

He shrugged. “Sure.” He hadn’t had a lot of time to be a tourist. Short shooting schedule.

“Let me guess,” she said, “it turns out there’s a traitor in your midst.” She laughed and he glowered at her. He hadn’t even read the script in advance. Big-name action director and big-time paycheck. And his name above the title.

“It must be hard,” she said, trying to make amends, “to have to co-star with explosions all the time.”

“I co-star with Mira Sorvino in this one,” he said, snapping a bit more than he’d intended.

“No,” she said, “I meant that as a compliment. I mean…”

“Most of the time I’m not even there when stuff blows up,” he admitted. “I have to spend a lot of time throwing myself through the air and landing on mats. But sometimes I’m there when it happens. It takes a really long time to set it all up.”

She finished prying off the heels on the shoes. “How are we doing for gas?”

“It will run out right around the same time as nightfall,” he said, looking at the gauge.

“Even with the AC going it’s hot as hell in here,” she said. “Good thing it was just the transmission.”

“I guess,” he said.

He felt like it was his fault. Ignoring the bad transmission. Deciding to drive across the desert. No flares.

She never really thought that. Even when things got bad she didn’t blame him. It was just an accident. Accidents happened.

It got dark and the engine sputtered out and they got out of the truck wordlessly. The water was gone by then.

“Which way?” she said when they met in front of the ticking grille. It was still hot as hell – the air was cooler but there was still a lot of warmth coming up from the desert floor.

“We’re pointing straight west,” he said. “We know it’s too damn far to go back the way we came. Might as well keep going. There might be a Howard Johnson’s right on the other side of the horizon.”

“Might be,” she admitted. She looked to her right. “That’s the Big Dipper,” she said. “That’s the north star. Keep it right there in the sky.”

He looked at where she was pointing, and then looked at her. A little surprised. A little impressed. He wrote a note on a scrap of paper and turned the headlights on. “Just in case,” he said.

At first, things went well. They were both in pretty good shape. They were really inappropriately dressed, of course. Removing the heels from those sandals hadn’t made them any more comfortable. The little black dress didn’t have much fabric but it wasn’t really meant for hiking. And he was wearing long pants and Gucci loafers. Again, not optimal hiking gear.

So the night wore on and they both grew exhausted and sore and they couldn’t see the truck anymore. Whether it was from distance or a dead battery, they didn’t know.

When they got to the pile of rocks it was a welcome relief from the monotonous terrain. They were dimly aware of mountains ahead and to the right but they didn’t seem to be getting much closer despite a lot of walking. The pile of rocks told them that they were actually making progress, that the landscape could and would change. The pile of rocks gave them a little hope.

“Let’s take a break,” he said, and she was happy to agree. They squatted and rested and then he straightened and began to climb the rocks.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“If there’s anything ahead – anything man-made – I might be able to see it if I get a little higher,” he said.

She looked at the rocks doubtfully. “Be careful,” she said, “there could be rattlesnakes in there.”

He looked down at her. “Thanks,” he said, after a moment. “I wasn’t nervous enough.”

He kept on climbing and then something shifted – his foot? A rock? Whatever it was, he pitched backwards off the pile, not very far, just three or four feet, and came down hard on his left leg, which broke with an audible pop.

He screamed and clutched at it as he rolled onto his side, as she raced over to him.

For a moment he couldn’t say anything, just held his leg about two inches above the ankle and writhed, his forehead pressed into the grit and sand.

“Shit,” he panted when he could. He felt hot and cold at once, clammy and nauseous. He breathed hard through his mouth and concentrated on not throwing up. Can’t lose the water, he thought to himself fiercely. Can’t lose the water.

“Let me see,” Cass said, but didn’t try to touch him until he stopped writhing, sat upright, and nodded his OK.

She eased his pant leg up gingerly. The moon was fairly bright. Bright enough that she could see a large bulge in the lower part of his shin, an extra joint in his tibia that hadn’t been there before.

“Shit,” he said again, rocking slightly. “It’s broken, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think so.”

“Oh, Christ it hurts,” he said. He looked down at it. “And I tore my pants.” She laughed despite herself. He chuckled, too, and then winced as even that slight vibration made the leg hurt worse.

“This isn’t funny,” she said. “How are we going to walk out of here now?”

“We aren’t,” he said. “You are. This is the only damn landmark for ten miles. You’ll be able to find me again. Go get help and come back for me. I’ll be OK.”

“I don’t like leaving you here,” she said.

“You don’t have any choice. The best hope for both of us is for you to keep walking until you find somebody. Because if we’re still out here when it gets hot again, we’re both screwed.”

He was right.

“Take my shoes and socks,” he said.

“What?”

“Take my shoes and socks. The socks, at least, will help your feet some. Maybe the shoes. I’ve got little feet. They’ll still be too big but you can decide if they’re better than those sandals you’re wearing.”

It made sense. She put on his socks and stepped into his shoes. They were way too big. But not as uncomfortable as the pumps.

“Now get going,” he said, hissing a little around the pain. “I thought I saw something straight west from here. We’re going in the right direction.” That was a lie. She knew it, and didn’t press him on what he saw.

“I promise I’ll get back here,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I’m too famous to die in the desert. So get going. If someone happens along, I’ll know to send them straight west. So don’t change directions.”

“I won’t,” she said. She glanced up at the North Star, looked at him again, and set out.

Finch dragged himself over to the rocks and leaned against them and tried to focus on the pain shooting up his leg. It was a distraction from the thought that he was likely to die alone in the desert, famous or not.

Dehydrated, terrified, exhausted, and slipping in and out of shock from the injury, somehow he managed to sleep when he could no longer see her moonlit form receding away from him. And he had no idea what time it was when he screamed himself into wakefulness, hurling his body away from the rocks and swinging his hand away from the fire that shot through it.

Rattlesnakes are reptiles. They can’t control their body heat in the desert. So they hunt at dusk and at dawn, and look for rocky, shady places that can protect them from the sun during the day, and that offer some residual heat during the night. They look for places like that pile of rocks. The surprising thing is not that Finch was bitten as he slept there. It was that it took him that long to be bitten.

As he rolled away from the stones he heard the rattling, too late, and his leg shot a fire up that touched his belly and the little bit of moisture left in him stained the front of his pants. The bone that had bulged against his skin broke through with this frenetic movement and he could do nothing but scream wordlessly, almost soundlessly, paralyzed by the agony in his left hand and left leg.

Calm, he told himself. Calm. You get scared, your pulse races, your blood pressure goes up, you just spread that venom through your system faster. Lie still. Still. You’re motionless. It doesn’t hurt.

It was the best bit of method acting he’d done in a long time. But he convinced himself, at least enough that he could feel his pulse rate slow and the pain seemed to float outside his body.

He lay on his side on the hard-packed earth, motionless, and wondered where the snake was.

Not all that far away -- not all that far, considering how long she’d been walking, and how tired she was – Cass Harding shuffled in a line that was surprisingly straight and true west. She wondered, not for the first time, if splitting up had been a mistake. If she should have stayed with him. If he got picked up, of course, he would tell them which way she had gone. So she had to stay straight west. If he didn’t get picked up, then it was up to her to save them both. But if he was unconscious when someone found him, he wouldn’t be able to tell them which way she went. Or that someone had even been with him. Nobody knew that they’d left together. Not that she could think of. Should she have stayed with him?

This looped thinking was interrupted by her first fall. The oversized loafer caught on something and she fell straight forward and landed on her face.

For a moment she lay there, stunned, tired, thirsty. She heard her father’s voice in her ear. “Get up, Cassidy,” he said. It was just like when she was a kid, after her mom died, when her father would get her up for school. “Get up, Cassidy.” It was a gentle voice but one that did not allow for defiance.

She got up and continued walking. Were the mountains a little closer? The mountains looked a little closer.

Right when the sun came up she fell the second time. The shadow she cast, with the sun at her back just peeping over the horizon, made the ground look uneven and she took a false step and she fell again.

This time her mother was there. “Just get some rest,” her mother said.

Cass struggled to her feet. “You’ve been dead for 15 years,” she muttered.

“You know I’m an hallucination,” her mother said. Or the voice said. She didn’t actually see her mother. Just heard her, just to her left. But she resisted the urge to turn her head.

“Yes,” Harding said aloud, through clenched teeth.

“So why go and ruin it with all of this, this… objectivity?” her mother said. Cass didn’t answer and there was no follow-up from her mother.

The mountains were definitely closer. Jesus, she was thirsty. She knew she was bleeding, her knees and palms and forehead, from the falls. The sun was already fierce and it wasn’t completely above the horizon yet.

What if they’d found Dylan, but he wasn’t able to speak?

No, it was just a broken leg. That doesn’t render you mute.

The sun went higher and she grew hotter and she could feel her skin reddening. She tried not to think about water. For some reason oranges were stuck in her head. A cool, sweet, perfectly ripe orange. The flesh beneath her teeth. The juice on her tongue. That acrid smell when her fingernails broke through the peel.

She was thinking about oranges when she came to the cliff wall. Doddering, blank-eyed, just a few stages shy of heat-stroke, she came to the cliff wall like a zombie, as if she walked simply because she’d forgotten to stop.

But the wall stopped her. It was sheer and rose sharply perpendicular to the desert floor, and stretched north and south as far as she could see in either direction. She stood in front of it, just a few feet away, and blinked at it stupidly. A wall. How could there be a wall in the middle of the desert? She looked up and saw that she’d reached the edge of the mountains, reached them at a point where there were no foothills and gradual slopes but just this giant upthrusting of rock.

A wall.

She collapsed.

When the sun came up Finch awoke. His throat was dry and sore. His leg was a throbbing horror. His hand was numb and when he looked at it he saw that it was swollen and purple and that the swelling was reaching toward his elbow.

And yet it was the sun that awakened him. It touched one bare foot with an almost-gentle, almost warm probe and he saw the red lip of it above the horizon and he was afraid.

Shock? He thought. Dehydration? Snakebite? No, the sun will kill you quicker than those other things. He watched the sun rise, watched his shadow move a little.

Might as well make a race of it, he thought. Dying of snakebite seems somehow a little more… fitting than dying of thirst or shock or sunstroke. Yes, I think I should work to let snake venom win the contest. Then that fucking snake will try to eat me and choke and die.

He tried to say something out loud but couldn’t. Too dry. He worked his mouth a few times and then settled for glaring at the rock pile. Hear that, fucking snake? Eat me.

With an inaudible groan he tried to use his right arm and leg to drag himself into the shade of the rocks. Every pebble, every grain of sand sent exquisite bolts of pain shooting up his leg and from his arm across his shoulders. It seemed as though he’d dragged himself a hundred yards by the time he got into the shade, but when he looked back across the sand he saw that it had only been six feet or so.

Fuck you, snake, he thought, settling in close to the rocks. We’re just going to have to share.

The sun rose up behind him.

Thirst – a distant third behind the pain in his leg and the pain in his arm – began to move up in the standings and before too long it stood proudly in first place. To distract himself from that desire he stared at his arm and was disappointed when he could see no further progress from the snake venom. Fucking snake, he thought again. Wasted all your venom on some rabbit before you hit me. Could’ve had a movie star for dinner. Wasted it on some rabbit. Come here and finish the job.

The sun was almost directly overhead when he finally understood, really understood, that he was going to die. He’d told himself before that he was going to die but some part of him hadn’t really believed it. Hadn’t quite accepted it. But now it was right there. Tomorrow the sun would rise, and he wouldn’t see it. Everywhere on earth people would go on living their lives, his friends and family would get up and do things and new movies would come out and someone else would drive his Porsche and there would be, be, current events, people would become President and just life, life would go on and he wouldn’t be there. It would go on without him.

He felt utterly insignificant. Had he the moisture, tears would have flowed. It was so… unfair. Unfair. That everything would continue just fine without him. Maybe he would be remembered for Dogs of War. And the fact that he died would sell a few more tickets to Ravens. But the fact that there would be a Ravens premiere after he died…

Selfishness, he realized. That was really it. The urge to live, fighting death – it was just self-centeredness. It was an inability to accept the fact that the sun would continue to rise and set long after you were dust.

When you freeze to death, he recalled, you stopped feeling cold as you drifted off to sleep. Maybe he would stop feeling thirsty.

It was the last thing he thought.

On the ground in front of the cliff wall Cass heard her parents arguing.

Let her sleep, her mother said.

It’s time for school, her father replied.

What difference does that make? She’s going to be dead soon.

She has perfect attendance, her father sputtered. Why should she throw that away? She made a commitment to finishing this. No excuses.

“Perfect attendance” she whispered, and opened her eyes, and got to her knees, and stood, weakly, tottering.

Her parents were nowhere to be found.

She stood there for a moment, her feet spread wide apart for balance, her eyes closed, until things stopped spinning. Then she looked at the cliff wall. North, or south?

She turned north, thinking, it’s cooler up north.

After about a hundred yards she went down again. She lay on her side, facing the cliff, her eyes closed, waiting for her father to get her up again. But she heard nothing. Felt nothing. Just a tiny puff on her face, the hint of a breeze. And then a faint, faint squeak of metal.

Her eyes snapped open. A breeze from the cliff? A metallic squeak? She listened intently but didn’t hear anything else. Felt no more breeze. Her eyes scoured the cliff wall in front of her and then she saw it pop into view, like one of those 3D images that she’d gone cross-eyed trying to make out.

An opening. A path. Maybe three or four feet across. Camouflaged perfectly by the coloring of the rocks and the angle of the sun… an opening all but invisible unless viewed at exactly the right angle.

When she tried to stand she found that she was now too weak to do it at first. Even the idea of a passage through, the squeak of metal that said “humans,” the breeze – her arms and legs trembled and wobbled and would not lift her up. She had to crawl to the opening and then grabbed hold of the rocks and pulled herself up.

She took a step inside. There was a word painted in something dark on a rock. Kerith. It meant nothing to her. She staggered onward, leaning on the rocks for support, and followed the thin defile through the cliff wall and navigated a dogleg and then the rocks on either side of her were gone and she was standing in a small box canyon, one that seemed green to her eyes grown used to the barren brown waste of the desert. And ahead of her was a deeper, fuller green, and she heard the metallic squeak again. Her eyes focused on the windmill and she staggered toward it, and as she fell for the last time she became aware of a figure rushing toward her very fast.