SPIN

After a few moments I reached out and pushed the buzzer again.

The voice returned. "What part of that didn't you understand?"

I said, "I can pay cash if it makes a difference. I won't quibble about the price."

"No sale. Sorry, partner."

"Okay, hang on… look, I can sleep in the car, but would it be all right if I pulled in just to get a little protection? Maybe park around back where I can't be seen from the road?"

Longer pause. I listened to a trumpet chase a snare drum. The song was naggingly familiar.

"Sorry. Not tonight. Please move along."

More silence. More minutes passed. A cricket sawed away in the little palm and pea-gravel oasis in front of the motel. I pushed the buzzer again.

The proprietor came back quickly. "I gotta tell you, we're armed and slightly pissed off in here. It would be better if you just hit the road."

"'Harlem Air Shaft,'" I said.

"Excuse me?"

"The song you're playing. Ellington, right? 'Harlem Air Shaft.' Sounds like his fifties band."

Another long pause, though the speaker was still live. I was almost certain I was right, though I hadn't heard the Duke Ellington tune for years.

Then the music stopped, the thin thread of it cut off in mid-beat. "Anybody else in that car with you?"

I rolled the window down and switched on the overhead light. The camera pa

"All right," he said. "Okay. Tell me who plays trumpet on that cut and I'll spring the gate."

Trumpet? When I thought of Duke Ellington's midfifties band I thought of Paul Gonsalvez, but Gonsalvez played sax. There had been a handful of trumpeters. Cat Anderson? Willie Cook? It had been too long.

"Ray Nance," I said.

"Nope. Clark Terry. But I guess you can come in anyway."

* * * * *

The owner came out to meet me when I pulled up in front of the lobby. He was a tall man, maybe forty, in jeans and a loose plaid shirt. He looked me over carefully.

"No offense," he said, "but the first time this happened—" He gestured at the sky, the flicker that turned his skin yellow and the stucco walls a sickly ocher. "Well, when they closed the border at Blythe I had people fighting for rooms. I mean literally fighting. Couple guys pulled weapons on me, right there where you're standing. Any money I made that night I paid for twice over in maintenance. People drinking in the rooms, puking, tearing the shit out of tilings. It was even worse up on ten. Night clerk at the Days I

"And play Duke," I said.

He smiled. We went inside so I could register. "Duke," he said, "or Pops, or Diz. Miles if I'm in the mood for it." The true fan's first-name intimacy with the dead. "Nothing after about 1965." The lobby was a bleakly lit and generically carpeted room done up in ancient western motifs, but through a door to the proprietor's i

"Dr. Dupree," he said, putting out his hand. "I'm Allen Fulton. Are you headed into Arizona?"

I told him I'd been bounced off the Interstate down by the border.

"I'm not sure you'll do any better on ten. Nights like this it seems like everybody in Los Angeles wants to move east. Like the flicker's some kind of earthquake or tidal wave."

"I'll be back on the road before long."

He handed me a key. "Get a little sleep. Always good advice."

"The card's okay? If you want cash—"

"Card's good as cash as long the world doesn't end. And if it does I don't suppose I'll have time to regret it."

He laughed. I tried to smile.

Ten minutes later I was lying fully clothed on a hard bed in a room that smelled of potpourri-scented antiseptic and too-damp air-conditioning, wondering whether I should have stayed on the road. I put the phone at the bedside and closed my eyes and slept without hesitation.

* * * * *

And woke less than an hour later, alert without knowing why.

I sat up and sca

The flicker had stopped.

Which should have made it easier to sleep, this gentler darkness, but I knew in the way one knows such things that sleep had become impossible. I had corralled it for a brief time but now it had jumped the fence, and there was no use pretending otherwise.

I made coffee in the little courtesy percolator and drank a cup. Half an hour later I checked my watch again. Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity. Might as well shower and get back on the road.

I dressed and walked down the silent concrete walkway to the motel lobby, expecting to drop the key in a mail slot; but

Fulton, the owner, was still awake, television light pulsing from his back room. He put his head out when he heard me rattle the door.

He looked peculiar. A little drunk, maybe a little stoned. He blinked at me until he recognized me. "Dr. Dupree," he said.

"Sorry to bother you again. I need to get back on the road. Thank you for your hospitality, though."

"No need to explain," he said. "I wish you the best of luck. Hope you get somewhere before dawn."

"I hope so, too."

"Me, I'm just watching it on television."

"Oh?"

Suddenly I wasn't sure what he was talking about.

"With the sound turned down. I don't want to wake Jody. Did I mention Jody? My daughter. She's ten. Her mom lives in La Jolla with a furniture repairman. Jody spends the summers with me. Out here in the desert, what a fate, huh?"

"Yeah, well—"

"But I don't want to wake her." He looked suddenly somber. "Is that wrong? Just to let her sleep through it? Or as long as she can? Or maybe I should wake her up. Come to think of it, she's never seen 'em. Ten years old. Never seen 'em. I guess this is her last chance."

"Sorry, I'm not sure I understand—"

"They're different, though. They're not the way I remember. Not that I was ever any kind of expert… but in the old days, if you spent enough nights out here, you'd kind of get familiar with 'em."

"Familiar with what?"

He blinked. "The stars," he said.

* * * * *

We went out by the empty swimming pool to look at the sky.

The pool hadn't been filled for a long time. Dust and sand had duned at the bottom of it, and someone had tagged the walls with ballooning purple graffiti. Wind rattled a steel sign (no lifeguard on duty) against the links of the fence. The wind was warm and from the east.

The stars.

"See?" he said. "Different. I don't see any of the old constellations. Everything looks kind of… scattered."

A few billion years will do that. Everything ages, even the sky; everything tends toward maximum entropy, disorder, randomness. The galaxy in which we live had been racked by invisible violence on a great scale over the last three billion years, had swirled its contents together with a smaller satellite galaxy (M41 in the old catalogs) until the stars were spread across the sky in a meaningless sprawl. It was like looking at the rude hand of time.

Fulton said, "You okay there, Dr. Dupree? Maybe you ought to sit down."

Too numb to stand, yes. I sat on the rubberized concrete with my feet dangling into the shallow-end declivity of the pool, still staring up. I had never seen anything as beautiful or as terrifying.

"Only a few hours before sunrise," Fulton said mournfully.

Here. Farmer east, somewhere over the Atlantic, the sun must already have breached the horizon. I wanted to ask him about that, but I was interrupted by a small voice from the shadows near the lobby door. "Dad? I could hear you talking." That would be Jody, the daughter. She took a tentative step closer. She was wearing white pajamas and a pair of unlaced sneakers to protect her feet. She had a broad, plain-but-pretty face and sleepy eyes.