PART 1: THE END OF THE WORLD

      1. Chan gets a little lost
Afternoon. Out past hundreds of miles of natural nothing, under a blistering summer sun, long past the point Palm Springs faded into Coachella and Coachella faded into Mecca, a Crown Vic rolled to a stop on the side of the 111, two miles outside a place called Bombay Beach. It was out of gas.

Dr. Roofman leaned his head out the passenger side window, taking in the arid air with eager breath, then pitched his weight forward, and landed with all four paws on the ground. On the other side of the Crown Vic, a man no older than twenty-five stepped out of the driver’s side and sniffed the air, thinking he might’ve gotten a whiff of smoke. The young man went around to the trunk, watching the road the entire time. The last car passed in the opposite direction several hours ago. He opened the trunk, inside it two coolers of perishable food and drink, a large suitcase full of clothes, and a small suitcase half-full of books. A hastily-made turkey sandwich accompanied A Confederacy of Dunces out of the fold. The young man ate the sandwich slowly, but only managed to finish one page of the book before his patience began to wear, either from the heat or the stillness.

He decided to keep moving, somehow. Dr. Roofman got in the driver’s seat, and the young man, called Chan, pushed the car for the next two miles down the road.

      2. Chan learns about postmodernism
The door was a remnant of a vacation home once belonging to a Malibu resident who decided that Malibu was preferable, year-round, to the steady desolation of Bombay Beach. It was a lovely door, made from alder, and though technically an interior door, it would serve its purpose all the same.

Written on the door, in a blocky scrawl: THE END OF THE WORLD.

Its scribe, a boy who looked about twelve, stepped back and wondered if the wording was unclear. An audience might take it to mean the door was the limit, and not what contained the end of the world, and that would mean they missed the point of his art. He was considering adding a word before the phrase, when a dog about the size of him approached the door and started peeing on it.

“No peeing on doors! We talked about this!” Its owner rushed in and nudged the dog away. Through a quick grimace, the owner stuck out a hand.

“Terribly sorry about that. I’m Chan. The one who peed on your door is Dr. Roofman.”

The door, his art, the thing he had been working on for months, was eclipsed by the stranger in front of him and the dog. Dr. Roofman’s dark hair seemed to glitter against the yellow-pale of everything that he was used to. He had to have some.
“I’m Yardley, like hardly, with a Y. Nice to meet you.” He met Chan’s sweaty palm with his sand-dusted hand. Dr. Roofman was deposited back onto the sand after a quick reprimand. The dog gave his leg a tentative lick, then padded away.

The strange owner of the strange dog took a look at the door, grimacing at the yellowing stain.

“The end of the world, huh?”

Yardley pounced on the chance to explain his artistic vision.

      3. Atlanta gives Chan a tour
Chan still didn’t understand what exactly the boy meant by “a postmodern apocalyptic abstraction of the boundaries of our creation”. He let Dr. Roofman stretch his legs, and the boy meandered after the dog.

He decided to walk about the town, or what might be considered the town: a handful of wind-battered, low-standing shells of buildings.

He happened upon a girl, swinging her legs carelessly from a perch on the edge of a roof. She took notice of him, and she greeted him with a jovial good morning.

“Isn’t it the afternoon?” Chan asked. The girl seemed to mull over the concept for a few moments, then she swung her legs and let herself down from the roof. She landed awkwardly, tumbling across the ground, getting pale dirt all over her clothes. Ignoring the dirt, the girl checked a nonexistent wristwatch.

“Oh, you’re right.” She gave him a grin. “Time loses track of me sometimes.”

“Don’t you mean you lose track of time?” Chan hoped he wasn’t being rude in correcting her.

“Well.” She thought this over too. “I never had track of it in the first place. Oh, look at me.” She put a finger on her lips. “Talking about myself when there’s a new visitor to show around and ask probing questions. Terribly sorry, I can be like that sometimes.”

She straightened up, brushed off an insignificant amount of dirt, squared her legs together, put her shoulders back, and stuck out a hand in a cheeky way that seemed to suggest she’d spit in it.

“I’m Atlanta,” the girl said, puffing her chest out, “I’m the number one tour guide in Bombay Beach! I know everything there is to know around here.”

“I’m Chan,” said Chan, “Is there a gas station nearby?”

“Nah,” she shrugged, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Atlanta walked him to the opera house, a modest building not unlike a line drawing of a house drawn by a child. Robin’s egg blue. Embossed lettering tightly packed under the apex of the roof read: BOMBAY BEACH OPERA HOUSE. The barn-style doors were tightly closed and gave nothing. She claimed that concerts were held there occasionally, and he imagined the type of people who would come out to Bombay Beach to perform for the type of people who lived in Bombay Beach. He imagined he was being too judgmental.

Chan’s name wasn’t short for anything, but she was convinced it was.

“Chanel? Chantel? Chanterelle?”

And so on. It wasn’t until the end of the tour that she finally ran out of things it could possibly be short for.

      4. Chan answers a question
Under the pretense of going to look for Dr. Roofman, which he really didn’t need help for, he insisted, he managed to part ways with Atlanta and found himself on the edge of town, where the roads’ cracked old pavement turned into dusty sand. Past the dry expanse to the south was the Salton Sea in all its pallid splendor, its thin shore a mirage in the heat, swallowing the horizon with a shallow-blue mouth walled in on the right by a loose pile of rock.

Dr. Roofman, missing a centimeter of hair from his tail, sauntered into his field of view; checking in on him, leaving in the direction he came.

Chan continued further, towards the water. The pile faded into his periphery and revealed a woman, dressed in the rags of a t-shirt over a sundress. Her skin was freckled, sun-drunk; it shone like leaves in the height of summer. She was resting on her back, limbs askew on the sand, and she helped herself up to a seated position at the sound of his footsteps.

“Hello,” she called out to him. She patted the ground next to her, motioning for him to sit. He was unsure whether or not to approach the woman. Still, the woman beckoned him over, and he sat down beside her, inadvertently just inside the reach of her hair, causing the wind to blow the ends into the side of his face.

“You’re new.” She turned towards him, staring with eyes the same color as the sea. When she spoke, it was even, ended lightly like a whisper. Chan turned his own gaze away, feeling exposed.

“Just passing through,” he replied. “Do you know if there’s a gas station around here, by any chance?”

“I do,” she said. “There isn’t. But they might have gasoline at the church.” She paused. “Are you really in such a hurry to leave?”

Chan stared out past the sea and the sky, towards a place he had yet to set foot in.

“I’m just trying to keep moving.”

“Where are you headed that puts you in such a rush?”

“Away. Out of here. Somewhere else. Who knows. It’s about the journey, right? Not the destination?”

“Is it? I think it matters where you’re trying to go, no matter the means.”

He said nothing. The water ebbed, eating at the sand, being no one, going nowhere.

“A long time ago,” the woman said, after a moment, “I began a journey of self-discovery. I needed to find the key to myself, and I felt that it was here. I have long since forgotten the name I was given, but my journey is not yet over. This place calls to people, brings them here, keeps them under its spell. Especially the ones who like to run away. But none of us are meant to stay, and even those of us who linger, we are just here. We do not stay. Who are you? Why are you here?”

“I’m Chan. I’m here because my car ran out of gas. I…” he paused for a while to think. “I committed a terrible crime. And I couldn’t stick around after that. So I left everything behind.”

“Is that true?”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s not.”

The woman lay back down, seemingly disappointed.

Chan watched the sun crawl away, wondering how best to excuse himself. He had almost managed to come up with something good enough when the woman spoke again.

“I heard a story once,” she said, still facing the dimming sky. “About a dog who ran away. The dog had a good life: he was given two meals a day, a plush bed, had a big backyard to roam, and was dearly loved by his master.”

“Why did he run away?”

“Perhaps he was curious. Or he was longing for something outside of what he knew. You pick. But the dog eventually got weary of his new adventure and wished to return home, but the scent of his home was not what he remembered, and he no longer knew the way back. He slept under boxes, ate from the trash, and prowled about the streets until one day, someone took pity on him. And suddenly, he had a new home and a new master. But it wasn’t the same as what he remembered home being. The food was less and stale, the bed was a cage, and he was never let outside. Until one day, when a relative of the master took him on a walk, and he fled. And the dog decided that he would have no master, and his home would be of his own making. So he became human. The end.”

“The end? Seems a little dubious.”

“It’s a story, not a fact.”

She said nothing else after that, not even as Chan quietly left a little while later.

Her words stuck with him the most as he tried to fall asleep that night. He wondered where Dr. Roofman had gone but wasn’t too worried. The dog always came back in the end.

      5. Yardley runs away
Yardley had wandered far from home, following the shoreline and the trail of useful debris. His arms and pockets were full of trinkets he found; seeds of creation that would inspire his next great work. He absorbed himself in a dream of the annual art exposition; better yet, a gallery all to himself. Entangled in his daydream, Yardley wandered past the farthest point he had ever gone from home. Realizing this, he turned back to look at the makeshift home built by his father, the symbol of a stagnant pursuit of a dream drowning in another day’s sunset.

He spat on the ground and continued away.

PART 2: THE CATALYTIC CONVERTER

      1. Atlanta gets close to the truth
Fully reclined and pushed all the way back, the seat was just uncomfortable enough to both prevent him from a deep sleep and give Chan an aching body the next morning. He got out of the Crown Vic to stretch his legs, already starting to sweat. Dr. Roofman was curled up in the backseat, getting the sleep that he could not.

At the first intersection on the road into town, there was a two-story building, a restaurant, which seemed compressed into the earth by the flatness of its surroundings. A sign at the side of the road, just past the building’s parking lot, read: SKI INN, an odd choice given the lack of nearby mountains.

A dull ring greeted his entry into the restaurant. It was sparsely furnished, uneven tables topped with an assortment of faded tablecloths. A simple laminate counter ran across one length of the floor space. The inside smelt savory, but it didn’t necessarily smell like food. Atlanta, behind the counter, looked up at the sound of the ring and greeted her patron.

“Hello, welcome to Ski Inn! I’m Atlanta, the number one barista in Bombay Beach! I’m also the number one waitress, and the number one chef. Sit anywhere you like.”

Chan took one of the ratty stools at the counter and rested his hands on what turned out to be a rather sticky surface. He waited for a few minutes, looking around the restaurant, as Atlanta puttered around in the back of the kitchen, making noises, not all of which sounded like cooking. Eventually, she returned, toweling her hands, and approached him.

“Do you know what you want to order?” Atlanta gave him a warm smile. She didn’t seem to recognize him from the day prior.

“No,” Chan said.

“You don’t want to order?” The smile faded.

“I haven’t seen the menu.”

Atlanta seemed confused by this.

“There isn’t one? You just tell me what you want and I’ll make it.”

“A lobster roll and a coffee would be nice.”

“I don’t know what those are. I can make you grilled cheese.”

It didn’t seem worth it to Chan to argue about having a menu, so he ordered the grilled cheese. He reluctantly braced himself for the prospect of receiving a pathetic piece of cooked cheese rather than a sandwich, so he wasn’t all too disappointed when the former was exactly what he received. He stuck the cheese to the underside of the counter when Atlanta wasn’t looking.

“Say,” Atlanta came out from the back, toweling her hands again. “What did you say it was that brought you here?”

“A car,” Chan replied. His noncommittal reply didn’t faze Atlanta, who continued to ask probing questions.

“Where are you from?”

“Los Angeles.”

“What’s that?”

“Where I’m from.”

“You don’t like talking about yourself much, do you?”

“I don’t.” He didn’t.

“Did you do something bad?”

“Hasn’t everyone?”

“I mean, like, bad-bad,” Atlanta thought about this for a second. “Did you kill someone? Did you cheat on your partner? Did you dishonor your family? Did you commit a different, equally compromising moral crime?”

“No,” he said. He hoped one response would suffice for all the questions posed. The battery continued.

“Where are you headed?”
Chan decided he was better off not entertaining Atlanta at all, and he left the Ski Inn after noticing that the cheese had come unstuck from the counter.

      2. Chan goes to church
A dusty five minutes later, found himself in front of what was presumably the church because of a pathetic wooden sign at the front, which read: FORSAIL CHURCH.

The last time Chan had been to church was the first time he had gone to a funeral. The funeral was for someone he didn’t know too well. He decided half an hour into the affair that he didn’t particularly like funerals. He never knew what to say. It didn’t feel like the time to empathize with a similar experience, nor did it feel helpful or worthwhile to lend mere sympathies, of which, doubtless, they had already received a countless number. He had to remind himself that it wasn’t about him, but he also left early.

He let himself inside and found that the interior of the church was barely more than a single credenza, with a man leaning over it, polishing it with a rag.

“Sorry to bother you, but I heard from someone that you might have gas here?”

The man looked up and squinted his eyes in a way familiar to him; people often confused him with someone else.

“Money.”

“I, um, don’t have any,” Chan replied sheepishly, telling the truth.

The two shared a blank, unthinking length of eye contact.

“You really don’t have any money?”

“No, sorry.”

“How?”

“What do you mean how?”

“Everybody needs money.”

“I don’t.”

“What makes you so special?”

Chan thought about this.

“Nothing.”

The man sighed and stepped out the door.

Chan was left unsure if he should follow the man to wherever he was headed, or if he should wait for him to come back. He opted for the latter.

“I’m Chan!” he called out from the doorway. He thought for a second, then made an addition to his call. “Thank you!”

“Gatorade!” the man yelled back.

Chan wandered around the bare space for a moment, unsure if that were his name, or simply what he said when he learned people’s names.

      3. Gatorade helps Chan with his car
Sun screamed down at the flatlands as Gatorade and Chan walked to the edge of the town to where Chan’s Crown Vic hunched low into the dirt on the shoulder of the 111. Conversation between them was virtually nonexistent, and if it did exist, Chan’s curt answers and Gatorade’s inability to ask meaningful questions stalled out any continuation.

Climbing up a small incline, the car in view at the peak, Gatorade felt the weight of the gasoline sloshing in the container he was carrying and the generosity he had displayed.

Gatorade had convinced himself he could act magnanimously on occasion without suffering any real financial repercussions, which he was now regretting. As he put another step into the soft dirt, feeling it sink, he wondered if he could retract his refusal and demand payment. He was lucky enough to have a place to live and a source of income, but he had to take advantage of every opportunity, otherwise he’d find himself at rock bottom. He gripped the gas can tighter and hoisted it over his head.

Reaching the top of the slope first, Chan called Dr. Roofman’s name twice, turned back towards Gatorade, and collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

Gatorade panted heavily, trying to catch his breath, surprised that swinging the gas can took so much energy. The gas can had opened when he cracked it against Chan’s head, and the contents soaked into the ground before fading from the loose pebble and grit. He looked down and cursed his misfortune.

He sat on the ground beside Chan’s body and tried to remember the mnemonic device for the process of stripping a car for parts.

      4. Gatorade makes his own luck
Gatorade originally intended on knocking Chan out and stealing the car, but he too was out of gas, thanks to his apparent bad luck. Perhaps it was a universal exchange of fortunes for good luck in his past. He hadn’t thought of it as monumental, but if his bad luck was going to continue to pay out over time, then he’d clearly taken it for granted. If he had nothing but bad luck facing him for the rest of his life, then he’d have to make his own good luck.

He didn’t remember the mnemonic device, but he figured he’d mess around with whatever moved when he yanked hard on it. Pacing around the car, he noticed that there was a dog curled up in the passenger seat, and he decided the first thing he’d do, regardless of the directions of the mnemonic device, would be to break the window and open the door so the dog wouldn’t pass out from the heat. He got to work on the car.

He had removed the catalytic converter before he noticed that Chan’s body was stirring just a bit too much for comfort. This wasn’t to say that he hadn’t made progress on the rest of the car; the damage done was enough to prevent it from running, but the catalytic converter was the only part that he’d actually managed to remove.

There was also stuff in the trunk, but none of it was really of interest. Two coolers full of food, the bulk of which was turkey sandwiches, and bottles of water, a suitcase full of neatly folded clothes, and another suitcase that only had a few books in it. Out of curiosity, he fished one out: A Confederacy of Dunces. He put it back, tinged with disappointment. Cradling his newfound treasure in his arms, he made his way back down the slope, admiring the shine in the metal so much that he bumped right into someone.

It was the woman he’d seen before on the beach. He had spoken to her once before.

“You again,” he said, a little startled, a little more wary.

“Hello.” He hated the woman’s lilting voice. It seemed to grate in his ears, sticking around too long.

“What do you want?” He clutched the catalytic converter tighter. She didn’t seem like the type to want it from him, but he knew not to trust anyone besides himself.

“I want to help,” she replied. He opened his mouth and began to speak, though he felt somewhere inside that she wasn’t done speaking.

“I don’t need–”

“Not you.” She stepped past him and continued up the hill.

Gatorade tried to shake the interaction from his mind and decided to head back into town, where he figured he’d wait for Chan to come back after waking up and see if he wanted a catalytic converter for a reasonable price.

PART 3: THE SEASIDE OPERATIC

      1. Chan is found
Chan’s head hurt.

Though his eyes were shut tight and he couldn’t see anything but vague specks of indiscernible color. He had gained consciousness a few seconds after Gatorade hit him, but his head hurt so much that he simply decided to play dead.
He felt something cold across his forehead, felt smooth like skin. Cracking his eyes open just a bit let in too much light, intensified the pounding waves in his head, so he kept them shut. He croaked, with a dry mouth.

“Who’s there?”

“A friend.” He recognized the soft tone from the woman on the beach.

“What happened?”

“Something bad.” He opened one eye, just barely, and he could see that she was holding a forearm to his head. It seemed to stay cold, draining the heat away. When he finally opened his eyes fully, he didn’t know if he had fallen asleep, but the woman remained over him, her arm held to his head.

He sat up, still dizzy, quelling a wave of nausea. Slowly, so as not to disrupt the tenuous steadiness he had achieved, he turned his head towards the car and got a full look. The hood was propped open, with cables and wires dangling from the lip. The trunk had been ransacked, the windows broken, and the underside of the car was leaking fluid. With a grunt, he leaned forward, the dull throb floating to the crown of his head.

“Fuck,” he whispered, gritting his teeth.

A long while came to wait, to listen, before the woman spoke again.

“Some things stay still. Some things move. What are you going to do?”

A wispy cloud, the only one of its kind among the uniform blue, laughed at him.

“I’m gonna get away from this place,” he sighed, “I gotta.”

He helped himself to his feet, stumbling, and when his eyes lifted from the ground he found Dr. Roofman in the distance, staring back at him. It occurred to him that the dog was grinning.

      2. Chan breaks and enters, again
Wandering back through the town, still trying to screw his head on straight from the concussion, Chan felt more lost than ever. His car was completely disabled. He was tugging the two coolers of food and drink with him from the car, slowing his pace to a zombie-like lurch. The clothes and books he left behind, since he wasn’t in dire need of quality literature.

After an eternity, with much difficulty, he found himself in front of the opera house, its robin’s egg blue casting a chill through his eyes.

He pounded on the door, fruitlessly. In frustration, he hurled a cooler through a haze of dull pain, bouncing it off the door. Letting the wave of exertion pass, he braced himself, and launched himself at the door, breaking them open and tumbling through.

Chan, winded and worried he might be asthmatic, got his bearings. He was inside of the opera house, which had very little in it like the other structures in the town, except the interior was also painted the same radiant color as the outside. And a bicycle, which was miraculously functional.

He took a few more moments to get his breathing down, then got up and walked the bike outside. He took off on the bike, a little unsteady, but the motion wasn’t unfamiliar to him, even now.

Only a few yards down the road from the opera house had been covered before he almost crashed into Yardley, fell off the bike, and landed quite hard on the ground.

      3. Yardley borrows a bike
It was a stroke of luck, really.

Yardley had wandered back into town shortly after his resolution to leave. He could’ve come up with any number of excuses to set his mind at ease, but he ultimately turned back, looking up at the road out, because he was scared. He had no idea what was out there in the world beyond. For all he knew, it might just be the same stretch of dust and dirt nothing with the hills forever in the distance.

But just as he depended on trash and the fortune of the universe to leave it for him, a perfectly working bicycle had been deposited in his hands, even if it almost hit him. And just as the things he happened upon gave him inspiration, so too did the bike give him a newfound resolve to pursue what he had dreamed.

The stranger, Chan, he was pretty sure, got up, groaning as he put his weight on what seemed to be a sprained wrist. He stood and met Yardley’s gaze, who was holding the handlebars of the bike.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered, a bit of hurt to his voice.

Yardley didn’t respond.

“Can I have the bike?”

“No.” Yardley stepped back and turned the bike to face away from Chan.

“I have to go. Please.” It wasn’t a question anymore. “I….Uh, your father. He’s in the opera house. I hurt him. I hurt him badly.”

“I don’t care.” Yardley put one leg over the bike. It was a little too big for him to reach the pedals.

“Why are you so desperate to leave? You’ve been here all this time.” Chan’s voice broke, just a tiny bit.

“I have places to be. I have things to do. Things I want to do.”

“And what is that, exactly?”

“I’m going to be an artist. I’m going to show the world what I have to offer.” Yardley’s resolve hardened into steel.

“So what?”

“So,” he readied himself to put his other leg over and begin riding, “I think that’s better than nothing at all.”

He took off before Chan could respond with anything else; before he could make any attempt at chasing after him.

      4. Chan does not stay
Chan watched the boy ride into the distance until he was no longer visible. He breathed a heavy sigh of disappointment. Of contempt. Of longing.

He decided to make his way to the beach, feeling the afternoon sun shred hungrily into his skin.

Chan took a hesitant step into the shallow water of the Salton Sea.

Then another.

Then another.

      5. Atlanta asks a question
Evening. Out past hundreds of miles of natural nothing, under a sun creeping low, long past the point Palm Springs faded into Coachella and Coachella faded into Mecca, a Crown Vic sat outside of a town called Bombay Beach.

It would never run again.

The woman had stuck around, after Chan left in his uneasy state, sitting on the roof of the car as if she were guarding it for his improbable return. There was a certain calm now, like a single word spoken could fill up the bare miles between the mountains on either horizon. Atlanta approached her; she seemed to blend into the background, becoming part of the stillness.

“Good morning,” Atlanta called out. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Take your time.”

Atlanta clambered up the back of the trunk and sat down next to the woman, dangling her legs over the side.

“How does one leave this place?”

The woman looked at Atlanta, and her eyes seemed as distant as the hills.

“That’s easy,” she said. “You just have to go. You don’t need reasons. You don’t plan it. You don’t think about it too much. You don’t have anywhere in mind. You don’t think about what was here. You just go.”

“How come no one goes?”

“Because it’s easier to be like the sand; to be no one and go nowhere.”

Atlanta thought about leaving.

      6. The old dogs howl again
Long after Yardley found his way out, and Chan found solace in the waters, Dr. Roofman plodded along the shore of the Salton Sea, tongue out, drinking in the salty-sweet, and his prints in the sand turned from paws to feet.