I was an unlicensed weather system when the sun crawled over Las Vegas like a jaundiced tick, and the air tasted like burned coins and motel chlorine. The assignment, dubious, said “Investigate the new American optimism.” Optimism! That fiberglass word politicians polish with human sweat. My suitcase gurgled as I kicked it shut—tape recorder, notebooks bleeding coffee, a rosary of motel keys, and the pharmaceutical orchestra. The car, a glorious rusted Cadillac, coughed to life and agreed to be my accomplice.
I dictated into the recorder because typewriters don’t get seasick. “Note: optimism remains a rumor spread by people who sell confetti.” The tape hissed. Somewhere a mariachi band played through a wall, or inside my skull. A bellhop with eyes like funeral pennies asked if I needed help. “At this stage in the war, help is treason,” I said, and tipped him with a campaign button from a dead year.
The Strip burned in day-shift neon, a godless aquarium; corporate sharks circled the glass. Tourists sweated through patriotic fabrics, every shirt an alibi. I drove out of town, because stories breathe better when the horizon isn’t fenced. Bats stitched themselves from the shimmer and flew alongside the car. I kept driving.
Barstow arrived in a spasm of signs. I refueled with black coffee stirred by a pocketknife and asked the cashier where the parade was hiding. She had a lighthouse tattooed on her throat. “The parade ended years ago,” she said. “We keep the music on so the children won’t notice.” I bought sparklers, a flask, and a map folded so often it became origami for paranoid birds.
The road unspooled, a ribbon tossed by a drunk gymnast. I turned onto a county route that did not exist outside the map’s imagination. Dust rose like witness testimony and fences dissolved into desert. The planet was honest: scorched, pitted, wide as a courtroom where the judge is a coyote. I parked beside a rusted billboard for a vanished casino. Someone had painted eyes on the metal; they followed like creditors.
A carnival had sprouted on the flats, skeletal rides shuddering in wind that smelled like batteries and apricots. No cars in the lot. No people, unless you count silhouettes that moved when I wasn’t looking. I walked in with the solemnity of a priest burglarizing his own church. The first tent was a museum of lost slogans. “TRUST ME,” said one banner. Another: “FREEDOM: NOW WITH MORE RULES.” A woman in sequins asked for my ticket; I offered a press badge and a dollar from a state that no longer existed; she tore the dollar in half and let me pass.
The funhouse swallowed me. Mirrors did their rituals—shrank, stretched, split. In one I was a senator selling miracle droughts; in another a choirboy shoplifting fire. The center mirror refused to reflect anything but smoke. Behind me, calliope music fell down a staircase; ahead, an exit sign flickered like a dying conscience. I kept the recorder rolling because someday a historian might need to know how the species laughed while it bled.
Outside, the Ferris wheel turned with a noise like a dentist gnawing aluminum. A man sat in a lawn chair reading a Bible hollowed for a revolver. “Journalism?” he asked. “Gonzo,” I corrected. “Journalism with rabies.” “They built this fair for a rally no one could afford,” he said. “Now the ghosts come for the rides.”
Darkness arrives differently in the desert: a shut eyelid of God, some say; others say physics. I say it’s a tent the mind pitches over its own fire. I lit a sparkler to negotiate with the night and wrote with it in the air—words that evaporated before even the bats could read them. Then a parade of ambulances drove by without sirens, every driver asleep, every patient awake and pounding the glass. The sparkler burned down to my thumb; I took that personally.
The midway offered games rigged by an engineer who hated fathers. I shot water into a clown’s mouth until it drowned in laughter and won a taxidermy jackrabbit wearing a mayoral sash. The prize lady told me the rabbit’s name was Accountability. I slung it over my shoulder like a scandal. Behind the ring toss, carnies brewed coffee in a paint can and argued about which apocalypse had the best lighting. I proposed the end arriving as a civic parade, sponsored by a bank, confetti made of shredded promises.
At midnight, or maybe noon wearing a fake mustache, I found the tent with the grandest lie. The banner showed a smiling scientist hugging a flag; beneath it: THE ETHICAL MACHINE. On a pedestal sat a slot machine wired to a polygraph and a crucifix. Instructions stapled to green felt: “Insert your last dollar. If you deserve it, you win.” The suitcase hummed. I thought about the lighthouse tattoo and the children’s parade. I inserted a coin that once bought mercy and pulled the lever. The reels showed teeth, churches, zeros. The machine paid in cold clatter.
Out behind the rides a preacher washed his hands in gasoline. He was gentle in the way of large storms. “Faith is what you do with fear once the witnesses go home,” he said. I asked if witnesses ever truly go home. He pointed up. Drones circled like metallic seraphim; their red lights blinked the Pledge of Allegiance backwards. “They learned to hover,” he said. “Next they’ll learn to pray.”
The car still believed. I drove until the carnival shrank to a rumor. The highway poured us into a town that looked pre-ruined: stucco peeling like sunburn, a bar named The Invisible Fist, a courthouse wearing scaffolding like a tuxedo of bones. I rented a room where the carpet was damp with the previous tenant’s loneliness. Gideon’s Bible had been replaced by a manual for optimism. Step one: Smile until your face understands. Step two: Purchase the authorized smile.
At three, the phone rang. A velvet sledgehammer of a voice: “We heard you at the fair.” They wanted copy for a magazine that specialized in patriotic anxieties. Deadline: yesterday. Pay: hazard and a coupon for redemption. I agreed in a tone that implied I was in on the joke. The mirror whispered, “Liar.” I pasted two nicotine patches onto my heart and swore an oath to the coffee maker.
Morning arrived with a siren and a marching band of bill collectors. I fled with Accountability under my arm, its glass eyes approving nothing. Somewhere on the road the ethical machine’s coins shifted, reminding me money speaks with dry teeth. I stopped at a diner where the waitress wore roller skates and despair. She poured coffee that tasted like a lawsuit and said, “You look like a man negotiating with his future.” I told her I had already signed but misplaced the contract. She nodded like a bailiff.
The recorder documented breakfast: eggs that believed in reincarnation, toast that refused to testify, bacon crisp as a congressional hearing. I asked the cook if hope came à la carte; he said hope was extra. I tipped in aluminum coins. They sounded counterfeit but honest.
South of town, a billboard begged for forgiveness on behalf of something unspecific. I pulled over to draft the lede; the words fought like cats in a bag. Gonzo demands blood, not grammar. So I cut my palm with a pocketknife and shook hands with the page. The sentence arrived wearing a trench coat: America is a hallucination you can drive, but the payments will murder you.
Afternoon folded the sky into a blue envelope and mailed us to the mountains. Thunderheads massed like juries delivering the same verdict again and again. At the pass I found a chapel made of license plates, a shrine to the god of transit violations. Inside, parishioners nailed speeding tickets to the altar and lit matchbooks from extinct motels. A toothless choir sang “Amazing Grace” in four versions of incorrect. I left Accountability curled on a pew and asked the god to return my appetite for mercy.
On the downgrade the brakes began to confess. I coasted into a valley where everything was for sale, even the permission to complain. A man at a roadside museum sold me a jar labeled AUTHENTIC SKY. It was empty; the sky had escaped. I kept it anyway—souvenir of a transaction between fools.
Night again, because the planet spins despite petitions. I parked among Joshua trees guarding their personal apocalypses and built a campfire out of newsprint. Headlines curled into black petals. Coyotes debated tax policy just beyond the light. I poured whiskey onto the recorder and told it to transcribe. The tape caught every confession I meant to forget: that I loved the parade even when it crushed me; that the machine paid because it knew I would waste the coins on prophecy; that optimism, if it existed, feared daylight.
After the fifth confession the bats landed and asked for a quote. I gave them the only honest thing I had left: “We are not here to win. We are here to testify.” They approved this, which worried me. Approval is a narcotic that ruins editorial judgment.
Dawn pulled itself up by its bootstraps and pretended to be new. I drove back toward the city, the car speaking in knocks and parables. The fair had vanished, replaced by tire ruts and a sign that read, in hopeful paint, WE’LL RETURN WHEN YOU’RE READY. I laughed and wrote the crueler truth: We are never ready, so the carnival never ends.
Las Vegas took me back the way a shark resumes swimming. I turned in the car and the coins to a clerk who did not believe in receipts. In the newsroom bar, they asked for the story. I delivered twenty pages of flaming moderation. The editor, a veteran of symbolic wars, said, “You can’t print bats.” I said, “Watch me,” and he did, with the gaze of a man reading his own obituary.
I walked into the noon that thinks it’s midnight, a suitcase lighter by one rabbit. The Strip howled. Tourists lined up to buy fragments of a dream that never belonged to them. I put on the sunglasses and became an unlicensed weather system again—gusts of disbelief, a high chance of outrage, scattered redemptions near dawn. The recorder clicked to a stop. The tape had eaten its tail.
Final note to the historians sifting the ash of this decade: I found optimism. It hid inside a broken machine, terrified of being used. It paid in counterfeit metal and asked to be believed. I believed for the span of one ride on a wheel that lifted me into the hot, lonesome sky and set me down among strangers who applauded because they were also afraid. If that’s optimism, guard it with your teeth. If it’s a scam, which is likely, spend it quickly and leave the change for the bats.
End transmission—until the carnival puts up its lights again, and the night remembers my name, and the recorder wakes like a mechanical conscience, and the road, that cruel, necessary lie, demands one more testimony from a man already guilty of loving everything he swore to expose.
