The road markings have become crucifixes, lit by headlights in the blackness. Somewhere out in the desert an animal is screaming, mourning its demise as mouths take it apart. The cruelty of man is a kindness compared to the infinite terror of nature, from the implosion of a star to the autofornification of bacteria, the feeble ethics of humanity is but a sputtering candle held tightly as we navigate the unfeeling void between physics and biology. Between the empty bellies of carnivores to the insistence of entropy, the universe seems resolved to escape life and return to nothingness, as if all of evolution of all had been a mistake, a one-night stand between minerals and energy that now needed to be undone. I light a cigarette. The best hope one has is to be ignorant. At the edge of the horizon where this forsaken road leads is the city, the final destination of my journey, Los Angeles, the city of angels. The place where America dies.
The Hyundai Sonata purrs across the interstate, a sign welcomes me to California, patched with rust like liver spots. Blown out truck tyres and garbage lie along the roadside, passing faster than days, as I push the car towards its terminus. In the passenger seat I have mounted the skull of Walt Disney onto a statue of Shiva, kept in place by a safety belt. The things in the car had been my companions on the journey, perfect listeners as mile upon mile ran beneath me, piling up by the tens, hundreds, thousands. I pass the carcass of a motel, swollen heads of cacti, deserted cars trail crime scene tape out into the road like a still parade. For the last hour I have been the only driver on the road, though now I start to see the red tail lights of fellow travellers. Billboards advertise the Winchester Mystery House, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Preston Castle, as if the ghosts were only confined to haunted houses than whispering in the alleys and the gutters of L.A.
A man leads a mule with a string round her neck, together they walk down the wrong way of the interstate, though the sparse traffic move out of the way of the bedraggled Quixote. I slow the car down to a stop, wind my window down.
"Where are you going?"
"There's nothing left back there." He says, not stopping, nor looking at me.
"There's only the desert that way."
"So I shall eat sand and drink the wind. You should turn around." He says, walking past the car, the mule’s hooves tapping on the cracked asphalt. They walk on, towards stone, towards dust. I continue driving. The sky ahead is filled with smoke from wildfires, illuminated from the city beneath like a Bosch painting. I think back to my previous visit to L.A., trying to understand where the edge of the city was. The city in my memories had paled, lacked detail, as a photograph is obliterated by years of sunlight until all that is left is a blank. Though as I got closer, I began to recognise the contours of the hills, the landscape acted as a memento to what I had been before. It reminded me of picking a way through a graveyard, using taller tombs as landmarks towards the dead ones waiting. Through this sepulchral topography, I steer the car off the interstate, through empty roads, pulling up at a motel car lot. The night was warm, the air smelt of ash. I got myself a room, flicked on the light, cockroaches skittered across the linoleum. I sat on the bed and breathed deeply.
As inevitable as midnight, I had reached my destination, the weeks of travelling had come to an end, all that had come before had led to this. I was standing in front of a gallows awaiting the arrival of the condemned, though not entirely sure when the moment would come. The world stood beside me, waiting for America to die. From the indigenous people to the ancestors of slaves to the orphans of war, all eyes of Earth were swivelled towards the fading Empire as it slouched towards the end.
They had no idea how much they were hated. Generation after generation whose homes had become killing fields or polluted swamps, cursing the decrepit string of Presidents and all that hailed them. And as the last memories of the foul nation become forgotten, and its relics locked away in the museum basements, and its lands carved up and renamed in foreign tongues, it would cease to exist and become a story used to warn children of folly, hubris and madness. I watch late night news reports behind the burning embers of cigarettes, watching patterns fall into place. Most American citizens were too arrogant and wilfully stupid to understand that the process of its extinction had already begun, though others had seen through the veil, recognising the signs and symbols that heralded the collapse of its empire. Pride comes before a fall, and the United States was on a rollercoaster straight to hell.
