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I drive upwards, then I trudge in white mud. He stands motionlessly through a yellow-orange haze with a white cloth fitting tightly around his waist and upper thighs. I am wheezing and squinting at him, leaning my head toward him and refocusing, because of the haze. He is nodding. I find a glass. Separations in the backbone pull a little farther apart so they can touch better. “It means we have fun and we touch,” he is laughing. Rotating my neck to lock my eyes with his, he blinks back, nodding. I look over and hunch more to study the patch of evaporating puddle twenty feet ahead. The asphalt is a thick rubber like the sort used in McDonald’s playgrounds beginning in the early 90s. My fingernail catches between the edges of rubber and plastic. He stretches back, tugging the cloth’s drying glue, his skin now a flat orange, the wall speckled in black and yellow and increasingly green. I get up to pour myself a cup of water.

If you’re going to ask me about inches, I’ll have to show you in miles. I say that to him. He removes a farm. “How about now?” He takes out two mountain ranges and a national park. “How about now?” He pushes a toe between two of mine. “I’m not interested in things you really mean.” I pull my toe out.

He’s playing coy again, but who could blame him? He moves with his legs hitting the ground in quick succession, galloping down the steep path smirkily, less giggling and more of his typical Bratz doll expression, bouncing every eight feet, gliding over boulders, spraying widely into a dusty billow. A warm wind starts to pull through.

I know we’re always laughing for different reasons. Sometimes the distortion between them vibrates through the wind. I have to rethink my trust in him.

It’s interesting how we make things in assortments of colors so we can’t tell what’s really on them. A ladybug is red, and suddenly I’ll be terrified of Formica. We’re on our way to a museum. All I do is wet my finger to rub off a fiber of rust. He moans while the bacteria are already tonguing the scrape. Some older styled Russian lady is pushing her husband’s corpse in an oversized stroller through the bicycle lane. She makes a gesture with her tongue, just trying to be funny and then walks by. I think it’s important to acknowledge others.

He opens the door and places his bare feet on the concrete. We’re on La Cienega and Wilshire, and he suggests we need to go somewhere for fresh air so he can breathe. He’s in front of me, going down these giant metal stairs, the last one at the bottom is so big that someone left a rope so we could rock-climb our ways down. Past ten-foot-high mouse holes there are dust balls that could form tornadoes. “I could be someone else here and neither of us would know it.” He laughs as I smile. I start reminiscing about smokestacks.

It is deeply dark, no stars, no blue light, no hum from branches. We are in public. He rips apart the vacuum-sealed sediment and takes out the crank-like pipe to match the gears together. He hands me a card and keeps one for himself, putting away the extra ones. “We’re looking for penises in the shapes of states.” Something glimmers from an old hook in the ceiling panel, and my heartbeats grow speedy. We swerve and I fall into his shoulder. The joints in my hands are tired. He doesn’t pay much attention to my bumping into him, expensive as it may be. “Ooh! There’s one in the shape of Oklahoma.” We look down at the same time at our maps and he stamps his.

My hand is feeling along the gravel. His arms are wrapped around my chest, the weight of his abdomen on my pelvis, his feet skidding behind me as I crawl. “I wonder if we’ll find the Ambassador Hotel.” I pout my lips and return my attention to reading the pebbles. “Why do we still make maps?” he says.

6’2” 150 pounds. 20” screen. No hair, no pores. Lips, teeth and tongue in tact. “Pleasure to meet you.” What do you think of the asteroid belt? The question is ignorable, what with so many people whispering around us, their corners touching and different red and orange fogs. “I’m into it.” I don’t like his shoes, and I can tell he is into noble gases. I drive back onto the road and find a freeway.

“Why do people lie to each other and say they’re over forty?” I’ve never known the point. Everyone died in the 80s. “We are orphans.” I start shoveling the dirt under the tires again, knowing I can’t pretend to forget what has to be done. The next time I see my grandmother I’m crawling around on a shelf in her linen closet, curling up in a ball. I give her a hard time; I tell her she’s a phony. She tells me it’s not her decision to be capable of acting.

I look at him, he looks at me. It is afternoon. We’re watching Anna Nicole Smith’s dog running down a gravel path, ten seconds passing before each time its legs touch the ground. We both hum, trying to match the timbres of each other’s voices. We don’t say anything, but we stop. Then we think about where the land has been and where it is going. First we’re chewing it up, then we’re secreting it, leaving small balls of grout. We stand in the shadow of the only cumulonimbus cloud.

He and I are lying on a large flat grassy lawn in front of a windowless cobblestone building. “What about making a third person out of the two of us?” I remark. A woman in a shoulder-padded business suit appears and gives a list of names, favorite colors, genders and personing places. Then he says Connecticut is probably his favorite option from the last list, because someone else recommended it once, and it gives him the right feeling. “Let’s get lunch first,” he says. The woman gives us complimentary beads and suggests meeting again at her parking space at the Crenshaw Wal-Mart, then takes off.

If he likes my type then he might like me. I don’t want someone only for “love”; I have a number of scenarios that could work. In the produce aisles, the apples are always polished. If we’re going to dance, I want to hear it. I want my value.

If you’ve been talking to him, he’s not here right now because he’s been launched out the window and through the fog, catapulted beyond the San Gabriels, looking down over the same house repeating for miles on the other side. In a bed of oysters does the ugliest have the pearl, or is it the pearl? Maybe they all do collectively, or maybe he should stop looking for one. When he washes the deodorant off, he immediately goes and reapplies it.

When the door is latched, I know not to bother checking if he’s in there. My sarsaparilla sarsed, my jawbreakers broken into half-moons. He’s indulgent and I wouldn’t be shy to watch him eat. The many planets and suns swell to dimness and hang low in crisp tones around our heads and I purr like a cat.

He wraps my arms over his shoulders like I’m sobbing on his neck or looking down his shirt. He walks backwards one step, turns at an angle, then takes the other. He grabs me from the forehead to push off of him, then as I descend he grabs my hands from above my head and flings me back up. I wind around so I end up facing away from him, my back against his chest. The ringing noise from the animals is louder because we got closer. We’re frowning about the coincidence because it was a coincidence.

Whenever I hear that song about “waiting on the world to change,” I think about the San Andreas Fault and our viewing parties from the lookout point. Stucco crumbles so well, and everyone cheers and butts heads like it’s the Super Bowl. I massage the bottoms of my feet on viscous rock material to be polite.

He’s looking to be brought to that split-second moment between day and night. He’s looking for someone to relieve the embarrassment of his honesty for sharing that information to everyone. For this reason, he holds the cantaloupe in his arms when we walk to the check out, and he serves me some after I’ve brushed my teeth.

The spiny quills of dead sagebrush are stuck to my socks. From the canyon edge I can see a metal pole emerging from beneath the salt flat. This is hours before the sunset and its burnt plastic odor are both supposed to end. Now half the LA skyline has peered out, caked in nourishing dirt. The yellow fog also rises, smelling sweet of lemons and pine. I worry about getting a parking ticket for having left my car in there.

When he has important things to say, I am not on another mountain. I am sitting in front of him cupping my ears and with my legs close together. When I’m more interested in the land, I’m already blindfolded in an empty room. He is naked and I’m clothed. I’m grabbing on tightly to one or two penises in each hand, and with them he drags me around the room. Blue or yellow, any color or flavor, it doesn’t matter.

Driving toward the Hoover Dam, looking over the steering wheel I watch several people swinging on a body. I climb on. I can hear all of its memories as we go back and forth, rapidly spoken as if the audio was edited to remove pauses. Four miles southwest of Cal Nev Ari, Nevada, he’s massaging the nerve endings and prostate, unsure why neural systems and solar systems aren’t skeletal systems.