The road ahead is the same road behind us. I know this because of the water tower.
It appeared on our left forty minutes ago — rust-orange, listing slightly to the east, with the name CULVER stenciled in faded black. We noted it. Wilfredo even took a photo. Then we drove on for what felt like twenty miles, and the water tower appeared again. Same lean. Same rust. Same stencil.
Now it has appeared a third time, and none of us are taking photos.
“Pull over,” Odette says from the back seat. Her voice is completely level, which is somehow worse than if she had screamed.
Wilfredo slows the car to the shoulder of the highway and we sit in the engine tick and the silence of the Nevada flats. The sun is at exactly the same angle it was when we first saw the tower. Three forty-five in the afternoon, stretched long and amber across the scrubland. It has not moved.
I should explain how we got here, though I am not sure explanation is the right word for it.
We left Reno at noon. Four of us: Wilfredo driving, Odette navigating, me in the passenger seat watching the desert open up like a held breath. Sigrid in the back with her headphones on, half-asleep against the window. A road trip. A birthday. Odette’s thirty-second, and she had wanted to see the salt flats before dark. Simple. Ordinary.
The first sign something was wrong came around mile marker forty. The GPS had gone quiet — not lost signal, just quiet, the blue arrow frozen on a stretch of road that didn’t match what we were seeing. Wilfredo tapped the screen. Odette tried her phone. Sigrid pulled off her headphones and said, “We passed that same dead Joshua tree twice.”
We told her she was imagining it.
We were wrong.
Now we stand outside the car on the gravel shoulder. The wind is low and steady, moving west. There are no other vehicles. There have been no other vehicles for the last hour, which on a Nevada state highway in the middle of the afternoon is the kind of absence that registers in the body before it registers in the mind.
“We turn around,” Wilfredo says.
“We’ve turned around,” Odette tells him.
He looks at her.
“After the second tower. I told you to turn around and you did. We drove back the way we came for eleven minutes and then the tower was in front of us again. You don’t remember that.”
He doesn’t. I watch his face while he tries to, and I watch the moment he decides not to argue about it, which is its own kind of frightening.
Sigrid is crouched at the edge of the asphalt, looking at something. I walk over. She is staring at a mile marker post. The number on it is zero.
“That can’t be right,” I say.
“I’ve counted four of them,” she says. “All zero.”
We get back in the car because standing outside feels worse. There is a quality to the light out here that I want to call wrong but cannot specify. It’s the right color, the right temperature, the right angle. It is wrong in a way that has no name.
Odette pulls up her photos from the drive. She has forty-six pictures. The first twenty-three are normal — gas station receipts, a funny road sign, Wilfredo squinting at the horizon with his coffee. The last twenty-three are identical to the first twenty-three. Not similar. Identical. Same blur of motion in the same corner. Same crack in Wilfredo’s cup.
She puts her phone face-down on the seat without comment.
“We go forward,” I say. “We keep going forward and we don’t stop.”
No one has a better idea, so Wilfredo pulls back onto the road.
For a while it seems to work. The landscape changes — or it seems to. A dry creek bed appears on the right, which I don’t remember from before. A cluster of power lines crosses overhead. Sigrid starts to say something about seeing a gas station in the distance and the tension in the car drops by half, the way it does when you think you’ve solved the thing.
Then we pass the water tower.
No one speaks for a long time.
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