Stop it! I commanded myself, and pulled reluctantly out of the all-consuming food dream. America’s greatest commodity, the hamburger, the most ubiquitous of all meals – and yet it was far, so far out of reach now. Maybe if we found a place with solar and batteries with a freezer that was still running. Just don’t think about it, it’s easier that way.

Perhaps I dozed, for the stars remained in view but became, in my awareness, a network map. Connections appeared, and I could see that pairs and groups of stars flashed in sequence, sending and receiving information across nearly invisible lines of fiber. The constellations came to life, morphing into vivid forms that began as children’s book images, but then began to turn horrible and… I sat up, jerking myself out of another sleeping dream or waking vision – the boundary was beginning to erode – and felt the HK45 in my waistband press reassuringly against my hipbone. How long I been dreaming, high up there above the ocean?… I could only indulge in so much astral revelry, for I was conscious of needing to get back to my companions. Aaron had a gun, too, but I was nearly certain that he and the others would hesitate to use it until it was too late. I had already proved to myself and my friends that such hesitation would not befall me. I had even pulled the trigger eagerly, having waited through years of wearying civilized abstractions – standing patiently in line, filling out endless forms, polishing my resume – to commit some primal act of death. There might be mountain lions watching in the dark – or worse, much worse, human animals. A hungry beast might kill and devour you, but would finish the job. A person might decide to take you captive, to use you for unspeakable purposes, to draw out purposeless suffering. Someone from the next fire over could make their way quietly down the beach and… Don’t finish that sentence, I told myself. Don’t torture yourself, just get back to the others… My mind would not wander as easily on the climb and walk back.

An hour later, after following the high coast road a mile downhill and hiking through rocks back onto the beach, avoiding any other people who were out there, I arrived back at our group’s small enclave on the beach. When I walked up on them, I made sure to signal my approaching presence so that I would not be shot in surprise and misrecognition. Sarah, in jeans and a hoodie, her long ponytailed hair bounding behind ran to me, put her arms around me, and said, “Thank God, I was afraid something happened to you.” She looked up at me with flat, listless eyes that couldn’t focus, the eyes of a person whose soul has retreated to safety, found that there is none in existence, and began to become untethered from reality. I kept my thoughts to myself and we all went to sleep.

That night I dreamed of wandering through an endless city in the desert, a place of extreme rationality and yet, simultaneously, total madness. There were palaces filled with splendidly architected corridors that led to nowhere, compounded mazes of intricate design – find your way out of one, but now you are in another. Libraries filled with shelves so high that most of them could never be reached, and these filled with books written in languages that were achingly beautiful but had never been readable by any mind. A Borgesian old man appeared wordless and guided me through the most tortured parts of the journeyy. For many lifetimes, searching for something I knew I would never find, or dared not discover, I travailed tormentedly among the inspired and carefully worked fructum of unlimited imagination turned unrecognizably back upon themselves; a hideous debasement of intellect, the work of fearsome, darkly humorous gods with every means at their disposal. But, despairing, I knew that no gods had been at work here – not Zeus or Isis, Shiva, Baal, or any of the rest of them. This was the work of humanity itself.

Then, after uncountable revolutions of the Wheel, a flicker of hope: the warheads rained down from the burning sky, screaming isotopic condors descending in their swoop of predation. For brief moments I waited, eyes turned toward heaven, exuberantly anticipating the glorious fireballs, the orgasmic release of energy which would deliver me from the yoke of this agonizing psychosis. But then, nothing – they fell with a sickening, impotent thud into the sand, their trigger mechanisms rendered useless by that same insane engineer who had so gleefully executed all the rest of this captivating deliration, their abominable rending fissions suppressed by some stronger force of impenetrable Magic.

I woke with a start to a vicious chill, like a hard, cold blade running up my spine. For a moment, I had the sensation of being awakened by a cry of fear or alarm, but then the wind surged howlingly and I knew, or wanted to know, that this was the culprit. Seeking elusive remnants of warmth, I wriggled down further into my sleeping bag, wary of the mocking dream that still felt so oppressively close. But for now, I had escaped its clutches, and the clutches of some other lingering thing. There was only blackness…