I was thumbing through New Mexico with nothing, headed nowhere, when I fell in with a shaman named Shaman who pricked a hole in my mind. A little prick it was, but everything gushed in through it, and everything spilled out. Suddenly, I could not tell the difference between myself and others or between my body and the rest of the world.

"Don’t be afraid, Mel," Shaman said. I was very afraid. We were sitting inside a long canvas tent, the communal kitchen of the Space People. All the other Space People were asleep. They had picked me up outside of Albuquerque and driven me out onto the desert to their little spread. Because Shaman liked me, they had picked me up. Even though there were Chicanos in those days who hated hippies, who conned their way into communes and shot them up, and I am as dark-skinned and small as a Mexican, they had picked me up.

It was dark in the tent. Flaps open, stars filled the big triangles at either end; feeble candlelight unsealed the night between us, loud with cicadas and dead souls crying. There was a votive candle in a shot glass on the dirt floor. Rococo shadows angled and sprawled across chairs, long table, canvas, and ourselves.

"You’ve broken me." The words jumped where my bones should be. Something in me arched and bristled like a frightened cat. Were the words mine?

Shaman took them for mine. "I’m you," he said. Incomprehensible. "Relax."

I left that place. I left the Space People sleeping. I left Shaman with his kit of tropes that killed or cured or pricked your mind and left you to bleed to death or to drown in the world’s blood, bleeding into you through a tiny hole. The last thing I saw there was the candle flame reflected in Shaman’s eyes, two little flames dwindling as I stumbled out into the desert, out into stars and the cries of cicadas and dead souls, which might have been my tongue, my voice, my limbs, or my self, since Shaman had pricked a hole in my mind.

I had a talk in the dark with a Joshua tree. I said, "Everything’s okay. I have a mother in New York. I have brothers and a sister. My father left us, but he’s still in my mind. In there, I can see the faces of all the people in my life, I know the names of everything, and no one on Earth would disbelieve me." The Joshua tree was unconvinced. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face. I stood there, out of sight of any highway, lost to the Space People, stars in my skin. Someone had just spoken. It might have been the Joshua tree. It might have been the sand.

Finally, tears gushed. I was sitting on a curb by the highway before dawn. I was dawn, not quite risen over a small, dark man on a desert highway. I was a pool of tears splash-fed by a biped above my gutter. I was a tremble, a sob, a cicada, a dead soul listening in. I don’t know what I was. I was a car coming, high beam illumining tear-slicked face, driver coming in earshot of moaning figure, alone in the desert, in the dark.

The car stopped a few yards past me, then purred back. The passenger door flung open, and a man leaned out, balding, single-browed, a skinny man with a nasal accent: "Get in, Jack. We ain’t got all day."

I smelled jasmine, sweet and piercing. Inside, beneath a red tassel hanging from the rearview, a small soapstone elephant was lit by the map light above the dash. My tusks curled into the tangle of threads. I had many arms. In my hands were medicine bottles, knives, diamonds, skulls, crushed demons, and snakes. A naked woman scissored me.

I was sitting in Ganesha’s lap. My legs embraced the elephant’s hips. My heels massaged his buttocks. My nipples rubbed his chest. I smiled, but held my lips enticingly distant. The Indian behind the wheel stroked my back.

Or perhaps I was from Pakistan. I was irritated at Izzy. I, the driver, said, "If I had wanted like this, I would have stayed at my motel, Izzy. Do we have to pick up everybody?"

"Exactly, Sarvaduhka," One-brow shot back. "That’s who this piece of merchandise is: everybody! Ain’t you, Jack?"

I pulled my sleeve across my face to erase the tears. The car, a warm shell of light, seemed heaven, but I couldn’t find where to say yes from. When I tried to speak, the car door groaned instead. It closed. I was inside, in front, squeezed between the door and the man with one long eyebrow. "How did you know?" I tried to say; instead, the sun rose.

Sarvaduhka pressed a button, and there was the United States of America: news, music, tractor pull ads?"SUNDAYYYYYY!"?static, evangelist patter, a song by Johnny Abilene…

… used automobiles, paid political announcements, weather reports…

"Wait a damn minute," Izzy said. "Turn it back to the Haymakers, Duke. I wanna hear that song."

"Haymakers, Izzy?"

"Gimme that." He pushed Sarvaduhka’s hand away and manned the radio dial himself. I felt as if someone were reaming my navel. The smears of sound as the needle skimmed the tuner scale were gurgles of cud surging up my throat. Finally he found it. There were the slightly off-key notes and bad mixing that signal a live performance:

"Epoche?" Sarvaduhka took his eyes off the road?me, a flat, black triangle long as the desert, wide as the squareback here, beetling to a point out there, and dotted with my Bott’s dot vertebrae?to frown at Izzy. "Did the Haymaker say epoche, Izzy?"

"Shut up! I gotta hear this."

Just then Izzy’s beeper went off. I’d never seen one before. I don’t think anyone had at that time. But Izzy’s was beeping. "Not good," he said. He pulled it out of his belt, then held it up close. "Four degrees Kelvin. Shit. It’s up a whole degree. He’s actually tried it."

"Tried what?"

"Epoche, for crissakes. What have we been talking about?salami? Sarvaduhka, who’s President?"

"McCarthy. Why?"

"McCarthy? Still? What color is the American flag?"

"Red, white, and yellow."