Nearly a year had passed since his mysterious appearance in New York. Not that it mattered, as his sense of time had since been whipped into a nonlinear fog—five days, eight months, one second, six weeks—it all blended into an indivisible lump of time. He suffered an ever intensifying desire for change, for normality, straight and narrow, and for months, struggled to stay aligned with a plan, which kept shifting beneath him. Joyce had finally convinced him to come to Phoenix for a visit. She offered him the car that had been sitting unused in her garage. It was, and had always been, registered in his name. All he’d need was a driver’s license—a minor issue, for which Joyce had a solution. Roland sipped ginger ale from a thin plastic cup, yet feeling weak from the cold and flu he’d contracted six days earlier. Seven miles below, the featureless flatness of Kansas crept sluggishly by in the little oval window to his right. His thoughts wandered between lifetimes, as they so often did of late—his childhood, Selma, growing up in Indiana, Nancy and their move to Stelle, and then the strange days leading up to his first evening with Dana.
