Northern Boulevard

Driving in Rio Rancho. Don't know whose car, but it's not mine. It's mid morning or mid afternoon in early springtime. The sun is out but the shadows are long. I pass my mother's car somewhere on Southern Boulevard. Mom calls my cell phone and we chat briefly. We say goodbye; we'll meet at her house later.

Sometime later I turn onto Northern Boulevard, which is developed on the south side (boxy industrial parks) and mostly undeveloped on the north side, save for a couple of plain churches and custom-built homes. I pull off the road, park the car and pick up a library book sitting next to me. It's a cheaply-printed, laminated paperback with an ugly gray cover, no graphics or illustrations, and a title written in a generic Times Roman-like font. Some kind of sci-fi novel self published by a crank author who lived in Rio Rancho until his death a couple years back. I'm studying this book for my own personal research, taking notes about it in a spiral notebook. I start to copy the title, but then I realize that the spine of the book, the front cover and the title page all give slightly different titles.

The Arrival at Isthmorn[? or some other nonsense science fictiony proper noun]
The Ithmorn Arrival
The Ithmorn Arrival: A [something something]

Something like that. Even stranger, the edition of the book that I have is an omnibus collection of three different versions of the novel-- the original, a revised version, and a version re-written by a friend of the author. Confusingly, the different versions are jumbled together, with one chapter of each respective version in printed in succession. Many of the chapters are only half a page long, while others go on for twenty or fifty pages.

Because of the rampant inconsistencies in the text, I give up on my notes for the time being and just begin skimming through the book. The prose is impenetrable, like a Scientology book translated into Japanese and back into English. I have no idea what any of it means.

I look down the road in front of me. Rio Rancho used to be known as a haven for crank science fiction writers. Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when this area was empty desert, the author of the book I'm holding was allowed to build a line of small monuments along this street, then a dirt road, immortalizing his insane philosophies. The first one is at the very spot where I've parked. The monuments are squat little structures, maybe 4 feet high by six or seven feet wide, made of beige cinder blocks, like the signs you see in front of call centers and suburban housing subdivisions. Quotes from the book are stenciled on them in white paint. They are small and nondescript enough that you could completely ignore them if you don't know to look for them as you drive by.

The signs continue for the next couple of miles down the road, one every hundred yards or so. I stop at each one, cross-checking them with the corresponding passages in my book and still utterly failing to understand they're supposed to mean. Then I get to a place where the soil on both sides of the road is being churned and flattened by bulldozers, preparing for the construction of a new housing development or a box factory or something. The signs beyond this point have been destroyed. Soon they will all be gone, and no one will notice.

I take Northern the rest of the way down to Highway 528, make an awkward left turn and then drive north toward my mother's house. I pass hesitantly through a flashing yellow stoplight. Then I hear sirens approaching from somewhere behind me. Helicopters pass overhead. Fire engines go by as I pull over to the far right side of the road. The radio tells me that there's a massive forest fire somewhere up north, started by an electrical mishap. The implant in my brain begins playing a TV newscast about the fire. A pretty, airheaded anchorwoman says that the fire is the fault of some collectivist farmers. Somehow I know that this is false propaganda.