A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown

toss him into one of the two empty cells.
    But he hadn’t, of course. The sheriff had finished his report and then driven Henry back to the motel. They drove straight past the spot where the accident had happened—it had not been an accident, of course, but what had it been? What were the words he was supposed to use? The sheriff simply glanced over at Henry as they drove past and let out a long breath. “Awful business,” he said, and Henry turned and looked out the window. His car was gone, towed away, but the highway was still stained, a darker black against the black, bits of glass shining in what was left of the daylight. Awful business. Was that how Henry was supposed to think of this?
    The sheriff pulled into the motel parking lot, stopped in front of the office, and kept the patrol car idling while Henry got out, fished the room key from his pocket, walked down to his room, and opened the door. His hands were still shaking. Henry looked back and waved, and only then did the sheriff nod and drive off.
    It just made no sense, Henry thought as he lay on the motel bed and stared at the ceiling. It made no sense that a man was dead and that his city was in ruins and he had no wife or friends or family to whom he was able or willing to turn and that what he felt was not anger or grief or loneliness or guilt.
    He felt nothing.
    No, to feel nothing would be a relief.
    He had wanted that child. Why had he not managed to tell Amy how devastated he’d been? What had prevented him from speaking?
    Why had he walked away from what he wanted, the only thing he wanted—but there had been all that blood on the highway, and the single V-shaped scratch on his arm, and the thousands and thousands gone in New Orleans, and Amy, and the girl, this girl. For the first time he did not require sleep, did not need the absurd machinations of his dreams, to summon her. Oh, he did not feel nothing. What he felt—what he had become—was desire.
    He did not understand his own thoughts, his own mind. How, in the midst of such ruin and horror, was there this: He watched, his eyes closed, as the girl stepped to the foot of the bed, stood there exactly as his father had stood there holding the bass, though that was in a house that was now gone, a house that was underwater or had been washed away, a life that he had given up, that he had forsaken. The girl wore faded jeans and a red T-shirt, low-rise jeans that rested below the bones of her hips, a torment of bare skin between jeans and shirt. She smiled at him, coyly slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans, and said, Oh, you know who I am, you just won’t remember.
    “I don’t remember,” he said. “Tell me.”
    Henry, she said, and he felt a sharp stab in his back, a pain that arced up through his ribs and then down along his left leg. The girl knelt on the bed, leaned forward, and cradled his feet in her tiny hands. He closed his eyes, felt her press her breasts against his thighs, felt her hands reach beneath his back, her fingers tapping along his spine as if she were searching for the precise place where the pain had begun. You don’t have to remember, she said, whispering now, playful. You don’t have to think at all.
    “Please just tell me,” he said, or tried to say, and he felt the girl stretch over him, felt her tiny hands, her fingers, brush against his lips, felt her hair spill across his chest.
    “I killed a man,” he said. “A man is dead,” he tried to say, but he knew that the girl couldn’t hear him, wasn’t listening, and he lay there with his eyes closed and heard the slow thrum and groan of his father’s bass and he tried to speak, tried to say the girl’s name, Clarissa Nash, but he knew now that he was asleep and so did not have to open his eyes to see that the girl was undressed, that she understood the delicious agony of her breasts and thighs, her scent and skin, that he could do anything to her, that he could do nothing, that he was nothing but