The highway stretched ahead of me like a scar across the face of the continent, gray and cracked and endless. I had been walking it for eleven days. My shoes were falling apart. My water was gone. My pack contained approximately two dollars, a half-eaten bag of crackers, and a book called The Western Gold Guide that I had found in a trash can in Chicago.

The book was supposed to be a guide to gold mining in the western territories. It was published in 1921 and had not been updated since. The maps were wrong. The mine locations were wrong. The advice was wrong. But it was the only thing I had that pointed west, and so I followed it.

My name is Jack Morrison. I am thirty-four years old. I was a mechanic in Chicago until the plant closed in March. I have been walking west since April. I do not know why.

The Great Migration was what people called it. Not officially—there was no official name. But everyone who was doing it called it that. Thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, walking west from the devastated heartland, following rumors of work and land and opportunity. The rumors were mostly false. The work didn't exist. The land was taken. The opportunity was a story people told themselves to keep walking.

But they kept walking anyway.

I met an old man named Riley on the third day of the migration. He was about sixty, maybe older, with a face that looked like it had been carved from leather and a voice that sounded like gravel in a tin can. He had been a farmer in Oklahoma until the dust took everything. Now he was walking to California, he told me, because that's where the work was.

"Everyone says that," I told him.

"Everyone says a lot of things," he replied. "Most of them are wrong. But you walk anyway. That's the trick."

We walked together for two weeks. He told me stories about his farm, his wife (dead), his children (scattered across three states). He told me about the dust storms, the bank foreclosures, the government programs that promised help and delivered nothing. He told me about the last time he had eaten a proper meal—three weeks ago, in a soup kitchen in Denver.

"I'm not afraid of dying," he told me on our last night together. "I'm afraid of dying without having done anything that mattered."

I didn't know what to say. I still don't.

He died on a Thursday. He was walking beside me on the side of the highway when he simply stopped. He didn't fall. He didn't collapse. He just stopped, like a machine that had run out of fuel, and sat down on the side of the road. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes and didn't open them again.

I checked for a pulse. There wasn't one. I checked his pockets. He had four dollars and a photograph of a woman and two children who were probably long gone by then. I put the money in my pocket and left the photograph where it was.

I walked west alone.

The highway was crowded in some places and empty in others. There were families with children, old men with walking sticks, young women traveling alone. There were men who had lost everything and women who had lost everything and children who had never known anything but loss.

We shared food when we could. We shared water when we could. We shared stories when we could. We did not share fear, because there was too much of it to go around.

On the twenty-first day, I reached the Colorado River. The bridge was crowded—hundreds of people waiting to cross, some of them having waited for days. The bridge was a wooden structure that looked like it had been built by people who had never seen a bridge before. It swayed in the wind and groaned under the weight of so many people.

I waited for two days. On the third day, the bridge collapsed.

Not all of it. Just a section in the middle. Approximately thirty people fell into the river. Some of them drowned. Some of them were pulled out by the people on the other side. Some of them were never pulled out.

I waited three more days. Then I found a ferry. The ferry operator charged me five dollars to cross. I gave him the four dollars from Riley's pocket and promised him the fifth dollar when I found it. He looked at me for a long time and then told me to get on the boat.

I crossed the river. I continued west.

The landscape changed as I progressed. The flat plains gave way to rocky hills, the hills gave way to mountains, the mountains gave way to valleys that were green and fertile and beautiful in a way that made my chest ache. I had not seen green like that in over a year. The heartland was brown and gray and dead. This was green and alive and it hurt to look at it.

On the forty-second day, I reached California.

There was no gold. There was no work. There were thousands of people—maybe tens of thousands—already here, living in camps and shantytowns and abandoned buildings. They had come from Oklahoma, from Texas, from Arizona, from everywhere. They had all followed the same rumors, the same stories, the same lies.

I stood on a hill outside the city of Fresno and looked down at the camp. It stretched for miles—tents and shacks and makeshift shelters, smoke rising from a hundred different fires, the sound of children crying and dogs barking and people arguing in a dozen different languages.

It was the same camp as every other camp. It was the same story as every other story. Walk west, find nothing, join the camp, walk somewhere else, find nothing again.

I thought about Riley. I thought about the four dollars I had given the ferry operator. I thought about the gold guide in my pack, lying open to a page that described a mine that had been dry for thirty years.

I thought about turning around.

I thought about walking east, back to Chicago, back to the life I had left, back to the nothing that I had known.

I thought about it for exactly three seconds.

Then I turned around and walked east.

I don't know why. Maybe because the west was a lie. Maybe because the east was at least a familiar lie. Maybe because I was tired of walking in any direction and the only direction left was back.

I walked east for eleven days. Then I stopped. I sat down on the side of the highway and I waited.

I don't know what I was waiting for. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

The highway stretched behind me like a scar across the face of the continent, gray and cracked and endless. It stretched ahead of me the same way.

I sat down and closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the wind.

OTMES Objective Tensor Codes v2.0 ============================== TI (Tragedy Index): 62.4 | Level: T2 幻灭级 MDTEM: V=0.70, I=1.0, C=0.50, S=1.0, R=0.0 Core Tensor: (M1_悲剧=7.0, M4_诗意=7.0, M5_权谋=7.0, M7_恐怖=6.5) Action: N1_主动=0.85, N2_被动=0.15 Value: K1_感性个体=0.70, K2_理性超个体=0.30 Direction Angle: θ=270.0° | Style: 纽约现代主义/存在主义 Literary Potential E_total: 17.8