Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 by Various Page A

bleeding to death by the time the constitution had been adopted in 1789. Slavery and the Indian genocide built a country still in denial, chained to its past, still ill with immigrant enemies, as stained with human blood as anywhere else on earth.
    It was my shadowy inner landscape that had attracted the tour guide, a curious, thoughtful man, I told myself, who read my melancholy expression and body language, and knew a sucker when he saw one.
    His story was a lie on the face of it, but matched to my mood and personal history by an observant con man. What could I lose by going along for the show, which I would not even have to pay for up front, if ever?
    It was a smooth ride north, in an expensive air-conditioned and well-shocked black Rolls-Royce. I sat in the stressed suspension with a quiet old man and woman. The guide was up front with the driver. Business must have been good for the guide to have a vintage vehicle.
    We did not speak, as if on our way to a funeral or an execution, which in a sense was true. My companions in the facing seats were well past their sixties, maybe much older, but fit and booted for hiking out of a past that was not yet past. Their gray, well preserved faces held more than could ever be said. Their staring silence knew my youth.
    Outside the windows the beautiful landscape was ever more hilly as we neared the mountains. Gnarly trees, mossy rocks, goat trails, and streams, a stone house here and there all clung to a steepening that might roll up and over the blue sky, past the zenith and down the other side, as if the world was the inner surface of a hollow sphere.
    An amnesiac concentration locked me into a scanning, predatory patience, as if waiting to be confirmed in lost truths.
    The guide had told me of his long walks in this landscape, where he had stumbled upon the historied infinity of branching pasts, and I had told myself that only a lunatic would believe in the discovery that had given him the way in which he now earned his living.
    Still, however vengeful the suckers, he would have to deliver something to get paid. But what could he ever deliver? Once he was paid, I imagined that he might kill us in some seclusion of mossy rocks, but reminded myself that he had not asked to be paid in advance or out here.
    We reached what seemed an arbitrary destination and got out. The driver stayed with the car. The guide led the way.
    The old man and woman walked ahead of me on the narrow hot dusty trail, with high-powered rifles over their shoulders. I had refused the weapon offered to me, but I felt it pulling at me from inside the car.
    Our guide stopped and pointed, then came back to my side.
    I peered ahead, but could not see the figures coming toward us. The couple unshouldered their rifles. The guide handed me his binoculars.
    I put them to my eyes and fixed on the figure of a man. He shimmered as if through a mass of heated air, and for several moments held still between one instant and the next, in the way that an analog clock’s second hand seems to hesitate when you stare at it too long, as if it will never find the next moment.
    A guide moved ahead of a man I recognized from the album of mugshots which my guide kept for his customers. All the faces had a look about them that was unmistakable to an informed viewer.
    “It’s him!” the old woman rasped, wheezing in the hot morning air, and for an instant I felt that she would die of heaving.
    Then silently, they both raised their rifles and fired, and the figure’s head exploded into a watermelon red as the shots echoed and he fell backwards.
    His guide turned to look back and stood transfixed, then fled back up the trail, and seemed to fade away.
    The old couple sighed and stared, and trembled as if about to collapse, but held steady.
    My guide’s face was without expression as he led us back, and I could not help feeling deprived; there had been no one here for me to kill today.
    Back at the hotel, I tried to absorb the fact that