Lexicon

“We have big states, love.”
    “How do I get there? Which is the closest city?” She hoped he was not about to say
Sydney
.
    “Adelaide.”
    “So I can fly to Adelaide,” she said, “and drive from there.”
    “Yes, you can.”
    “Thank you. Sorry for your trouble.” She began to get out of the cab.
    “Only three hundred miles from Adelaide to Broken Hill.” He was grinning. “Welcome to Australia, love.”
    “Thanks,” she said.
    • • •
    She couldn’t secure a flight that day, so she caught a cab downtown and checked into a mid-priced hotel. With the balcony doors open, bringing in a breeze from the green-flecked bay, she sifted through the suitcase, inspecting skirts and jackets. She found a romance novel, the kind you wouldn’t read on the plane, and a diary, for appointments, not confessions. Still, she turned the pages. This woman saw someone named Matt R. a lot. Emily wondered if they met in hotel rooms like this. If, after sex, the woman talked to Matt R., telling him her hopes and problems and idle thoughts. She closed the diary.
    She had to get organized. Her stolen cards were already too dangerous to use; she wouldn’t reach Adelaide on those. She turned to the mirror and fiddled with a shirt. It was a little big, but she could work with the cuffs. She picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. “I want to play poker,” she said. “Something informal.”
    Eventually, the guy stopped recommending casinos and steered her toward an upper room of a nearby bar. It turned out to be middle-aged men in expensive suits, friendly and patronizing while she lost the first two hundred dollars, smiling over their single-malt whiskeys and advancing theories about creative ways to cover her losses. By then she had a queen under her left thigh and a king and an eight under her right. It had been three years since she’d done this kind of thing, and a more attentive audience would have caught her. At one point, she tried to feed a jack into her sleeve and missed so badly that the card landed on the table. She tensed to run, but they only laughed and one man said, “That’s enough grog for you.” The man had red cheeks and was divorced, although he didn’t know it yet. “Sorry,” Emily said, and put the card back in her hand.
    She took him for twenty-eight hundred in the final round, going all in. His face turned incredibly red, like a balloon. No one was smiling now. The game’s operator approached the table, but she didn’t need to be told; she gathered her winnings, thanked them, and when she reached the street, ran as fast as she could back to her hotel. That was how she got to Adelaide.
    • • •
    From there it was a bus ride, the world outside draining green until it was the color of snakeskin. The air-conditioning barely worked and she kept being woken by little trickles of sweat. There was only one other passenger, a woman with skin like coral who nodded off before they were even out of Adelaide and slept like she was dead. Emily wriggled around in her seat, seeking escape from her own body heat.
    Eventually she opened an eye to a passing sign: BROKEN HILL, POP. 10,100. One corner was missing and the rest was peppered with gunshot. It flared in the afternoon sun, leaning drunkenly out of the baked red earth. She sat up and saw a gas station, abandoned, and a tin structure with no windows that was she didn’t know what, also abandoned. A flat, sagging house with a dirt yard full of disemboweled cars. She glimpsed a tall iron structure, vaguely Soviet, but it was on the other side of the bus and she couldn’t see it properly. A thin dog scratched in the dirt. Another low store, this one advertising CHEAP PARTS , although for what she didn’t know. The windows of the stores on either side were blank. Everything was widely spaced, the center of its own little wasteland, and why not, because, she was quickly realizing, that was all there was out here: land, land, and land. She passed signs that said SULPHIDE ST and CHLORIDE ST , because they had named their streets after
minerals
, apparently, and the bus turned onto OXIDE ST and began to slow. She saw a sign that said CITY CENTER and thought,
You have to be kidding me
. When she stepped off it was into burning air, the heat crawling into her nostrils and down her throat, and they hadn’t updated that population sign in a long time, like maybe twenty years, because there might be ten thousand flies here but not people.