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“There’s an underground fire. This is coal country, and the coal caught on fire. It’s been burning ever since—fifty years or so. They can’t put it out. Or they won’t, because it would be too expensive.”
“That’s bizarre.”
“Yeah. So for a long time, it wasn’t noticeable, but then in the eighties and nineties, I think, there started to be all these dangerous things. Like, Stanley says the highway was venting clouds of gas, and plus it was so warm that the temperature difference caused banks of fog, and people couldn’t see where they were driving. He said it was like driving into the Twilight Zone sometimes.”
The surface of the road undulated and shifted. Gullies opened up, then disappeared. She kind of loved this road. She loved thinking about what it must have looked like when it was exhaling heat into the air, the strangeness of it, how beautifully broken it had become since it was abandoned. Most of the surface was covered with graffiti. One section featured hundreds of identical spray-painted phalluses—cartoonish wangs with proud, bulging balls, all pointing in the same direction. The words and colors hit out of order, making a profane poetry.
Ziggy. Cami. Creamy snatch.
Never forget.
This is where she appears in the dark of the night.
Wark.
Asian people love golf.
Welcome to Hell.
Be kind whenever possible.
Roman studied it with his forehead furrowed, like it was a puzzle he might find the clues to solve.
It was all very Roman of him. She was starting to get how he approached the world. As though he were just visiting, trying to understand the best way to blend in with all these messy humans.
Though sometimes he surprised her by blending perfectly well. In the trailer, he’d surprised her, and then he’d cut her down at the knees, and then he’d surprised her all over again.
She’d kept thinking he was going to say it.
She didn’t love you.
Nobody loves you.
But he hadn’t. He’d pulled the punch, and afterward he’d looked punch-drunk himself, and full of shame.
Ashley had lost her resistance to him. The boxes, her disappointment, her tears, their argument—all of it had emptied her out, left her feeling as though she’d been scoured with sand and water and now she was just a clean shell, receptive.
She looked at Roman, and she wanted to draw him inside.
They crossed over a torn-up section of road and reached the outskirts of Centralia. Here, too, there was life—not in abandoned houses, because the houses had all been cleared away, but in the intersections of roads like veins, the bones of a body that had lost its flesh but not its spirit.
“What happened?” he asked.
“The government decided it was too dangerous for people to keep living here, and it would be more practical to get rid of the town than to get rid of the fire. They started paying people to move away and knocking down their houses. When some people still wouldn’t move, the state evicted them. It took a long time, but it’s nearly empty now.”
“It doesn’t look dangerous.”
“Right? Some people think it’s a conspiracy,” Ashley said. “They think the state government wants to kill the town to get the mineral rights.”
“Please.”
“This is one of the richest coal seams in the country. Sometimes the ground is worth more than the people who live on it.”
Roman stopped asking questions. She hadn’t meant to make the comparison to Sunnyvale, but there it was.
She didn’t want to think about Sunnyvale.
“You want to go see the church? There’s one that still holds services.”
