October 14, 2020.

Fait Accompli, Chapter Three.

When I wake up I can't remember who or where I am for about a quarter of an hour. The old gal who I guess lent me the room raps on my door and tells me what time it is (nine thirty ay em) and would I like some breakfast and I say yes please. She gives me toast and runny undercooked eggs that look how I feel. I say thank you ma'am. She says I'm welcome and am I a University man too.

I say no ma'am but why do you ask. She says Dinnerset is a sleepy town and almost nobody comes through but the postman, and yet they've had two strangers from the University come through in the past month. One of them, a Mr. Schmitt, slept right where I'm sleeping now and ate eggs and toast too, right where I'm eating them.

I estimate the old gal to be O.K. and so I tell her I'm not a University man but some University men sent me to check on the fellows that came through Dinnerset. I lean in, confidentially, and she leans in confidentially back. She's having fun and so I start having a little fun too. They've gone missing, I tell her, and the profs put me on the case.

O, she says, o goodness, I hope they're O.K. I ask her about them and what they said they were here for. She says they said they were checking out a site out in the desert to erect a radio transmitter tower tall enough that the whole state could listen to KDZK or KOJ if they wanted. I tell her, wow. That's pretty tall. She says yup.

We get the facts established. The men came through a month apart, no family, no assistants, each carrying a cart of radio equipment (or something that she believed to be radio equipment, she excuses herself, for she is not an educated woman, although she does know how to read). Mr. Schmitt was calm and bookish and very pleasant to the old gal, Dr. Palmer stayed over at the Fifs House and so she didn't know what he was like outside of the gossip, although from what she heard he was a drinker and maybe more, and I say what does that mean, and she indicates that she heard that those at Fifs House had suspected that the missing Dr. Palmer was an indulgent in laudanum. I say oh boy and she says oh boy too.

After a day of preparation, they each of them in their own respect had left Dinnerset to the West, heading into the desert with their equipment. Then nobody had seen them again.

I ask her whether either of them had been strange, and she says no more than anybody else from California, and I tell her that's fair and we both laugh. We talk about the desert for a while and she gives me some more sage advice that I write down in my notebook next to the advice from Dinnick. Then I say thank you ma'am and I pay for the room and I go out to look at the town.

I get outside and already I know it is a mistake. My body feels like it is boiling inside my clothes and the sun is nowhere near overhead. The packed sand that makes up the town's roads creaks beneath my shoes, like it's going to crack beneath my weight and I'm going to tumble endlessly into a forever pit.

First I find the Fifs House and ask those staying there about the missing University men, but they tell me the same story as the old gal, although they add enough gory personal details on Dr. Palmer that I decide that I'd like to attend a clam-bake thrown by the rip-roaring egghead.

By the time it is noon I am drenched in sweat, the sand has penetrated all the folds of my skin, I feel like a being of grime. Every movement of flesh against flesh on my flabby body is either unexpectedly slimy or an awful sandpaper dragging sensation. I decide it is high time to start drinking.

I get myself drunk enough to function. I interrogate everyone I run into in the town. They all seem genial and pleasant but have nothing more to tell me: the men came into town for one night, headed out towards the desert, and they never saw them again.

O.K. I think. A little too consistent. There are secrets left to be revealed, and there is a conspiracy afoot in Dinnerset to keep me from the truth. Maybe the men saw something they weren't supposed to see. Maybe a labor dispute got out of hand and they got caught up in the middle of it. Maybe this is a stopover for hooch runners and the mob buried them out in the sands. Maybe a corrupt mayor didn't want news of his crimes leaving the town. Maybe Dinnerset murders out-of-towners under the full moon. Maybe a blood ritual to Ba'al. Maybe a portal to Hell.

But I know that I am just trying to find an excuse to not walk out into the Mojave. Still I keep drinking and investigating and drinking and investigating until night falls and the temperature starts to drop and I can breathe again.

My investigations have not been going so well. In fact I am getting the sense that I have spent my good-will in Dinnerset over the past six hours pretty completely. Even when I retire to the old gal's little house, I can feel her souring to my presence, a cant to her face that lets me know that to her I'm revealed as a bad and broken thing.

I will have to steal away in the dark, and walk out on the sands hours before sunrise. Everything has gone wrong. I wish Annie were here, she'd know how to smooth things out with the old gal, with the people of Dinnerset. I wish Annie were here. She'd know what to do.

There is no moon. The desert looks like a hole, and hungry.