The Shoes.

He wore dress-shoes with no socks, a masculine version of a wealthy woman's long fingernails; they said, "Under no circumstances will this man be forced to walk far enough for this to become uncomfortable." The shoes had become uncomfortable. This was not tolerable.

The challenge was to not focus on it. Not to look, again and again, at what he already knew was there, had already folded into its own particular painful shape in his mind. This task was made worse by the fact that every step forward hurt just a bit more, and so the nerves in his feet continually had new information to report; a bit of epidermis finally jolted sideways and delaminated from the pink dermis situated below the third metatarsal of his left foot on this step. His faithful neurons reported it in detail, as they had the hundred previous little blisters inside the three-thousand-dollar shoes.

Having never endured this level of discomfort, his nerves knew nothing of numbing down in the way the body-sense of a worker from childhood does. He simply hadn't had a chance to learn the skill of it, in twenty-five years. He screamed occasionally. To his credit, he continued stepping forward onto the sand, one step at a time, one step at a time. The moment his pampered foot had met the grit, there at the end of the leg extended from the open door of the pearlescent white Bugatti, the grit had met his foot, somehow climbing over the hand-stitched leather and into the narrow spaces between his flesh and the borrowed flesh of a flawless-skinned calf, which processed skin had not been selected, treated, or cut for sand-resistance.

Ambient heat is oppressive. When the temperature of the air rises above the core body temperature, which in humans averages an almost-mythical ideal 98.6 degrees, the body begins to take in heat from the air, the reverse of the ordinary venting process his body was accustomed to; his cells began complaining of it when the first blast of desert air broke through the barely-weeks-old door seal of the limousine and met the well-moisturized skin of his face, and the chorus of neural signals reporting abnormally high cellular and interstitial temperatures had risen in a direct ratio to the howling of his blistered feet. The shoes, now deeply scuffed outside and in, seemed to him so far away this moment, directly adjacent the next, swimming, like all of his person, in and out, to and from his point of conscious perception. He wondered if his body was cooking.

The sun beat down on his head. He remembered, once, seeing a man working in the sprawling gardens of his father's estate. The man, brown-skinned and moustached, had worn a wide-brimmed straw hat. The young scion, inheritor, had thought it looked ridiculous; it didn't fit the picture; he had ordered that the man's hat be confiscated. He stomped through the crown of it, just to see the look on the gardener's face. Hours later the man had collapsed in the heat. He was fired for sleeping on the job; another man had taken his place within hours. He hadn't thought of it since; now he wished he had a hat like that, ridiculous or not.

Utah is not a good place to be left out to die, even for those well-trained in survival. This far out on the salt flats, there isn't anything. That is not an understatement; all the way to the delicate line of the horizon, he could see four things; in order, white salt, blue sky, white clouds (few) and silvery, shimmering mirage. Five; so present as to be beyond present, the eternal Sun, its golden face as indifferent to the wealthy young man's fate as it had been to the half-million years' human events which had passed under its light before, and just as distant to the drying, for example, of his pampered skin as it was to the growth of corn crops just a few hundred miles away in Iowa; though both were the result of that golden light. He cursed that golden coin as he recognized it to be the source of his burning.

At some point he had taken off the shoes. He still held them, one in each hand, though there could be no value left in them.

He remembered the way he and his fraternity brothers had treated one bright young pledge. The young man had done everything right, he remembered; memorized the entire pledge book, even learned parts of it which had not been used for questions since before any of the senior brothers were born. He had comported himself with dignity, kept his grades up, kept his appearance perfect except for one factor. The pledge's shoes were always scuffed. This was unacceptable.

The one time the pledge had shown up with the black leather shined, the former fraternity president remembered, he had been ganged up on and the finish ruined by stomping and kicking. He remembered that he had lead his brothers to do it. The young pledge had not come back. The fraternity was notified that he had withdrawn from school. The brothers used the failed pledge's name as an epithet for every infraction, from that year on; he had heard it used at the alumni event just - was it just a week ago?

The sun had become a sliver on the horizon. The temperature did not go down one degree, he estimated. He had no way, however, to estimate the distance he had traveled. He was sure only that it was much farther than he had ever walked in one day. His view had not changed at all; all he saw was salt. As the last rays of the sun winked out, he collapsed onto the hard ground, and lay facedown for an eternity which wasn't likely more than four minutes. He rolled onto his back with great effort, and was stunned. Twenty-five years believing he owned the world - and he had never before seen the stars.

He had stepped into the plush leather back bench seat of the pearlescent white Bugatti from the front driveway of his father's casino on the Las Vegas strip. The alumni event had become a week-long bender; he didn't remember much after the short speeches were finished and the bottles came out. A blur of lights and bodies was about it. At twenty-five he had been on a few tears already, real shenanigans, and had always been bailed out by his father and the rest of his social connections. He hadn't ever considered that fact. It was as natural as breathing to him. As it turned out, that safety net had had limits. Here he was, now, past them - drowning.

The Milky Way stretches, pearlescent, all the way across the desert sky. In populated areas, it is invisible, has been for several decades; the light level on the street at night is sufficient to tune your eyes out of the necessary range to see it. Ancient sages have described it as a road, a scarf, a river, the bent back of the goddess of night, and a thousand other metaphors; none of the descriptors can capture the sheer size, the brilliance, the variation of hue and pattern and chaos contained in the star-studded band of cream which bisects a truly dark night sky. The salt flats are almost entirely uninhabited; the lights of the Strip, brilliant as they were, blinding, eye-bleeding bright neon colors, were nothing compared to this. He remembered learning once, in school, that the planet Earth was out at the edge of the galaxy; that the Milky Way was the galaxy itself, visible. He had no way to comprehend the size of what he saw, or to match his scant knowledge to it.

His nose stung; his eyes squinted; his chest hitched. He had not had this feeling since early childhood, if ever. If his body had had the water to spare, tears would have flowed; it did not, and so his face remained dry. He was small, and small in a small place. The last thought to cross his mind as he fell into a painful, dry sleep was - he was ready to die.

A muffled thump to his left - the first sound he had heard in - forever? He turned his head painfully to look. Impossibly high, towering over his head, the curved beak of a vulture ended in a wicked point. Dark, dusty feathers ruffled in the slow, salt wind of the flats. He squinted - daylight had returned to Utah, fiercer, it seemed, than the day before. In a moment he was on his feet, half-screaming as his blistered soles met the white grit. His eyes locked for a moment with the yellow eyes of the carrion-bird. He half-expected it to speak, to list his sins, to guide him to a better way of living. It did not. Seeing that the expensively-clothed form was not that of a dead man, kicking up a torrent of sharp dust, the scavenger beat its way into the air. He watched it circle for a moment, then beat a straight path away from the rising sun - to the west. Picking up the shoes, he followed its path until the bird became a black speck, then disappeared. He continued to walk in, he assumed, the same direction. There was no way to tell. The horizon remained stark white against blazing blue.