The machine streaked across the desert, screaming through bleak vistas of scorched earth where nothing lives without a little outside help. Joshua trees and desultory vultures. Fossils buried under the salt floor of ancient seas. She was hammering the gas, white knuckling the wheel until the screaming of the engine drowned out the screaming in her mind. She was riding inside a shot bullet, all done and hurtling toward any bull’s-eye she could hit. There was a world of shame in the rearview mirror and a vortex of impossible questions ahead in the blinding beyond.

Lean muscle danced under the blue ink hieroglyph down her arm, taut sinews singing as she pushed the tiny flash of metal past RPMs she didn’t bother counting. Everything played games just below the surface of her skin: angels and devils flirting with delicious catastrophes, the appetite for better dreams swimming against the rush of her blood. When she caught a flash of her eyes in the mirror, the shadows she knew had been living behind them were gone. She didn’t know where, but it didn’t matter anymore.

The whole idea of gone took on a strange new meaning. It was where she was now – where she was headed - and the sudden revelation of freedom made her cells prickle with something soft and electric. She’d never been more alone, yet she couldn’t help thinking maybe this was what being in love must be like.

She almost felt herself turning beautiful again, the way she was before the dark ages of manifold appetites and penthouse excuses unplugged her sparkle. Even under the ink and scars it felt like her skin was changing into something better than it used to be.

A new name, a couple more borders and she was home free.

Then something moved in the middle of the lane ahead, and by the time she realized it was only a scrubby headed turkey vulture gnawing up roadkill she’d already hit the brakes too hard. The car fishtailed and she pulled the wheel too sharp into the skid. But even as the car veered onto the rocky desert sand a strange sense of calm came over her. Whatever happened now could never go as wrong as everything before it.

She took her hands off the wheel and pressed them up into the ceiling, closing her eyes while she felt the vehicle bounce and spin. She took one bounce hard enough to make her wonder why the car didn’t roll, but she felt separate from it all, pressing her hands even harder into the ceiling, pinning herself down against the seat. She was steady under all the layers of chaos. There was nothing to do but wait for the car to lose momentum and finally crunch up against a tree on the passenger’s side.

She sat a moment, waiting to be sure the car had really stopped. She pulled her hands back down to her lap and opened her eyes, realizing the engine hadn’t even stalled. She shut it off and got out. The car was layered in grit and heavily scuffed. The dust trail behind her still drifted on slow moving air. The right front headlight was smashed, but the tires were all okay…and so was she.

She walked over to the road and looked off in the direction she’d come from. The vulture was already back where it had been before the skid, finishing off what was left of its meal. She laughed a moment or two, then looked around at the vast expanse of beautiful nothingness. She wondered if it was wrong not to feel disoriented, but as the desert heat licked at the pores of her skin she felt calm. Her heart felt strong and steady, like a secret fist.

Every moment was nothing more or less than whatever was happening inside it. She was alive and perfectly self-contained, even if she wasn’t supposed to be.

The long, black thread of road shuddered with heat ripples in both directions. She pulled her cropped T shirt over her head, then toed off her sandals and unzipped her cutoffs, pushing them off along with her panties. She stood naked in the center of the road and touched her breasts. Her body felt weightless, but there was a heaviness to her breasts that felt comforting. Hot desert air swarmed through the space between her sinuous thighs. Shaven slick as Teflon, her pussy felt touched.

She looked up and then down the road again. More of nothing piled on top of nothing. Freedom was letting the sun kiss her body like a secret lover in the middle of a road no one needed anymore. She closed her eyes and pinched her nipples. The heat felt like ions raining on her skin.

She opened her eyes and started walking toward the vulture, the heat of the pavement nearly burning the soles of her feet, but she was too consumed with being alive to care. She stopped and stood fifteen feet from the vulture. It just kept digging and eating.

“You don’t want me, so I guess that’s a good thing,” she said.

The vulture ignored her. It made her think of those twisted old widows she saw once in Mexico. She turned and walked back toward her strewn clothes. She owned the last remaining secrets of the world now, and the notion was almost enough to make her wet.

She stopped in the middle of the road, her feet planted on either side of the ghost of a center line. The desert air merged with her skin. She touched her palms to the insides of her thighs and followed the line of empty road with her eyes until it thinned into whatever was going to happen next. She pushed against the meat of her own body until her blood stopped. The pressure against her muscles pried against the petals of her pussy.

Air hotter than her skin licked at her half splayed lips. Open desolation lay out in every direction. Her hands slowly closed in on her pussy, thumb crossing over her mound while her fingers dragged along her folds. Sense and moisture. Right hand finger dug and parted her flesh. She flushed slick and pushed her finger inside.

She owned everything and possessed nothing. She stirred herself slightly, feeling her blood rush and then slowly dragged her finger back out. She set her feet further apart on the pavement and rolled the clustered pads of her fingers along the slippery crease of her sex. Something caught inside her she couldn’t stop. Something she didn’t want or try to stop.

She threw back her head and closed her eyes. Highway and desert spun around her in the darkness, and the caught thing inside her locked up in her muscle and sinew. Her fingers slicked up inside her, pump strokes of her own, haphazard design until the scarlet pearl riding the apex of her core pulsed in waves that shivered through the stone clench of her body.

She couldn’t stop the caught thing inside. She couldn’t stop anything, couldn’t stop being alive until the waves became a vortex and she opened her eyes to see the open world around her. The only real living thing for miles in every direction – naked and taking flight - she felt like a secret too thrilling to even tell herself. Her body clenched around the explosion of heat in her cells. She buckled from the middle and lightly stamped a bare foot on the tar as the waves of sensation rose up through her body and disseminated in the air.

She was twenty-six and knew how to move in and out between beats of the earth’s heart, but it was the first time there was ever a vulture over her shoulder that wasn’t there to eat her alive.

Her finger moved and stirred inside. There was a difference between touching and feeling, but she had yet to learn what it was. She slowly drew her finger out of herself. She stuck it in her mouth and sucked. She was free enough for now.

She gathered up what little there was of her clothes and put them back on, then went back to the car and started it up. It took a couple of minutes to work it back onto the pavement. She idled a moment on the shoulder and took another look at the hand drawn map on the passenger’s seat. She knew every line and scrawl by heart now. The X on the map wasn’t much farther. A man she’d never met before would be expecting her, and so was the person he was waiting to help her become.

**

Hawke was sitting Lotus style under the old willow behind the house and trailer. His back was to the trunk, his eyes focused on the blurred lace of the tree’s canopy against the sky beyond, but he wasn’t seeing it now. It was only the point where he always started. After focusing on the leaves for several minutes, his thoughts would begin to blur and merge until his mind became as clear as water. It never lasted more than a few minutes, but the feeling of being in tune with himself would be with him for hours.

Prison zen that had stuck with him.

Breath went in and out of him like a circle, but when the car pulled in he was nearing the end of his usual peak. He’d been expecting her, but he didn’t move when he heard the tires crunch up to the front of the house. The engine shut down and the door opened and shut as he sat a moment more. He took one more, long, slow breath and floated to his feet, but he stayed where he was in the cool shade under the willow, hidden behind the dangling skirts of its branches.

She was driving a 3 series BMW that had seen better days than today. She walked a circle around it, cautiously checking out the house and the trailer that faced it on an angle, keeping her distance. She scanned the area, her gaze sweeping across the hillside where the tree was, but she didn’t see Hawke hidden behind the skirt of branches and leaves.

She was out in the open too much. She moved too much like a bird and not enough like a cat. People were earth bound creatures. She was going to need a lot of schooling.

Her legs had a long, sapling-like quality about them in cut-offs too small to let her be anonymous. The tattoo on her upper thigh probably reached up across her hip. It matched the ink on her arm; same motif and style. Probably the same artist, Hawke assumed. Her breasts weren’t overly large, but they were slightly out of tune with the hard willowy look of her body. At least her long, blonde hair could be cut and dyed.

The tits and ink were going to be a problem, though.

She called his name a couple of times, once toward the house and once toward the trailer. She finally went to the front door of the house and banged her small fist on it a few times.

Hawke waited. If she was bringing anyone else along to the party, knowingly or otherwise, now was the time to find out. He waited long enough to let her start thinking he wasn’t there. She banged on the door of the house again and then stalked across the gravel drive and banged on the trailer door. She started to look worried and paced around the car some more.

Her body started to fill with tension, but she finally seemed to deflate and went to sit in the small square of shade under the awning over the door.

Hawke watched her sit another ten minutes or so. She was understandably tense, but she knew how to wait. That much would always be in her favor. When The Monk had called to set up the meet, he’d given Hawke the impression she was just another party favor running from her own bad choices, but there was a weight about the blonde that wasn’t on her resume – self-aware without being self-absorbed. He could feel it from there under the tree. She was rumpled and dusty, a woman not above allowing herself to get smudged.

Instinct prickled the follicles at the base of his neck. He passed a couple of minutes considering whether or not to wait long enough for her to get fed up and leave. She didn’t read like the type who would need his help, but he finally stepped out from under the tree and started down the hill. As he drew closer and got a better look at her car, he caught a good idea of the kind of time she’d had getting there. She didn’t notice him until his shadow cut across her bare legs and she looked up squinting.

“You know who I am?” she asked.

He nodded. “Only what The Monk said.”

“So, then…you knew I was coming?”

“Let’s go inside.”

She stood up and looked a little awkward as she waited for him to open the door. The house wasn’t much bigger than the trailer, with a small kitchen and dining area on the left and a living room on the right. Hawke went to the refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of water. She was still standing by the door when he turned around. He set one of the bottles on the table and leaned back against the counter, uncapping the bottle he kept for himself.

She didn’t seem to know what to do next. She was watching him for a sign, but all he did was angle the water bottle to his mouth and drink. She moved to the table and sat, opening the bottle he’d set there and drank.

He watched her throat move as she drained half the bottle. Something shifted inside him. Delicacies always sneak out from the corners you don’t expect. A feeling came over him that call from The Monk would have been a good one to miss. Whoever was looking for her was probably committed to finding her. It’s what Hawke would do if he lost something like her. Once upon a time, anyway, in the days before he’d lost himself.

But he was used to losing things, and he was better at it than most people. She put the bottle back on the table and looked at him expectantly.

He watched her wait. She had the kind of beauty that was intense but not angry. Even now. Her eyes were serious but without fear. Maybe that was even a good thing.

“Did The Monk tell you anything about what to expect?” he finally asked.

“He just said I should do what you tell me or I’m probably fucked.”

Hawke nodded thoughtfully. “You’re down to your ninth life or you wouldn’t be here. I’ll help you change the most recognizable things about you. Few more days and you’ll be somebody else.” He paused a couple of beats and she nodded, the attentive pupil. “Are you careless or stupid?”

She shook her head no. There was no exaggeration to the gesture but no hesitation, either. Hawke reached in his pants pocket and pulled out a key, then slid it across the table in front of her.

“You’ll stay in the trailer while you’re here. There’s not much in there, but at least the basics. Clean sheets, lights and hot water. There’s no food so you’ll have to come back here if you get hungry.”

She didn’t say anything, but as soon as he said the word he realized she’d probably gone most of the day without food. Her eyes were pale jade, but there was something darker about them –a shade that had nothing to do with color - like someone else was sitting inside the raw shell of woman sitting at his table.

“You’ll be comfortable enough in there for a couple of days. Go settle in. Shower’s working if you want. I’ll see about putting something together to eat.”

She looked disoriented for a few seconds when he mentioned eating, but she caught herself and nodded. She got up to go and then paused with her hand on the door.

“Do the people you help like you’re helping me ever say thanks?” she asked without looking at him.

“No.”

“Not ever?”

“No.”

He watched her study the door knob a moment longer. She fingered strands of stray blonde behind her ear. The relationship between her jaw and cheekbone were like few things he’d seen.

“Do they ever tell you their names?”

“Absolutely not.”

She nodded – unsurprised by his reply - and walked out. Hawke opened the refrigerator and started taking inventory.

**

The trailer was cramped but everything was crisp and tidy as an old motel room. Fresh sheets were folded and stacked on one of the bunks. The lights turned on and water ran in the kitchenette. The moment alone made it all feel more comfortable somehow. She tested the shower and water ran there, too. She left it running and peeled off her top and shorts.

She stepped inside the tiny stall under a weak spray just warm enough to pretend it was hot. Dust and fatigue ran off her skin and pooled around the drain. She thought about the scar running down the side of Hawke’s face from his brow to the edge of his jaw. She’d wanted to ask him about it. He was handsome all around it, but he kept turning his face the other way when he caught her looking.

It wasn’t the kind of scar a boy gets falling off a swing.

She thought about scars as she slid a fresh bar of soap across her wet skin. Hers were all on the inside, and until recently, she’d thought they were self-inflicted.

Suds ran down the ink on her body. Right arm, left hip. The images were crisp but the colors were dull when you looked at them too long. It was the quality of her skin that made them vibrant. Blood red flowers and mythical war birds. She was a story with a beginning and end but no middle.

She realized the ink on her body was as much a burden to her now as Hawke’s scar was to him. For all the promises The Monk had made about what Hawke could do, she knew he could never turn her skin upside down. She hadn’t missed the way he’d quietly studied her. He’d kept the annoyance off his face, but it had passed through his eyes like the shadow of a pendulum.

The Monk had told her she would need a miracle to slip away from Trey, but Hawke had looked at her like she’d squandered all the currency she had to buy one. She realized the truth of her survival rested somewhere in between.

She leaned back against the cramped enclosure and closed her eyes as the dull jets of tepid spray pelted her breasts. She reached up and clutched each one hard, squeezing and kneading her pliant mounds until her nipples ached. She pinched her growing nipples and thought back to when the car had spun out around that vulture in the desert.

Her knees started to bend as her right hand dropped down her body. Her skin felt wet and slick as her fingers formed a half cup over her bald pussy. She felt warm, pliant and alive. A thousand oily liars had told her she was beautiful, but the words had only ricocheted off the shell around the burning lamp down in the window of her soul. Everything they said – the way they’d all looked at and touched her – never connected with the lost animal inside.

The web of her fingers pressed into herself. In the moment she closed her eyes and felt only the spray against her body and the pressure of her hand between her thighs, she felt herself turning beautiful the way she had just before the car spun out of control. But it was a different kind of beauty the parlor freaks had all told her she had. They’d all looked at her like something they were about to wound. Hawke had looked at her like something wounded that needed fixing.

At least if you look at something like it needs fixing, you have to harbor the belief it can be fixed.

Her middle finger settled into the furrow between her flushing sex lips, and the animal inside called out to say it had never been lost at all. She pressed her weight against the side of the stall and let her thighs drift open.

Her finger moved. Her pussy swarmed wet heat around it.

She didn’t need Hawke to fix her. If he could help her reinvent her identity, she’d be just fine fixing herself. Still, as her pussy flushed hot sap around her deepening finger she wondered what it would be like to be touched by a man like him, who’d caught a glimpse of the hidden animal. One look at his scar and eyes was enough to see he knew something about healing from a deep wound.

He would have hands like any other man. A million hands all made of fingers and thumbs, but the man is always revealed in the shifting weight of his touch. Every set of fingertips forge their own relationship with the surface of a woman’s skin.

Her finger curled up inside and she felt like something new and unbroken. The slick cavern felt like the flesh of another creature, but the shiver of sensation seeping through her cells brought her back home to herself.

“I can be beautiful,” she aloud as she slid her finger deeper. She pushed another inside along with it, feeling sweet tension sing through her sinews and muscle.

She flashed back on her life with Trey and his coterie of parlor freaks. Five years summed up in a fleeting hallucination of memory. “I’m not the kind of beautiful you think you made me…I’m something else…I’m the kind of beautiful your wretched eyes will never see.”

She ground her heels against the enclosure floor and pushed her fingers back and forth, slip-sliding through the center of her body. She remembered hearing somewhere how all the cells in a human body die off and regenerate every minute or two. It was like becoming someone new every minute.

Every minute of her life was just about to begin.

**

Hawke stood outside the trailer, debating whether or not he should knock. When he heard the way she was talking to herself he decided not to. She’d smell the steaks and come across the gravel when she was ready. The wretched eyes she was talking about weren’t his, but he knew the kind of eyes she meant.

“Eyes I dare not meet in dreams.”

He knew his eyes weren’t wretched, even though people rarely met them head on. It was the scar that made them turn away. The only wretched thing about his eyes was how the light inside them kept flickering on and off.

She’d looked at his scar without turning away. It was his eyes she turned away from.

Times like this, when everything held still for the sun to go down, he felt the intricate motion of it all. Sun, moon, sky – jagged horizon. He listened to her through the trailer wall and studied her face in his mind. He had a strong feeling she wasn’t going to resist having to reinvent herself from the ground up. It was as if she’d started well before she got there.

She let out a muted gasp that almost sounded like crying. He knew how badly she needed to be alive. Even the first time he’d spotted her earlier, from the hillside under the willow, he could tell she was a ravenous organism hell bent on staying alive.

He suddenly felt an odd sensation of missing someone - someone he’d never met before - and the odd futility he probably never would. Most people would never set foot in the same room with the one person who’d end up changing their lives. Believing in fate didn’t necessarily mean believing it did you any favors.

He didn’t want to care about the kind of beauty she was talking about to herself in the shower. If he started to think about the vibrant synergy between herself and the way she moved – the way she would ask a question and then knit her brow to consider the reply – or even the way her jaw curled in and down toward the delicacy of her throat – he’d lose his objectivity, and he’d never be able to do the job she was paying for.

He didn’t want to stand there and listen to her drive herself through the center of a thousand firing synapses. He turned and walked back across the gravel to the house.

There was a worn carpet in the living area where he practiced his Tai Chi form until he smelled her shampoo and knew she’d come in. She was standing just inside the door watching him.

“Smells good,” she said from the doorway.

Her hair was still wet. She was wearing black leggings and a cropped, white T shirt that make her ink and nipples stand out like an awkward greeting. A black and blue nylon backpack dangled from her right hand.

“Steak and beet greens,” he said, floating out of his form to stand and face her. “There’s plenty of greens if you don’t eat meat.”

“It’s ok,” she nodded. “Meat’s good.”

She was looking at his scar without flinching. He didn’t turn his head this time. Unspoken thoughts hung in the still air. Hawke studied her face while she studied his scar. There was a quality in the stretch of her skin over her tendons and bones that didn’t seem to match the husk of her voice when he’d listened to her talking to herself about being beautiful.

He caught himself wondering what the hollow of skin at the base of her throat would taste like when he realized just how valuable a piece of candy she had to be to Trey. He tried not to speculate how much The Monk might have told her about the jagged history they all shared.

“Let’s sit down,” he said, moving toward the Formica table that was half blocking the entrance to the kitchenette.

“Here,” she said, holding the backpack up to him as he passed. “Might as well just give you this now.”

He took the pack without looking at it and flung it sideways onto the worn sofa in the living area.

“Aren’t you going to count it?” she asked.

“Any reason I should?” he countered as he stepped into the kitchenette and set the steaks and a bowl of cooked greens on the table. There were already plates and tin dinnerware he set about arranging into crude place settings on opposite sides.

She sat down on one side and he stabbed one of the steaks with a fork and put it on her plate. He put the other on his own plate and started cutting. He almost expected her to say something more about the pack full of cash, but mercifully, she didn’t. She cut a piece off her steak and chewed hungrily. She ate as if she needed the food more than the freedom she’d come to buy.

Hawke ate slowly, watching her tear into her steak with predatory zeal. He suddenly got up and got two bottles of water out of the refrigerator, setting one in front of her. She paused and opened the bottle. The drink broke her rhythm and she went back to her steak more calmly.

“What’s my new name going to be?” she asked suddenly. It sounded like something she’d been wondering about but hadn’t been planning to ask. There was a curiosity in her tone that almost sounded naïve.

Hawke paused over the question. “I don’t know. Why?”

“It’s hard not to be curious. Besides, I can tell you don’t want to know my name, but you still need something to call me.”

“You can choose one,” he said. “It’s not like it’s all planned out ahead. Is there a name you always wished you had?”

She stopped eating and looked at him. Straight at his eyes this time. She looked even more surprised than he felt. The right corner of her mouth curled into half a smile, making her cheekbone dance.

“Why don’t you pick one?”

Hawke felt as close to confused as he’d been in a long time. The idea of having a name to call her made his wrists sweat. It wouldn’t change the delicate desperation of her features, but he’d never be able to look at her exactly the same way again.

“You can have any name you want now,” he started to explain.

She reached across the table and touched his hand. “Sure,” she said, “but how many people choose their own name. Most of the time your parents give you a name they like for some reason, or maybe something that reflects what they hope you turn into. Friends give you nicknames that say something about how they see you. Whatever. It just doesn’t seem natural to pick your own name.”

Hawke felt a smile fighting to break out on his face. He fought back, but he could feel it filter through his eyes. She was looking at his eyes again. There was a glitter in hers that entered him in a way that reminded him of breathing. Her eyes were green with random flecks of amber. He looked at her face and thought about names. She watched him think and he turned his hand underneath hers, touching her palm with the tip of his finger.

“Echo,” he finally said.

“That’s not even a name,” she said, although her eyes flickered with curiosity.

“It’s a very old name,” Hawke told her. “Echo was a beautiful nymph who used to tell stories to an immortal queen so her husband could sneak out and play.”

She uttered a half laugh. “Some claim to fame.”

“Well, that’s not Echo’s whole story. Do you know about Narcissus?”

“Sure. The guy who fell in love with himself.”

“Right. But Echo was in love with Narcissus. Can you imagine being in love with a man who loves himself more than anyone else?”

She suddenly seemed shrouded in worry, but she was tracking Hawke’s face. It hadn’t been such a difficult chord to strike. A man who loved her might be flattened over losing her, but he’d have to let her go. A man who loved himself enough to believe he could own something like her would pursue her all the way to Hell.

“One day she followed Narcissus into the woods,” Hawke went on. “All she wanted to do was hold him, talk to him, but she was afraid to reveal herself. She was a fretful creature without much in the way of self-worth. Narcissus sensed he wasn’t alone and called out, not knowing who was there, but Echo choked and all she could do was repeat everything he said. She couldn’t make herself approach him. Narcissus freaked and started to run, but when he saw his reflection in a pool of water, he became so entranced by his own beauty he was paralyzed. Echo wandered through the woods calling out to a man doomed to admire his own reflection so much me would never see beyond it. She kept calling and calling, trying to get him to see her, but she finally faded away into nothing but the echo of her own voice.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” she finally said. “But Echo doesn’t come out all that well in the end.” For a moment, her green eyes looked like they were about to spill.

Hawke broke into a full smile.

“If you ask me, Narcissus was the real loser. He would never love anyone but himself. There was no one to love him back but his own reflection. Can you just imagine how alive Echo must have felt? How her heart must have been swollen with love? And in the end she turned into a song.”

She blinked hard against the moisture in her eyes, but her mouth joined Hawke’s in that smile.

“Where’d you hear all that?” she asked.

“It was in a book I read in prison.”

She didn’t look surprised, but she nodded in silent approval. Hawke squeezed her hand.

“Eat up,” he said, going back to his steak. “You need a good meal and a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we go to work making you disappear.”