They checked into the Black Horse Motel, a cheap but clean adobe squat on the outskirts of Des Moines, New Mexico, just after dusk. They fucked nearly as soon as they had hauled the bags in from the car. He threw her on the bed, pinned down her wrists, and wrestled apart her knees with his Tony Lamas. She spread her legs wide and bent her knees to receive him, her short sundress working its way up her thighs in the process. He kicked off his boots and took her hard and fast and dirty. It was over in minutes.

No worries. Round two would commence shortly. After that, who knew? The night stretched out before them like an empty highway.

Afterward they lay next to each other, young blood thrumming in their veins, drops of hot sweat forming on the surface of their skin in large round beads. The ancient air conditioner groaned arhythmically, laboring under the scorching high desert heat.

“I can’t take that racket anymore,” said Ashe. “Turn it off.”

“Too fucking hot,” said Clay. “We’re gonna turn off the air conditioner?”

“It’s blowing hot air as it is,” said Ashe. “It’s broken.” She looked at him, tilted her head, and purred, “Please?”

The sweet, filthy drawl with which she said the word got him lurching up out of bed and across the room to the dented metal box in the window-frame. He flipped the cracked plastic knob to off. The machine wound down loudly and angrily and finally churned to a halt with a loud percussive cough.

Clay stumbled back to the bed and lay down next to his true love.

Silence.

No. Not silence.

The occasional whisper of breeze. The rumble of and trucks rolling by out on Route 87. The howl of a coyote, the scolding screech of an owl. The scuttling of a lizard up the wall outside. The far off lonesome whistle of a train. In the space between those noises another sound seemed to fill the air.

Ashe said, “There’s this sound some people hear. I heard about on the radio, late night talk radio about crazy shit like the New Jersey Devil, or the earth being hollow. Anyway, it’s called the Taos Hum.”

“Are we near Taos?”

“About a hundred miles away.” She continued, “They say like one percent of the population can hear it. Low pitched, right on the edge of perception. It ruins their lives, most of em say. They can’t sleep, can’t concentrate, can’t function. And they all describe the moment of waking to it, this moment when the world changed and was never the same again. When they heard the Hum. The Taos Hum, they call it. Government conspiracy, they say. Weather modification experiments. Weapons tests. Some secret submarine base at the South Pole. Big machines tunneling under the earth. Something alive living below the crust. Almost as many reasons for the Hum as there are people who hear it.”

“Is it bullshit?”

“I dunno. The people who call in, on the radio show, they sure seem to believe it. And it doesn’t ruin everyone’s life. Some people who hear it, they fall in love with it. Some of them say it’s like music. Like beautiful music. The music of the spheres. The sound of the earth turning. The sound of the stars burning. Like they’ve been waiting for it, a missing piece. Something they lost once, but have found again.”

“It’s like a choice,” Clay said. “Like one of those tests, the inkblot test, where you can see what you want.”

“Sorta,” said Ashe.

They listened together, bathed in sweat, bodies pressed close together. They heard the whoosh of the wind, the rush of the highway, the cries and howls of life in the desert. Thick adobe and plaster walls muffled the sound of the world outside.

And they couldn’t stay in the room any longer, they had to be out amongst it all, the heat in the room suffocated them, the air poisoned them. A sheen of oily sweat painted their skin. The promise of the sound of the world outside called to them like a sea siren crooning from rocky shores.

Clay shucked on his jeans and his tee shirt, Ashe wriggled into her sundress, neither of them bothering with underwear or shoes, and they ran like kids across the parched dirt lawn and hot asphalt parking lot to his pickup. The jumped in and drove until there was no more city, then turned into a BLM side road, shut off the engine and doused the headlights. Clay snagged the thick blanket he kept stashed behind the bench seat and together they kicked open their doors and swung onto the ground and into the bed of the pickup, shock absorbers complaining at the jolt of it.

Clay unfurled the blanket onto the floor of the pickup. Ashe rolled onto it, arms open, laughing. Clay fell into her, showering her face and neck with kisses. As he kissed her he unbuttoned the front of her dress. He devoured her breasts, taking each nipple into his mouth and rolling the warm hard button with lips and tongue.

She wrapped her long legs around his waist, her eager arms around his neck. She squealed and flipped over on top of him, the edge of her sundress lifting and floating in the air like a wind-blown scarf before settling down around them.

As she completed the turn and straddled his waist he opened his eyes to see her silhouette looming over him, and beyond her the stars burning in the dazzling blackness, the arc of the Milky Way splitting the night like a scar. The top of her dress fluttered open; she pinched her nipples between thumb and finger, performing for him.

He fumbled with the buttons on his jeans. His rapidly hardening cock helped with the process, pushing the material outward. Once he had freed himself from his demin confines he felt her pussy lips massage his shaft. She tilted her hips and slid forward along his hardness, smothering the head of his cock with her entrance, teasing him with the promise of her wet inner warmth.

Poised at her hole, his eyes fell upon hers, and locked. She smiled down upon him. As he shifted his own hips and prepared to enter her they paused, a moment frozen within the larger moment. The wind moaned across the high desert plain, really ramping up now, rocking the truck on its wheels. They felt more than heard the pinging impact of each grain of dirt and sand as it hit the faded metal of his truck.

Out on the highway they heard the low diesel wheeze of the big semis gearing down as they approached the exit, the cough of exhaust from misfiring engines, the honking blast of horns, the squeal of brakes. Farther away, the scream of a bobcat, the flurry of bat-wings, the scamper of mice, the leap of white crickets, the swing of the scorpion’s tail.

And beyond that sound another, on the edge of their perception, the sound of the world entire, the accumulation of a thousand tiny sounds, each one too small to be heard by itself, but when combined a single note, a voice given sudden expression. They listened, the world opened to them, shaking their minds awake. Something lost and now regained.

He thrust and entered her wild heat, she pushed and enveloped his hard desire, and together they disappeared into the noise, the night, and each other.