I didn't know why he wouldn't let me see her. When we got to Clarkdale, Sid got us a couple motel rooms and told me to stay put in mine. He left me alone there and he hung cactus flower on the door frame. Every time I got close to it I felt like I was gonna pass out. There was nothing more I wanted in the world than to be with the gold-haired woman, but Sid put her two doors down so I couldn't even hear her. I sat on the bed boiling. It's like steaming except the fire comes from someplace deep and bubbles away all the good in you. I wanted to punch the wall, but I just watched Wheel of Fortune instead.

After seeing some college kid from Wisconsin win a Corvette for figuring out "Long Island Iced Tea" in the last puzzle, I couldn't take it anymore. I paced around the room drinking complimentary decaf and sweating in weird places. I muttered to myself and tried to grab hold of my memories of the desert, the lake, the dance. My leg was still a hunk of dead, bony meat. Every step was ferocious needles and tears. Eventually it overcame me and I fell on the floor, wailing. A few seconds later I heard a knock on my door.

"Go away, Sid!" I shouted. But it wasn't Sid.

"You alright in there, mister?" I heard some guy say. I guess I yelled at him and after a pause he walked back to his door and went into his room. He was my neighbor that night. At first I hated him because he was so much closer to her than I was. He hadn't floated through a canyon with her. He hadn't given his health to help her walk. He was probably just some schmuck from who gives a shit on a trip to watch his cousin get married. He hadn't seen anything.

Sitting on the floor, staring at that cactus flower, I guess my boiling insides effervesced into my eyes. Who was my neighbor and who was I? The schmucks and the barflies and the myriad midwestern man-cattle, all of us just oily textile trying to catch a breeze to the ocean. I got myself up and I went to my shared wall. This is what I said to him, my neighbor:

I never mean to be a bastard, I just don't know what to do with my pain. I don't trust in kindness and I've never been in love. I get sick and hungry and sometimes the whole world smells like a dead cigarette. But if you'd just pass a kiss from me to your other neighbor, I think my stomach might do right for a while. Through the wall, just once, whatever your reasons.

"You want me to kiss the wall?" my neighbor said.

"Yeah."

And he actually did. I heard him walk to my side and there was this rustle, like he had a beard and the little tips resisted the plaster. I pressed my lips as close to where I thought he was as I could and I sent some love, some honest love, for him to borrow. My ear to the wall, I heard him cross to the other side of his room and plant a smooch on the wall there. I fell face-down on my bed and sighed for his sincerity.