Salt Lake City held a heavy strangeness in the heat of summer that you felt pushing in and drying out the mushy marrow of your bones. It was nothing more than this point of origin, another random point on the map, of just another run but he had never really spent much time in the too-clean, too-sterile grid of smiling white people drinking juice and strapping skis to things. So on this occasion he had splurged for a couple of days of hotel-room living before he picked up the next hook. Spent most of the time laying his heap of flesh on top of a stiff green-and-red flowered bedspread on a mattress that was too short, flipping through the Book of Mormon, reading about golden plates you didn’t eat off and a vault under a mountain where every single person’s name is written in a book to be sav
