Ever sleep in a wigwam? I'm starting at the marquee outside the Wickiup Motel in Holbrook Arizona and I can't believe it's serious, except there's a row of concrete tipis before me, each one with a door and a tiny square window near the base. Giant tipis next to a pasture of sheep, the moon so huge and flat against the sky it looks like paper taped on black felt. I feel like a plastic soldier in a world of discarded toys.
     Route 66, the wide main street of Holbrook Arizona is lined with steak houses and diners, car dealerships, lumber yards. There are better places to fade away than the Wickiup Motel, but I can't help myself. This is my last chance to sleep in a wigwam.
     The motel office is in a single-wide mobile home, not rounded-retro-Silver-Streak-style like the hotel itself, but a battered white trash monument with tires on the roof and a carpet reeking of wet dog whose body made a lasting impression on a threadbare ochre couch. The counter looks deserted and it's been that way for a while.
     I ring the bell, once, then twice. The third time my hand slips and sends the brass dome tumbling off the desk. The bell separates from the base and rolls over on its back, rotating hypnotically until it comes to rest as a silver bowl, something Tibetan with a mystical utility, or an offering for fanged deities, vampire spirits of the mountains.
     "Hold your horses!" someone yells. A teenager with a thin ponytail materializes from around the corner and throws an index card on the counter.
     " Make and model of your car." He wavers halfway between the doorway and the counter, as if unable to cross a boundary, his body drawn back, battling a powerful magnetic force. "Hurry man, I'm missing the Highlander."
     I toss him a wad of cash and he throws a key my way. "Number 14." We each wait for the other to leave. I don't like the way he's looking at me.

I wasn't always this nervous. It started last Christmas in Palm Springs. Cousin Orville, a minister of some renegade Protestant sect was visiting, down from Tuleri for the holidays. His eyes had that born again scan, as if searching for a tunnel in the side of a mountain, a safe place for an excavation. He was hunting for the weak spot, that vacancy where lust for Jesus might be planted - an innocent suggestion that would explode six or eight months later when all the earthquakes, tornadoes, insurgencies, and mass murders would solidify into one unshakable image of apocalypse. The four horsemen riding across the sky engulfed in flames like the Cartwrights racing across the map, only there would be no Bonanza, no Big Valley, no more Wagon Train. Just the end of the world. First, the doubt and then the detonation, that was Orville's job.
     In less than half an hour, he had prepared the soil. "You look like a sophisticated thinker," he said to me. "Are you ready for the Rapture?"
     "I don't believe in Jesus," I told him. "There was no Y2K. And there wont be any rapture."
     "I can see how you might think that," he said. "But the evidence shows otherwise." "Evidence?" That was all it took. One word from me and Orville was knee deep in an authoritative rant about the end of time and Nostradamus and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He stared at me intently and said, "During the Rapture all the born again Christians will disappear from the world." "Yahoo!" I whooped. It was a joke, but the despair on his face made me look out the window and chew off my thumbnail. I was thinking, man, this guy really believes it. He really believes in the apocalypse and all this rapture shit. What the hell do I believe?

Wigwam Number 14 has a single bed with a mottled yellow spread. The heater spews a smell like burning hair. The walls of the tipi slant inward, coming to a point about four feet above my head. It feels like space is folding up, as if it's only a matter of time before I'm sucked into the vortex of an inverted black hole. I pull the curtain open. The window is opaque with condensation.
     The slanted walls make the wigwam difficult to decorate. It relies on geometry for style. I search through the dresser, looking for hotel stationary, a t.v. schedule, or a Gideon bible, anything to connect this room to the predictable world of motel hospitality. It's empty. On top of the television is a table tent advertising the Pay Per View movies. The sides are covered with familiar faces, actors frozen in position, some laughing, some running away. I position it on the nightstand as if it was a family portrait, the photograph my father took at Easter with all of us kids lined up in birth order.
      Inside the nightstand is a raggedy magazine. I slam the drawer shut so hard that the table tent slides to the floor. I grab my bag and storm toward the office. There is no way I am staying in the room with that thing. The thing that started it all: The Watchtower.

I forgot about Cousin Orville for a while. Then, one day, in early spring, there was a knock on the door by a nice looking woman in a flowery dress. It was still a little bit chilly but she had bare arms as if it was summer. Behind her stood a girl, about twelve years old, hanging back, curious but slightly afraid, like a medical student about to dissect a cadaver.
     "Hello," said the woman. "I'm Sharon." She presented a manicured hand toward the screen.
     "Hello, Sharon," I said. "I'm late for work."
     "Oh, well I won't keep you." She handed me a little pamphlet with frightened and wide-eyed cartoon people running away from explosions.
     "Are you nervous?" Sharon asked. "I know I am." She didn't wait for me to respond. " Listen to this." She opened a notebook and began to read. A truck drove around the corner a little too fast and the brakes squealed slightly. I noticed that the branches on the linden tree were the last to leaf out. The neighbor had already mowed his lawn twice and mine was still brown and patchy, covered in twigs and leaves. Sharon stopped reading and looked at me.
     "Interesting," I said.
     "It's right here. God's vengeance. I, personally, am glad. I'm preparing for a better world in heaven. Are you prepared?"
     "World seems okay to me."
     Sharon put the book in her bag. "Then, I won't waste any more of your time." She turned away but the little girl continued to stare. She was sizing me up to see if I was evil. Her look said no. Not evil. Undead. She examined me as if I was one of the lonely undead. I threw the booklet on the table and Sharon walked briskly away. The little girl trotted behind, her tiny white shoes clicking, like hooves, against the driveway.
      That was the one look I just didn't need. At night I close my eyes and dream the same dream. I see that little girl. She's suspended in a magical heaven with Cousin Orville and Sharon. They are snacking on Power Bars and fiddling with the knobs on a wide screen t.v. Sharon licks her finger and bends down to rub a smudge off the little girl's lustrous white shoes. The television shows the four horsemen of the apocalypse spreading famine and war and fire across the earth. Orville says "can't say I didn't warn you." Sharon and the girl are trying to decide which of the horsemen is their favorite. "I like Pestilence the best," the girl says. "Look how fast he goes."
      The face of the fourth horsemen looms large across the screen. It's me. It's my face.

As I approach the motel office hoping to change rooms, the door opens and the teenager steps out. He's changed his clothes and is dressed in a leotard and black cape. "Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela," he says.
      "What?"
      "Never mind." He smiles, mysteriously. "Is something wrong?"
      In the light of the enormous moon, Holbrook Arizona seems perilously close to the sky. I wonder if the proximity of this place to heaven makes it unwise to examine things too closely. What if each of the wigwams in the Wickiup Motel contains something more onerous than the last? Perhaps Wigwam 15 offers a plague of toads while the blood of infidels spurts from the faucets of Number 16. On the spot, I change my mind and mumble, " I just need some towels."
      Back in Number 14, I toss my bag into the closet. I need to get out.

I wander toward town looking for a drink. At the end of a shadowy block, lined with shattered street lights and abandoned commerce, a neon cowboy beckons me. I stop in front of a cavernous shop filled with hunting trophies - antlers, the heads of elk and mountain goats, fish mounted on oak plaques. It's an ark with two of everything - moose, mountain lion, mule deer.
      The cowboy is perched on top of a steak house, a long ranch style building with a green awning. Two vampires and a witch stumble out of the bar followed by a bearded lady in a white party dress. I almost forgot. It's Halloween. There's a cowboy band playing in the bar and the sounds of people trying to impress each other with their gaiety. I take a seat at a small table in the nearly empty dining room. Raggedy Ann brings me a beer. Partiers stumble in and out of the bar in groups of three. When you're alone it seems that everyone else is in a group of three.
     A guy dressed up in a camouflage suit wanders out and surveys the dining room. "Hey, Buddy," he yells. "Join the party!"
     "Man's gotta eat," I say.
     He nods. "Hey, d'ya know what I am?"
     "Marine?"
     "Gonna kick some ass!" he yells. "Semper fi!" He salutes and the effort sends him precariously off balance for a moment. "What'r you?"
     I look at my regular black shirt, black jeans, black shoes. "I'm Pestilence," I say. "Say what?"
     "Pestilence. The fourth horseman of the apocalypse."
     "I got some horses!" he yells, then reels back toward the bar.

Look how fast he goes. Every night that dream. After awhile, I began to study the Book of Revelations. I bought books about The Rapture, conspiracy, illuminati. The words were dull but the pictures told the story. Every edition of The Watchtower had a drawing of the four horsemen where my face was clearly visible. In other sources I found the same blue eyes looking back at me. Sometimes the face was covered by a hood, sometimes smeared with eerie blue, but always something pointed to me. It seemed like coincidence the first time. The second a little strange. But finally, it was everything I saw. Everything I ate. Every night, the dream. Pestilence.

I finish my wine and start back to the Wickiup. It seems as good a place as any right now. The wind is cold and I expect to see a tumbleweed on the street. One big prickly bush rolling down Route 66. But there is never a poetic image when you need one. That's when the whole thing becomes too heavy, when you are looking around at the scenery of the last days of your life and its just machinery and asphalt and everything regular. Nothing to announce the end or the beginning of anything, just shop windows full of antlers or disassembled vacuum cleaners.
     As I pass the motel office, the door opens and the kid steps out dressed in a leotard and cape and wearing an authentic sword strapped around his waist.
     "What are you?" I ask, pointing to his outfit.
     "I'm an immortal," he says. "Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela." He flashes that mystery grin and something turns in my stomach.

Back in Wigwam 14, I open my suitcase. Underneath my sweatshirt and an extra pair of jeans is a pistol that belonged to my father. He kept a large collection of guns in a locked cabinet. They were rarely fired, but sometimes he took them out and held them, gently caressing the barrel with his palm. "This is a fine instrument," he'd say. On the weekends we'd shoot cans at the dump, launching plumes of lit garbage into the sky. I toss the gun on the bed and fumble around for the ziploc sandwich bag which preserves the bullets. My finger brushes against the edge of a photograph. I hesitate to take it out, but I can't stop myself. It's a photograph of my girlfriend, Mona, and her cat. They are watching me with the same aloof expression. The cat's green eyes reflect everything about my life. Empty.
      When Mona took off, she left the cat behind. I took care of it for awhile but pretty soon it wandered over to the neighbors and moved into their house. It didn't even have the courtesy to leave the block, but just lounged self-satisfied on the lawn next door as if to taunt me with its betrayal. Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. What the hell is that? It's stuck in my mind like a bad song.

Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. It's familiar. I hear the kid say it in his bored voice, eyes indifferent like the cat's. Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. It sounds like a foreign language. Latin or Greek. It sounds biblical. It sounds like a revelation.
     I look at the nightstand. Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela, it whispers.
      "I wont look at you," I say aloud. But, then I do. I can't help myself. It's a human failing, this need for answers. I should have asked for a new room.
      "It's not in there," I repeat as I slide the drawer open and take out The Watchtower. Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. It opens in my hand. It opens to the face of the fifth angel sounding the call. Summoning the four horsemen.
      Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. I see him there in his cape and crown. Sword raised against an innocent world. Bored green eyes. I'm immortal, he says. Ha! And beside him is the red face of War. "I've got horses," I hear him say, swaggering back to the party in his pathetic borrowed fatigues. Oh, he must be laughing now.
      Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. I've seen him astride a white horse with his saber raised. Charging forward across my dream. And suddenly it's all clear. Why I came to Holbrook. Why I chose to stay at the Wickiup Motel. Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. The call. The fifth angel. The end of the world. I'm not here to end my own miserable life. I'm here to prevent something from happening.

The office door is locked so I sit down on the steps and wait. He'll be back with the others, expecting me to prepare for the ride. The moon is high in the sky, looking small and pale now. The cold desert air cuts through my jacket. I feel solid and purposeful for the first time in my life. I am a dangerous angel.

It isn't too long before he, the fifth angel, comes around the corner munching corn chips from a grocery bag.
      "Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela." I say.
      "Dude," He says, nodding his head enthusiastically. "Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela."
      "I know who you are." I lift the gun to his chest. " I wont let you do it."
      "Hey, that looks real."
      "It's real."
      He backs away and puts one hand over his head. The grocery bag quivers in his left arm. "I can't allow it to start," I tell him.
      "Start what, man? I just work here. You want money?" He moves his hand toward his pocket then raises it back in the air, confused about how to proceed. "Oh man," he whispers. "This is wrong."
      "Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela," I say. "The call. You sounded the call."
      "I don't know what you mean, man. I don't know any call."
      "The call. Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. The horseman's call. Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela." The grocery bag slides to the ground. "Man," he whispers, his voice quivering. "I made that up."
      "Toon red nav ardnaxela. The fifth angel's call. To summon the horsemen. The end. The end! Tell me that's not what it means! "
      "Man," he wails. "It's just Tessa. The chick from the Highlander! Alexandra Van Der Noot. That's her name. Alexandra Van Der Noot. It's Alexandra Van Der Noot." He chokes back a panicked sob and his breath whistles heavily.
      "Alexandra Van Der Noot?"
      "The chick from the Highlander. Tessa."
      I stare at him, trying to understand.
      "The Highlander. On t.v. You know, the one where they're all, like, immortal. And you have to take their heads to kill them. You know, The Game. There can be only one. Come on, man. You know. It's a game" His voice trails off and he looks mournfully at the useless sword hanging from his belt. "Man, don't kill me. It's no call, I swear. It's Alexandra Van Der Noot spelled backwards. Alexandra Van Der Noot . Toon Red Nav Ardnaxela. I just like the way it sounds."

"The call," I whisper, lifting the gun and then letting my arm fall. Suddenly, I want only to lie down. I sink to my knees and then fall to the asphalt. Toon red nav ardnaxela. It's not a call but an incantation, making me thick and heavy and cold, a corpse, a soul unaware of the death of its body. I succumb and press my face against the sidewalk. Once again there should be a sign, a poem to announce the next moment. I'm listening for the rumble of hoofbeats. I'm watching feet move slowly backward and then pivot and run away.
      My cheek is frigid and solid like the concrete. I curl up into a ball against the wind and wait. I become a piece of impenetrable ground, a mountain, eroding grain by grain in the desert wind. There is time left for a mountain. A mountain has so much time. Grain by grain I wash away. Some things end. Some things begin. A herd of deer grazes on my hillside and I am not disturbed. Wild iris bloom in the wake of deforestation and fire. These things can never move me.
      The police come and hoist me into a van. It takes four of them to lift my expanding mass of shale and granite. The van speeds off down Route 66. Sharon's little girl points down from her magical heaven saying, "I like Pestilence. Look how fast he goes."

Lisa Thompson earned her MFA and has been published in several magazines. This is her first publication at Web del Sol. She is currently at work on a novel, The Dummy Saint Room.

 Lisa

 Thompson