We stop off at the Flagstaff museum, but as expected, Alexis isn’t there and nobody knows when she’ll be back. Another person in her office, a stuffy man who seems barely capable of recognizing us as humans worth talking to, suggests she’s “gone off again, on one of her trips.” But doesn’t explain any further. We try to ask him about the dig but he keeps deferring to Alexis as the expert. I’m not sure he even knew what we were talking about, he just wanted us to leave.
Flagstaff doesn’t seem to give us the answers we want, so Gus and I decide to drive down to Sedona.
The drive to Sedona is surrounded with more colors of red in the stones and canyons that I thought possible. The variances, like an obsessive painter’s palette, contort my mind and breathe new life in the idea of what red means.
Sedona is, at its core, identical to any other small American town at a glance. It’s not unlike our own sleepy Colorado mountain town, except instead of large pine trees, Sedona is mostly rock. As we drive through the main strip, I feel like I’ve been here before, not by some sort of magical transference of knowledge, but by the idea that human culture, when kept somewhere around 10,000 people, always seems to find room for a fudge shop on the main street.
The first stop is the hotel, a dusty, but clean enough place in the center of town that’ll give us a home base to track down Alexis and Melinda. It turns out David Sexsmith, the bowling alley owner, has turned into a Sedona real agent, based on the dozens of bus stop signs we see in town. I’d sort of written off his importance at this point, but it’s uncanny to see his face plastered everywhere.
These three people all ending up here in this small town must mean something, right? Then again it’s like 45 minutes away from Flagstaff. Not the biggest, craziest distance for one to move.
Sitting in my dusty hotel room, waiting for Gus, I get that feeling again. Like this is all a waste of time. I’ve been searching for new places my whole life and inventing them when I couldn’t find them. I’m like one of those people who invents drama because they get bored with their friends, but with entire worlds. Or at least maps of worlds.
Gus knocks on my door just as mind starts to unravel.
“Let’s go,” he yells through the thin hotel door, “David Sexsmith’s office is half a block away.”
I open the door quickly. Over the last week my face has hardened into a permanent incredulous stare. “What? Seriously?”
“Yeah, I just looked it up in the phone book,” Gus’ thinning hair is still wet, making him look a bit like a poodle in a rain storm. “Might as well pop in, right?”
I grab my bag and follow him out the door.
