Never Been to Heaven, But I've Been to Arizon
July 28, 2025… It's 9 am and I'm on a conveyor belt of freeways flaming through Phoenix. It’s my first time in this urban concrete desert sprawling atop dust and scrub, where it’s like somebody started dribbing roads and houses and buildings in the middle of the Salt River Valley and never really stopped, and asphalt and glass and steel just flowed outward like a pancake of pavement.
Maybe the city has a soul down under the personal injury lawyer billboards assuring you you're the victim and rows of palm trees that wouldn't grow here if ambitious real estate developers didn't plant them to make you feel like you're somewhere exclusive and luxurious and not in the middle of a sweeping, sizzling geological skillet. But I'm not here long enough to dig for that soul. It just seems to me this city is a hundred miles wide and as thin as a fried egg. I of course qualify this assessment by noting that the Phoenix metro area may be a thin fried egg, but five million people want a bite of it. So maybe just take me as a grain of salt on the surface of a yolk I’m in too much of a hurry to taste.
Dubai; 2014. Like Phoenix, a pretty city with a soul you have to dig a little to find.
My friend Brad, his wife Tiffany, and their three kids live on a tree-lined suburban street near the edge of the valley where the Superstition Mountains start to rise from the scorched valley floor. Brad’s favorite joke is, “I don’t get out much,” which doesn’t seem like that funny of a joke until you know that Brad has ALS, or Lou Gehrig Disease, and so he can’t move or talk, or even breathe without assistance. When you know that, his self-deprecating humor becomes monumental. A monument to the shapeless stuff good people have that you can’t touch or define, but that somehow still holds up hearts.
I park my bike outside, Tiffany welcomes me in, I climb up on Brad’s big bed, recline beside him, prop my head up on a pillow, and just lay there beside my friend. Brad’s body doesn’t do much but his brain is still galaxies wide, electricity flying light years in fractions of seconds, sparking new stars to dot the universes upon universes that swirl inside all his boundless, beautiful human-ness. Just like anyone. But, unlike almost everyone, Brad has a brain implant called Neuralink that harnesses his brain activity to power a cursor on a computer screen, which in turn allows him to type and click, lifting his thoughts up and over his faulty body and out into the world through technology. Brad explains it all a lot better than I can.
Maalula, Syria; 2004
When I got to know Brad more than 20 years ago we were studying Arabic together in Syria. I have pictures of him with my daughter on his shoulders, his brain telling his body to balance the baby and lightly grasp her tiny ankles, his body doing as it’s told. Now I’m lying next to Brad saying things out loud, and he’s lying next to me typing responses with his brain, and he’ll never get up again. I want things to be another way. I want a lot of things to be another way.
I want to escape this searing, colorless city. I want to live here forever bathed in the yellow void of sunshine. I want my children to choose their own path and rule their own lives. I want them to follow me, to believe what I believe, to live under my benevolent dictatorship. I want to protect them always. I want them to protect me. I want to ride this motorcycle all the way to the ocean. I want to ride it back home and stay there until I die. I want to stride strong and straight into the future. I want to go back in time and say I’m sorry so many times to so many people, to fix everything I’ve ever broken. I want to not be afraid that I’ll break people. I want to never break anyone ever again. I want for Brad to rise up and walk, to say something brash and funny like he used to. I want to lay here beside broken Brad for a long, long time, because he’s more whole than almost anything else I know of.
My arm rests against Brad’s. He’s warm. Full of blood going in gracious circles inside his skin, around a soul somewhere in there. Neither Brad, nor Tiffany, nor I have things just the way we want them. This is somehow all okay. This is as cruel and handsome and inescapable and lovely as time blinking by, bringing what it brings. When I leave, Brad’s brain types up a goodbye message while his body remains motionless. A computerized voice reads it off to me as I listen from the doorway. “Good to see you, you long-haired hippie government lackey!” It occurs to me that maybe this is creation, ex nihilo.
I’m still smiling while I ride away into a world wide as wind, beneath a surfeit of sky, tied to a tomb-full of time. I think of Brad. The future, this void, this vacancy, this now, this present, this instant, this is what I want, and that is what fills it up. Creation, ex nihilo.
