Tom Reinholt was standing in front of the empty storefront on Sierra Street with the leasing agent’s key in his hand when the school bus went by, and he stopped and watched it, because you could not not watch it.
It had been painted. Not painted the way a person paints a thing to sell it, but painted the way a child paints, all over, in colors that did not go together, a great blue eye on the side and gold rays coming off it and words along the top that Tom could not read fast enough before it passed. It was towing a trailer with what looked like half of a boat on it, a wooden boat cut lengthwise and mounted on wheels, and there were people up on the roof of the bus, sitting on the roof in the last of the August heat with goggles pushed up on their heads and dust already on everything though they had not reached the dust yet, and it went up Sierra toward the freeway at about fifteen miles an hour with its engine laboring, and every car on the street slowed to let it get where it was going.
It was the last week of August. They came through every year now, more of them every year, on their way out to the desert north of town for the thing they did out there, the festival, the burning, whatever it was, and for one week Reno filled up with them and their painted vehicles and their strange rigs, buses and box trucks and old ambulances and RVs with couches bolted to the top, all of them heading the same direction, out to the flat white nothing past Gerlach where they built a city out of dust for a week and then set fire to the middle of it and drove home. Tom had never been. He knew people who had. They came back changed for a week and then unchanged, the way people do.
He was twenty-eight. He worked for a company that had been quietly buying downtown, storefronts and small commercial buildings, the cheap ones, the empty ones, the ones nobody wanted while the casinos had all the light. His job was to walk into buildings like this one and imagine what they could be and put a number on the imagining. It was the family trade, in a way, though nobody would have called it that. His great-grandmother Clara had opened a dress shop on Virginia Street in 1920 and stayed. His father Dennis had opened a record store on Sierra Street in 1968 and stayed, three blocks from where Tom was standing, and had run it until the chains and then the mall and then the tapes and then the discs had finally worn him down, and had closed it a few years back but had not left, because Reinholts did not leave. They stayed and they made the street into the thing they wanted, or they tried, and the street changed under them anyway, and they stayed through the changing. That was the family. Stay and hold on and watch it change.
And here, going up the street past him at fifteen miles an hour, was the exact opposite of that. People who did not stay anywhere. People who built a thing on purpose to burn it. Tom watched the painted bus grind up toward the on-ramp and he felt something he did not have a word for, some pull under the practical part of him that spent its days putting numbers on empty rooms.
The bus did not make the on-ramp. It coughed and lost power and drifted to the curb half a block up with a sound like a sigh, and the people on the roof climbed down, and a woman came off the bus and stood in the street looking at it with her hands on her hips the way you look at a thing that has finally done what you knew it would do. Tom put the key in his pocket and walked up.
“You need a hand?”
“We need a mechanic,” the woman said. “Or a miracle. We’ve got a miracle guy but he’s three cars back.” She was maybe his age, dust already in the creases of her, sunburned, cheerful in the flat way of someone a long way into a long trip. “You from here?”
“Born here.”
“Then tell me I’m going the right way. We’ve got a guy swears we should take 395 up past the lake and everybody else says he’s going to kill us all.”
“Everybody else is right,” Tom said. “You want 80 east. Take the interstate out toward Fernley, get off at Wadsworth, then it’s 447 north the whole way, through Gerlach, and you’ll see it. You can’t not see it.” He looked at the bus, at the half a boat on the trailer behind it. “It’s about a hundred miles. Two hours if the bus holds, which it won’t, so figure more. Get your gas and your water and whatever you need before you’re past Gerlach, because after Gerlach there’s nothing. Empire’s got a store but that’s it and then it’s the playa.”
“You’ve been out.”
“No,” Tom said. “I just know the roads. I sell buildings. I know where everything is and I never go anywhere.”
The woman laughed. “That’s the saddest thing anybody’s said to me all week, and I’ve been to a lot of weird camps.” She stuck out a dusty hand and he shook it. “Come out sometime. You’d hate it or you’d never come back. One or the other, no in-between.” Then the miracle guy came jogging up from three cars back with a toolbox, and she turned to the bus, and that was that.
Tom went back down to the storefront. He let himself in. It was the thing he was there to do, walk the empty rooms and put a number on them, and he did it, the front room and the back and the little office and the storage, footsteps loud on the old floor, light coming gray through the dusty windows. He could see what it could be. He always could. That was the job and he was good at it and it was, he told himself, a real thing to be good at, seeing what an empty room could become and making it become that, building something on a street his family had held for eighty years.
But when he came back out and locked the door, the bus was gone. They had gotten it running, or towed it, and the whole painted caravan of them had gone up the ramp and out onto the interstate and east toward Wadsworth and the turn north, out to build their city and burn it, and the street was just the street again, quiet, ordinary, a Tuesday in Reno with the light going long.
Tom stood on the sidewalk with the key in his hand and looked east, the way they had gone, for longer than he meant to. Then he took out his phone to call the office with the number on the building, and he stopped, with his thumb over the buttons, and he did not dial it yet.
Burning Man began in 1986 on Baker Beach in San Francisco and moved to the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada in 1990. By the late 1990s the event drew tens of thousands of participants; the 1999 gathering, themed “The Wheel of Time,” drew roughly twenty-three thousand people, with the effigy burned on Saturday, September 4. Participants routed through Reno, the last major city before the desert, for supplies, then traveled Interstate 80 east to Wadsworth and north on State Route 447 through Gerlach, with the company town of Empire offering the last store before the playa. The Reno arch on Virginia Street, installed in 1987, read “The Biggest Little City in the World.”