A story about a man named Harlan who stopped at a roadside café in Amboy, California, on a July night in 1983. He was thirsty, but the water from the tap tasted wrong—metallic and warm, with a faint sweetness that stuck to his tongue. The woman behind the counter warned him not to drink it, but Harlan was already three swallows deep. What followed was a slow, creeping unraveling: a craving that grew stronger each day, a radio frequency that only he could hear, and a desert that seemed to remember him long after he left. No one knows where Harlan ended up, but sometimes at dusk, if you drive past the old café, you can see a man standing at the edge of the salt flats, drinking from a glass that never empties.