The Collapse of the Eastern Bloc has no directly narrated scene in this passage. Its place in the book’s historical horizon is instead approached obliquely: during a drive toward Santa Teresa, Oscar Fate is drawn into a childhood memory of a landscape changing from the built-up outskirts of New York to open country. The remembered scene offers no political explanation or historical account; its force lies in the uncertain passage between worlds and in the lonely figure glimpsed at their boundary.

A Night Journey Toward Santa Teresa

After asking for water, Fate goes to drink by a window. The desert begins to disappear, and he drives for two hours along dark roads, listening to a Phoenix jazz station. He passes houses, restaurants, yards with white flowers, and crookedly parked cars. No lights are on in the houses; the scene seems emptied of its inhabitants, while the description leaves a lingering impression of blood in the air.

The route does not offer a reliable sense of direction. Fate gets lost twice, and once considers turning back toward the restaurant or Tucson. At a gas station in Patagonia, a boy gives him the easiest way to Santa Teresa. Leaving town, Fate sees a black horse in his headlights. He stops and waits; the horse lifts its head, looks at him, then moves away and vanishes into darkness. The pause yields no explanation, only a brief encounter with an animal that resists being held in view.

The Remembered Landscape

The road takes Fate past what he takes to be a mesa, enormous and flat-topped, perhaps three miles long. Beside the road, he gets out of the car, leaves its lights on, and urinates in the cool night air. Beyond a slope, a valley strikes him as gigantic. In its far corner he thinks he sees a glow, but cannot tell whether it is a slow convoy of trucks, the first lights of a town, or simply his desire to escape the darkness.

That uncertainty opens into a memory from somewhere between childhood and adolescence. Fate recalls dreaming of a landscape like this one, though less dark and less desertlike. In the dream, he is on a bus with his mother and one of her sisters, traveling from New York to a nearby town. Buildings and highways fill the view until the bus suddenly reaches the country. The sun is setting; a small wood appears larger to the child looking out the window.

The Solitary Figure and Historical Resonance

At the edge of the wood, Fate thinks he sees a man walking in long strides, as if trying to stay ahead of night. His shirt and swinging arms distinguish him from a mere shadow. The man’s loneliness is so great that Fate wants to look away and cling to his mother, but he keeps watching until the bus leaves the woods and buildings, factories, and warehouses return beside the road.

The recalled image is not an account of the political collapse named by this entry, and it does not establish a direct causal or symbolic link to it. Its relevance is formally indirect: the passage sets a remembered transition from city to countryside beside a present journey through the desert, and places a solitary figure at the point where darkness threatens to overtake the visible world. History, like the glow Fate glimpses in the valley, remains distant and indistinct; the narrative gives the reader an image of uncertainty rather than a settled explanation.