She rolls through stop stop signs: a blonde, her bobblehead balanced perfectly on a crane-like neck, its tendons visible under a fabric of bronze skin. A lean phone spoons her right ear as she talks, her neck steady as she gives only the slightest glance to her left and her right.

In contrast is her vehicle: a black SUV, boxy like a hearse, shoulder pads and a football helmet on a child. Her arms and legs are narrow piping to control the dials and switches: step on the gas, change the station, answer the phone. It occurs to me the future is now, a populace of disembodied brains. In magazine ads hairless, fatless, uniformly tan figures are scaffolding for technological efficiency.

Car commercials are the loveliest: scenery and sunlight, the curve of road through Eden-like swaths of the American West. But the plastic is too thick. It obscures the view. The glass is tinted. The sky turns grim. The air is filtered. There's no scent. We drive to work, to eat, to friends. We are flies bottled up in jars.

On another street trundles a canary Hummer, fat and flashy, medallions of chrome hanging from its grill like rapper's gold. The driver is the past: thick hairy arms, thighs touching, bacteria sweltering in the folds of his skin. He is armored from the outside world, a child wrapped tight in a blanket of air-conditioning.

A BMW driver dreams a utopia of performance, Ayn-Rand order. His car is black, white, silver, a regiment in a Riefenstahl clip, precision blitzing down Western Avenue past rusted-out wrecks weighted by scrap plucked from alleyways.

Who are these men—dumpster divers, three abreast the front seat, windows rolled down, elbows hanging out? They are alchemists, touching the earth, embracing the rust and the rot, turning garbage into gold.