On Top of Nothing

Author(s): Leigh Upman

Location(s): Mexico, Oaxaca, Wirikuta

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): Contemporary

Four travelers. A dead man’s notebooks. A fifty-year lie.

A father who never learned to talk.
A daughter who stopped feeling.
A boy carrying songs he won’t sing.
A friend who never stays.

Fifty years after Ray Callahan walked out of his house in Tucson, he dies in Mexico, and the notebooks he left behind reach his son Daniel, a long-haul trucker with a bad back and a pill bottle in his jacket. Daniel turns his truck south. With him are his daughter Lexi, his nephew Jayden, and Ramón, a drifter with a guitar and twenty-three dollars who climbed in at a truck stop and never climbed out.

In the desert of Wirikuta, a Wixárika elder who won’t take their money sits with them through a night of peyote. In the mountains of Oaxaca, an old Mazatec healer sings them through a night of mushrooms. What they see there is not another world. It’s what each of them has been carrying.

Together, on the long road south, the old healer tells them the only thing that matters:

Nothing doesn’t weigh anything. What’s heavy is what you put on top of it.

On Top of Nothing is a novel about fathers and children, grief and silence, and the long way home. It is the first book in the Bare Road series. Its companion novel, Ray’s Road, tells the same story from Ray’s side.

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