A wall no longer visible

The afternoon heat could bleach those towns so clean that the houses and the buildings seemed always on the verge of dematerializing; there was the sense that to close one’s eyes on a Valley town was to risk opening them a moment later on dry fields, the sun bleaching out the last traces of habitation, a flowered straw hat, a neon advertisement which had blinked a moment before from a wall no longer visible: More Yield from Every Acre with Seeds from Northrup-King.

Joan Didion, Run River (1963)