Albuquerque, New Mexico.

If you've ever spent a summer night out there, you know the desert really doesn't ever cool down.

It just kind of halt its breath.

The air stays thick with the smell of exhaust, dry dust, and the faint, sweet grease of rotten green chilies drifting from some late-night diner.

And if you walk down Central Avenue, the old Route 66, the neon signs, well, they buzz like

angry hornets. They cast long, jagged shadows against buildings that have been standing since

before your grandparents had their first quiet backseat dreams. But there's one building downtown that doesn't look at all like it belongs in our century,

or maybe any century at all.

You stand in front of the chemo theater.

It's not one of those sterile glass and steel boxes that we built today to hold our collective

indifferences.

It's a three-story stucco monster painted the color of dried mud and desert clay.

At first glance, it looks like a prehistoric Native American in Pueblo that somehow grew a backbone

and shot up into the sky like a roaring 20 skyscraper.

It's beautiful.

It's bizarre, and it's deeply, undeniably weird.

If you walk inside past the ticket window, you're not greeted by plastic cup holders and the

smell of cheap carpet cleaner. You're stepping into a fever dream. Cast plaster buffalo skulls hang from the mezzanine walls, their eyes glazed in

enamelin glowing with a faint, eerie amber light.

Custom chandeliers, shaped like Native American funeral canoes, dangle from the ceiling,

hanging over the empty seats like wooden vessels waiting to ferry the dead across a silent

plaster sky.

...