Salis was cruising west through the desert.

Between the sun, the blaring radio and the strong American cigarettes, the heartache was almost gone. He adjusted his mirror shades, playing out conversations he would have in LA, and evenings he expected to see in San Francisco.

The blue mountains of central Asia were nothing but a darkening memory. Those days were stained across a thousand photographic plates, and digitally frozen on a dozen tiny cartridges. A smear of chemicals. Nothing more. Salis wanted to erase them completely. His assignments were delivered, and many thousands of dollars were in the bank. What he hadn’t counted on, perhaps, were the brutal acts he’d witnessed: the scarring of bombs, the close-up alienation of soldiers. The dehumanising grief of hypocrisy and needless violence.

The black dog of the world walked close to Salis now, and he dreaded catching a whiff of its awful, irrational scent.

Jim tells us about the White Wall over at Big Robot. A genuinely impressive reapplication of a pulp archetypal structure to modern ends.