the night comes , and when the sun rises again it rises over a motionless desert , over streets full of rusty , broken-down automobiles , over tumbleweed towns filled with derelict buildings , signposts twisted and bent so that their arrows become nonsensical , pointing into the dirt or up into the sky , billboards whose sunny images and colorful words flap unglued in the breeze , shop windows caked with the grime of decades , bicycles with flat tires abandoned in the middle of intersections , their wheels turning slowly like impotent tin windmills , some buildings charred and burnt out , others half fallen down , multistory tenements split down the middle , standing like shoebox dioramas , pictures still hanging on the upright walls , televisions still in place on their stands teetering over the gaping edge of the floor where the rest of the living room has collapsed to the ground in great mountains of concrete and dust and girder like the abandoned toys of a giant child .