by Damon Knight
“Her guardian angel sure was with her,” Farley said as they drew near the boulders. One of the mammoth rocks was balanced on the edge of the crest.
“I don’t believe any of this,” Sam said angrily. He stopped. Ahead of them, lodged in a crevice, something gleamed in the sunlight. Farley took several cautious steps and picked it up. He handed it to Sam, a single key. Without comparing it, Sam knew it was a key to his camper.
They made their way among the boulders, through the only possible passage, and came out on top the ridge that now widened for several hundred feet. At the edge of it Sam could look down over the gorge; he could see the ranch road, and between him and the road there was a small sunken area, the sheltered spot where “Reuben” had taken Victoria. There was no sign of a campfire ever having been there. No sign of a horse, a dog, a camp of any sort. Silently the two men walked back to the road and the jeep.
Farley did not turn on the ignition immediately. “That was in April, three months ago. Why are you checking on it now?”
Sam looked at the gorge wall, imagined a river roaring below. “Mimi, the girl who was going to drive up with Victoria, came to see me last week. She and Victoria were friends, but Victoria dropped her too. Mimi thought something happened out here between Victoria and me, that I raped her, or tortured her, or something. She told me Victoria is sick, really sick, in analysis, maybe even suicidal. Whatever is wrong with her is serious and it started here.”
“You have seen her?”
“Yeah. For half a minute maybe. She wanted to see me like a rabbit wants to see a bobcat. Wouldn’t talk, had to run, too busy to chat.” He scowled, remembering the pallor that had blanched her face when she saw him. “She looked like hell.”
“So you want to get her back out here to find out what she saw.”
Sam grunted. After a moment he said, “I don’t know what I want to do. I have to do something. I just had to check for myself, see if there’s any way it could have been like she said.”
• Farley put the key in the ignition. Without looking at Sam he said, “She could have gone back east, or to Texas, but she didn’t. She could have taken an overdose, slashed her wrists, gone off the bridge. She could have really hidden, but she kept in touch with the friend who could get to you. She wants you to help her. And you owe it to her for losing your temper because she had the vision you’ve spent so many years chasing.” He turned the key and started to drive before Sam could answer.
That night Sam said he would try to get Victoria to come back, and Farley said he would visit his parents in Bend to see if there was anything his father could or would tell him about the fenced-off acres.
Sam walked. If you really wanted to find a god, he thought, this was where to look. Such absolute emptiness could be relieved only by an absolute presence. Men always had gone to a mountaintop, or to the desert, in search of God. Not God, he thought angrily, peace, acceptance, a reason, he did not know what it was he sought on the desert. He would be willing to settle for so little, no more than a clue or a hint that there was more than he had been able to find. After he had quit his job with GoMar, he had tried drugs for almost two years. Drugs and a personal teacher of the way, and both had failed. He had found only other pieces of himself. He had turned to asceticism and study, had become a jeweler. He had fasted, had lived a hermit’s life for a year, had read nothing, denied himself music, the radio, had worked, walked, waited. And waited still.
He was out of sight of the ranch buildings, the spacious house with old oaks and young poplars sheltering it; the big barns, the small bungalows some of the hands lived in, the bunk house, machine shops . . .You stepped over a rise and the desert swallowed it all, just as it swallowed all sound, and existed in a deep silence, broken only by the voices of those few animals that had accepted its terms and asked for nothing but life.
And just having life was not enough.
He waited across the street from her apartment until she entered and, after ten minutes, followed her inside. When she opened her door and saw him, she hesitated, then with obvious reluctance released the chain to admit him.
“Hello, Sam.” She walked away from him and stood at the window looking out.
He remained by the door, the width of the room between them. He was three months too late. In those months she had turned into a stranger.
When they had returned to San Francisco in the spring, he had taken her bags inside for her, and then left. She had not invited him to stay, and he had not sat down as he usually did. “I’ll call you,” he had said.
But he had let the days slide by, pretending to himself that he was too busy sorting the material they had brought back, too busy with an order from a small elite store in Palm Beach, too busy, too busy. Every time he thought of calling, he felt an uprush of guilt and anger. Finally, filled with a senseless indignation, as if she were forcing him to do something distasteful, he dialed her number, only to get a recording that said her number was no longer in service. Furiously he called her office; she had quit, and left no forwarding address.
Relief replaced the anger. He was free; he no longer had to think about her and whatever had happened to her out on the desert. He could get on with his own life, continue his own search. But he could not banish her from his mind, and worse, his thoughts of her were colored with a constant dull resentment that marred his memories of the good times they had had, that quieted his sexual desire for her, that distorted her honesty and humor and made her seem in retrospect scheming and even dull.
Over the months that they had been separated the new image he constructed had gradually replaced the old, and this meeting was destroying that new image, leaving him nothing. He had to start over with her, falteringly, uncertainly, knowing that the real changes were not in her but in himself. There were intimate things to be said between them, but intimate things could not be said between strangers.
Everything Sam had planned to say was gone from his mind, and almost helplessly he started, “I treated you very badly. I’m sorry.” His words sounded stiff and phony, even to him. She didn’t move, and slowly Sam repeated his conversation with Farley, all of it, including Farley’s explanation of his rage. “It’s possible," Sam said, then shook his head hard. “It’s true I was sore because you saw something I didn’t. I can’t explain that part. We both, Farley and I, want to find out what happened.”
“It’s true then!” Victoria said, facing him finally. She was shockingly pale.
Sam started to deny it, said instead, “I don’t know.”
“We have to go back there to find out, don’t we?”
“You don’t have to now,” Sam said quickly. “I think it would be a mistake. Wait until you’re well.”
“Thursday,” she said. When Sam shook his head she added, “You know I won’t get well until this is over.”
Color had returned to her cheeks and she looked almost normal again, as she had always looked: quick, alert, handsome. And there was something else, he thought. Something unfamiliar, an intensity, or determination she had not shown before. “Thursday,” Sam said reluctantly.
She had never been so talkative or said so little. Her new job, the people in office, the changing landscape, a grade school teacher, sleeping in the parking lot, how easy driving the camper was . . .
“Mimi says you’re in analysis,” Sam interrupted her.
“Not now,” Victoria said easily. “She was more Freudian than the master. Treated my experience like a dream and gave sexual connotations to every bit of it. The thing in the valley became phallic, of course, so naturally I had to dread it. Reuben was my father firmly forbidding my incestuous advances, and so on. I took it for several weeks and gave up on her. She needs help.”
Too easy, Sam realized. She was too deep inside; all this was a glib overlay she was hiding behind. After dinner, she took two pills.
“Something new?” Sam asked.
“Not really. I used them when Stuart and I were breaking up. They got me throug
h then.”
“Bad dreams?"
“Not when I take these,” she said too gaily, holding up the bottle of pills. She had changed into short pajamas; now she pulled a book from her bag and sat on her bed. “My system,” she said cheerfully, “is to take two, read, and in an hour if I’m still reading, take two more.”
“That’s dangerous.”
“At home I keep them in the bathroom. If I’m too sleepy to get up and get them, I don’t need them. Foolproof. Hasn’t failed me yet. Have you read this?” She handed him the book.
“Stop it, Victoria. What are you doing?”
She retrieved the book and opened it. “It’s pretty good. There’s a secondhand book store near the office . . .”
“Victoria, let me make love to you.”
She smiled and shook her head.
“We used to be good together.”
“Another time. I’m getting drowsy, floating almost. It’s like a nice not-too-high once it starts.”
“And you don’t dream? How about nightmares? You were having three or four a night last time I saw you. So bad you wouldn’t even wake up from them.”
She had became rigid as he spoke. She closed the book and let it drop to the floor, then swung her legs off the bed.
“What are you doing?” He felt the beginnings of a headache: guilt and shame for doing that to her, he knew.
“Water. More pills. Sometimes I don’t have to wait an hour to know.”
Presently she slept, deeply, like a person in a coma. She looked like a sick child with her brown hair neatly arranged, the covers straight, as if her mother or a nurse had only then finished preparing her for a visitor. He no longer desired her. That sudden rush of passion had been so sudden and unexpected, he had been as surprised as she. He had not thought of her as a sexual partner for months. Their sex had been good, but only because each had known the other would make no further demands. It had been fun with her, he thought, again with surprise because he had forgotten. It had been clean with her, no hidden nuances to decipher; no flirtatious advance and retreat; no other boyfriends to parade before him hoping for a show of jealousy. If they existed she was reticent about them, as she was about everything personal. No involvement at all, that had been the secret of their success.
He had planned to surrender the camper to Mimi and Diego, and share his tent with Victoria, out of sight and sound of the others, with only the desert and the brilliant moon growing fatter each night. Even that, showing her the world he loved so much, would have been something freely given, freely taken, with no ties afterward. They both had understood that, had wanted it that way.
He turned off the lights but was a long time in falling asleep.
Toward dawn he was awakened by Victoria’s moaning. He put his denim jacket over the lamp before he turned it on. She had the covers completely off and was twisting back and forth in a rocking motion, making soft, incoherent sounds. As he drew near to touch her, to interrupt her dream, she stiffened and he knew she had slipped into a nightmare like the ones she had had before. The first time he had shaken her, called her repeatedly, and after a long time she had screamed and gone limp. After that he had simply held her until it was over, held her and murmured her name over and over. She had not remembered any of the nightmares.
He slid into the narrow bed and wrapped his arms around her, whispering, “It’s going to be all right, Victoria. We’re going to fix it, make it all right again.”
It went on and on, until abruptly she began to fight him. Then she wakened and, gasping, she clung to him as he stroked her sweaty back. He pulled the covers over her again.
“Sh, sh. It’s over. Go back to sleep now. It’s all right.”
“No more! I want to get up!”
“You’ll be chilled. No more sleep. Just rest a few minutes. It’s too early to get up. Try to relax and get warm.”
The drugs and the nightmares were battling for her; the nightmares waited for a sign of weakening in the pills, ready to claim her swiftly then.
What had she seen? What was she still seeing when her pink pills lost their effectiveness in the darkness before dawn?
“How sick is she?” Serena asked. She was watching Farley and Victoria going toward the reservoir for a swim.
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?”
“I like her. I don’t want to see her sick, maybe die. Farley likes her. Is she, was she your girl?”
“Not the way you mean,” Sam said laughing.
“What other way is there?” Serena raised her hands and let them drop, expressing what? Sam always knew exactly what she meant, yet could never put it in words.
After Serena left him on the porch, he wondered how sick Victoria really was. After six days on the ranch, she was tanned, vivacious, pretty. Maybe she was sleeping better. Farley was keeping her busy riding, hiking, swimming, whatever they could find to do out in the sun and wind, and her appetite was good again. By ten or eleven she was ready for bed. And sleep? He wished he knew.
Farley sidestepped every question about what he planned to do. “Don’t rush,” he said. “She’s terribly tired. Let’s get acquainted before we dance. Okay?” He said he had learned nothing from his father.
“Aren’t we even going out there?”
“In time, Sam. In time. She quit her job. She tell you that? She’s in no rush. No place she has to go.”
She hadn’t told him, and it annoyed him that she had told a stranger. It annoyed him that Farley and Victoria were having long talks that excluded him, that Farley had announced their swim after Sam had said he was expecting a long-distance call. Most of all it annoyed him that Serena evidently thought of Farley and Victoria as a couple. An hour later, his call completed, he walked over to the reservoir, but stopped on the hill overlooking the lake. Victoria and Farley were sitting close together under a juniper tree, talking. Sam returned to the house.
It was not jealousy, he knew. It was the delay. Victoria had something, could show him something that he needed desperately. Every delay increased his impatience and irritation until he felt he could stand no more.
After dinner he said coolly, “Tomorrow let’s ride over to the gorge area and camp out.”
Victoria leaned forward eagerly. “Let’s. Let’s camp out.”
Farley’s face was unreadable. He watched Victoria a moment, then shrugged.
“In that case,” Victoria said quickly, “I’d better wash my hair now and get plenty of sleep.” There were spots of color in both cheeks and she looked too excited. She hurried to the door, said good night over her shoulder, and ran upstairs.
Farley leaned back, studying Sam.
“There’s no point in putting it off any longer,” Sam said. He sounded too defensive, he knew. Sullenly he added, “I’m sorry if I upset your timetable.”
“Not mine. Hers. She thinks she’s going to die out there. We had an unspoken agreement, a pact, you might say, to give her a vacation and rest before she had to face that valley again.”
“You know that’s crazy!”
“I don’t know half as much as you do, Sam. I seem to know less all the time. I don’t know what’s in the valley, don’t know what it will do to her to face it again. I don’t know why you think you can use her to see it too. Nope. I don’t know nearly half as much as you do.”
Sam had risen as Farley spoke. “Back off, Farley. I said I’m sorry. Let’s drop it.”
Farley nodded and left the room.
Gradually the ranch lights went out, until only the dim hallway light in the main house remained; outside, the desert crept closer. From the porch Sam watched the darkness claim the barn area, the yard, the bungalows, until he could feel it there at the bottom of the porch steps. He had dug around one of the desert ghost towns once, where only a juniper mounting post remained. That was what the desert would do here if this small group of people let it.
The moon rose, a half moon. Enough, Sam thought. It was enough.
That was what the ol
d Indian had said. Sam had driven three hours over New Mexico desert roads, gravel roads, dirt and sand roads, to find the shack. It had a tin roof covered with sagebrush. An Indian woman had admitted him silently; inside, the temperature was over a hundred degrees, cooler than it would have been without the sagebrush insulation, but stifling. On a straight chair before one of the two windows sat the Indian man, one arm swathed in bandages where the stump was still not healed. There was a roughly sawn table, two chairs and several stools, a wood-burning stove with a cast-iron pot on it, a rope-spring bed and several rolled-up pallets. The walls were covered with newspapers, carefully cut and pasted up $o that the pictures were whole, the stories complete. From outside there was the sound of children’s whispers, a faint giggle. The woman scowled at the window on the opposite side of the cabin, and the sounds stopped.
Sam had seen many such cabins, many worse than this one. He pulled the second chair around to face the man, introduced himself, sat down and drew out his report form. “I’ve been to the mine,” he said. “What I need now is a statement from you so the company can process your claim.”
The Indian did not move, continued to gaze at the desert.
“Sir . . .” Sam looked at the woman. “He was rambling when he was found. Did he suffer head injuries? Can he hear?”
“He hears.”
Sam glanced at the preliminary report. There had been an explosion at the potash mine; an avalanche apparently had carried this man down a ravine where he stayed for two days before he was found. Two days on the desert, in the sun, no water, bleeding from an arm injury, possibly head injuries. “You haven’t filed a claim yet,” he said. He explained the company’s disability pension, the social security regulations, the medical settlement. He explained the need for the claimant’s signature before processing could begin. The Indian never stirred.