I would do it, Paul had said, the night we took this road together. Whatever it was. I would cut off my fingers. The window is open, the cat sitting on the ledge, and then she leaps away. I take in the details. I tilt the borrowing card toward the pool of ambient street light, and I make out faint letters scrawled between the scratched-out name of the original borrower. The writing is crabbed scrawl, written as if wrong-handed, or palm gripped around wrist to still a tremoring hand. Apollo, the new letters read. Apollo Blue. The name that was once here has been replaced.
He was perfect, and he wasn’t sorry. It was what he’d intended all along. Some night, long ago, now smeared with the Vaseline of cloud memory, I took cloud to stop wanting so badly. Was there something in particular I had wanted to stop wanting? It’s no longer relevant. But, perhaps, for Paul, it has been the opposite. He has fed his life to the want itself. Slowly, over time, Paul has been erasing himself, until he became only that single desire. Act I. His whole life before him. Something vital. He has erased himself even from me.
There’s a logic here I recognize, because it is ancient and universal. To achieve the impossible thing (save the doomed city; defeat the immortal monster; win the unwinnable war) the sacrifice of a loved one is required, but which of us has made the sacrifice?
I find myself back at the studio, close to midnight. I let myself in with Lew’s keys. In the ambient street light, I read the blank squares in the sawdust surrounding the abandoned set. The cameras, with whatever they have recorded, are gone. An overturned sawhorse, the glitter of shattered lens attest to some incident. The back door hangs open onto the night. Skid marks, if I cared to read them, have written the opening of a chase scene into the parking lot beyond. The lights, when I flip them, don’t respond. Still, I find my way to Lew’s office and let myself in. The chip reader is no longer in the port. I drop to my knees, fingertips moving beneath the desk, sifting through the pocket scatter and hole punch confetti, the penny, the sticky plastic spoon, until at last I encounter a toothed piece of plastic the size of a penny. The chip. On its own, as an object, the things onto which data are recorded reveal nothing of their contents. The film canister, the video cassette, the floppy disc, the chip: no sweat, no color, no taste of their contents passes from the contents to the medium. A snuff film resembles a holiday cartoon. A newsreel looks like a melodrama. Even if the actual footage could burn me alive, encoded, it might as well be tax records. I hold the chip in the palm of my hand, waiting for some ancient essence to seep through, some flash of recognition to come, but it is only material, I can’t bear to watch it even one more time. Still, I hold onto it. Because if it is what I think it is, no one else should watch it either.
But first, I take the Epilady and grind Valerie’s canvases to a fine, white powder. What’s each of these worth these days? Five thousand? Twenty? All this money around me is dust. This is how you ruin, I tell her blinking camera. This is what you do when you destroy. Then I open my paperback, and press in the chip, and glue the adjoining pages. I will forget. I will forget. I will forget about it altogether.
As I set my raw, burned hands on the steering wheel, the phone is already ringing, an international number. Nancy, on the other end, sounds concerned and ethereal at the same time.
“I have news, Mel.”
“What kind of news?” I ask.
“You know what. He’s in Mexico.”
I want her to say his name, to have anyone acknowledge him other than me, but I am afraid to break the fragile spell between us.
“I’ve thought it over, and I think you can do good,” says Nancy. “But there’s one thing. It’s very important. You can’t eat cloud until you arrive.”
“It’s like nine hours,” I tell her.
“Mellie, this is nonnegotiable. You’ve got to.”
“All right,” I tell her.
I’ve been so high so long I don’t know what my body will do if I deny it now, and I’m not sure I should be driving deserted Mexican highways alone in any condition, but the story of the sacrifice, I realize, is also told in reverse. If you can follow the prohibition (seeds you must not eat, a candle you must not light, a turn of the head you must resist) then you can bring the loved one back, and so I agree.
I am greasy-haired, unshowered, rank and sour. My skin in the rearview has a gray pallor. I’m fattening beneath the chin and on my finger pads. I listen to right wing radio because music and NPR make me nod off. Now, says Glenn Beck, now I get sent about a hundred books a month, books people tell me I’ve got to read. And from these I maybe select ten to put on my bedside table, and I’ll tell you the truth. When Prayer Spiral came out what was it? Two, three years ago, it passed me by. But then this friend of mine—have you ever prayed with Rafael Cruz?—well it was Rafe Cruz and he said I had to, just had to read it. You know people who when they pray you just know they are intimate with God? And you think to yourself, I pray, but I’m not—anyway, Rafael, he’s got that thing. A prayerful, an intimate knowing. Well, Prayer Spiral turns out to be about that. Moving inward, with prayer. Locating the center. Along the way, those things that interfere, your sense of humor? Your pride? How busy you are? It has to be discarded. You is your soul in connection with God. The rest is in the way.
San Diego. The funnel of the border. Homeland Security drowses over his automatic weapon. The floodlights are the only thing awake. Tijuana. Ensenada. And then the vastness of the desert. I am headed toward the border between Baja California and Baja California Sur, where a road breaks off from Highway One and heads for the OneLife compound. I have about three hours to go before the turnoff, before the road gets truly hairy, before I do the final miles in absolute darkness, on broken paving and sand. The cloud need is crawling all over me. I’ve got beetles under my skin and I’m blinking hard and gripping the steering wheel. The radio is mariachi static, the landscape Martian and unchanging. I blink, shake my arms, blink again.
Suddenly, a single headlight appears in the darkness. It’s a motorcycle, and it accelerating toward me at a terrific speed.
I try to swerve on the narrow road. It swerves, too. I try again; it mirrors me.
Ten seconds.
Five seconds.
Four seconds.
I yank on the wheel and veer into the sand beside the highway. Scrub growth and night. The motorcycle, piloted by a helmeted figure with long dark hair, slows. She flashes me twice, and, instead of stopping, revs again until she’s back up to ninety. I watch the taillights for maybe thirty seconds, listen to the engine, and then both are gone.
Leaving me—nowhere. In the well of light around my car, I can make out the bulbous organic forms of the cacti. Nopale. Saguaro. Chain-link Cholla. Beyond, the horizon has a touch of orange from the cloud-hidden moon, but otherwise the earth and the sky are a uniform color. About thirty miles back, I had passed the lit Tecate stand, where Paul and I had brought the girl from Nancy’s compound back to her family—tin roof, stucco walls, a man within slumped against his cash drawer. Then, maybe fifteen miles later, I’d passed a group of five on foot, filthy water bottles strung from rods over their shoulders, trailing a barefoot kid at the back of the group. But now, I am in a dark geometry, shape barely differentiable from shape. It might be mirage, but I think I can make out a cook fire somewhere in the brush. It can’t be so far that they aren’t aware of my plight. Who would live here, and how? Are there springs in the desert? Are these traffickers, camping the night, or some family who has chosen this stretch of scrub and sand to live? I turn the key. The wheels of the Lexus spin and whine, but I stay put. I think of a story I heard, this couple Paul knew from his gym contacts. Before him, they said, they used to do their own incendario runs through the desert. This one night, middle of BFE, they’d seen a girl by the side of the road. “Little thing,” the woman said. “All alone.”
“We didn’t stop,” said the man. “But we slowed, to see what was what.”
Then, out of nowhere, swarming, two ancient pickups had barreled t
oward them. It was an ambush. The man of the couple had floored it, one door flapping open, and the first pickup had thundered past, searing the metal off at the hinge and giving the woman a burn on her shoulder she showed us in the light of the bar.
“What happened next?” I’d asked.
“I drive a BMW,” the man said, knocking back the rest of his cocktail. “They were in pickups that still took leaded.”
His wife or whatever, bleached-blonde, showing cleavage, placed her big diamond on top of his hand. “We outran them.”
The fire seems to waver in the desert. Is it moving? Is it coming toward me? And the land around me is not depopulated. It rustles, as with wildlife. The sand spatters against my windshield. Even though the night is windless, it is moving. I try the car again. No luck.
There’s a thing I remember my mother used to do, in the snow, back east, sliding a piece of cardboard under each tire. If you can just get a little traction, the power of the motor will take over and you can get out of a snow bank. I launch myself over the back seat and begin to root around amid the fast food papers and the soda bottles I’ve tossed over my shoulder. My hands are shaking. Damnit. Damnit. Damnit.
My foot knocks against the dashboard, and dislodges it. There, in the hiding place, is a single forgotten box of cloud. I don’t think. I open the box and unstick a tab. Nancy’s going to set conditions? She’s going to tell me if it’s right to come? Screw that.
—pop—
—ease comes, emptiness. There is a fire moving toward me, accompanied by shadowy figures that bob in the scrub. I turn the key. The Lexus loves me. She spins once and then pulls back onto the highway. In the rearview, I watch the fire disappear behind me, until I remember to look ahead at the road. I am in darkness again with only my own reflection to look at. G-d, what a mess I am. Before I reach my destination, I decide, I will have to take a mascara break.
I could write an autobiography of the sordid places I have squintingly tried to pull myself together: gas station bathroom before visiting my father’s mother to beg for money as a child; in a pay toilet, as a teenager, before I really got it about having my period, and after I’d bled through a purple silk skirt; off Avenue D, to put on more lipstick over a fresh mouth of cloud, in the So Shoot Me Hangar. Tonight, I am parked in the tropical flora at the side of the sand and gravel road, dome light bright, occasional VW van passing behind me to take the last turnoff for OneLife. It’s late at night; the pools are open to the public.
I braid a kind of hippie thing into the front of my hair, smooth my flyaways with my fingers. I layer on the eyeliner and the lipstick and brush bronzer over my cheeks and brow line. Extra mascara. I pop a crusty tic tac from the bottom of my purse, and I rub a little coconut lotion under my arms and into the fabric of my underpants. A bug the size of my fist is crawling across the windshield. A rubber tree branch stirs in a light breeze. The undergrowth is alive with sound. In the mirror, the little portions of myself I can see at a time, I look attractive for a corpse. I am counting on the night to cover for me.
I’m not high, probably, but I’m not sober either, and I’ve got adrenaline so bad I am rocking, tapping the wheel with my fingers. I’m exhausted and I know better than to trust my brain, so I don’t prepare what I’m going to say to him or wonder how I’ll feel. I needed to come to him. The next part is just the next part. I back out onto the route and then pull a K-turn up onto the road that leads to Nancy’s retreat center. I park in the first lot and ascend into the hush of the wee hours. It’s changed since I came nine months ago, but in some way too subtle or intangible to define. There are Jags in place of the Mercedes; the mindfulness messages along the footpaths have vanished. There is more wind, more sea and sulfur in the air. From the inky shadows, a blue creature emerges who turns out to be Nancy.
She hands me a glass of water and puts her arm around my shoulder. I drink steadily. Then we step apart. We look at each other. It’s been almost a year since I’ve seen my friend, but the main sign of time is that her hair is shorter. There’s something else, maybe grooming, those blond streaks exclusive hairdressers put in their clients’ hair, weight loss—but she resembles, more than I recall, her rich-lady clients. She carries herself with that sort of assurance and authority. I know the months have not been as kind to me, but I am unprepared for the scrutiny I’m getting from Nancy.
“I look like shit,” I say. “I’m fatter.”
“You don’t know?” Nancy tells me. “Seriously?”
“What?” I touch my face, suddenly convinced I’ve sprouted a mole or a port wine stain.
She smiles and touches my stomach. “You’re carrying,” she says. “You’re pregnant.”
“Fuck you,” I tell her. “Since when does being a massage therapist make you a midwife? How the fuck would you know?” And yet, even as I say it, I feel a little thrill inside, a little something flip over in my heart. I think of all the little caplets of Ortho Tri-Cyclen I’ve introduced into the sewage system, all the days unprotected.
“Massage therapist,” Nancy says. “You sound like my mother.” She puts her arm around my shoulder and begins to lead me. She isn’t in the dorms anymore, some sort of promotion to do with the new outlet venture—she’s got her own tasteful building, set apart from the others in a protected grove. Nancy pauses at the entryway to her house, and turns to me.
“Did you do as I asked?” Nancy asks.
“Yeah, but I didn’t really see the point.” I say. I follow her over the threshold, across the warm brown tile and through to the courtyard in back “So, how is he?”
As we pass by the kitchen, she takes my water glass from me and puts it on the counter. “Listen, there’s a thing I should prepare you for, a thing maybe you’re not totally aware of. When he’s been coming here, it hasn’t just been for business.”
“You’re saying there was what? A girl? Was it you?”
“Snap out of it, Mellie. I’m saying, I know you don’t have much confidence in the work we do here—”
“My boyfriend doesn’t even like to hug, OK? And then, I wake up one morning and he’s got rocks on his head. How does that happen? Someone had to convince him.”
“Obviously, I bear responsibility. His interest in the work flattered me, and I thought it could help him. I was sad.”
“I’m fucking sad,” I say. “But I guess you didn’t think I needed a better life.”
“Look, be pissed at me. Just, save it until after.”
We find the rear entrance, and then we begin a climb up a narrow path which cannot be heavily trafficked.
To the left, as we curve upward and toward the sea, the mutter of the midnight bathers is audible.
“Where are you taking me?”
“This place, the OneLife center, has been here for a long time. It’s been other things, before it became what it is. And there are holdovers from before, and also people at the fringes who are kind of attracted here. They’ve been kicked out. They return. And the legality of it, of their encampment, is a little tricky. Anyway, these are people with very few other options, and I’ve always thought it was kinder to let them stay. Sometimes, they come into our orbit, and that tends to justify it. But also, it happens the other way around. He got involved.”
We’ve left the public part of the compound now. The paths are narrower, kept up by foot traffic rather than gardener’s shears, and so I have to walk behind Nancy. Not every word she says is perfectly clear. I can see steam rising from the springs, but we skirt around the cliff edges, and keep to the rocky trail.
“When did he leave you?” she asks. “What kind of shape was he in?”
I don’t say anything, but I can see the organic matter on Lew’s clothes, the smear on the pavement.
“Mellie?”
“He didn’t leave me,” I say. “He got hurt. I guess I let him get involved with some bad people, too.”
Nancy waits, and when I reach her, she puts her arm around me. I stay stiff, and after a few moments, she r
eleases me.
“How long ago was this?”
“A day, I think.”
A fence of bleached driftwood and barbed wire marks some boundary. Beyond, there are flattened beer cans and snack bags caught in the scrub.
“Are you sure?” She shakes her head. “I think it may have been longer. Four days ago, I heard this rumor of this pocho hitchhiking south. I tried to intersect him, but it wasn’t possible. The whole balance, between the villages and the Center, it goes through phases, and recently, something having nothing to do with either of you, I overstepped. I was able to ensure he got this far.”
We have reached a reach a break in the wire fence.
“So, wait—you haven’t seen him? How do you know he’s OK?”
“He’s alive. That’s the point. The point is, it’s not some other life this is about now. It’s life. We’re trying to keep him alive.”
Before I can respond, Nancy reaches back a hand and gestures for me to stop. A man approaches the opening, and he and Nancy have a whispered exchange. In the trees, I make out the encampment that I had noticed on my previous visit, but it’s larger than my earlier impression suggested, six or seven trailers, a few shanties put together from plastic rain barrels and corrugated roofing, the triangular lines of nylon tent flaps bisecting the space between trees. The man at the fence is shaking his head. Nancy accedes with a little gesture of her hands and steps back toward me.
“Listen, Mellie. The long and short of it is, I can’t go in there. Which means, it’s on you now.”
“It seems like you’re not telling me something, like there’s something you’re avoiding saying.”
“Later. Ask me anything,” she says. “But now you have to hurry.” Then she hands me a headset. “There’s a lot in you, Mellie. There always has been. He’s been lucky to have you.”
The encampment is shadows and impressions in the firelight. There are coolers carefully marked in permanent marker, as for a school field trip, and also something that appears to be a skinned animal hanging over the fire. A length of chain encircles a tree. Children’s underwear dries on a line. No one is about, but a pipe set in a dish releases curls of smoke. Shadows pass behind tent flaps and a sleeping bag rustles out of sight. The man I follow has not introduced himself, and does not give me time to observe his face. The trees fade behind us, and then we have come to a rockier area. I can hear the sea, more loudly, but as if underneath me. It should be to my left, I think, but the sound seems to come from the outcropping of stone ahead.
The Likely World Page 41