I found myself mumbling to myself, mimicking the sound of the Sea, while I walked along a dusty highway, in a daze. I realized the great weight in my lungs, upon my heart, it was not Her. She had been pushed aside by loneliness. In that moment, only loneliness filled me up.
Loneliness doused in gin and moonshine, that is.
So, in that disorienting daze, I mumbled and burbled and the Salton Sea suddenly dribbled from my lips. It was terrifying, but it was happening. My lungs were now heavy with Her. I tasted Her salt, felt Her rot tickle my tonsils before Her waters parted my lips again and leaked down my chin, my neck, my chest already damp with sweat. Her salted waters just kept spewing from my lips, an endless well. It burned, Her salt in my sinuses, my eyes now dripping, too. More and more poured from me, allowing no breath to be drawn. No air to be kept. Cars zipped past me, unaware of the spectacle, or too careful to care. I think I had been walking south, toward Mexico. And I’ve no idea why. But I walked, gurgling, still attempting to sing Her song, though my vocal chords were too drenched to do so. My wind was stopped up. And I was so far away, unable to hear Her anymore. Unable to catch even the faintest hum of Her baritone. In that dry distance separating us, the only sound of water came from me. Came out of me, a slow but constant stream. Until that stream became a river exiting me, shaking my knees. I stopped and convulsed. Bent in half. Saltwater gushed from me, splattered at my feet. My capacity to carry on, to keep moving, to attempt to sing Her song, had left me. I stood and choked and shook, wrapping my own arms around my middle, saltwater stinging my eyes as She continued to spill from them. I wept openly without the ability to cry out, Her waters rushing from me, drowning the dust and asphalt around me, damming my cries.
And I had a vision: my people were out there experiencing this very same thing. Drowning in Her, but not drowning.
It was a sign. It was Truth. It was a miracle.
And when I collapsed at the side of that dusty highway, next to miles and miles of sagging telephone wires, there was nothing but Light.
And She will cut the rope and drown you in the Light.
Drowning but not drowning.
I clawed at the Light but couldn’t get purchase.
I convulsed and heaved. I tried to clog the river with my fist.
I swallowed mouthful after mouthful of saltwater, then threw it all back up.
Drowning but not drowning.
I gasped in the Light.
I choked in the Light.
But I did not drown in the Light.
And when I came out of the Light, I was not some crumpled man beside a dusty highway. No, when I came out of the Light, I emerged, buoyant, cleansed, and replenished, literally thirty yards from the Salton Sea’s shores, baptized once more in Her lulling waters. I was with Her once again, physically inside her. Pulled through the tunnel of space and time and birthed into the Sea, reborn, as I would always be.
I treaded Her thick waters, floating atop Her surface with such ease you’d think I was filled only with air. But, no. No, it was the Light. The Light inside lifting me up.
Unintentionally, I let out a ululation like no other heard before, on this plane of existence or any other. It was such a shining exclamation, and so four-dimensional, I know they felt the reverberations of its Light in parallel dimensions. Somewhere, in some other world, at that moment, they were just learning of Her love. Of its possibilities. Wet eyes were looking up, souls suddenly filled with unimaginable beauty, unaware as of yet the blessing they’d received.
After such a welcoming home, I had a hard time leaving the water. I treaded water for maybe two hours, completely at peace, somehow well-rested. Yet, once I swam to shore, I collapsed on the bone-sand, exhausted. I slept immediately and dreamed of all my people returning to me. And when I woke, the Sea was firmly within me, weighing down my lungs once again with Her scent and Her meaning.
Was the emptiness, that overwhelming loneliness completely replaced? No, but that’s only because She deems loneliness a necessary path to salvation.
seventeen
Jacob was the first to return to me. He showed up with three. Like the Sea had told, there would not be many. I would not be drowned out. I would not be forgotten. So Jacob showed up with three, not a flock of sheep on his back to overwhelm the setting. After all, a flourishing desert would hardly be a desert in the end.
Still, it somehow disappointed me. I imagined preaching to a land of people just as massive as the Sea. I imagined them ebbing and flowing toward me like a gentle wave, reaching out to grab just a bit of my Light. But that was not the fate. And that’s not what She had in store for me.
So Jacob set up the three with meager housing in Slab City. As we discussed, they would be under his tutelage, but his tutelage would be informed through me. They seemed nice enough people. Honestly, though, I wanted nothing to do with them. They were Jacob’s pupils and he would deal with them. I could only offer them small talk and a bit of eye contact to help them feel special, included.
Later in the evening, Jacob cooked up something special for us. We went to the beach and smoked it, named new constellations after the Sea: that one Salt. That one Breathless Fish. In the stars, we found The Mark. That which each of us bore across our cheeks, our foreheads, and our chins. We called that one: Promise. I had the book I’d been writing with me and so it came to include star charts so that others, such as yourself, may see what we saw there in the desert night.
What glory! It had been such a long time since I laid with one of my people that I was overcome with emotion and I cried. I wept and my tears turned to crystal on my cheeks. Blood fell from my eyes. The smoke in my lungs mingled with the rot. My head, attached firmly to my neck and shoulders, still floated somewhere out there over the center of the Sea.
We made love that night under the birth of constellations. And I was careful with him, it being our very first time alone together. Because I had missed him (as well as the others), I was careful with my crystal hands. Though my excitement urged much broader strokes, when I cut him, I made sure not to cut too deep. The bone-sand beneath Jacob gasped at the first drop of his blood, so thirsty for a taste of another true believer, my people’s absence not lost on the Sea or Her land surrounding us.
It was the least I could do, that holy bloodletting. We stayed there the whole night, drinking each other in, and letting the Sea drink of us.
eighteen
Curtis and Angela arrived separately the next day. The thread that held my people together was being drawn back in by the Sea, bit by bit. My heart soared! The burden of my loneliness, which sat hard on my heart those past several months, was lightened. That terrible loneliness that threatened to crack the foundation of my faith was being pulled out of me like a sickness. Even though I had understood it all to be a test, I could not will the affliction away. I had to live through it. I had to fight through it, and so I was being rewarded with their return.
To my surprise, Curtis and Angela each returned with three, same as Jacob. I told Curtis and Angela that I didn’t want to know what they said, what they did to ignite the fire of belief in their followers’ souls. I told them to wait. I wanted the others here before the story could be shared. So we decided we’d wait for Marcy’s and Jasmine’s arrival. There’d be a party of course. There’d be something to eat and drink and smoke. There’d be lots of lovemaking and bloodletting.
The three agreed and went off to attend to their sheep.
Later in the evening, we sat around a firepit outside the camper and Angela played the nylon-strung guitar. We nodded or waved to other Slabbers as they passed us by, most of them skin and bone, nearly destroyed by the sun, the wind, the hard life of freedom. Though me and mine know it wasn’t pure freedom. Not for them. And not of the soul. That’s why they clearly suffered such malnutrition. That’s why most of their teeth rotted in their mouths and their flesh opened up all over in sores. Not enough salt in their diets. Not enough true love in their hearts. They’d wither and die lon
g before us and their souls would simply extinguish. There was no eternity for them and it saddened me, but not so much in that moment, surrounded by three of my friends. My true friends that sometimes called themselves my disciples. I never saw anything wrong with that. Still don’t.
So, while we sat there, singing along with the Sea that glittered in the dark distance, our nine pupils kept themselves company with each other and Her Word, which by that time was nearly captured in my book. Though it wasn’t finished, I let them have Xeroxed copies of the early draft. The words there were pure enough to be the basis of their everything from that point forward. The sediment, the admixture that would make the foundation of their paths.
When Jasmine arrived the next day with her own three, we rejoiced once more and awaited our beloved Marcy so that we could truly celebrate.
We spent several days baptizing the initiates. As these twelve were our first ever, we decided we’d baptize one a day. We dipped them in the Sea, then I would make The Mark across their faces with my crystal hands and dip them once more, letting Her salt sink deeply into the wounds. I held them underwater until their screaming stopped. Each time I brought them up, they were renewed, at peace, feeling no pain.
Their Baptismal Day was the only time I would spend with the new arrivals. As it turned out, I enjoyed getting to know them as we relaxed on the bone-sand beach and took in lungfuls of smoke and Her scent. We reveled in the heat and sting of the sun. The occasional swarm of flies couldn’t dim our elation. I enjoyed hearing of the initiates’ hunger for belief, for the Sea to unlink the chains around their souls. They longed for freedom and were ecstatic where their journey had landed them, at my feet, at the water’s edge, in the loving warmth of Her embrace.
On their Baptismal Day, the initiate would also be granted permission to lay with us, to be whetted by our touch. It was decided then that no longer would we celebrate birthdays, only Baptismal Days. On these days, our flock could freely mingle with all of us, touch us, sleep with us, love us, and experience Her Word directly through me.
It was another moment of clarity found in Her salty waters. We rejoiced and I put it all in my book.
Did you rejoice when you read it? Did you rejoice with us?
It was after those twelve days of baptisms that I began to feel especially anxious for Marcy’s return. Since the Sea had seen to returning Jacob, Angela, Curtis, and Jasmine to me, I assumed Marcy could not be far behind. But this delay troubled me.
For many nights, weeks perhaps, I’d stay up waiting, expecting her knock at the door. It got so worrisome that I would keep the others up with me, talking and worrying in the dim lamplight. Finally, one day Jasmine took me by the hand and walked me to Salvation Mountain, that multi-colored, manmade monument to faith. It’s a beautiful piece of art, crafted from adobe, straw, and thousands upon thousands of gallons of paint. We walked up it and when we found a blank space, wrote a word of love for the Sea there. We used paint we found at the mountain’s base. There was a pleasant breeze to comfort my ache, though the sun shown as harshly as always. Then Jasmine took my hand and looked me in the eye and told me Marcy would not be coming back. Shocked, I nearly fell backward off Salvation Mountain. I asked Jasmine why. I nearly screamed it: Why? At first she didn’t want to say. Then, as the breeze died and our clothes grew damp with sweat under the hard sun, she said Marcy had heard I’d given our son away. I protested: But I didn’t! I left the child with his nanny. She’ll find him safe and sound, here, in The Slabs. Apparently Marcy didn’t see it that way. I told Jasmine I’d not abandoned my son. That one day we’d bring him into the fold. He’d been baptized already and bore The Mark. I had not abandoned my son.
Jasmine told me that when Marcy had heard I’d given away our son, her faith drained from her. I asked Jasmine to explain.
Upon hearing this terrible lie, Marcy wandered off the path of delivering Her Word. Wandered off all paths altogether. How she heard, no one knew, but I feared perhaps the Sea was testing me yet again by speaking directly to someone other than me. Perhaps the Sea, Herself, was testing Marcy. Or perhaps the Sea, Herself, was jealous. I would never know for certain. But when Marcy heard I’d placed the child in another woman’s hands, she walked away from the city where she had hoped to open minds and souls. She walked away and collapsed outside the barbed wire and chain-link fence of some humming power station. Workers found her spitting up water. Saltwater. The water gushed from her in torrents, unending. Marcy’s eyes showed terror when she realized there was no way to take breath in. The saltwater kept spouting forth. Eventually the water dammed but was still trickling from her lifeless mouth when the ambulance arrived.
I was shocked. Saddened and shocked.
I told Jasmine that the same thing happened to me, only I awoke in the middle of the Sea, refreshed and clean. That I swam back to the shore anew, transported over miles and miles of land at Her whim. Jasmine nodded knowingly. She said the same thing happened to her, except that after drowning she was not transported to the Sea, for she still had her work to do, out in the world.
The Drowning, as we would come to call it, happened to the others, too. She explained that after the saltwater flowed out of her and she came back to this earthly plane, dozens of people surrounded her, amazed. Baffled and amazed. How could one survive such a thing? And how was it even possible? Though, out of mortal fear, most didn’t follow, those that did follow her back to the Salton Sea knew it to be only one thing: a miracle. It’s the same for the others, she repeated. A miracle.
This was the news I had hoped to hear, but only once Marcy was back. This was the news I wanted everyone to share as a whole: how did they convince others to follow? And somehow I knew how. But, imperfect, I was compelled to have them say it aloud. And, yet, what did it matter?
Marcy was gone. Forever gone. The mother of my once-and-only son. It was a special bond. Perhaps one that She didn’t approve of.
nineteen
In retrospect, I knew something was amiss upon Jasmine’s return. She was quieter. Her Light didn’t shine as bright. As we lay with the initiates, her heart didn’t seem to be in it. We all were making love in bone-sand but it seemed she was staying on the outside, barely participating, and pulling punches when she did. Her lips drawing away from a kiss. Her mouth not as open and accepting. Her touch cool, hardly feverish. Now I know that she was in mourning.
As I too would be, as soon as she told me.
Without Marcy there with us, it felt like the breaking of a perfect circle. Every day. Of course, we had our twelve pupils, and there was our shared son in the care of Teresa, his appointed nanny. But how could anything be the same?
Life went on, of course. Jacob, Curtis, Angela, and Jasmine tutored their people. It was studious, yet casual. Casual enough that other Slabbers were invited. Even the Slabradors were welcome. Sometimes they sat with a class around a fire, singing songs of salt and Light, songs of tears and souls, songs of everlasting salvation through the freedom She had granted us. They would sing under blinking stars while sitting on a land that stretched for miles into the dark, all the broken glass upon it twinkling as if in response.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling somewhat responsible for Marcy’s premature expiration. So I visited Teresa and my son, my last tie to Marcy. I informed Teresa that Marcy would not be returning. When she asked why, I explained that she had drowned attempting to spread her faith, her love into the world. Oh no! Teresa said, pulling me in close and tight when the tears began to fall.
She asked me when I would show her more of my book and I told her I didn’t know. She asked if she could join my group now that Marcy was gone and I said no. She asked who would take care of the boy, and I said that she was no longer his nanny but his mother. She must make do with him. Earn her keep.
After we made love, I peeked into the crib at the back of her camper. The boy slept soundly. He looked healthy. Teresa had done well by the boy. He had grown. How old was he then? A year? Probably not quite but it
wouldn’t be long before the baby was a toddler.
After a time of peacefully watching him, I reached down to caress the boy’s rosy cheek but I nicked him with my crystal hands. A banshee crawled out of his throat. Such a strong voice. Such strong lungs.
Quickly, Teresa rose from the disheveled bed, pulled the boy from the crib and placed her nipple in his mouth. She wiped the blood from his cheek with her thumb, then sucked the blood off that. She shushed and quieted the boy so quickly, her focus so intent, so nurturing. She enveloped the child, made him feel safe and warm.
I realized then that three bodies in Teresa’s camper was one too many. The space suddenly felt crowded. I hardly felt visible in the place, so I exited without a goodbye.
Once I was down the aluminum steps of Teresa’s trailer, I heard a great rumbling. Was a pack of lions on their way to devour me? Soon the rumbling was accompanied by singing. A joyous chorus that boomed and flooded the desert fields.
The merry ruckus was no ravenous beast, only a school bus of long-haired people I’d never seen in The Slabs before. And their song? It was of the Sea!
I was flabbergasted. Who were these people? Did the others know that there were more pupils on their way?
There were forty-two people on that bus, yet She had said there wouldn’t be so many. Is forty-two such a small number to the Sea? Of course it would be, but I thought our school was complete, that we, for a while, anyway, would have only those first twelve to teach.
What’s more, when the long-haired, half-naked people streamed from that bus, they spotted me standing there in the dirt and they cheered and came straight for me. How did they recognize me? I always assumed it was from the light radiating from me. But, more likely, it was my crystal hands.
The God of Salt & Light Page 6