Sonora

by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  Copyright © 2017 by Hannah Lillith Assadi

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Assadi, Hannah Lillith

  Sonora / Hannah Lillith Assadi.

  ISBN 978-1-61695-792-6

  eISBN 978-1-61695-793-3

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction.

  3. Infatuation—Fiction. 4. Sonoran Desert—Fiction.

  5. Phoenix (Ariz.)—Fiction. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

  7. Psychological fiction. I. Title

  PS3601.S77 S56 2017 813’.6—dc23

  2016038000

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my mother and father, always

  & in loving memory, g.g.

  And he said unto them, I am an Hebrew; and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land.

  Then were the men exceedingly afraid, and said unto him, Why hast thou done this? For the men knew that he fled from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them.

  Then said they unto him, What shall we do unto thee, that the sea may be calm unto us? for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous.

  And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.

  Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring it to the land; but they could not: for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous against them.

  Wherefore they cried unto the LORD, and said, We beseech thee, O LORD, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not upon us innocent blood: for thou, O LORD, hast done as it pleased thee.

  So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging.

  —Book of Jonah, King James Bible

  I

  August

  I have always missed watching the sun fall down into the desert. It is always so slow. There are no windows in the waiting room. The fluorescence blares on despite the romance of the hour. A nurse greets us, my mother and me, and tells us not to look so worried, that my father won’t feel a thing.

  There are no other families waiting with us. There is no one to distract us. The doctor promises the surgery will help my father walk without pain. My mother is picking at her cuticles. I shuffle the coins in my jacket like prayer beads and make myself automatic cappuccinos to deliver me from the disinfectant, the syrupy trace of fresh death. The television is on mute. We hear the discordant heart monitors of strangers, their parade of breath. We are fleeting visitors, they are here to stay. No one has died yet.

  I take my first cigarette break at dusk, and then every half hour after that. There is a sign that prohibits smoking a hundred feet from the hospital entrance, but I walk farther, all the way to where the grass ends and the dirt of the reservation begins. I meditate on a vague mantra, of touching the earth to soothe the soul. The desert, once dark, is slurred with new lights, traffic on the freeway, sirens rushing on in the distance. I escape the hospital light but cannot escape the swell of memory that assails me only when I am here, back in Sonora. I wonder about the anesthesia, close to death as it brings us, about whether or not our dreams go on when we go under, and if they do, what my father is seeing.

  I see us in the dusk beyond, as we once walked in a land wrought for ghosts—the coyotes’ silver coats marring the dark. We walked despite their weeping, unrepentant and desolate. It was only at dusk that the land was thronged by spirits, the wind in the brush a moan, a song. My memory of it is folded into one long night, one melodic collapse into the blue-black bigness of the night sky.

  From the canal, we returned home, my father and I, saying nothing at all, through a brief and feral silence until streetlight. It was August when we first arrived, the month of monsoons.

  The carpet was thick and scratchy and a stained maroon. The blinds never quite closed, so the rooms were always pierced with angled sunlight. Smoke, Turkish coffee, and cat shit pervaded the apartment. We always had a male Siamese blue point, and when one died we got another, and they were all named Sharmut—the Arabic word for whore. When my father wasn’t driving a taxi, he sat in the after-school hours, a cigarette in one hand, a glass full of ice and vodka in the other, watching battles roar in deserts on the other side of the planet. My mother worked the night shift at Denny’s, the only restaurant in what was once a small town, and as a secretary for a dentist during the day. To relax between shifts, she retreated to the bedroom and watched aerobics tapes, never quite fully following the moves, resting on the floor at the first sign of sweat.

  Every day, my father and I walked through the desert to and from the elementary school. In the morning, guiding us silently were Laura and her father. Though we never spoke, it was established that we follow the path they had carved before we ever arrived. Laura’s father always wore a sombrero. They never seemed to notice our following them. They never turned around. In stretches, my father yanked me from walking too close to jumping cholla, triggered by even the breeze, resulting in an entire arm or limb smothered in spine. I never paid attention to the threat at every step. I was always watching Laura.

  Laura wore sandals every day. Her magenta skirt blew in the brief wind. It was ankle length and tied at her waist with string because it was too big and it was not just that the color was her favorite but the item she would miss forever once she had outgrown it. We all had one. That magenta skirt was always violent beside the dull brown surroundings, but the rest of her, her skin, her hair, was brilliant beneath that sun. She was all caramel, luminous. She walked without fear, as if she were made of the desert vegetation, made of cactus, made of dirt. I yearned to know her even then. Nothing else was of interest on those walks. The sky was always blue, cloudless. Our skin, no matter the month, hot to the touch. Sometimes I became lost in the fancy of a fairy tale tied to the articles of clothing caught in the branches and beneath rocks, a single dirty sock, an abandoned shoe. The desert, so dead, was always littered with our leftovers—evidence of the living.

  I do not remember how many months we trailed the path of Laura and her father, but I remember the morning the entrance we had used into the desert was blocked off by orange signs. There were three construction workers sitting with cigarettes in the shade of a paloverde. Laura and her father were nowhere. A police car with its siren lights going pulled up beside us. The officer rolled down his window, asked if we needed assistance. “You know where you are, sir?”

  My father shook his head and pulled me close as if my body were a shield. “We used to walk here,” he muttered.

  A year or so later, the cacti were removed for the scaffolding of the high school Laura and I would attend. Before there were any windows or floors, there was a flagpole. The football field was finished first. The workers slept beneath the bleachers, the only shade that remained. It was an ugly view, all that steel rising up against the mountains. My father said it would never be finished. I hoped that he was right. I was never a girl who yearned to grow up.

  Some nights while my mother was at work, my father and I took drives in the taxi he called his Battlestar Galactica. The engine softened the coyotes’ howls. One of these nights, we dr
ove by way of a dirt road that rose up into the Superstition Mountains. On the drive, one arm out the window with a cigarette, my father spoke of other deserts where he once lived, deserts populated by gazelles, undulating dunes guarding hidden jinn where beyond us only stick-figure saguaro stood. He played the classical station on the radio as the soundtrack for his stories until we passed into the range, where it became too quiet to have music on even in the car.

  “There is treasure here, piles and piles of gold,” he said when we entered the mountains.

  The Arabic moon, a crescent, was a sliver on the horizon. Venus blazed below. My father grew quiet, at last humbled by his present setting, before embarking upon a new story set in the desert in which we found ourselves and featuring the range we soon would become stranded in. He told me of the Lost Dutchman who on his deathbed had given his nurse the secret directions to a hidden gold mine in the Superstitions.

  “Maybe we can find it, Ahlam, and when we do, everything will change,” he said. I stared out the window, looking into the black range for some glint of gold.

  “When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it,” he said. “Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.”

  A few minutes later, the engine died. The view we had had of the night sky was now blocked by a veil of mountain. The lights of Phoenix had disappeared miles back.

  “Are we lost?” I asked finally, watching my father on the hood of the Battlestar, waving for reception on his foot-length mobile phone.

  “Go to sleep,” he said.

  I pretended to sleep as he smoked his Parliaments, finishing one and with each extinguishing bud, beginning another, surrendering only when the dust had risen so thick it covered the stars. My father jumped into the car and closed the windows. Everywhere there was thunder. The sky was torn asunder in purple. And there was the rain, thick on the windshield, thick on the steel of our Battlestar.

  I know that I hadn’t fallen asleep when the sounds of the storm dissolved into a chorus of voices, their screaming emanating from within me instead of without. I know that it was not a dream when I saw Laura. She was just outside our window, dressed in a charcoal-grey cocktail dress. Mascara streamed down her face. Her hair had lost its dark luster, turned ashen. Her body was still a girl’s but her face suddenly that of a woman. She was tied upside down from a saguaro cactus, crucified by way of her legs rather than her arms. She began to swing as the wind picked up. The dust rose. She was weeping, her eyes prosecuting, wide. Soon you will be blind, I wanted to say. But the wind was so bellowing and the sand so swirling between us, it was difficult to tell which of the two of us needed the warning.

  My father shook me, and I came to. He was speaking in Arabic, reading verses of the Quran over my forehead. I was covered in sweat.

  “I feel cold,” I said.

  “It was just a dream,” my father said.

  Every night we meet the faces of those we love in our dreams. Every night we meet ourselves in the faces of others. Dreams must be love’s purest territory. Some dreams dissipate with the morning, some dreams recur. Some dreams appear in broad daylight, some emerge impossibly.

  My visions began in the desert and with Laura. Seeing her on that mountain in the middle of the night. In the years that others grew breasts and added inches to their height, I grew fever dreams. My body would suddenly go cold, my head heavy. I felt faint. A chorus of voices converged in me, and then a flash of sight, quick as a dream. In the day or two that followed, my temperature would rise. I’d fall sick. No medicine ever brought me back, only the low sound of my father’s words conjured me away from the possession.

  With the light of morning, we saw where we were. There were branches tossed into the road. Everything smelled of sage and the smoke of creosote. The sun had fully risen by the time a man in a rusted Chevy pickup drove up and stopped beside us. Without saying hello or good morning, he asked us why we were there. “You know these mountains are haunted,” he said. “The Apache guard this place. It’s their underworld.”

  My father squinted against the light. “No, we did not.”

  The man, strawberry blond with sunburned skin, turned off his ignition. He stepped out of his car, revealing dusty boots, ripped jeans, and a camouflage fatigue button up, to retrieve some jumper cables from the bed of his truck. He wobbled over to us.

  My father eyed the gun tucked into the man’s hip. He squeezed my hand.

  “What’s that accent you got?” the man asked my father.

  “It’s from”—he paused—“the Holy Land.”

  “I’m Woody,” the man said.

  “I am Joseph,” my father said. “And she . . .” He squeezed my hand tighter. “She is Ariel.”

  “Nice Christian names,” Woody said.

  We followed Woody on the dirt road that led out of the Superstitions onto Highway 60.

  “Why’d you lie to that man?” I finally asked my father. “Why did you lie about our names?”

  “You will understand when you are older. Ariel is pretty. You can use it when you want. Don’t ever become attached to your name, Ahlam, or to the place you are from. Just tell people what makes them smile. It’s always better to be easily forgotten.”

  I understood later that the place my father was from had disappeared into a new name. Or an old name. And that it was easier to say that he was from the Holy Land. I understood later that my father came to America and then fled to the desert because he believed that place to be his curse, a mark on his birth he could never run far enough from. That the same place both my parents were from was spoken of often and was the place over which the blood of thousands had been spilled. A place that provoked an endless war that began when my parents were born and still has not ceased. I understood that my mother being from Israel and my father being Palestinian was something that made them feel lonely together, and that was why they never felt at home anywhere except for perhaps, against all odds, with each other.

  To me, it was always an underworld, the voices from thousands of years in the past, condemning the present. An underworld where the dead lurked, as it was for the Apache, in those mountains where I saw Laura as a ghost and not as a girl.

  I remember little else of our early years in the desert. I remember when there was suddenly a Burger King, a Dairy Queen, a Chevron built in the desert where we had only months earlier walked. I remember the signs for new housing developments, one after the other, advertising larger and larger pools, and three instead of two-car garages. I remember the smell of my dance studio, of the wood and the hairspray and the lipstick and the alternating men and women at the piano as we stood rigid at the bar performing first and second positions. I remember when the high school was finished and that the coyotes disappeared with it. I remember that come dusk, beyond the walls that separated this America from theirs, there where the sun dipped down over the reservation, I saw sea. It was only there that the carcass of saguaro, naked of spines, elegant as piano skeletons, could rest, could rot; there that unbridled horses wild and fast and white as unicorns still reigned.

  I found Laura again at a football game the August of my freshman year. I’d never seen a football game. Everyone else was in jeans. My mother made me wear a black lace top, a burgundy chemise beneath it. A dark cherry taffeta skirt. Everyone else had liquor in water bottles. There was a small dance party held at the school after the victory. I danced with a boy to a song about a girl being dead and still haunting the dreams of the singer until he broke away from me. I sat in the bleachers and discreetly sniffed at my shoulder, admiring the faint residue of cologne the boy had sweated onto my skin when Laura sat down next to me. “How’s his Axe body spray smell? Is it very special?” She stared on at the crowd before us.

  Her voice was deep even then, resonant, and hoarse. I didn’t know whether or not to laugh. My hands turned bright red and wet as they had ev
er since I was a child and nervous.

  Laura turned to me. She had amber eyes. They alighted from her deeply tanned face like a beautiful curse. Her hair was streaked magenta. “I’m Laura,” she said. She pronounced it the Spanish way, though no one else ever did. We sat there quietly observing the others. Laura hummed a tune dreamily as if I weren’t there at all.

  “He smelled like shit,” I said.

  “Fuck, the stupid fireworks have begun,” she said, looking up.

  The high school was hailed as the most beautiful school in the valley with its floor-to-ceiling windows and elegant outdoor walkways, its Greek columns mixed with modern architecture. There was a public library housed in its interior. I smelled no chalk, no glue, no rubber cement, no sunscreen. No children had ever been there. Everything was too new. The high school was erected on Yavapai land. This was normal. The entire city was erected on someone else’s land. My father told me to be vigilant. “The Navajo won’t touch Anasazi ruins because of the jinn that go inside of the coyotes.”

  “It’s the Hohokam that were here,” my mother corrected him.

  “They are brothers, same people,” he said.

  As we passed through the gates of the school each morning, my father asked, “Do you remember when there was nothing here, when it was dark, quiet?”

  “It’s still empty and quiet and dead,” my mother said.

  The first week of school, one of the surveillance cameras caught the fluorescent lights flashing on and off through the halls long after all the janitors had left. Over the course of the next four years, this would happen sporadically both when school was in session and when it was not. The administrators blamed the recurrence on the monsoons, even when it was not monsoon season.

  As we await my father’s waking, I smoke outside and stand apart from the desert as the darkness falls. Every movement in the brush sends me leaping back onto the pavement. The desert scares me because it is empty, always shuddering, condemning me to memory.