“Sorry, I like drawing flies.”
“I know. They’re easy to make. Like a smiley face. You know why everyone draws smiley faces ? Because there are less than five lines you need before you can recognize it.”
“I believe it.”
You hear the buzzing sound again, and you know what it is before she even pulls it out. She smiles an apology and presses the phone deep into her face, quickly walking away before she starts talking.
You walk off in the opposite direction to give her some privacy. You think of your phone number and the fly you drew on her skin, and you cup your hand around your ear like a seashell. Even years later, when you’re both miles away and her head and her hand are the only things visible above the waves smacking your face and filling your nostrils, you still keep your hand over your ear, and you can still hear every word of her conversation like she’s swimming right next to you. Until you pull her under.
The top of the hill is a house, beneath the moon, part of the stars. A figure walks up—a man, in a heavy canvas coat and a sagging hat. Closer to him is his wet breath and beyond the sprinkled lights. He is getting close to the door and as he does, we look around frantically—if this is it, if we are going to leave everything outside when we go in, this is all we get to leave.
Darkness. Glow. Implied ground. Not enough.
“Beal ! Beal ! Listen up !”
Low light. Just soft flame on cupped boards and dim sea shapes. On a bench made of split logs sits a hollow headstone. A radio with a yellow heart polished to life by a fist on a wide wheel.
“Pardon, Beal ! Pardon ! Sit.”
Beal turns to drop the door back.
“There was another.”
The round man at the dial jerks. Beal shows his face. The other shows his.
Beal has tiny black eyes that sit not on his face but at the outside corners of it. They can’t be seeing a resolved image. His nostrils are tall and thin and sit a hair apart. It looks like he breathes through neat wounds inflicted by a fork. His mouth is pink and alone and is pursed like cherub. It is a baby’s mouth. Baby lips.
“I said another, Cuddy.”
Cuddy has turned back to the dial. Beal’s head, small at the front and heavy back from the crown, is trembling and shivering. It is not possible to look at Cuddy for long with Beal’s face hanging in the room.
“So ?”
Cuddy contracts. Large ball into not as large, in a single convulsion.
“So ! So ! So !”
Beal’s head is a jungle bird, bouncing and presenting itself, repeating, shrieking the word so.
Cuddy absorbs this then expands again.
“You know what I mean. It happens. I’m tired of freaking out.”
Beal’s eyelids roll in, making mean slits. His yelling has made blood surface around his lips. The lips are not fully finished, it seems, and all of this tissue is probably being used too vigorously, too soon. Beal breathes in sharply, drawing skin into his nostrils revealing it as slough. He holds the breath and releases it out through some improbable exit under his thin hair.
“I’m not freaking out.”
Cuddy’s body puddles a bit as he calms.
“Good. It doesn’t change anything.”
“No. Doesn’t explain anything.”
Cuddy taps the yellow dial.
“Nope. Doesn’t.”
Beal has stopped trembling and his face is gelling. It is slightly different now, his features lower.
“I’ll get it.”
Beal waits for Cuddy to say ‘Ok’ or something.
“Ok ?”
Cuddy raises a hand.
“Shhhh. What ? Yes. Ok. Sure.”
Beal leaves the small single-roomed building through its only door.
Cuddy pools toward the dial, his upper body focusing on the face. He reaches over and pulls a tin chain leading up to a hanging bulb and it snuffs. The only light now comes from the dial and it is expanding up Cuddy’s face and we are forced to look.
A buzz from the machine. A crunching voice.
“ . . . this is about human beings. Victims. Survivors. We can champion this or that later. But right now, my god, we are devastated . . . ”1
Cuddy squeals and convulses. He leans back, revealing a squat three-legged chair beneath him. Turns out that’s the source of the squeal. He has inadvertently nudged the dial and lost the transmission. The chair squawks.
“Beal ! Beal ! Pardon ! Beal ! Pardon !”
Cuddy rubs his hands on his knees and his head sinks.
“Oh Beal.”
Cuddy sits like this for a while, flopped inward and wheezing lightly. In time he reaches up and taps the dial but the machine is dead. The sound of a spring within him. Cuddy pushes upward. It is clear he is unable to walk.2
“Beal !”
The noise again.3 Higher in tone and stretched out.
“Beal. Beal. Beal.”
It’s a despairing voice that doesn’t stop. It trails off into a upset drone.
“Beal.”
Cuddy leans into the radio to steady himself. He is concentrating, afraid of falling. Cuddy settles eventually his upper back flating like a squeeze box. The yellow light on the radio fades from neglect and the room sinks into tar.
***
“Cod ! Cod ! Coddy !”
Beal is mispornouncing Cuddy’s name. The light bulb lights up, Beal’s face is different again.4 He has obviously been trying to push his features up to where they began but has only managed to drive his eyes beneath his skin. They roll and quiver like submerged hatchlings. His nostrils are broader now and no longer symmetrical, and each is pulling at the air.
“Cod ! Cod ! That smell ! Cod ! What is that ? !”
One of Beal’s feet rests on the back of a shirtless man.5 The relative size of things is revealed. Beal and Cuddy are very nearly giants, at least twice the size of a person. The ceiling of the cabin is probably four metres high. The man is facedown, dead or unconscious. Cuddy is crying.
“I had it on. I heard something.”
Beal is gagging as he sweeps the man up and drapes him like a gown across his arm.
“What’s that smell ? Cod ! It’s fuckin’ awful.”
Beal glares at Cod, tears smashed across the face we were forced to see not 45 minutes ago.
“Did you hear me ? I heard something on this.”
Cuddy slams his hand against the radio.
“ . . . not an injection or a cream. Tell your doctor if these feelings develop . . . ”
Beal and Coddy freeze.
“ . . . one of many questions investigators are asking right now . . . ”
Coddy shakes his head slowly.
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
Beal holds the man under his chin and extends his arms,
“Well, I can’t believe what I’m smelling !”
“ . . . they had a son together so there’s a lot to learn about what she knew in the days leading up to . . . ”
“I had to shit ! What am I supposed to do ?”
The man drops from Beal’s throat into his hands.
“Oh yeah. I’m sorry, Cod.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sooooooo sorry, Cod.”
“ . . . this was well-planned. He was ready to die. This isn’t the act of someone totally insane . . . ”
Beal’s eyes sink even further beneath his face in an inobvious sign of contrition.6 Cuddy listens to the radio as Beal uses the man to clean his backside.
“ . . . and that of course prompts more questions from around the country and that’s a big reason they said what they said and why they said it in such a powerful way . . . ”
The lights in the valley are visible through the hillside, burnt earlier this year by a wildfire. It’s a small city whose name is known around the world. From films and stories that find in it a handy setting. Stories spread through piracy mostly. Stolen by anyone from anywhere. A River
Runs Through It. The Bridges of Madison County. BASEketball. Basket Case. Basquiat.
* * *
1 All of the radio comes out at once. a single wavelength excised from the line. On it was suffering and calliope and dancing and colours. a bent copper tube with a cold hollow core. This is what we can’t do. This, what I’ve done. Take a single length of wave out. It is a thing along which it happens, but lifted up or dropped down, pinched clean at either end it is nothing more than a whistle, a dull tunnel within which shatters the foreign lengths. None of them transmitted and all of them chaotic. And so I have you here, what I said was copper but not sure, and I am sad that what I have done is so outside of anything I could say about it that it envies the strangest of things—the impression of sight on a pillow—the effect of daylight savings on the magnetic field of an object lost at the back of a sock drawer. It does, however, give us permission to enumerate events that fall short of any register.
2 The decision I made, to stand and find my coffee.
3 The idea out there that the universe is nothing more than a giant face. I am drawing our attention to its right eye. Nebula and super nova and spiral galaxies, any of which are indetectable because of scale, are prevented from escaping by the sac of the eye. The thing we are noticing, however, and we have nearly forgotten the point of this, is that one of you, out of disinterest in this writing, is imagining the vast hollow beneath the retracted lid. It requires specificity to isolate this now—the effect of losing interest in the description and the introduction of the impossible space beneath the eyelid. This has caused light and that’s the thing to measure.
4 There is a stone on a planet—it matters what planet and what stone, though we can’t say because we do not know. But it is a startling fact that because of our sentence we have eliminated a great number of stones and planets not referred to. This elimination has brought us much closer to our referent but we remain and always will remain, unable to complete this knowing. The stone knows, however, and is made suddenly aware.
5 There is an idea out there that can be brought to bear on the stone on the planet. The idea follows that in the fullness of infinity that stone has become the first letter d that denied us the coffee. (What does this refer to ?—Ed.) There is also the lazy guess that the conditions which brought this about are unreproducible.
6 There is the pulling back from the mouth of a recently bitten piece of toast. Then there is the interrupted return of the toast to the mouth. A second bite is deferred due to savouring the first. It was a miscalculation. I am going to say this again : It was a miscalculation. Saying it again was deliberate and an invitation to the hand to put the toast to the mouth even as it is still savouring. A conflict is noted but more importantly it is given a shape in heaven. That shape cannot exist properly because there is no heave and so it reverts to a single wavelength. So that these things can exist we preserve the wavelength but divorce it from these givens.
You will hear their voices when you try to sleep.
This was written in bright orange paint marker in desperate, trembling letters on the wall of a religious alcove. It stood out among the small paintings of saints and messages of hope that adorned Salvation Mountain. When we first saw it, we thought it was desecration. By the time everything was done, I understood that it was a warning.
We were eight miles away from the Salton Sea, a quick stop to film some b-roll and see the sights out in the middle of the vast nothing. Salvation Mountain was a singular work of insanity or religious devotion, depending on your perspective. Thousands of gallons of paint, hay, glue, and trash sculpted into the hellish desert as a last refuge. It was the first stop on our road to hell.
A little ways up the road was Slab City, an enclave of people who’d reclaimed an abandoned artillery range in the desert, parked their motor homes, and started a strange, off-the-grid community. Sharon and I were there to interview the residents and document their lives for a fluff piece on the late news back in LA. The state government was getting ready to impose some water and land restrictions, and the locals were ready to fight. It was exactly as exciting as it sounds. Still, we’d needed an excuse to get away from the city and spend more time together. Sharon loved camping. I am not a fan of the outdoors, but I loved her more than I hated dirt, so what was a girl to do ?
I don’t know if the locals were always open and friendly, but they were nice enough to us. We set up our camera by an old spindly tree decorated with countless shoes strung by their laces. There were dozens of locals hanging around that day, and every one of them demanded to say their piece on camera, hopeful that we’d get the message out to anyone who might sympathize with their quest for freedom and lend support. They wanted us to understand what brought them to the desert and what stopped them from going back to civilization.
That’s all I want, too. I want you to understand what brought us out to the desert and what we left there.
After we wrapped, we got to talking to a couple of the locals and decided to spend the night there. They took us everywhere, insistent that we document the lives they’d created so that the world wouldn’t think this was just a bunch of hippies in the desert trying to freeload. There was an open air installation called East Jesus that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with turning garbage into beautiful art. Houses, bike repair shops, craftsmen and artisans plying their trade. When the sun started going down, they took us to The Range, a stage and open air restaurant where the locals gathered every Saturday for food, music, and stories.
Somewhere around our fourth beer or fifth joint, one of them asked if we’d heard of the crack in the sky over the Salton Sea. She was all leathery skin and grey dreadlocks, told us about how she’d moved out this way back when her husband was still serving with the Marines during the birth of the Cold War. She said there were things he was privy to that got him killed. He would tell her about these experiments they ran out in the restricted area, way back in Patton’s day. Something worse than the atom bomb that was supposed to split atoms in a way that hadn’t been tried before. One of those world-enders that the military likes to call peacekeepers. She said he knew too much about it and that’s why they killed him.
Sharon whispered to me that he probably ran off with one of the younger, smoother artist chicks. I started to pull out the camera to talk to her on tape, then felt a warm hand rest softly but firmly on my forearm
“Just let her alone.” An old man from the next table over squeezed my arm, two gentle pulses. He murmured in my ear, “She’ll stop talking soon enough. You’re here to help us, right ? You put Doreen on camera and it’ll scuttle the whole thing. I used to do what you did, way back in the day. I get it. But can you just take the rest of the night off and enjoy the music ? We’ve been nothing but nice to you.”
Sharon pursed her lips and nodded at me, hoisting her beer bottle. “Dee’s a workaholic. It’s one of the things we fight about at home.”
I slid the camera back into my bag and picked up my beer bottle. “All work and no play.”
“No such thing out here.” The old guy smiled at me. “And thank you kindly.”
It was one of those thank yous that was tinged with a healthy dose of fuck you. I didn’t want to wear out our welcome. This was the closest thing to a date night that Shar and I had had in a long time.
Doreen smiled at us through the whole exchange. “Are you two married ?”
“We’ve been talking about it,” I said.
“For a long time,” Sharon said. “A really long time.”
“It’s legal now, right ? What are you waiting for ?”
“What are we waiting for, Dee ?”
“What was your marriage like ?” I asked Doreen.
She jumped right back into her conspiracy story, said the night before he disappeared, her husband told her to watch the sky at noon because something was going to happen that would change the world. She took their car up to the top of a ridge with a pair of his field glasses
and watched where he told her to watch. There was no explosion, she said. Just a weird ripple in the air that she kept calling the crack in the sky. He didn’t make it home from work that day. Nobody came to inform her that he’d deserted or died. They just erased him. No benefits for her. No memories. She said they stole all of his photos while she slept, his clothes too. Like she’d never been married.
“That was the worst part,” she said. “All of those years, everything we built. All of the little things, you know ? His face ? His smell. His . . . you know, everything.”
She seemed lost in the moment.
“I had friends, people I used to write to every week. They’d get suspicious if I stopped, you know ? I think that’s why they didn’t come after me, too. Ray’s only friends were in the service, and they were loyal to the Corps. If they had anything to tell me about what happened to him, they didn’t say boo.”
The old guy wandered back to our table and laid a hand on Doreen’s shoulder. “It’s getting late, Doreen. I don’t want you walking across the street in the middle of the night. Let me get you home.”
She reluctantly stood up. “If you have radios, you can go out there and hear it. Probably film it too. Forget this water rights stuff. There’s bigger things out there the people need to know about. Go out there by Bombay Beach where the ground is burned.”
“All right, Doreen,” he said, turning her by the shoulder and casting a glance at us as he walked away.
“Such interesting people,” Sharon said.
The music and festivities were still going, and the booze had worked its way nicely into my blood. Sharon asked me to dance, and we did. We forgot about Doreen and got lost in a haze of smoke and hooch and good music. When we went back to our little pup tent at the end of the night, I asked Sharon what she thought of the story.
“Probably a crack in her brain from too much acid.”
“Yeah, but we should check it out, right ? We’re headed that way anyway to get back home. Might make an interesting pitch for another story.”
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