She kissed me on the lips. “I’m really high.” I kissed her back and we found our way out of our clothes and into our sleeping bag.
The next morning, I woke up cold. The old woman sat cross-legged outside our tent, staring at us.
“You believed me, right ?” Doreen asked.
“Sure.” I wiped sleep from my eyes and nudged Sharon awake.
“You ladies can see it. Turn your head to the ground and use your peripheral vision. If you’re near the north end of the Sea, you can see the crack out of the corner of your eye. It’s still there, letting things in. He died for it. They took him because he knew too much. You drive by Bombay Beach and you’ll see the burn in the ground from where the bomb went off. Around midnight, you turn your radio on AM to the end of the dial. The voices will come. That’s your story right there. People need to know.”
Her eyes were shiny and wet, somewhere far away. She wasn’t looking at us, just staring through the tent off into some past catastrophe.
“We need to get dressed and ready for the day, Doreen,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. Then, “Oh ! Oh my, where are my manners. You ladies get dressed. I’ll make you a sack lunch to take with you.”
“That sounds nice, Doreen, thank you.”
She tottered to her feet and crunched away through the gravel.
“Why would you bother that sweet lady to make lunch for us ?” Sharon whispered.
“She left, didn’t she ?”
Sharon took my hand and caressed my cheek. “This was nice, Dee. I’m . . . I really hate camping, you know. But this was nice.”
I smiled at her and spun around, snapping a picture of the two of us with my phone. We looked terrible. No makeup, bedhead, bleary-eyed. But she had that smile that I loved so much, that half-grin, those fretting eyebrows, tongue half-out. That was the last good picture of us. The last good moment, really.
We loaded the car to head out, shook a few hands, took contact info, promised we’d do what we could to get their story to the masses. We had just started to roll out on the main road when Sharon tapped my arm.
“There’s our crazy friend,” she muttered.
Doreen was flagging us down, waving a sack wildly above her head, doing that weird chicken walk some older people do when they need to move quickly. Her face was more wrinkle than skin, her smile more open space than tooth. I rolled down my window and she thrust the sack through into my lap.
“Hi, Doreen,” I said.
“There’s notes in there that you’ll need. Didn’t have much for food, so I hope you like peanut butter and apples. Couple bottles of water. And some masks. You’ll thank me later for that.”
“Okay, Doreen. Thank you for all of this. We’ve gotta hit the road.”
“To Bombay Beach ?”
“We’ll . . . yeah, we’ll probably make a couple of stops on our way out. Promise. We might be back out this way if things pan out, okay ?”
“Oh, I hope so. I hope so. As soon as the sun starts going down, they’ll start singing to you. Believe me. Just listen. Open ears, open minds.”
We were five miles outside of Slab City when Sharon opened the bag and started poking around. The sandwiches she’d made us were remarkably clean-cut, perfect squares with the crusts cut off, thin slices of apple and peanut butter in between slightly crusty white bread. There were two more apples inside the bag, and another smaller brown bag. Sharon opened that one to find two painters’ masks nested inside of each other and a faded picture of a man in military uniform. It was a formal portrait, his jacket starched, his hat perfectly poised on a head that was mostly scratched and faded into obscurity.
“That her husband ? I thought she said they erased every trace of him.”
“She also said there’s a crack in the sky. The back of the photo says something,” Sharon said. “I can’t make it out. A love note, I guess. It’s got her name at the top and some scribbling underneath.”
“Sweet.”
“You want to check it out, don’t you ?”
“You’re in a hurry to get back to LA and hand over the bumpkin interview spectacular ?” I poked her thigh. “We’re off today and tomorrow, might as well take advantage, right ?”
“Yeah, take advantage of a free day back home. Shower three times to get all of this dust off. Catch a movie, go to dinner . . .”
“Come on, Sharon. I’ve heard about Bombay Beach, I think it’ll be pretty cool.”
“You’ve heard about all that shit she said ?”
“No, just . . . it’s like this tiny little town that got wiped out in a flood years ago. All sorts of cool graffiti and houses falling down, and . . . come on ! You like street art, right ? I’ve heard it’s a haven for taggers.”
“Taggers,” she scoffed. “Fine. A quick stop.”
***
You will hear their voices when you try to sleep.
This was etched in bright orange paint marker on the inside of an exposed doorframe on a burned-out trailer home.
“So this one says ‘their’ voices. The last one said ‘her’ voice. Looks like the same handwriting to me,” Sharon said.
It had become a game. Maybe we were killing time. Maybe we were subtly trying to convince each other that there was something to Doreen’s story. It was pretty clear that we’d end up at the North Shore before the end of the day to turn our radios on and hear what we could hear.
We took a brief lunch at Bombay Beach, scarfing down Doreen’s sandwiches which were surprisingly delicious. The water tasted a little off, which we attributed to well water or the fact that it had probably been sitting on a shelf somewhere for way too long. West of Bombay Beach, there really was a dark line in the ground, about five feet wide, black as coal.
It faded about ten feet from the shore, obscured by sand, but there was a curve to it. I imagine if you traced that arc it would be an inverted-U shape cutting out of water that encircled most of the small rotting enclaves remaining near the northern half of the Salton Sea. In reality, it was a small patch of scorched earth half-buried in silt and powdered fish bones.
“Once you cross black, you don’t cross back,” Sharon joked as we walked across the expanse of charred earth.
Sharon was only halfway across when she turned a quick 180 and walked back out, planting her feet in the untarnished dirt. She folded her arms across her stomach, keeping her back turned on the line.
“Did you feel that ? It’s cold, it’s . . . weird. That’s weird.”
“Just the breeze, girl. Don’t go crazy on me now.” I’d felt it too, a push of air like cold water surging around me. To give voice to that would have pushed me over the edge. I probably would have gotten in the car and headed back to LA to drink away our day off.
The line between would have and should have is the one I should have crossed.
That was the first time I noticed the stillness, standing there on the opposite side of the line from her. No birds. No breeze. No rustling of leaves, although the few nearby trees were swaying, and I felt the wind on my face.
I extended my hand to Sharon. She turned to me, that crooked smile of hers that always tugged at my heart, and I wanted nothing more than to march back across that line and take her in my arms.
“We’re on an adventure,” I said. “To boldly go.” My feet felt anchored, rooted into the hardpan. I shuddered, then lifted first one foot, then the other. Stepped back into the black, walked to her, rested a hand on her shoulder.
“See ?” I said. “Don’t let the old wives’ tales fool you. We’re done here anyway. We’ll go check out the northern shore, put the radio on, listen to all of the nothing that comes through, call it a ruined night and head home. What do you say ?”
She took a deep breath and kept her eyes down, the toe of her boot digging a line on the rough gravel in front of the charred black. “You’re so romantic.” She sighed, looking up at me. “Did you just call me your old wife ?”
“I�
��ll be your old wife. One of these days.”
She smiled and took my hand. We walked together across the line.
We explored Bombay Beach for a few minutes, snapping pictures of all the insane artwork, the shattered furniture, the broken houses and skeletal structures. There were giant political paste-ups, airbrushed pinup girls, multicolored stencils and cryptic messages. It would be good for our Instagram if nothing else. The farther we put the line behind us, the cooler it got. The weather hadn’t changed a bit. The sky was just as mercilessly cloudless, the sun still bright enough to peel paint off the decaying trailers dotting the landscape. It was unmistakably a few degrees cooler here than it had been back at the car.
The only noise came from the crunch of our boots against the broken masonry and glass on the ground. This area hadn’t seen auto traffic in years. Our footsteps weren’t loud exactly, but intense. Any noise came sharp, harsh. The swish of an arm as it swept across the body. Inner thighs whipping past each other. The aglet of a shoelace ticking against the side of a shoe. A tiny pebble skittering out from underfoot. All of it reported with the clarity of a gunshot on a still morning. If we stopped moving, everything grew painfully silent beyond the rasp of our breath.
I think we both noticed it, but neither of us said anything.
I thought about a trip we’d taken before to do a doc at Birkenau in Poland, trying to work with an Electronic Voice Phenomena “expert.” This town had that same strange feeling, row after row of empty buildings. The only thing more unsettling than the feeling of being watched was the knowledge that nobody was here to see us. We walked, keeping our eyes low until we got back to the car.
Finally, Sharon whispered, “You hear that ?”
“What ?”
“Exactly.”
“This is weird, right ?”
“Yeah.”
“But we have to go check out the north shore, right ? I mean . . . we have to, now. Right ?”
“It looks like other people have tried.” She pointed to another paint marker tag on a doorframe that said The voices come when the stars fall.
We took a few more pictures, prodded at some of the broken glass, the boards, the pieces of appliances and furniture. I did some wide shots with the video camera, getting as much graffiti as I could while still conserving batteries. If nothing else, I could smack together five minutes of footage that could convince the higher-ups to send us back out here to get a story.
“You think the Yacht Club up there will be as fancy as this place ?” I asked.
Sharon smiled a little, but her cheek dipped in a little where she was biting it. A nervous habit of hers, a tell I’d learned to spot.
I started the car and we rolled down the road, noting the change in sound as the tires crunched over the gravel. Everything had a strange, muted quality. Sharon turned the radio over to AM and scanned through the high and low ends of the frequencies. The static would grow quieter as she reached the extreme ends until they hit silence.
Sharon kept her arms folded and her eyes out the window. I kept checking the temperature readout on the dashboard. We’d been sweating in ninety-five degree heat back at Slab City. Now the dashboard was telling me it was seventy-two degrees, a few miles down the road.
We drove in silence until we reached the northern point of the sea, the fabled Yacht Club. It had died an undignified death decades ago, its corpse slowly rotting by the water. There had been plans to refurbish it into a visitor’s center. The people of the area were under no illusions about the grandeur of the Desert Riviera era returning to the Salton Sea, but they were still proud enough to eliminate as many eyesores as possible. There were retirees out here trying to make an honest go of it, and they were determined to hold on to their dignity. Seemed like everything was on hold now.
We pulled into the dirt lot. Everything was boarded up, huge murals coated every available surface, even the broken pylons that jutted from the water a few feet from the shoreline.
“Sixty-four degrees,” I muttered as I got out of the car.
We stood there looking at the hulking ruins of the yacht club. Faded yellow plastic caution tape floated like party streamers on a silent breeze by the front door.
LISTEN.
The word was spray-painted over and over again in a repeating line stretching the length of the building. Someone had drawn crude stars spilling out of one of the upstairs windows.
Sharon moved up beside me, shouldering her backpack. “You ready for an uneventful evening ?”
“You planning on a hike ?”
“I’m not going into that creepy fucking place without every light source we have. We have two radios and three recorders.”
“You believe her ? And what do you mean going in ?” I asked her.
“I want to see what’s in there. Might as well kill some time before the show starts, right ? I’d rather do it while we still have some daylight.”
We moved to the trunk so I could pull out my gear bag. I tested my flashlight and checked my batteries. We looked at the building, at the parking lot, the sky. Both of us waiting for the other to take the first step.
“I have an idea,” I said, so suddenly that it startled Sharon. “We set up a recording station out here. Let it run for a few hours and see if it picks anything up.”
“You think there’s any burnouts squatting in there ?”
“We take off at the first sign of occupancy, deal ?”
“You don’t have to tell me twice.”
We set up our outdoor audio listening station. I aimed the camera at the front door, setting the video for the lowest acceptable quality to maximize recording time. I taped an mp3 recorder to the front leg and hit record. It should give us a few hours.
The sun was getting lower. When I moved my head quickly, I thought I saw a ripple in the sky over the sea just to the east of the building. It wasn’t quite a crack, more like a fold, a darkening of color, and it was only there when I wasn’t really trying to find it.
“You see it ?” I asked.
Sharon shrugged. “The Sea ?”
“Nah, the uh . . . never mind. You ready to go inside ?”
“You got a knife on you ?”
“What are you planning, Katniss ?”
“Don’t make fun. We don’t know who’s in there, but if anyone is, we need to be ready.”
“Fine. You hear me scream, then come running with your pig-sticker.”
There was a sense of unease settling around my shoulders like a cold, wet blanket. I suddenly wanted this to be done. But I couldn’t stop. Maybe I was seeing things in the sky, but it felt like there was something here worth hanging around for.
I walked toward the main building, hoping it looked more like confidence and less like nervous energy. The main doors had been blown out long ago, replaced with crude plywood to keep the elements out. It was dark inside, small pools of light thrown here and there through holes in the roof and walls. Someone had spray-painted NO CALLS AFTER SUNDOWN in four-foot-high orange letters on the wall in the hallway.
The lobby was as beautiful to look at as it was wretched to smell. We stood beneath the shattered remains of a light fixture designed to look like we were beneath a boat. Everything smelled like rot. Salty air, bird shit, human waste, rotting wood, dead fish brought in by the seagulls. All of it piled here and there beneath beautiful airbrushed murals, illegible phrases and giant paste-ups. There were rusted lawn chairs, eviscerated loveseats, desks that looked like palsied old men leaning back against the wall. Sharon pulled out the paper masks Doreen had given us.
“Guess she gave these to us for a reason. Keep it on if you’re moving around. We’re gonna be kicking up a lot of nasty shit moving through here. Sundown in about an hour,” she said, following that up with something else.
“What’s that ?” I asked, turning.
“Two hours.” She tapped her wrist. I only knew she was talking because of the way the paper mask moved on her face.
I held up a finger and quietly asked, “Can you hear me ?”
She nodded.
“Tell me you can hear me.”
Her mask moved and I heard nothing.
“Louder.”
“Stop fucking around, Dee !”
This time I heard her just fine.
There was a torn sheet of notebook paper on one of the chairs in a corner, held down by a broken piece of cinder block.
First the tide will rise. After sundown. The breeze. Then the birds. Isn’t the season for insects, but maybe you’ll hear a few. Then you’ll grow tired. Then I’ll come to you.
I gestured for Sharon to come look at it.
“What do you think that means ?” I asked.
“Nothing. It’s . . . wait . . .” She cocked her head, then fumbled in her pocket and pulled out the photo Doreen had given us, flipping it over and holding it side-by-side with the paper. “Okay, that’s weird.”
“Same handwriting ?”
“I mean . . . I’m not an expert, but . . .”
“What do you think she . . . Doreen ? Doreen !” I called her name out a few times, convinced she’d come around the corner smiling at us.
“I don’t think she’s here, Dee. I don’t think anyone is.”
“Fine. Let’s look around and get some video and get the fuck out of here. It’s too cold in here.”
Sharon headed for a staircase at the far end of a long hallway lit by dusty shafts of dying light. I called out to her to stop but she just kept moving like she didn’t hear me. She turned when she got to the foot of the stairs and stared at me. I looked back at her. Finally her head started to bob and she stuck her arms out as if to ask me what the hell I was waiting for. I hustled down the hallway to the staircase.
“You didn’t hear me ?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Not a thing. This place is weird.”
“Turn your radio on. Might as well go full crazy if we’re going, right ?”
“This is crazy. Can you hear me now ? You sound like you have a pillow over your face.”
We looked at each other, sharing an uneasy smile. It was actually happening. It’s one thing to read about going to the moon, an entirely different thing to take that first step into the void.
Lost Signals Page 10