I had to get help. I looked around for any sign of movement in nearby buildings, on the road, anything. There was no life out here.
But in the sea !
In the Salton Sea, the placid sea, all of the stars shone, and the moon. I looked up again to a black sky, then back at the water.
I didn’t realize I’d taken off my shoes until I felt the cold mud between my toes. My left foot still had a sock on. I ignored every prick and cut from the bone shards on the beach until I felt my legs enter the water. Knee-deep, I turned to the yacht club. A dark silhouette up in one of the windows, a person, maybe. I hoped it was Sharon. Had to be. She hadn’t fallen through the floor, that was just an overactive imagination. Scare-Dee Cat, Sharon used to tease me in situations like this.
I started to call out to her, but the thought left my mind as quickly as it came. I was standing in the sky, swimming in the stars and the moon and the endless black. I wanted her to see.
Sharon.
I shouted her name until her voice came over the radio still clutched in my hand.
“Where did you go, Dee ?”
“I’m outside ! Can you make it ? Are you okay ? I want you to see this. Come out ! Look at the sky ! Look !”
“I’m okay. If you knew this was the last thing I’d ever tell you, what would you want me to say ?”
“Why ? No, Sharon. Just come outside and see this !”
“They need something. It’s why the gate opens. They’ll show us everything, but we have to pay first. We have to give them—zzzxxxzzz . . . ” Static swallowed her voice.
Then the voices came. First there were only two. They were children. Shouting and playing. Speaking a language I’d never heard, something ancient and guttural. There was an undercurrent of that same static-breath noise, but this time much more organic. Alive, pulsating, breathing at regular intervals. It pulled on me. Every time it exhaled, I could feel it sliding through the hairs on my arms, tugging my wrist toward the sea.
When I was thigh-deep in the water, a chill rushed through my skull, poured over my spine, and spread out into the water. I stripped down to my bra and underwear, convinced the heat from the stars in the water would keep me safe. I should have been freezing, but I was fine. Warm. Relaxed. I was in my body and in the water at the same time.
There were things in the sea. Beyond the curling, sun-dried remains of thousands of Tilapia stirred up by my footsteps, long, leathery, undulating things moved past my legs. Not seaweed, not here. When I looked down, I could only see my naked legs plunging down into an impossibly starry night sky. When I moved my feet, the stars drifted as if floating. Waves of vertigo washed over me, the feeling that I would become unrooted and fall into the sky. I had to look away toward the yacht club.
There she was, on the shore. She was glowing. Her skin pale and radiant in the light that rose from the water.
“I don’t want to get my shoes muddy, Dee. Come over here.” She extended a hand. “I figured it out. You just have to stop talking so that they can start. You just—”
Her voice trailed off as a steady stream of blood flowed from her mouth. Her eyes wide in panic, she kept trying to talk. Blood and spittle sprayed from her mouth, spattering down onto the muddy ground between us. It was only then that I noticed her sinking. The muck around the shore slowly swallowing her up. I rushed to her, nightmare-slow slogging through the silt. She was thigh-deep by the time I fought my way back to shallow water. Something clutched at my ankles as I moved, the water turned jello-thick. I stumbled twice, falling to my knees the first time and onto my face the second. My face slapped through the foul water and cracked against a rock. I inhaled a mouthful of thick, rancid water and then the ground parted. I shouldn’t have been able to see in the brackish mess, but there was a hole in the sea bed. There was another night sky below. Not a sky. Lights. Southern California, all of it, so dazzling, spinning dizzily beneath me.
I pushed hard, afraid of drowning, afraid of falling, afraid of losing Sharon forever. I punched through the muck into that sub-sky. Clumps of mud and filthy water spun away to crash on the ground below me. It was such an odd sensation, still feeling the current of the water around me, rushing over me, none of it pouring through the hole beneath me. The sea bed under my fingers reminded me of where I actually was, so I kept my eyes closed and pumped my legs until my face slid and scraped against the grit of the mud near the shore. I squirmed and writhed and pushed until cold air stung my back. I don’t know how long it took to get out, but Sharon was gone when I did.
There was a disturbance in the mud at the shoreline, bloodstained spots that spattered across the ground like demented graffiti. Sharon’s hiking shoe lay a few feet away, caked in dirt, a sun-dried tilapia carcass glued to the muck on the sole. Her headband stuck half-out of the mud, surrounded by small puddles of brown-red water.
I dragged myself, dizzy and reeling, back toward the yacht club. A chorus sang in the sky, endless voices and static, screams and songs and sounds I’d never heard before or since. A shape passed by the window upstairs, a silhouette surrounded by strange fractals of light. It was a man. The building bled cyan and magenta and indigo light from every open crack and window.
The lobby was empty. The remaining light fixtures cast painful shades of reds and blues. I wondered what would happen if I had those old-style 3D glasses. There was no hole in the floor. No Sharon. I made my way upstairs, treading carefully across the splintered floor, trying to avoid the debris from the broken walls and windows. I should have plucked my shoes out of the mud before coming inside. When I reached the top of the landing, the radio crackled from down the hall. A whisper scraped by my ear.
“Don’t come closer. Don’t come. Don’t.”
A hum rose from the wall, pitches ranged in perfect fifths, a brassy, brutal harmony. I pushed on, ignoring the broken glass stabbing into my feet, the chill in my bones. My skin had become numb. I pounded my arms against my chest to try to get my blood flowing. My bra and underwear looked like sand carvings etched into my skin. I ran my fingers through my hair and found it soaked, caked in mud. My face was covered in gritty silt and dust.
“Help,” I whispered. “Sharon. I’m sorry. We have to go, baby. We have to leave.”
The doorway to the radio room bled dull orange light into the hallway like a fog, obscuring more than it revealed. I stopped by the doorframe and leaned my head in. The radio in the corner was lit up like Christmas, the antenna lines that spread across the wall glowing with strange energy. The mural painted on the floor glowed harsh white. It had changed from a starry sky to a thin, weaving line that ran a circuit around the length of the room and spiraled inward to form a circle in front of the radio.
Sharon was on her knees in the center of the circle, facing away from me toward the radio. She looked like a religious icon, surrounded by an aura of twisted wires.
“We should have talked,” her voice came through the radio. “We should have talked.”
Her shoulders heaved. I started limping toward her until she snapped an arm out to her side.
“Don’t come closer. It’s too late now. Just leave. I don’t want you to see.”
“See what, baby ?” I asked, my voice a raspy whisper. “See what ? Sharon, what’s happening right now ?”
“Everything they wanted,” the radio said. “Everything they ever wanted. They opened the door without thinking about what was on the other side. They don’t want to come through. They just want it to close and go away and they are very, very angry with us . . . ”
“Sharon, look at me. Please.”
A wet slap in the dirt near my feet. Something small and damp bounced off of the floor and ricocheted across the top of my foot, painting a streak across the muddy brown. Dark. Near the edge of my big toe, a small lump of meat rested on the floor.
I took two more steps to her and she staggered to her feet. Her body seemed to bounce off of an invisible wall that surrounded the perimeter of the circle.
The lights in the room grew brighter when she stood up. Her fingers were bloody.
“Please look at me, Sharon.” My jaw chattered, from cold, from fear.
She turned. The scream that rose from my stomach cracked my throat and sent me into a coughing fit. Her chin was black with coagulating blood. Her bottom lip looked like an animal had been chewing on her face. Her left eye was deep purple and shiny, not a bruise. Just iridescent. Her right eye bled indigo light. In one hand she held a bloody camping knife. She brought her other hand up, two fingers tapping on her chin as she smiled at me.
“It was the only way they would listen,” the radio said, static tearing her voice. Her lips didn’t move. She smiled, an awful, gaping thing that sent rivulets of bloody saliva cascading down her chin and chest. And then she flicked out her tongue, what was left of it. It looked like she was holding a lumpy meatball between her teeth.
“What’s happening, Sharon ? What’s happening ?”
“You tell me.”
“There’s light everywhere. The sky was in the sea, and the real sky was black. Everywhere I look I see light. I see the cracks.”
“And do you hear them ?”
“It’s too much. I just hear noise. Songs and screams and whispers.”
“All I see is the dark, but I can hear them perfectly.”
“Them ? Who ?” I asked.
“I know how this must look. But it’s okay. I’m hearing everything. It’s all in pieces. You see the light everywhere ? I can’t. I only hear them. Together we can put it all together. You just have to let them use your eyes.”
She smiled again and extended the knife toward me. She raised her eyebrows in that same way she used to do when she’d reveal surprise anniversary presents to me.
“They want your eyes. Give them your eyes and you’ll see everything.”
Sharon stepped forward, not threatening, just earnestly holding that blade up like this should have all made perfect sense to me.
“Lance Corporal Raymond Wood. He was here when it opened. He listened to them and he tried to see them and speak to them and it was too much. But together . . . Maybe together we can . . . ”
She walked over to the window. The sky outside looked flat, burnt orange. There were no stars, no moon, no rising sun.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t. What did you do, Sharon ? What did you do ?” This last scream broke my voice.
Sharon dropped the knife and held her hand out to me. “You were always afraid of commitment, weren’t you ?”
“What did you do ?” My hands shook as I raised them to her face. She closed her eyes and nuzzled her cheeks into my palms, her blood still hot and sticky on her chin.
“I always wanted you to know. I was never zzzxzxzx . . . –ou.” A burst of static overrode her voice. “You wer—xxzzzxzxz—and all I zxzzzzzzz—and you only had to say it. You only had to say zzzzzxxxxx . . . ” Her voice grew quieter. The lights in the room faded and the radio gave out a final sputter before silencing.
Sharon slid her stained hands up my bare arms, leaving streaks of her blood until she held my face in her hands. Our foreheads touched together, I looked into her eyes, watching the unnatural blues and purples fade, her pupils dilated and pulsed until her eyes were almost black. Her mouth went slack and she let out a soft sigh.
“Sharon ?”
She didn’t move.
I pressed my lips against hers, ignoring the tang of blood, the shredded lips, willing my breath into her. The room grew colder. I began to shiver, the lack of clothing finally catching up to me. Sharon swayed on her feet, her skin losing color, her eyelids fluttering.
I yelped when an explosion of static came from the radio in the corner. It grew louder and louder until it filled the room, no longer an exhale or inhale but a sustained scream threatening to shred my eardrums.
My knees knocked together and my breath came in hitching rasps. I put my arm around Sharon’s shoulder and pressed myself into her, leading her forward, out of the room. I briefly considered picking up the lump of her tongue from the floor. It was no use. It was just bloody meat now, speckled in plaster chips and sawdust. I’d never hear her voice again, never see that tongue stick out when she was concentrating, never feel it brush my neck, kiss me deeply. How much of us is our voice ? How much of ourselves can we lose before we become something else ?
We staggered down the stairs and through the lobby, out into the rising sun. It was the final blow to my addled mind. We hadn’t been inside for more than a few hours, and the sun had just been setting when this all started.
The car was locked. I dumbly patted my bare hips as if searching for keys. Sharon’s pockets were empty. My steps were a matter of inches. If I could get us to the road, we’d have a chance. Sharon was near catatonic. The cold had eaten me through to my bones. I looked down at my feet, sliced and bloody and stuck through with thousands of fish bones.
Get to the road. Someone will see us, someone will find us, help will come, or we will die.
Words raced through my mind. Hypothermia. Fear. Failure. Death. Divorce. Armageddon. I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked.
The tripod that held our camera was at the edge of the lot, so I picked it up. We kept walking until we couldn’t. I made it out to the main thoroughfare, Grapefruit Boulevard, and then my legs just wouldn’t move anymore. I took her by the hands and gently pulled down until she followed. I sat cross-legged in the middle of the eastbound lane and leaned her head into my lap. In the sun, she looked terrifying. Her lips were dried and cracked, her face coated with blood. In the light I noticed odd shapes carved into her arm. Glyphs and symbols that could have been a map or a message or just mutilation. My vision started going grey at the edges and I leaned my head against hers. I wanted to whisper to her, all of the things I’d wanted to say for so many years and stupidly kept buried. The good, the bad, all of it. My voice was broken. Breathing took effort. I tried to tap my fingers on her wrist, this little gesture we used to make at the movies to remind each other that we were there, close, in the silent dark.
I looked up to the sky and saw the crack, clear as day, sharp as permanent marker on glass. It wasn’t a crack at all. It was a design, geometric, orderly symbols that almost matched the ones on Sharon’s arms.
I fell unconscious as I heard the roar of an approaching engine, downshifting, tires biting into gravel. Then came shouting. I disappeared somewhere into the blackness of my mind, where everything was quiet and the inside of my brain was painted with the endless sea of stars that should have been in the sky that night.
***
They found one of our voice recorders during the investigation. I’ve reviewed the audio countless times. It’s just static, with a high-pitched whine in places that may have been an odd frequency or maybe Sharon’s screams. The only surviving footage on the camera from the lot was when I ran from the yacht club the first time. Hours of nothing, and then something hits the camera from the side. I’m pretty sure it was me, wobbling off to the sea. Twenty minutes later, from a skewed angle, my naked, mud-smeared legs walk past the camera. Somewhere around forty minutes after that, there’s a brief movement near the corner of the building. A shadow falls from the upstairs window. It’s too grainy to confirm that it’s a man, and the shape lands out of frame. They found a hiking boot and a belt near the spot where it would have hit, but there was no telling how long they’d been there. Inside of the yacht club, they found syringes, spent bags of powder and empty pill bottles. Five different knives. Three of them had dried blood on the blade, none of them matched Sharon.
This year will be the last that I go to visit her. No amount of reconstructive surgery could give back her tongue. It wouldn’t matter because she hadn’t tried to communicate with anyone since the EMTs brought her back. I have dreams every year on this day, the same as the fever dreams I had when they found us by the roadside the next day near the Yacht Club, near-hypothermic.
We spent a week
recovering in the hospital before the detectives came. They questioned us for days, convinced that we’d been kidnapped, drugged, and tortured. They started building that narrative while we slept and did their damnedest to get us to confirm their worst suspicions. The first time the detective suggested it, I spat in his face. The second time, I stopped talking to them. They tried getting Sharon to write a deposition, but she was catatonic.
They eventually settled on diagnosing us with a hallucinations based on toxoplasmosis. They said we’d spent so many hours inhaling powdered bird shit that it snapped something in our brains. They didn’t bother to test the empty water bottle Doreen had given us. I didn’t want them to.
That was as close to famous as we got. The first year, we were ridiculed in the media as a pair of crackpot hippie lesbians who got lost on a drug adventure. The years after that, nobody but the conspiracy theorists would talk to us. There were a few out there who’d heard Doreen’s tall tale. I wanted nothing to do with them. I returned to Slab City twice to find Doreen, but nobody would talk to me. They’d seen me on the news. Thought I just wanted to bleed more sensationalist stories out of them.
I went back to Bombay Beach. The black line in the sand was gone. The Yacht Club got its much needed renovation, reopening as the glorious Salton Sea History Museum. I kept my head down the whole time I was there, though there was nobody to hide from. I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. Instead, I walked down to the shore and stared at the sky until I was dizzy.
The last time I visited Sharon, I brought in a print of that selfie we took on the way in, her silly smile, the nervous energy on our faces, and tears started pouring down her cheeks. She looked at me then, really saw me for the first time in I don’t know how long, and it was nothing but hatred. She pounded on that photo with her finger, hitting the same spot in the background over and over : the sea.
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