by Tara Ison
Josh dropped the wagon and ran to me, grabbed my hand before I could reach down.
Uh uh, he said. Don’t touch.
Out of nowhere, I said. This thing attacked me out of nowhere. I bit my lip, determined not to cry, split open, fall apart.
Jumping cholla. They’re everywhere.
He pointed to a shrubby, fuzzy cactus nearby, three or four feet high, pale green and flowerless. It looked like a bristled balloon animal, twisted from those long, skinny balloons into joints, and covered with spiky hair. It looked mocking.
You must’ve brushed against it, he said. You step too close to one of those joints, they sense the moisture or heat or energy or something and attack. They jump and cling on.
This is like getting all your childhood vaccinations at once, I said. I wasn’t crying, yet.
I told you to be careful.
You told me to be patient.
Same thing, he said. He rummaged in his duffel bag. They also call it teddy bear cholla.
Adorable, I said. I pulled the bottle from my backpack and gulped water.
Or silver cholla. They have these silver sheaths on their spines. Look at it, see the sunlight through the spines? See how it shimmers? They’re sort of luminous, huh? Pretty?
Josh.
That’s good, keep drinking your water. You’re breaking out in a sweat. And breathe, Holly.
He came to me with a comb and a pair of pliers. He helped me sit down and propped my leg up on his thighs.
A lot of people think chollas are sort of ugly, he said. Stiff. Stunted-looking. I think they’re sort of cool. They get little violet flowers around this time of year. And they’re edible, you know? They taste great, sweet, you just have to peel them and—
Josh, do something.
Yeah, hold on.
He slid the comb between my leg and the cactus, threading its teeth among the spines. I swallowed a long drink of water so I wouldn’t scream again, maybe my two gallons’ worth.
These’re called glochids. These little spines, see? They’re barbed. They lock in under the top layer of skin. That’s how this thing reproduces. The joints cling to whatever passes by. Whatever’ll carry it around. Then it lands somewhere and takes root. Chollas are tough. Ranchers hate them; they’re like weeds. But medicine men used cholla on people during prayer ceremonies. They believed the spines drew out the sickness.
Josh.
Okay, hold on.
He gripped the comb, then flipped the cactus joint off and away from me, leaving a dozen golden needles still imbedded in my leg, and despite myself, I shrieked again.
Why didn’t you warn me? I asked.
I’m sorry.
No, about the cactus. If they’re so dangerous.
Okay. I’m warning you now. This is going to hurt. Take a few deep breaths. Try to relax.
One by one he pulled the spines out with pliers. My leg bristled and I shivered at the fierce, tiny burns. I chewed my tongue and swallowed blood while he tried to distract me by teaching me all about cacti. Their survival strategies. How their spines evolved from leaves as a defense against predators, how the reduced leaf surface helped them endure the desert. How their thick, waxy skins retard evaporation, how they’re misers, hoarding water in their fleshy stems, in their ribs or barrels or pads of tissue, how during and after a rain they gorge on water, expand and swell to hold as much as they can, how their root systems are shallow but extensive, spreading out wide under a thin surface of dirt to pick up and store moisture from the lightest desert shower. He talked in a smoothing, soothing voice while pulling out the spines. Each spine barb tugged with it a small divot of flesh, a brief welling of blood, and with each tug I thought Why didn’t he warn me? Why did he bring me here, drag me out in the middle of vast nowhere, if this was just going to hurt? He was trying to get me to relax and succumb to all the landscape and space, to feeling, to feeling small and not clinging to anything, to letting go. As if that weren’t dangerous, as if there’s any peace in that.
Cacti are actually related to the rose family, did you know that? he was asking. You can see it when they bloom. They blow roses away. Sometimes you can actually watch a cactus flower unfold, the petals open up and uncurl. Actually, they’re more beautiful than roses. You expect a rose to be beautiful. It’s more interesting to find all that beauty in a cactus. The split personality, you know?
I didn’t say anything. I was too angry, I didn’t trust myself to speak. Or breathe, I didn’t trust the only air there.
Okay, he said. Your spines are gone.
He squeezed my calf hard to bring out the last of the blood, blotted it away with a piece of gauze, then applied antiseptic ointment from the first aid kit. I wiped the sweat off my upper lip. My T-shirt, one of Josh’s, was sticking all over; I was sweating too much and too fast for the air to burn it off my skin.
Are you okay? he asked me. He leaned over and pressed his mouth against my damp forehead.
I’m okay, I said.
Drink more water, he mumbled against my hair. I want you guzzling, like, two gallons a day. You need to replace all those fluids.
I nodded, just a small dip of a nod so he wouldn’t move his mouth. But he did. He wrapped more gauze in a bandage around my leg, then carefully disposed of the bloodstained gauze in the Hefty garbage bag.
I WASN’T GOING to make love that night. My leg still throbbed, I felt filmed with sweat and sunblock, I wanted to punish Josh for not taking better care of me. We’d zipped our two mummy bags together and I crawled inside with him, determined to stay separate and stiff as wood. But he named the stars for me, and I pressed against him for a sense of scale. He wove his legs between mine so my bandaged calf would rest on top, and I bent my other leg to help. He raised his hand up to trace the constellations, but the parallax distorted their forms; I reached up with him to clasp his hand, trace the sky with him and share his view, horizon, galaxy. He kissed me and then I could breathe again, fully, breathe in the air that was him, breathe in the having him to hold on to, what always made me feel found and unbound, blessed. His touch always split me open into something tender and sweet. He saw in me something luminous, ready to bloom. But it was all him, and he never realized that. I didn’t deserve such significance. I didn’t deserve him. An elemental, pure, and infinite him, a man who saw the life in a dead lizard, who saw more beauty in a cactus than a rose, who could find the pulse in a petrified limb. A man who didn’t realize that I was just a mere me, and that I lived on, drank from, him. And that without him forever as wellspring, as font, I would shrivel up to a small, withered, petty thing and die.
A CACTUS, I said the next morning. I want my very own.
Come on, you have your very own. He stopped rolling up our mummy bags to strike an iconic cactus pose.
That’s a saguaro, I told him, remembering from Common Cacti of the Southwest. They only live in Arizona.
Hey, good.
At the saguaro festival in July they make cactus wine, I told him. It symbolizes rain replenishing the earth.
I’m very proud of you.
And you’re a lovely cactus, I said, but this way if you ever leave me, I will always have the real thing. See? I pointed to a small Joshua tree in the distance, an isolated straggler. I waited for him to ask Why do you think I would ever leave you?, but he did not.
Ah, he said, smiling his teacher’s smile. It said You are about to learn something, and I was sick of it. But a Joshua tree is not a cactus. It’s a yucca. It’s actually part of the lily family.
All right.
Not every desert plant is a cactus, he said. There’s yucca and agave and bear grass and ocotillo and creosote and—
All right!
He pointed to the ugly killer cholla that had attacked me. That’s a cactus. Chollas are cacti.
Fine. I’ll make do with a cholla. A lowly, ugly, common desert weed.
No.
You thought they were beautiful, I said.
We’re not taking a cactus
home, he said.
Why not?
He pointed out that the cactus had already wounded me, that I was still complaining about my throbbing leg, and that getting it home would be impossible.
You’re scared of a few glochids? I asked. Embrace what you fear.
He sighed. I waited. I waited for him to tell me we can’t disrupt the ecosystem of the desert. That tough as cacti are, they’re also vulnerable, that we might get it all the way home just to have it refuse to take root and then die. I waited for him to talk about indigenous nutrients in the desert soil, about fungal spores and etiolation. That we didn’t have room for the cactus at home, or space for its root system, that the concrete would snuff it out, choke it dead.
This is a national park, he said finally. Everything is protected here.
I wasn’t, I said.
We just looked at each other. Then he came and knelt next to me. He put his hand on the back of my skull, wove his fingers through my hair and tugged my head back, put his arms around me. He wanted me to clasp him back, I knew, but I wouldn’t give him that. We just sat there for a moment in silence, a heated, taut desert silence. I waited. He gave up first. He got up, took a bottle of water, and hiked all the way back to the truck for the shovel, twine, gloves, a tarpaulin, returned, and dug. I kept watch. We roped the cholla, steadied it in the wheelbarrow, strapped it to the bed of the truck with twine, camouflaged it with Hefty garbage bags, and drove home without talk. We planted the cactus in our found-rock-garden front yard. A week later I found a chipped ceramic Mexican child sleeping beneath its huge ceramic sombrero near a dumpster in the Fairfax District and brought it home. I tried to get Josh to debate whether the ceramic child was racist kitsch or just kitsch, but he only rolled his eyes at me. In the end we put it next to the cactus, facing the street. I called him our little ceramic son. And, as a little ceramic child, it had no moisture or heat or energy, so I knew it would always be safe from the cactus spines and could sleep in peace.
My leg healed, of course. The wound became a spray of small roseate scars. And the cactus did take root in our found-rock plot, did just fine. For two more months it lived and breathed and grew, did very well. I hoped it would blossom soon, give us showy violet flowers. It didn’t, but I smiled at it every time I came and went, every time I looked out the window. I admired how the sun on its silvery spines made it shimmer, made it luminous. And every time I thought with pleasure that stealing the cactus was the type of unwholesome, dishonest thing Josh would never have done in front of the junior high and high school kids, or by himself. But I got him to do it for me. I got him to break into the desert for me, plunder it to bring me jewels. I got him to tear a piece off the vastness, chain it down to a bound and finite space. Looking at the cactus always made me feel victorious. I would look at my healed leg scars and think I am inoculated now, I’m safe. I felt very peaceful and secure, until two months later, when Josh left me.
JOSH WAS KILLED in a plane crash. Not the kind where you’re on the plane. The kind where you start a fight with your girlfriend who loves you to death but who you say won’t let you breathe, is too clingy, so you decide to go off hiking by yourself because you need the space, you don’t want to do every single thing together, all the time, take and share every single breath with the woman who loves you to death, so you drive out to the Mojave by yourself in your truck, park it, and trek across the desert like Moses, through a field of Joshua trees with their grotesque, outstretched-to-God arms, to sleep under the stars and feel profoundly, vastly insignificant, and far overhead a Cessna Skyhawk SP with engine trouble sails downward, into the welcoming arms, and doesn’t see you because you’re a mere dot in the landscape, and you don’t see it, you just barely awake at the sputter, the swooping whine of what perhaps sounds like a very large desert bird, a hawk, or a screeching owl, or maybe the death cry of a lizard pierced by spikes, and so just as the plane crashes down—then you see it, yes, but it’s too late—and lands on top of you in a blaze of oil and shredding metal and burning yucca, creosote, ocotillo, maybe your last thought is I should have kissed the woman I love good-bye when I left, or I should have never left her to go outside where it’s harsh, unforgiving, dangerous, or at least I should have brought her with me so we could die together. That kind of plane crash. When they dug him out of the cratered brush and found his driver’s license, unsinged but the laminate melted into his thigh, they called and told me, and my first thought was It’s not fair to die in a plane crash if you’re not actually on the plane. Then I realized I was shaking and couldn’t walk properly, so I crawled into the bathtub. The porcelain was cold, wonderfully solid, anesthetic, and I could pull the shower curtain around to make myself a terrarium. I figured I could sleep there, bathe there, have a water source, have someone bring me packages of ramen to make, I could even shit and pee right there forever, a perfect ecosystem, for the rest of my life, and not ever have to go anywhere or outside again. That worked just fine for three or four days, except for the ramen because I didn’t have any, so I just drank a lot of water from the faucet instead, and then Josh’s younger brother Paul drove down from Santa Barbara, banged on the front door for a while, then decided to break through the bathroom window to come get me.
He made me get out of the terrarium-tub, and then he decided to stay the night, just to make sure I was okay. He was a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara, studying biology or pre-med or something. Josh had shown me photos of his brother. Paul was seven or eight years younger and unripe-looking, a laundered sweatshirt and ironed jeans, a Josh’s kind of hair but combed and darker, a Josh’s face but paler, unvarnished. He looked just like the photos, but now he also looked scared, stunned. He got me towels and one of Josh’s clean T-shirts and made me take a shower, which seemed ridiculous, given that I’d been living in a bathtub for four days, but fine. When I came out he told me not to worry about anything, that everything had been taken care of, their parents had had Josh’s body brought home to Ventura. They’d wanted to find me, have me come for the service, but I’d never answered the phone. They’d always liked me. They thought I was a stabilizing influence on their wandering son. That I could root him. Now they were worried that I was all right. So after the service, because there wasn’t time before, Paul had driven down to check. He could stay a few days, he said, then drive back up. I said okay. He’d found sheets and a pillow for the couch. He asked me if I wanted to go out for pizza or something. I looked outside the living room window, at the ugly, treacherous, stolen cholla cactus in the front yard. It had beaten me, gotten me back. I’d stolen Josh, too, and the cactus had punished me for both of them. No, I told Paul, I really didn’t feel like going out.
I climbed into bed. Since Josh had left I’d slept far to one side, almost on the edge, so as not to disturb his blanket and mattress space. So his imprint was still there, and a strand of hair, the smell of rock. I thought of his body burned into the California desert, if the heat had turned the desert sand to glass. I wondered how long the scar of his footsteps’ trek would last. I wondered if they searched for and found every last shred of him, packed up every scrap in tiny ziplock bags. Leave no trace. Or if a limb was left behind. A dead, rotting Josh limb, now food and home for the termites and kangaroo rats, his energy recycled, transformed. He would have liked that.
I got up and went back to sleep in the bathtub.
AFTER A FEW weeks, Paul had the idea to transfer to UCLA. He decided to just forget about fall quarter at UCSB so he could stay in L.A. and hang out with me, then start winter quarter down here. What he really wanted to do, he confided one night, was drop out altogether and do something really cool and free-spirited like Josh. He didn’t really want to be a doctor, but his parents were pretty invested in it. In one of their sons achieving, being successful. And now, you know. . . . His voice trailed off. He asked me if I had talked to my parents. If maybe I wanted him to call them for me. And I said No, they never even met Josh, I haven’t even seen them for a few years. We’ve never bee
n very close. They’re not your kind of parents, all nurturing and invested, I told him. My parents were always off being very busy, always leaving me to go off by themselves.
Paul was sleeping in the bed by then. I’d given him Josh’s space. I was sleeping in the bathtub, but I’d leave the door ajar and the shower curtain tugged open to talk at night until we fell asleep. And after a few months he decided he didn’t really need to get his own apartment, that he should probably stay with me so I wouldn’t be all alone and he could take care of me. I gave him Josh’s clothing to wear, all of which is too big for him and full of threadbare spots, but he likes it. He wears Josh’s French Foreign Legion caps. Josh would have liked that, too. Their parents call every few weeks to see how we’re doing. I hear Paul tell them he’s worried about me. They tell Paul they read an article that says the first year is the hardest, but then it gets better. They tell Paul they’re going to send the article, so that I can read it. They say they want to come visit us. None of them seems to realize it’s my fault we all lost him. That it’s because of me we all have to cling to each other and shrivel up and pay.
Paul tries so hard. He goes to the grocery store and makes us pizza from scratch. He goes to the laundromat. He downloads all of the newest releases, because I won’t even debate the idea of going out. He seems to think I’m very fragile, about to wilt and expire, or explode. He says he doesn’t like to leave me alone, but I think he just doesn’t like to go out by himself. I urge him to go. I tell him We don’t have to spend all of our time together, do we? I tell him to make some friends from school. I tell him he needs to give me more space, and his scared look has started coming back.
I’M ASLEEP THE night he comes home sometime in April, after hanging out with his new friends from school. I wake up because he’s loud and stumbling, a little drunk, and comes into the bathroom to tug on my arm. Please, Holly, he says, wake up. Please come sleep in the bed with me tonight. He strokes my hair and my shoulder. We’ve never touched. We’ve been together almost a year, and we’ve never even slightly brushed against each other. I barely even sense him in the apartment, rarely sense his energy or heat. He starts crying now, I miss Josh, he says, trying to grip me, I’m lonely, please, isn’t it time, aren’t you lonely? and I think What difference does it make? I let him pull me out of the tub’s cool hug and pull me into the bedroom. We get in the bed together, both of us in Josh’s T-shirts, and he’s fondling, clutching at me. My skin just feels numb. It’s dead skin, and he’s rubbing me as if trying to make it alive. He enters me, I’m dry as dust and I don’t even feel it. He’s trying to get further inside me, and I realize, then, what he’s really trying to do. Get me to unfold, to pulse. It’s April, and he’s trying to get me to flower again. He’s trying to peel back a layer of me to get where it’s pulpy and soft. He’s feeling so much, and he’s trying to make me feel, too, expose me to where it’s dangerous and full of unseen, searing threat. He’s touching me as if he’s capable of that. But he isn’t. He’s weak, insignificant, a pale imitation. And he’s just clutching at me because I’m here, not because I mean anything, am anything to him, really, he’s just clinging to whatever happened by. Anyway, I won’t let it happen. I suddenly see myself making love to Josh, then, opening up to all of it, I feel myself start to get wet and I chew my tongue to bleed and keep me from it, so I won’t cry, fall apart, split open into the tenderness and the sweet. I hold myself stiff as wood, I gulp and gulp to hoard up all the wet, keep it inside of me, and when he finally finishes I gasp and prickle with relief.