California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  From the edge of the pool in my new apartment in the low pink complex at the edge of the loose blowing desert I hear a single dove cooing incessantly. It coos and it waits for a response.

  Interrogation is a scaffold that stretches back into ancestry

  November 24, 1942

  KUIBYSHEV—More than 2,000 Jews—almost the entire Jewish population remaining in Smolensk—were massacred recently in that Nazi-occupied city, according to reports brought here today by N. Krilov, who succeeded in escaping from the city and reaching one of the guerrilla bands which are active in the Smolensk area.

  The Jews—mostly women, children and old men—were brought in closed trucks to Gegonovka Place, Krilov disclosed. Here they were lined up before a huge pit that had been dug beforehand, and following the usual Nazi pattern the victims were machine-gunned and dumped into the pit, dead and wounded alike, and flung over them was a shallow covering of earth.

  What happened to them anger they secreted away?

  A day will come when she will not live in California anymore. She will be miles north, in the suburb of a perfectly nice city rimmed by deep green forests and snow-topped mountains. One cold, bright Saturday she will round the corner in her neighborhood, setting out for the grocery store. On a street narrowed down to one lane by the cars parked on either side, a car will approach hers, head on. The other driver determined not to let her pass first, ignoring several open spots free for pulling into.

  There will be no openings for her to pull aside, otherwise she gladly would. She still likes to please.

  They will approach each other slowly until their hoods almost touch. She will put her minivan into park, in the middle of Mary Avenue, and think, This is awkward. And, This is mildly funny.

  You need to back up! the woman will call to her out the window.

  I’m not reversing onto a busy street, she will roll down the window and call back, her pulse speeding up a little bit, You have room and you should have pulled over.

  Then the other woman will yell: Where the hell are you from, California? Go back where you came from!

  This is all it will take. A cloud of nostalgia and terror and pride will drift in out of the clear blue sky. The memory of being speechless while wanting to speak, of a place and a voice finding each other.

  She will get out of her car, slam the door, cross her arms, not ready to chuckle anymore.

  I have all day, she will scream at the woman, louder than planned, enough for all the neighbors to hear. Louder, truthfully, than necessary. A rage not felt in a while, a rage and an ache and a beautiful allegiance, will surge. She will be both surprised at this rage and this ache, and not surprised.

  Goddamn Californians, the woman will keep yelling (how does she know?), but the Californian won’t hear it.

  I’M NOT MOVING, she will shout to the bitch in the car and to the whole goddamn neighborhood, feeling warmer and better the angrier she gets. I have all day, she yells, and I’m not going anywhere.

  I have already been, the Californian will think, reaching for her car door. I have already come and gone.

  What do you have to say in your own defense?

  In the desert I dream wildly, dreams I throttle through—dreams where I interview people and full conversations pour out, dreams where I’m soaring off a cliff, falling down stairs, dialing phone numbers, smoothing sand sculptures. Always, the dream where I stand, mute, in a wood and marbled courtroom.

  My fixation on this repetitive flash of memory is, it turns out, ordinary. A traumatic event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, Cathy Caruth tells us, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it: “To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.”

  One of the most viable responses to trauma is testimony.

  What will it take to mother myself?

  I was three or four, in my parents’ station wagon in the heavy heat of a Florida afternoon. We were on our way to see my parents’ friends Janie and Roger, who had a son I loved named Garett who played detective with me. Inside my shoe, sitting in the backseat, I felt a tickle. It’s nothing, said my mother when I told her. We’ll be there soon.

  I’m sure I whined. There’s something there, I complained one more time. But she told me to wait and so like a good girl I sealed my lips and did, my tickly right foot jiggling as I pumped my calf against the seat.

  As soon as we walked into the relief of swamp-cooler air at Janie and Roger’s house I reminded my parents to take off my shoe. My mother bent to unbuckle the Mary Jane, slid it off my socked foot, and screamed at the top of her lungs as a three-inch-long coal-colored lizard leapt free and hurried across the floor.

  What is here?

  I go out and I ask people to tell me their stories. I write down these stories in my reporter’s notebooks and later they are printed in ink. Stories of migrant farmworkers who slip through fences, make deals with coyote devils, pick spinach, cauliflower, broccoli, onions, grapes, dates; stories of trailer parks with live wires and bad plumbing and children at play; stories of mothers who have nothing for dinner but will offer you their last cold Pepsi and not accept no thank you for an answer; stories of wealthy septuagenarians who fight pettily over covenants, conditions, and restrictions; stories of twentysomethings who launch hot-spring spas on a shoestring in the wrong end of town; stories of tennis champions; of Hollywood’s gilded age; of a grandfather in a Rolls Royce who asks me at a stoplight if I am busy later; of immigrants who push mowers and change hotel sheets and float around as invisible as ghosts; stories of anonymous activists who leave barrels of water in the desert so the deaths of those on treacherous journeys, also anonymous, might be eluded; stories of transgender women who yearn to walk down the sidewalks as themselves; stories of neighbors thankful to have seen the face of Mother Mary in the pattern of a broken window’s cracks.

  Say what else is here

  A love that splits me like the earthquake fault that crosses this valley from the Chocolate Mountains along the centerline of the Little San Bernardino Mountains. After the shock of rupture comes the oasis.

  Always revisit the ceremony of crossing over

  Once, long after I leave college and move down the body of the state, I return north with Suzanne to visit a place called Beckwourth Pass, where in 1851 a ten-year-old girl who would grow up to become the first poet laureate of California, led by the legendary mountain guide and former slave James Beckwourth and followed by her family’s wagon, crossed over the Sierra Nevada on the back of a pony. “There, little girl,” Beckwourth told her as they crested the pass he discovered but was later not repaid for developing, “there is California! There is your kingdom.” Even as the girl, named Ina Coolbrith, lurched along that immigrants’ route, her gray girl’s eyes took in the valley ahead, the oxen behind, the nearness of the perfect clouds, and she began in her mind to write words.

  Though we drive east from Sacramento and trek close in the ice and slush of a cold March, it is hard to navigate against nature, and we cannot get all the way to Ina’s place of crossing like I want to. Even today with iPhones and radios and concrete one can hit an impasse. Instead I will see Beckwourth Pass best later from the air, heading away from the state: an emerald smear, surrounded by snow, the lowest point across the Sierras through which all those years ago a person with courage and supplies and most of all desire could come through. Why do you need to see this place? Suzanne asks me, with more patience than I probably deserve, as I debate whether to install metal chains on the tires of a rental car in the spitting hail on the side of a darkening highway.

  I need to see this place because I am coming closer to something. Because at some point I start to understand what it takes to cross over. You do not move across the border of someplace and instantly become. You do not just belong. You may be granted permission to cross, with a stack of papers and a stamp, if you answer their questions the right way. But to assimilate demands a push through silence. To have o
ur voice silenced, and then to bring it back. To lose one myth and build the next.

  Go back, try again. And again. Begin again.

  Brimmed with the golden vintage of the sun

  He appears over the cubicle wall at my desk, six foot four, longish hair curling around his neck, wide grin. His name is Lukas. He’s the newspaper’s environmental reporter. Do you need anything, he asks me. I tell him I think I am settling in alright. Too crunchy, I say later on the phone later to Suzanne, too granola, not for me. But soon we are having lunch together at cheap taquerias and Happy Thai, where the cantaloupe-colored iced tea is the only thing that cools me in August’s 110 degrees.

  He knows everything about the desert, about bighorn sheep and alluvial fans and water wars. He is an encyclopedia. One night we sit under the stars at a cantina and look up at the palms hanging over downtown, their fibrous skirts trimmed short and tidy. They’re not supposed to look like that, he tells me of the skirts, which are all the fronds that have already lived and died but stay attached to the body of the tree. When they’re allowed to grow, he explains, the skirts become microhabitats for beetles, bats, birds, snakes.

  I try to imagine those wild canopies underneath, frantic with creatures, but my skin prickles in the heat.

  Another time we sit outside his place with our feet in the hot tub. The night is perfect, like every one since I’ve moved to the desert: obsidian sky, eggshell moon, lime green fronds lifting in the hot breeze. We talk about books, about his childhood on a patch of Arizona land off the grid of anything modern, about my stories. I only want to be friends, I tell him. No problem, he answers casually, lifting his giant feet out of the water, pivoting onto his back, dropping his head into my lap.

  He travels to Arizona for a weekend to visit a woman he met at a wedding, a woman he is interested in because I have said I am not interested in him that way. I drive him to the airport at midnight on Friday and make myself smile when I wave him off. Then I sit with my feet in my pool for two days and wait, listening to the frogs croak in the dry culverts, feeling the heat in my bone, surprised at my unrest.

  What am I afraid of?

  California’s original inhabitants, her rightful inhabitants, fashioned thatched roofs for their homes from the fronds of the native fan palm, sealing their bodies from the elements but rendering porous the boundary between the landscape and the personal.

  I try to maintain the boundaries between myself and nature because I am afraid of what the open desert contains. But everything creeps and bleeds; tiny white bugs crawl across the carpet. Lizards scamper past my foot on the patio; kettles of Swainson’s hawks circle above. I spot a wiggling beige coil just left of the yellow center line and nearly swerve off the road. At night I dream about the fog of San Francisco, its cool pale-blue empty. Sometimes I dream that I need to contact Jim, it’s some kind of emergency, but I can’t recall his number or even his last name.

  I don’t want to go back into the fog, although the memory of it calms me. What I want is for everything before to fall away; to open myself to the desert completely. In the desert I feel like screaming, like finally I can.

  It’s not enough just to live

  When Lukas comes back from his visit to Arizona, we go to lunch and he tells me his weekend was not fun, that with the woman he met he didn’t feel right.

  What does it take to be heard?

  For the newspaper I write and write and write. I go to city halls and political rallies, boat races and AIDS support groups, courtrooms and living rooms. I interview people every day. I ask them easy questions and hard ones. I try to do almost everything gently. It is their choice, mostly. The regular people, the ones who aren’t paid to speak to me and answer my questions even when I need to push and probe and make demands and threaten to write “so-and-so would not return calls”—with those people I tell them I want to hear their story and others do, too. I invent my own shorthand so I can capture more of what they say. What is your name, I ask, for the record?

  Some days I have to sit in my car and psych myself up. I go over my questions, think about how to reach someone who is afraid or fed up or trying to disappear. I’m twenty-three. I check the clock fifty times a day. Some days by deadline I write and file two stories, three. Every morning I pick up the newspaper and look for my name. My chest pounds. Spell your name please, I always ask them twice, striving to get it all right.

  A story a day, two, three. Every week it’s like I did nothing the week before, and I have to prove myself again.

  One day I am sent to a meeting. The members of this meeting are local politicians, CEOs of large companies, hotels and golf courses and casinos and a transit agency that runs only on sunshine. I have my notebook and my three pens, and I find the address and enter the building and find the board room. I walk in and the members are sitting around a large oval table in sport coats and damp white shirts and belt buckles. I slip into a seat against the wall and check the clock. The man at the head of the table glances around the room. Probably can’t start quite yet, he says, we’re expecting a reporter from the newspaper today. I am the reporter, I offer. They turn and look at me, confused.

  I AM THE REPORTER, I almost shout.

  What does it mean to belong?

  Thousands of years ago, in the Pleistocene, the Mohave Desert was much wetter. As the lakes dried up, they left small pools and springs behind, where the ancestors of the desert pupfish clung to life and evolved. Different pools shelter different species and subspecies, all dependent on a fragile desert ecosystem threatened in many ways. Dodging electric transmission corridors, livestock grazing, and water diversions, tiny pupfish, the males of which glow blue when ready to mate, live on for now in rare desert wetlands and palm oases.

  Oases are clustered along valleys where springs trickle up through gaps in the earth’s plates. These are not the refuges of a mirage, a Fata Morgana; they are real, places that smell fibrous and yellow-green, of thread-bearing petticoats in heat, places you can walk through, your hand sweating inside a larger hand.

  State your name for the record

  One day for a story I am writing for the newspaper I take a tour of the desert with a federal border patrol guard. His intent is to show me and the photographer I am with how challenging it is for him to battle the porousness of the U. S. border here in Imperial Valley, how complex it is to monitor the systems of walls, gates, canals, and open wilderness for migrants trying to slip through. How hard it is to track them, to keep out aliens, and also, the guard says as an afterthought, to keep them alive. What I ask him is: How it is to keep them alive? What I write in my notebook is: Does he know it was theirs first?

  In his Jeep we bump across the blistering sand of the Colorado Desert, past the refrigerator-sized plastic tubs where citizen activists place water so that dehydrated and disoriented immigrants might be able to drink instead of die. We’re all working toward the same goal, really, the agent says, swerving us by a bend in the fluorescent aqua All-American Canal, a swift-running man-made river 175 feet wide that ferries the water the West fights over, near where later the photographer and I, by ourselves, will meet a group of Mexican men, modern-day Argonauts, showering from a chemical-laden agricultural runoff pipe. In my notebook I write it down when the agent says, If you don’t have permission you shouldn’t be coming through here. But I know there are things we shouldn’t wait for permission for.

  Another day I visit a small plot of earth in a cemetery in Holtville, a holy place, where rows of plain white crosses mark the sunbaked graves of migrants who are found dead in the desert, their bodies among the blue-green creosote and barbed ocotillo, or floating in the canals and ditches. They are labeled John Doe and Jane Doe, as if they never had names, nor a language of their own. As if they came from nowhere and California, once they stepped foot in it, was all there ever was.

  The opposite of erasure is inscription

  Soon we are slick with sweat. While tiny lizard feet scratch along the dry rocks, the sun blaz
es so hot we slide loose from ourselves making love.

  I become an empty white heat

  We drive to Mexico. We slurp sweet seafood in an empty dining room on a cliff above the Pacific. We buy tourist wine glasses and a carved stone chess set sturdy enough to last until a child not yet born is ready to learn the rules of play. We listen all night to a young couple on the other side of the hotel door fight ugly. We get sad about them then move to a quieter hotel. We lie flat under the high wood beams, our muscles like hills. We fuck against the hand-painted indigo tile. We turn each other inside out.

  I know now where I want this to go

  In The Land of Little Rain, published in 1903, naturalist Mary Austin surfaces and interrogates several aspects of the California myth—generally understood as the at-times-foolhardy belief that California is a sort of Eden, a western paradise where, if you can get to it, all your problems will be solved and every one of life’s riches is ripe for the taking. In the slender book—part travelogue, part backcountry guide, part sociological study, and part prophetic environmental warning—Austin, like other naturalist writers of the era, situates nature in its untouched form as a salve for the soul, much as some believe God is or can be. And she warns those chasing the dream to heed the lessons of the people here first.

  In her introduction to a later edition of The Land of Little Rain, Terry Tempest Williams quotes biographer Esther Lanigan Stineman: “While many Americans turned to old cathedrals and traditions of Europe, or even the far East, to alleviate anxieties emanating from an increasingly mechanized and industrialized world, Austin found a solution in America itself.” Austin’s Biblical allusions position the Southwest, with its magical waters hidden in Shangri-La deserts, as a spiritual journey. A sacred place we are pulled to by powers and patterns larger than ourselves. “No man can be stronger than his destiny,” Austin writes.