Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  Laid out before you, in the desert, is Earth’s slow thinking.

  Johnny got out his Moleskine and sketched some scat: two long corded pieces, each with a black tail. Hairy scat, the flowing tail: coyote scat. Way back on the road, their white vehicle was a dot bouncing the light. They had been walking twenty-five minutes; twenty-eight minutes to their dune.

  Worldwide insomnia could be from lack of desert. From too much life in too much verticality, the big tall buildings in cities only allowing slivers of body clock–setting blue. Here in Death Valley the blue was so big it could reset the natural clock of all Earth’s wanderers.

  Vivienne’s eyes were soaking in the horizontal universe. Space was time here. How could you convey that? Her quest had to do with perception. The small-sized photo of this would not get it across, because you had to feel much smaller than the desert to feel the desert inside you. No postcard of a huge Mark Rothko painting ever told you what standing close to a Mark Rothko painting told you: about colour, shine, light, eternity, degradation, paint itself. His paintings were painted shivas, joyous acts of mourning, or mournful acts of joy, and they put you in a glowing desert, and you did not get there by holding a miniature replica of mourning in your hand. You had to be small, next to the huge unforgiving world. When you strip the Earth and its water, you become the dry desiccation walking the dry desiccated land. Larger than a grain of sand, a human is still a grain of meat and bone. Before endtimes arrive upon us, the drought times will come, with Bonneville Salt Flats fire speed igniting our home lives down the canyons.

  Vivienne could see a thing called five hours away.

  You could see five hours away and walk to it, convinced it was surely only five minutes. Desert light was a species, a feral energy that came at you and bent you. Across the miles of sand, it looked like thousands of tent encampments had been set up.

  The cold wind soothed their burned places. They started walking the dunes. The sand grew high and they walked it, climbing, sinking, pushing forward. The land taught them how to walk the land.

  VIVIENNE TOOK SOME pics of their walking feet on re-virginalized sand, their rutted shoe prints, and here came a coyote print. Each of the four toe prints had a little line above it where a claw had landed. Below the toes was an interdigital pad that looked like a nose. The coyote’s track was shaped like the letter C. This meant the coyote had come through at a lope. Johnny loved this stuff, here was the urban creature in love with scats and tracks, joyous to see footprints. He was standing and sketching the coyote track.

  The coyote: First comes the walk, then the slightly faster walk called the amble, there is the trot, there is the gallop and there is the slower version of the gallop called the lope. Johnny adored the English language, it was the sea his brain matter swam in; words were the stars he steered by and they were the land below the stars at night. It thrilled him no end that a lope was a gallop, only slower.

  He drew the coyote’s lope track, with the one hind foot showing behind the other three feet and the characteristic C shape.

  They climbed the next dune. There were lines down its wall of sand, long lines and dots on either side of the lines: a lizard. A thick herringbone track that looked like a tire tread ran up the side of the dune beside the lizard: a desert sand beetle.

  When Vivienne Pink and Johnny Coma arrived at their dune, they used the far mountains off to the east as their guide. Vivienne recognized the notch between two of them. Their dune looked directly across to where the sun would rise between 07:05 and 07:10. They had fifteen minutes. They climbed up their dune, a nice thirty-footer. Vivienne rubbed out the ripples at the top of their dune, and the wind put the ripples right back.

  The dunes moving in and out of each other, making glory shapes: the barchan dune, shaped like a crescent, barchan from the Arabic for ram’s horn, with its steep slipface, its gouged eddy, downwind. The parabolic dune, upwind, was the same, only gouged and crescent in the opposite direction. There were the star dunes, with multiple slipfaces and wind coming in from chance directions. There were the traverse dunes, the classic ridges at right angles to the wind. Wind was a great artist. Wind erased your home, and the steel vehicle became the new encampment with wind-shattered windows.

  They sat on wind’s art. They held hands. Their four legs hung over the edge, two in khaki, two in blue cord. It was about freezing when they set out, and now they were feeling deep desert cold, colder at sunrise. Yet the burns burned. They touched icy cheeks together. Johnny kissed Vivienne with his warm tongue and his cold peeling lips. They had been married so long, they finished each other’s silences.

  They were just-me just-you in a space of three million square acres. They faced the Funeral Range.

  The sun rose in the far mountain notch. Vivienne was ready to aim. The sun entered the notch. She shot it. Now it spread golden on the grey notch. She shot that. The sun beamed onto their faces, creating the first morning shadow behind them. Their bodies were projected down the sand dune where they sat, and along the sand beyond that. Alone, at the end of December, on their own planet. The early shadows of the morning were the best. You did not get shadows like this unless the land was open and clear and low and free of impediment.

  Vivienne took Johnny’s hand. They stood up. They turned around, letting the sun beam their bodies as shadows with heads elongated to the west. The long necks and long heads of the alien shadow invaders. They walked towards the Grapevine Mountains, zigzagging towards the highest dunes, the ones you see in the postcard of the Death Valley Dunes. Each dune was eighty to one hundred feet high. They climbed to the top of one, walking single file along a one-inch seam. Her day’s work was almost done. There might be another picture.

  She twisted her camera strap to her side. They sat with the etched mountains. It was 8:47 a.m. They slid back down the high dune, pushing through sand on a return route for a half an hour, way off course. Ahead was a mesquite tree shining in the risen sun. Like a crazy dried berry hairdo glowing rusts and golds. Vivienne saw the picture. She waved her hand at Johnny; he came close to her. He saw it now: the sun hit their backs, projected giant leg shadows in front of them, and their shadow heads were hidden inside the mesquite tree. This was the extra picture she had felt coming. She found it when they veered away from the straight path, by accident. The white sedan was way back east on the road, alone on the highway. They zigzagged to it, another half hour until the sand showed some low green, then gravel. They got in the car.

  They drove back the short five miles to the motel, travelling in bright morning, which made the same highway seem like a different world than the dark secret highway of night.

  They parked the car at 214, changed into fresh clothes and went to the restaurant. They each ordered a short blue stack. They dug into the pancake stacks, pouring on ample syrup. The coffee kept on refilling. They had not said a word to each other yet. The marriage did not care how the work went, the work did not care how the marriage went. It was 10:27 in the morning. Vivienne had finished her art day. Now came the hard part.

  She opened her mouth: “Did she call you?”

  Johnny looked up from his syrup and buttermilk blues. “I’m not getting into it.”

  “Did she call you? Because if she called you, I’m finished.”

  “Please, Vivi, it’s been so good. No more aches and thunders. Please?”

  “Did she call you? I want to know if she called you, because if she called you, I am going back to Baghdad. If she keeps calling you, and you keep letting her, then I am going to the Turkish border. Call me in Damascus. I may look up Dale. Dale, by the way, likes me. Nobody photographs DaIe, but I photographed Dale. I want to know: did that anorectic lamp pole leave another sex message on your phone?”

  “It’s business, if I tell her not to call, we won’t have the money. She’s a fundraiser.”

  “She’s a married fundraiser, Johnny.”

  “I know. I know she’s married. I know I am married, too, by the way. Just by the way.”<
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  “For this, I stayed home?” Vivienne said. “For this I gave up war? ‘Oh, it’ll be great, you can take pictures of flowers.’”

  “Stop with the Minnie Mouse,” Johnny said. “I never said that. You love flowers.”

  “Flowers will wait, I want to go back to the story. It was you, not me, my dear husband, who said you were sick of reading books written by scaredy-cats who’d rather get all their details about the Middle East off the Wikiyenta than travel to see it with their own eyes. Please. What would happen if I went back to war, what’s the big deal? I don’t have to look Cairo up, baby; I’ve been there. I don’t have to look up the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, I went diving in Eilat, baby, me and Moses, Moe and me, down with the fishes and the chariots, come on. I have been in Babylon, baby, Basra, Shatt al-Arab. Were we not in the Garden of Eden together?”

  The waiter came by, with the handi-Pyrex of the hot stuff, and refilled their cups, and brought more syrup, and chose not to get involved with the Garden of Eden.

  Vivienne pointed with a forkful of blueberry buttermilk pancake and syrup dripping on the wooden table. “How can I have been to the origin of the Torah, and now I am sitting here in Death Valley and I can’t even remember why I came here? I should be back in the military grounds of Area 24, trolling for more pose boys. I have what is it? Two days to deadline?”

  “We came to get Danny,” Johnny said, scooping up the last of the buttermilk blue into his mouth. “To finally have it out with him. To get an apology on behalf of the people. So now I find out my own brother tortured you in Montevideo, and you told Val and not me.”

  “I told you. I had mercy on your manuscript. Isn’t that what a lover should do? Spare the one she loves, so he can keep his soul intact and work?”

  “I don’t think they were talking about torture.”

  “I think they were precisely talking about the worst things you could imagine.”

  “I never imagined that,” Johnny said.

  “Sweetheart. Jojo. J. I’ve been living below the polite veneer so long, I don’t know if you even ever see me.”

  “Look. We’ll forget about Danny.”

  “I’m tired, J. I’m tired of wrangling your female fans. I’m tired of waking up on Sunday morning, and having one more woman who’s never read any of your books on our front porch, asking for an autograph.”

  “Or stalking me. Glory hounds.”

  “There is that. I’m at my own front door, and there is a nice-looking, seemingly intelligent woman boasting to me that she knows you. She’s trying to wedge past me into our home. Like I’m your assistant, or the maid. You know, maybe they’re right. Maybe my life is as small as theirs is.”

  “Good job we’ve got them all on security cameras for the cops,” Johnny said. “Look. We’ll hang around here overnight, then we’ll drive back to Vegas in the morning. You can be on your perch in the coffee shop by noon. How’s that?”

  She sipped and gulped her coffee. “If I had stayed away, if I had stayed in the conflicts, what would have happened?”

  “I would have been articulated,” Johnny said.

  “What does being articulate have to do with it?” Vivienne stabbed a pancake.

  “Not articulate, V. Articulated. Like how they get those ships in the bottles. They build it folded, and carefully insert it. Then they pull at it and magic! It unfolds inside the bottle. That would be me, if you went back to Iraq. You’d come back from Kirkuk, and there’s your husband, articulated inside a bottle of Absolut Vivi.”

  “I asked you a serious question,” Vivienne said.

  “I gave you a serious answer. I can’t live with the tension.”

  “But, I can, Jojo. I can. I feel alive with the dead.”

  “You’ve done those post-mortems, honey.” He leaned forward. “Now it’s time for us.”

  “But who is us, if I’m all knotted up inside? Peace gives me a headache.”

  “She didn’t call, if that makes any difference. I told her if she keeps calling, I’m calling 52 Division. The cops know her big-time lawyer husband down there well enough, that might have worked. And Val keeps good dossiers on all of them.”

  “Thank you,” Vivienne said, drinking more coffee, looking at the wagon wheel decor of the room: big, comfy, rustic, built with beams from a defunct mine. They paid and went their post-art-making morning ways.

  Vivienne went into the room and got Andy’s T-shirt from her suitcase. She put it on against her skin, zipped up her pink leather jacket and walked west on the narrow highway. She walked up a rutted side road, placed her camera on a rock, took off the jacket, took off the T-shirt, laid the white T on the pink leather and took pictures of it. When she got back to the room, Johnny was outside, drawing a palm tree with a water faucet at its base. She went in, got in bed, took off her jacket, laid it on her pillow and fell asleep in the T.

  A LARGE WOMAN with a small dog on a long leash came walking across the parking area. Johnny sketched her. Walking towards her was a wobbly figure in bare legs and a big grey sweatshirt. Danny Coma in all his glory. Johnny put Danny in the sketch, and called out to him, “Hey Daniel! Welcome to Death Valley.”

  Danny, oblivious to the sound of his brother’s voice, patted the small dog, and said, “Yes, Mr. President, chéri. I understand that it is understood that pre-eminent among the concerns…” The dog yipped a response, Danny nodded in agreement.

  Johnny, feeling the invading passive voice infections, got up and went inside. Good. Danny had arrived under his own elvin steam.

  22

  ENEMY WATER

  VIVIENNE, JOHNNY AND Val shepherded Danny through the first narrow entrance made of marine deposits left eight hundred million years ago, sedimentary rock called Noonday dolomite, rock that was one thousand feet thick. Once, down in quiet seas, there were vertical tubes through which the rotting algae at the bottom of the water sent up carbon dioxide, venting the marine rot upon the rocks. Now the quiet seas were quiet canyons. This first passageway was wide enough for only one person. It rose high on both sides, smooth and shiny, made of marble. The Noonday dolomite and the mosaic breccia had formed in a seabed, and under pressure the rock became a masterful mosaic, cliffs of it, and narrow dry falls you inched through, and climbed up and down rocks through. Whereas the testing grounds and the dunes presented as CinemaScope and IMAX views too big for the human eye to comprehend when standing in them, Mosaic Canyon in contrast presented as a narrow hallway through which an accused might be led, a spooky hallway with shiny sides reflecting back to him his bewildered face as he emerged from the hallway into an open amphitheatre. An open rock setting for the next stage of justice.

  There was no shade in the amphitheatre. Danny hobbled in his loose boots to a big rock, hoping to get shade under the rock’s slim overhang, sitting down, using the rock ledge like a slim-brimmed hat.

  Val came over to Danny and did not sit down. “What do you know about the terrorist bomb set off at the supermarket in Barcelona?”

  “Preposterous. One was never there,” Danny said.

  Val lit a cigarette. He walked back and forth in front of Danny. “June 1987? The Barcelona bombing?”

  “One has not been in Spain, didn’t I tell you that?” Danny said, with all the irritation of a man sending the tomato juice back when he had ordered tomato. Johnny and Vivienne were the audience.

  “You were the Americans’ point man for the Basque terrorists. Let me ask you again, Danny. What do you know about what happened on that day? They came down to Catalonia, far from their territory, and in order to demand their own parliament, which they already had, they bombed the Hipercor supermarket on Avinguda Meridiana. Can you tell us where you were that day?”

  “One had things to attend to. The capital connections. Bad shellfish. One had been poisoned. There was no coverage. One had the youngsters to attend to, though it must be said they did supersede their poor father’s graduate degrees. The plane was late. Intelligence had been reported in certain quarter
s of incendiary devices down in Barcelona, one has to cede that. Damn pilots and their unions. There was fog. Well, what else is new? Could one locate a rental car? They gave me a window seat. Ridiculous. The back went out, what else is new? Lumbago is no pile of peaches. There was a back molar acting up, absolutely impossible to locate a dentist. There was a service chinchilla demanding a ham sandwich and a kosher mouse demanding the chinchilla’s ham be kept at a distance, plus when one merely goes to get the hand luggage out, my firearm discharged inside my diplomatic pouch. Very kind stewardess helped clean me up. One has immunity, extremely helpful. The damn fog. One had to circle, fly to San Sebastián, fly back, by which time the ETA had blown up the supermarket. Don’t blame me. One will find no record of Daniel Coma in Spain. Not now, not ever. My retriever has never been to España. Can I get my gofer now?”

  Vivienne saw that the fog was also a meteorological system inside Danny. He must have reached burnout, and then stayed on, in working embers, for another decade and a half. What happens to a man’s brain when he soldiers on using muscles and synapses howling from exhaustion? Does he enter the whispers?

  “Don’t be a goon, Dan. If the thugs can’t get the details right, don’t be like a thug and claim to be a good guy.”

  “I am a good guy,” Danny said. Like a lot of good guys, he had faith that bragging about being good was a good thing, and not bragging.

  “Were you not in charge of the CIA’s desk on the Basque terrorists known as ETA? Euskadi Ta Askatasuna.”

  “Very impressive. Five out of five. What’s the point?” Danny reached down into his left Frye boot, losing half his skinny white arm down there, and pulled out an old cigar butt. His boot was his personal sidewalk curb. “I am semi-retired, leave me be.” Danny put his hands on the rock rubble, tilted forward and did a handstand, his Frye boots waving behind him. “One yogas, one mini-marathons, one keeps up with the Ring Cycles,” Danny said, his mouth close to the amphitheatre floor. “And yet, there they were, the trust-fund chums, them and their golf games. There they were,” continued the mouth, looking like it was at the top of his head, his legs hanging in the air, “those smarty-pants. Daniel Coma got better marks than them. Daniel Coma beat his ass, then Daddy calls the dean and they are in like Flynn.”