Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  “And in the desert heat,” Danny went on, “the corpses in the dry riverbed putrefied and filled with gases. The soldiers had been chased, electrocuted, blown up, thus murdered twice, and left to putrefy, dying a third time in the desert of Iraq. Then Pharaoh Saddam put the waters back in the rivers to hide the corpses, he returned the blood waters to the riverbeds, and the soldiers’ decomposition went into the water supply. The people of Iraq were drinking the dissolved corpses of their soldiers. The land was buzzing with the murderous, and the earth was biohectic.”

  Johnny watched his brother. Danny could have been the contender-in-chief. Danny could have been a history teacher to remember. The last time Johnny had seen Danny show his tender self through words Johnny was fifteen and Danny was eighteen, and Danny was reading Ovid to Johnny. Forty years between open-heartednesses was a sick lonely desert stretch. Maybe Danny couldn’t have had class. Maybe Danny couldn’t have been a contender. Maybe Danny’s passion was the passion of the man who lusts for the sidelines. Where you can know everything that the contenders do wrong. Maybe Danny couldn’t have been somebody. Maybe Danny was a bum with a high-toned veneer.

  Danny took one of Val’s cigarettes and walked back and forth in front of his audience of three.

  “And so the story is written,” Danny went on, “that for the first time in five thousand years, the Arabs of the wet river lands of Iraq had to leave their fishing and wet agrícola life and be refugees fleeing the dry beds. The salt remaining became the oversalination of dry beds. Then, the Americans came in and destroyed the dykes and the Saddam-built canals. The oversalinated ancient riverbeds became flooded with sick salt and toxic war chemicals. Tortured were the waters of life.

  “And mixed up in the poison soup were the bodies of our American boys in the rivers of old Eden.

  “And so, my sons,” Danny said, “in conclusion as we depart this morning, I say today: A country is not an idea, though politics would have you think so. I say this, as a student of history. A country is its land and its water. And war evens every hand. Thank you and good night. God bless and come again.”

  Danny took a bow. He pulled out his penis and peed on a rock. He said, “Can I go now? I want to get my gofer on the line to the White House. The President put me in charge of public security. I need to tell Georgie Porgie that he can downgrade to a yellow.”

  “Special Ambassador. Special Ambassador Coma, could I have a word with you?” Val was at Danny’s side. “You must have had quite the life. Can we look forward to the memoir soon? Tales of coping in Copenhagen, or facing down photographers with your home appliances in Montevideo?”

  “Yes, my lad. Come ahead.” Danny shook his hand, having emptied his skeletal posture of the easeful teacher and the Sunday morning preacher, and letting the hail-fellow-well-met enter in. “So nice to see you again. When was it we last saw each other? Ceuta? No, don’t tell me, Melilla. I heard in the wind it was those damn bastards from Morocco who bombed the Madrid trains, but one is never where one wants to be when one wants to be there, and so forth, so on, inter alia, pro rata and whatchamadiddle.”

  Whatchamadiddle, indeed.

  23

  FEAR FACTORIES

  “THE PERSON OF a foreign service officer shall remain inviolate,” Danny said, his right hand motioning to the sky, the canyon, the threesome of planes flying overhead. Daniel Coma who, if he had been born a generation earlier, say in 1910, and had wanted to have the job he had, dirty tricks hire under the cover of being an American foreign service officer, well, there would have been really no such work. The United States embassies, at first, were few and important. The United States was the new country, and abroad there were the first responders to the new hopeful country of 1776. The first responder was the Netherlands, then Paris (with Ben Franklin, yes, France), and Morocco. There was China, Japan, Siam. These were the legacy missions: Paris, the Hague, Rabat, Tokyo.

  Danny dreamed of it: a small embassy station in an old elegant building. A Prague, a Libreville. He was going to sit with the cigar men and find them amusing and be amusing himself and feel distant from Lord Jim and know Lord Jim and love Lord Jim and talk about meeting up in London again, and facilitating trade routes and the trading of cultures, kimonos and kielbasa, Noh theatre and No, No, Nanette, explaining Torah to Thais, and exchanging anecdotes about learning to eat with chopsticks.

  Slowly and carefully and with consideration, as if choosing a special house, it had begun, this thing they call diplomatic missions. Then it had grown, like the man with many houses, at home and abroad. Then with so many houses it did not know the number, something clicked in the brain of the executive function of the land, and impulse control quit, and the map ran amok with American embassy franchises. The map once devoid of US embassies was now full, and the country felt less secure, not more. So insecure with so many holdings, it began to hire staff to keep all its holdings secure. While nobody was looking, Ben Franklin in Paris became thirty thousand employees of the security firm whose job it was to protect US embassy staff around the world. About twelve thousand foreign service officers, about thirty thousand security staff for them.

  It had become a bureaucracy of the dissatisfied put in to facilitate the imperializing of the ungrateful. For every one foreign service officer, there were three security hires to protect him. Fear factories, Val called them. Danny woke up and he was a bureaucrat in a bureaucracy, and there was no honour left in the lying.

  And now, the biggest fear factory of them all was being built in Baghdad: the biggest embassy ever seen in the history of the world. Was this not further pharaohs?

  How did Ben Franklin in Paris become the new embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, which would take up one square mile? The plan for the US Embassy in Baghdad was to have ten to fifteen thousand personnel there, half of which would be security.

  And when the troops were gone from Baghdad, if there were eight thousand army and armed guards and “no troops,” would the local Iraqis discuss semantics? How did the mansions of Paris and Rabat become a world where the word mansion became the word fortification? Time was a neutrino, the world was at speed, but Danny’s heart beat slowly. He had wanted to get out of the shadow work at that nice twenty-five-year mark. But he had not. And again at the thirty-year mark. But he had not. And the thirty-five-year mark, but he had not. To leave, in Danny’s eyes, would be to admit that Ben Franklin was not in Paris anymore, and neither was Marlon Brando in Indochine in The Ugly American. Ben Franklin was no longer living in the suburb of Passy, and neither was Marlon Brando, who rented a flat in Passy in Last Tango in Paris. The game changers were receding, replaced by the gatekeepers in contracted uniforms.

  Like the anima, our shadow self, made into a holy bunker, like the part of us we did not want to know, writ large in other countries, denied but visible to all, a supersizing less about food than about a psychosis, the United States Embassy in Baghdad was an architectural monstrosity in progress. Its look – and the look was planned – was as totalitarian in appearance as anything Saddam Hussein had ever calculated when he himself razed his own Baghdad neighbourhoods, the shops, the souks, the riverboats, the alleys. The plan was to have the embassy area, ninety-six football fields in size, with AC in the desert land, with US food in the Arabian desert, with movie theatres where maybe the only sight of the emotionally tantalizing Arabia and its dust would be in the air-conditioned theatre inside the concrete walls so tall you could not even see great Arab Baghdad at all. Had the United States become the great imperial exporter of agoraphobia? Had fear become its main export? Had the USA outsourced itself?

  The United States had out-Saddamed Saddam. As they were planning to hang him, the United States had taken up his totalitarian mantle, building a totalitarian monster’s wet dream.

  Danny looked at Johnny with fury, “For your information, I was born into a family of writers!”

  “Dan,” Johnny said. “You were born into a family of card sharks. Furniture salesmen, itinerant jewellers. Fur c
utters. Shmatte workers. In the history of our family, I am the first writer. So far, the only one. Don’t spin my life back to me, okay?”

  “No wonder I have no confidence. Listen to him.”

  “Don’t ride on my coattails,” Johnny said. “I worked hard for my money.”

  “I have my own coattails, I will have you know,” Danny said.

  “Danny, if you thought my work was so easy, something you’d pick up when you got finished with a lifetime of your own, what did you think of your own job? If you thought writing was a little hobby, a little pastime your brother has been playing at all those years, if you had no real respect for my work, then is that why you screwed up so badly at yours?”

  “You experts think you know everything.”

  “Yes,” Johnny said. “We do. Because we don’t. It’s you ignoramuses who are the know-it-alls. You thought my writing life was all gravy, and you left out the gravitas.”

  “Or,” said Val, “it’s all a long con to get in your head, Johnny. A ruse to disrupt you, put Danny-static in your brain. It worked. So then, how be we continue our little tourist tour? Family on vacation, see the sights, Christmas holidays, natural wonders.”

  “Leave no trace,” Johnny said to Val, giving him a pat on the back as they walked out of the amphitheatre into the marbleized hallway.

  “Never do,” Val said. He and Johnny walked ahead, followed by Danny, followed by Vivienne, who lagged back to take a picture of the backs of the three men.

  Vivienne shot the back of her husband, Johnny: Johnny had class; Johnny was a contender; Johnny was somebody; Johnny used his hands, his forearms, his fingertips; Johnny was a workman; Johnny laboured; Johnny brought the world to readers; Johnny punched through the paper wall of the psyche. Johnny stopped. She took another quick pic of her husband. The back of a man in a long black coat, tucked inside a narrow shining canyon, under a blue so deep it reminded Vivienne that blue was a new colour, a found-hue miracle, an invention, which came after the original black and red of the cave drawings.

  Val’s body was open, elbows touching the close mosaic shine, the silver fox in the interrogation canyon.

  Danny followed along, obedient, resentful, in a haze. Hunched, bowed, weaving. Saying, “I asked for water. Please. Is that a flash flood I see coming down the crevices? At last. At last, the fast knives of water will rush down to me. Have you no water?”

  The droughts of ages provided no water to the guilty to wash the blood from their hands, even in mirage, even in madness.

  24

  TWO VIEWS OF MANZANAR

  UP A HUNDRED feet on a promontory, Vivienne spotted the profile of that bighorn sheep, and she shot it against the noonday sun, its horns curved down, its head noble, looking down on its big rocky house and the four intruders.

  The naturally tiled high walls made a canyon curtain.

  “Hold up,” she said. “I want a pic. You two stand on either side of Danny.”

  Val placed Danny against the ancient polished wall. He got on his left, Johnny got on his right. They each put an arm around Danny. They smiled, but not with their eyes. Vivienne liked that. Danny looked at the camera, stunned. “Let me have that,” he said.

  “You wish,” Vivienne said.

  “Call him Special Ambassador,” Val said. “We named him.”

  “Oh good,” she said, the camera at her eye, framing. “Now he can go back into Iraq and get rid of the non-army.”

  Vivienne climbed up and down a rock to get to the three of them, and she took Danny’s chin and lifted it. “Good. Now you’re going to look real pretty, Ambassador.” She pushed Johnny in a bit, and Val in a bit, acting like it was a wedding photo, only nobody was asked to say cheese and the venue was about a foot and a half wide. A Western movie passageway.

  “Remember that one?” Vivienne asked. “The one with, was it Jack Palance and Lee Marvin? Where they’re in the canyon, and Lee Marvin says something to Jack Palance like, I may be a son of a bitch, sir, or something.”

  “I know, honey,” Johnny said. “It was The Professionals. Lee Marvin and Ralph Bellamy. Lee Marvin brought the pretty Spanish Señora back to her husband, Ralph Bellamy. Remember? Bellamy hires the professionals. He wants pros to go out and find his kidnapped wife, taken back to Mexico. Then it turns out the wife wasn’t kidnapped, the wife ran away with her lover. Bellamy told a lie to get his wife who hated him brought back to him by professionals. So there is Lee Marvin, yeah, sure in a canyon close like this, with Ralph Bellamy, and they let the Señora go, and Bellamy says, ‘You bastard.’ And Lee Marvin says, ‘Just an accident of birth. But you, sir, are a self-made man.’ Didn’t you love that? They made it at Lone Pine.”

  Vivienne, still behind the camera, “One more, for insurance. I wish I were Lee Marvin. He is the woman for the nuclear age.”

  They finished the photo op, and walked further, and the open gouge appeared where they had entered, the wide entrance to Mosaic Canyon formed by ancient flooding waters. It was a source of endless fascination: in a place with no water, water had been one of the principal geological protagonists. Water and wind were the basin and range’s ancestors, and only one of them remained.

  Danny was sulking, shoulders down, looking smaller than small, an inviolate elf in violation canyons. The Honda sedan was the only vehicle in the parking lot. Strange. Foothill charcoal, upper pewter, then deep dark blue outlined the ridges and paler shadow pinks drifted on the belligerent blue California sky. “Aw, come on, Daniel,” Val said. “Humour me, keep me company in the back, while these two humps drive.”

  Danny sat with Val in the back. Val took his hand and they held hands as Johnny drove down the dusty road from Mosaic Canyon through the space that used to be the deep coral sea. He turned right at the bottom of the hill, and carried on past the general store, the gas pumps, their motel and Stovepipe Wells. “You missed the motel,” Danny said.

  “I know,” Johnny said.

  “Where are we going? Help!”

  “You’ll see,” Johnny said. “We planned a scenic exit.”

  “Don’t kidnap me,” Danny said.

  “It’s done,” Val said, tickling Danny’s hand.

  The vehicle kicked up more road dust, going fast on 190 East, past the Devil’s Cornfield, which was arrowweed on both sides of the road, spreading in land without signage. The sense you are on your own was once hardwired in humans, but modern humans have lost it. We make civilization to have surroundings, to orient us. The land alone scares us. Death Valley was the lonely margin that ran for millions of interior acres. Danny was in the hands of his captors, his brother, her…that one, Val, and the land out the window was a strangeness with shades and shadows of elsewhere.

  Johnny turned left and drove up Scotty’s Castle Road, through the valley, then up Grapevine Canyon Road to Scotty’s. Scotty’s Castle. “Let’s stop at Scotty’s,” Vivienne said.

  “I don’t want to stop at Scotty’s,” Johnny said, “I’m taking us to the crater. As we discussed.”

  Vivienne put her hand on the back of Johnny’s neck and massaged it while he drove. She leaned over to him and kissed his neck. She kissed his cheek, she turned his chin and kissed his mouth. He veered to the left.

  “Watch it, man,” Val said.

  “Call Ma,” Danny said. “You owe her twelve hundred dollars.”

  Vivienne did it again, kissing Johnny longer and harder, “Come on, honey, a little Scotty’s? Five minutes.” Johnny kept the car steady this time.

  “You know,” he said, “the biggest cause of death in Death Valley is not dying of thirst or being eaten by a snake, it’s single car accidents. Single car accidents.”

  “Too much kissing,” Vivienne said.

  “She’s nuts,” Val said.

  “I know,” Johnny said.

  “My brother never married,” Danny said.

  “Don’t play the Pinochet card with me,” Johnny said. “You are not getting off the hook because of age. What you did you did when you
were young. Don’t wait to get old to take a senility plea. Not with me, brother.”

  “See how he talks to me?” Danny said, squeezing Val’s hand.

  “I paid my debt to Ma by the way,” Johnny said, turning his head from the wheel, veering to the right this time. “I paid it like twenty-seven years ago, which is also, by the way, more than I can say for some people, and society.”

  “See?” Danny said, investigating the mystery treasure down in the depths of his blue Speedo, comforting his family jewels with one hand, and smiling up at Val, holding Val’s hand with his other.

  They came to Scotty’s Castle. Vivienne loved it. A magnificent folly in the middle of the desert. A castle built by Death Valley Scotty, whose real name was Walter Scott, a hard barking trick rider with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, who then became a promoter, looking for backers for his separate and several schemes, including a mine he promoted which did not exist. And this Death Valley Scotty befriended the wealthy Albert Johnson. Scotty convinced Johnson to build a vacation home in Death Valley. This was in the 1920s. The two men built a monster mansion, with one man’s money and the other man’s bluster. Scotty claimed the mansion as his in his self-promotion. Johnson, who liked his privacy, did not mind having a holiday home that another man fronted with his blustering and self-promoting fun. When Albert Johnson found out that the mine did not exist, he did not even care. Scotty was the front man, while Johnson and his wife, the real owners, stayed low. Johnson enjoyed the BS of Scotty. The castle became a tourist site, a place to stop, Scotty’s Oasis in a way, long after Scotty and Johnson and Bessie the missus had all passed away. Scotty was the third of the happy Death Valley castle trio, the publicity hound and it is his name that survives. The turrets, the porticos, in a photograph of Scotty’s Castle, look like a castle in Spain.