Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  “Son, I haven’t even had a bite.”

  “Waiter? Could you kindly get me some portobello and goat?” Vivienne asked.

  “I have some leeches in the kitchen, ma’am. He has a serious stab wound. His skin is clammy.” He was holding Johnny’s hand. “Would you like me to put on ‘Madame George’ while I bleed you?”

  Johnny took the waiter’s hand away. “Just get my wife some food, will you?”

  “Coming right up, sir. Ma’am, that was a small Caesar and was it cranberry juice for the lady? And no worries on the spy front. I had a friend who turned out to be DEA. Things pass.”

  “Thank you for your psychiatry,” she said. “Just the mitosis and the curds, doctor.”

  Blood had dried at the wound. The waiter wet the napkin, wiping the Mercurochrome over it. Johnny winced and howled, “Oh living Jesus.” Val took the napkin from the waiter. Johnny had his Moleskine out, as he was being treated by Val he was sketching the very thing that was happening, drawing in real-time pen lines: a goofy bellied guy with an open wound and a big-haired guy with a big cloth and a big wacky grin and a bottle with an M on it, and the bellied guy going, Yipes! Yips! Eek! Awk! Gawk! Yiperama That Hoits!

  When in distress, Johnny went to the place of routine, where he made things. Back to his atavistic roots, where the ancestors took the burnt pieces and drew on the walls of caves.

  ANDY GOT UP, walked the length of the verandah, turned and walked right back to Vivienne. She took her shades off and looked with hard twin beams at him. What did Andy do, follow her? He walked back down the verandah and around a corner. His back was like old times in fervour to her. She did not have time for memories. Memories kill you. Memories hang you up. Literally. Her hands kept shaking.

  The pain of war had not broken Vivienne Pink. The broken places had not made her stronger either. What did not break her, made her persevere. She was not stronger, she was more determined. The world breaks you and makes you stronger in the broken places. People who misquoted that line from Hemingway tended to be people who never had a bad break in a bone, or ever saw war. It was much more fuck you than any sentimental makes you stronger. Quoting it gave them the glow of the chicken-hearted. It was your animal part that powered your art, not some literary quotation. Then, of course, there was good old Friedrich Nietzsche and his That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Men: so squishy, so sentimental. No, baby, it was much more, in the field, You fuckers, you will not win, I will beat you. I will walk into the sun, I will walk into the minefield, I will face down the acid-gut vultures. It did not make you stronger, it made you live. You learned to love Death Valley. You began to love to walk through Death Valley, the valley the geologists called a graben, walking through your own quilted blood and the split rocky lobes of your head. What does not kill you makes you go to Death Valley. The world tries to break you, but you make a deal with the world. If you don’t kill me, I will tell more stories in my work.

  Work lust moved into her bone marrow. Here is where art is made, in the studio of your body. She said to Johnny and Val, “Back in a minute. Washroom.”

  She walked through the atmosphere that Andy had walked through, the belligerent, the war resister. As she turned the corner, she saw he was not there. Down a soft gravel area sat a short row of motel rooms. Rustic, peeling, no one around. She was, in fact, at the washroom, a wooden addition at the side of the building. The mirror inside was cracked, rusting at the edges, with rainbow stains. Vivienne took a pic of herself in the mirror: pink leather, long camera snout, cheeks as blotched as a bad mirror face.

  She peed, and opened the door. Andy stood outside. “What are you doing here?”

  She stepped close to him. “I had a funeral to attend.”

  “I wasn’t aware there were any funeral homes in the vicinity.”

  “It’s Death Valley.”

  Andy sat down on the ground. She joined him. She offered a cigarette from the Pink cigarette pack she had carried from Nevada. They inhaled old Okinawa tobacco together. “Are you going back to Canada?” Andy said.

  “It’s my home. I don’t know. It’s base camp, anyway.”

  “Come with me to Baghdad.”

  “Are you crazy? And what? Sit somewhere and wait for you?”

  “Embed yourself.” He chuckled. “In my bed.” He put his mouth at the end of her lit cigarette and inhaled the smoke.

  Vivienne shook her head, saying, “Does being AWOL give you the giggles?”

  “I don’t know for certain I am actually AWOL, ma’am.”

  “Oh, with the ma’am again.”

  Andy was afraid to say her name. He had not said her name out loud since he left her. He was scared to say it, even to her. The Vivienne in his mind had kept him going. He took her hands, kissed them. “Vivienne. Then let me come with you.”

  It was too much too soon and she liked it. She had liked it in Nevada and she liked it in California. The drought made their kisses spark with tiny blue.

  Andy could be the road taken. As soon as you take that road, the other roads drift back in the rear view.

  You stand too long at the crossroads, ghosts eat you.

  “Stand over there,” she said, pointing to the jerry-rigged loo door. Andy, with the small leavings of his smoke, stood against the door in profile. “Talk to the cigarette like you used to,” she said.

  Instead, he put something starlit into his cheekbones, held his smoke down beside his left leg and looked right at the camera lens. He whispered, “Vivienne.”

  Vivienne saw the misfit heart coming at her. There was something of the damaged man unafraid to humble his strength.

  Andy came over to her. “What happened to your head? Your hair. It’s white.”

  “I think we were in an A-bomb. Bu it might have been two miles away, so…but I think I got a concussion… I don’t know. Then down at the playa an IED went off inside a coyote.” She rubbed her fingers on her pink leather shoulder, where the coyote blood had dried.

  “Do me a favour,” he said. “Kindly take off your jacket, Vivienne.”

  She slipped her jacket sleeves down. Andy removed the jacket, draping it around his shoulders. Vivienne’s arms were stippled with white scales, black-blue buboes rising, blisters near her shoulders, other buboes under her arms, the blisters nearer her wrist, her left hand had a lake of red, the white-tan skin had come off entirely. An inch of her right wrist bone was sticking out. Andy kissed it.

  “You have to see a doctor,” Andy said, stroking her face.

  “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “I met a man in an alley who brought me here, I think. He left me on the other side of the mountain. You know, I actually do not know how I ended up here.”

  Vivienne reached into a pocket of the pink leather jacket, and pulled out Andy’s white T-shirt. She took off her python vest and put the T-shirt on. “You kept this,” he said.

  She kissed his cheek. “Your T-shirt saw a man jump into a crater, and a coyote rigged with a bomb explode. Your T-shirt has volcanic ash and coyote gut bits on it.”

  “My T-shirt smells like you,” he said. He was shy to show her the small piece of her green jersey he had cherished. If he brought it out, would all his feelings for it go away?

  Andy walked towards the small motel. Vivienne snapped his back, walking away, his gold jacket with her pink jacket draped on top. He sat down in a white vintage-metal round-back chair at room 15. The 1 above the 5, the numerals metal. She moved towards him, from fifty feet to twenty feet to eight feet to four feet, then she kneeled down and shot his body from below.

  Vivienne’s arms looked like a perverted extension of the python skin vest she was wearing. Her bare arms were another family of reptile skin, they were burns like Nagasaki. The photographer had changed more than her subject had. What happens when the photographer is a victim of the war? Who takes the picture-taker’s picture?

  They went into room 15.

  “I’m burning up,” Vivienne said. She
took off the vest. She was topless with her back to him. She turned. Andy had a hard eye, she snapped that face on him. He did not move. She snapped that too. She turned away. He came over to her, he put his palm on her back. He reached out and took her camera, she did not resist. He walked backwards to the door; he snapped multiple shots of her back.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” he asked.

  “If you’re not AWOL,” she said, “you might be a deserter; we’ll take a couple pics, and then get you back. Johnny might be able to help. He’s counselled deserters.”

  “You’re tattooed,” he said. “Vivienne.” He snapped the two of them in the mirror. “Look at yourself. Look at your back.”

  “I can’t see it,” she said. She craned her neck and got a partial view. “Holy cow. What? There I see something. What is that? That’s not me, can we wipe it off? Fuck me, you’re right. Oh my God. How did that happen?”

  “Take off your watch,” he said.

  She did. The analog face of 11:02 was burned into her left wrist. What had happened? Like a little piece of pie branded at her wrist bone inside a circle with dashes on it. This must have been the exact hour they stood at Sheep Springs in the Divine Strake’s light, which burned the python pattern into her flesh. She had seen her bones inside her body, it is true that a thermonuclear explosion lights up your bones like a full-body x-ray. Then she remembered. She had taken a couple pics of her arm, lit up like an internal x-ray light. Thank goodness. She had taken an actual photograph not of the bomb in the sky (although that too), not the aftermath (although that too), but a human being at the exact moment the bomb blew. A human who became an x-ray light, a human who became python tattooed, in the moment the branding sizzled her flesh. God saw how the shanda was another magnet to us humans. The shame drew us to want it, and want it in epic proportions.

  “Why are you here with me?” Andy asked.

  “I want some insurance pictures,” she said. “I have a deadline for a book. I’ve got no money coming in. I do not need you. I want to take your picture is all.”

  This all was true, yet it was not the reason. The reason was the need. It could be a sudden fire in her eyes, it could be the hairline crack in her composure. The fissure, the rimose in her art heart. Back around the corner, at a table in this remote eatery, her husband and her best friend were sitting. She had up and walked away, saying nothing, to sit and kiss, to kiss and reminisce and camera-schmooze with a man she had known in a hotel room back in the blur earlier in the holidays. And that seemed not crazy.

  The thing about Crazytown is this: you never feel crazy in Crazytown. In Crazytown you have never felt more sane in your life. You feel clever, alert, super-sane. That’s Crazytown’s trick. Outside of Crazytown, they are all nuts. “Forget the A-bomb and let me photograph you,” Vivienne said.

  “Look,” Andy said. “Last time we were flying over to Iraq, we’re in the plane, somebody left some old camera magazine from wherever. I’m flipping through it, and I come across this picture of a woman from Japan who had the pattern of the kimono she was wearing burned into her skin from the bomb at Hiroshima. You look like her.” Vivienne’s lower back was tattooed with intricate snakeskin diamonds.

  “You can’t see what I see,” Andy said. “Guapa, I hate to see you this way.” Using a Spanish endearment: gorgeous, pretty thing, guapa. “Come. Lie down with me. Let me stroke your hair.” He took her in his arms. Her hair was full of metal bits. Andy tossed the hair like worn feathers from a wounded avian, a small crushed thing down in the cobbles who sipped from a rain puddle, who sipped from the nuclear rain. He stroked the woman he had known as a redhead with a thick short mane, an older woman with olive-tinted skin in lovely condition, with choice lips who knew how to use them, with a smooth back dotted with a decent number of beauty marks and moles. Now, a few days later, this woman looked ravaged, as if she had had months of radiation and chemo; as if she had suffered months of starvation, paltry feeding, no bathing, dirt work; as if she had walked the refugee trail of world deserts. Heavier blood had pooled under her blue eyes, shock wave bruisings, and the hair of the radioactive dove girl came off, as Andy, soldier-nurse, stroked her. The green filigreed light outside the motel room waved in the high elevation breezes. She had the body of a nuclear winter. It is alive with us, in our life. It is alive, on the newborn fledgling winged planet. Andy took her to the bed.

  He stroked her back, pausing at the raised python pattern tattooed into her spine’s skin. She was part bird, part reptile, part woman. Vivienne Pink, photographiste.

  ON THE VERANDAH Val was saying again to Johnny, “Let me have her.”

  Johnny said, “Val, don’t try me. You stick a knife in me and demand my wife? Is this what you spooks call protocol?”

  “I put in my dues.”

  “Dues don’t get you the dame.”

  “Cute. You’re buried half the time in your writing. I take care of her.”

  “Val. You’re the other man. That’s your job. If you had wanted the job of husband, when there was a clear opening, you should have taken it. You let your chance go by a lifetime ago. Find yourself a nice Jewish girl and move back to your homeland.”

  “For your information, we’re in my, as you call it, homeland.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot,” Johnny said. Fully aware of it.

  “I am the boss of your brother.”

  “Late brother.”

  “I am the equivalent of a chief of mission.”

  “So you’re the chief CIA spy for Toronto. It’s not a points situation, Val. You don’t build up years and then cash them in for another man’s life. Listen to yourself. ‘Equivalent.’ Are you the equivalent of a husband? Are you the equivalent of my buddy?”

  “Johnny, I am your friend.”

  “At a distance. With qualifications. I’ll give you a pity B-plus at faking friendship.”

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

  “Sure you can. That is exactly what a fake friend would say. I bet your bosses in Washington told you to write a fake memoir in which you trash V and me. You’re a tenant. You keep my wife company when I’m away. Tell me this, Val, has Vivi ever photographed you?”

  “Of course.”

  “No. Really photographed you. Got you alone, in a place. Did she ever come into your room with her camera and close the door? Don’t you ever wonder why Vivienne spends so much time with you, but she has never made you a subject? You don’t appear in any of her books.”

  Val had never thought about this. Johnny and Vivi had befriended him. Had they been on to him from the beginning? Had their friendship been fake? Val felt ambushed. They might have been watching him.

  VIVIENNE AND ANDY were on the bed of room 15. The door was open. She was wearing his white T-shirt. He had on her python vest. He had her wounded head next to his neck, in a close nest. In Andy’s keeping, Vivienne was a wreck, feeling lightness in her limbs.

  Where there is no water, Earth’s creatures will feel the former riverine life, how we miss our gills, our scales fluorescent magnificent, how things own us when we own things, how winter douses the light to let us rest in our emotions.

  In a small room, you could pretend it was dusk with each other.

  VAL WAS GRILLING Johnny about Vivienne and Andy.

  “So how does this guy turn up out of nowhere?”

  “Beats me,” Johnny said.

  “Hang on,” Val said, getting up and walking down the verandah and around the corner. In the distance was the open door of room 15. Entwined legs were moving on a bed. Why him, and not me, Val thought. She’s known him two minutes and she goes with him. Just when I decide to make a move on Johnny, this guy reappears out of nowhere to stand in my way.

  Val walked towards the motel room. Vivienne got off the bed. She motioned to Andy. He got up. Val watched Vivienne stroke Andy’s hair, and them kissing. Vivienne picked up her camera; she walked to the open door. She waved to Val. Naked, she took his picture, him reaching his arms out
to her. She closed the red door.

  Val was sweating in the cold. His spy electrolytes were spiking and dipping in his body. He stepped into the rustic washroom. He pulled his special orange phone out of his pants pocket, pressing a green button on it. “I’m married,” said a voice from the phone. Vivienne’s voice. Val pressed a blue button to rewind the tape. “I could love you,” said a voice, then Vivienne’s voice, “I’m married.” I could love you. The soldier, Andy, talking to her in the hotel room in Vegas. Good job I put the bug on that bed, Val thought. She needs protection. How the hell does she know who this Andy is? Val pressed a purple button, fast-forwarding the tape. He leaned against the wooden door, with his eyes closed. “Let me nurse you… Let me take care of you…hush now, hush now…down, down, ease your wings down…” Val, hearing Andy’s voice, could picture Vivienne back in that hotel room. Val put himself instead of Andy with her on that gone and done bed, saying those things to her. In the bivouac of the tiny facility of the small motel, the world had gone trespass on him. The agencies of love had passed him by. He replayed the part where Andy was cooing to Vivi, and Val whispered along with the voice on his phone, “Hush now, hush now, let me take care of you…”

  He wiped his wet face with rough paper towels. His long lined face with the knife slash on his forehead looked like hell in that dying mirror. He came out into the cool wind. The red door that held her was still closed tight. Val walked back to the table and said to Johnny, “Do you think she knows?”

  “Chances are he’ll keep his mouth shut,” Johnny said.

  “Why should he? He’s got the cash. He’s got no loyalty to you.”

  “He has no reason to be a rat.”

  “He’s overplaying his hand,” Val said. “I don’t like it.”

  Johnny laughed. “It’s not up to you. You still don’t get it. It’s none of our business.”

  The waiter appeared. “Ribs and smashed potatoes for the tall guy,” he said.

  “He’s naked in room 15 with my buddy here’s wife,” Val said.

  “No worries,” the waiter said, setting the food down at Andy’s empty table.