Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  “Here,” Vivienne said, handing her camera off to Andy. “This is a total lie. I do not want to ever touch this thing again. You do it. You go lie with this. I want to jump into that canyon.”

  Jeremiah spoke into the canyon. “I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy; I will shew them the back, and not the face, in the day of their calamity. Jerusalem is no more. I will send for their many fishers and I will send for their many hunters and I shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of rocks.”

  He shook the rug with his feet and moths flew out.

  “And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double; because they have defiled my land, they have filled mine inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable things… Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit.”

  The moths flew back to the chevron pattern of his rug. “These are the new drones. The new Moth Drones.” He took the turquoise stud from his ear. “The turquoise is dug at Fallon, near Reno. I refashioned it to do surveillance.” He threw the turquoise up in the air. It flew to Vivienne’s nose. It turned back and forth, robotically. “Dragonflies, moths, flies, bees. They are all government weaponry now. I engineered them. People,” he stood up, he put his arms out, folded ailerons, and he spoke to Rainbow Canyon. “People, Jerusalem is over. Jerusalem is never come. Jerusalem will never be.”

  Andy got in the car, passenger side. Vivienne got behind the wheel. Her mentor, Marty, who held cameras high to witness the wicked, the humble, the war prism of berserkers, he was a quadruple amputee on the streets of the city. In a portal with a paper cup. They come for your broken parts, and amputate them.

  The toxic veil of the chemical empire covered them as they drove.

  30

  SWITCHEROO

  THE SKY WAS a felted underbelly. The air was full of lithium.

  Back about a million years ago, give or take ten or twenty thousand years, there was plentiful water and runoff down past lakes in the Great Basin. Here beaches receded and land popped up, and the thin white line of the beach border still lies on the ancient falling valley rocks, and down from later-named Owens River water flowed to later-named Owens Lake, which was a beauty.

  Here, the first white man came in 1843. Joseph Walker walked and took a wagon train through Owens Lake, and for fifteen years until the California Gold Rush, Owens Lake and this part of the Northern Mojave was quiet and lonely and wet. There was time yet for water to live.

  But there was a faraway town on the west coast, far from Owens Lake, a small settlement, San Pedro, described by observers of the day as a fetid inward swamp, a place contrasted with San Francisco, which was a booming cosmopolitan port, but the fetid swamp had ambition. It was a nowhere place, and unlike San Francisco, it was hot, tropical. It had been compared by the local wags to Guayaquil, Ecuador, or Veracruz, Mexico, but without any of the charms or industry of those hot swampy places. A hot swamp facing the Pacific, its rear to the desert, it had little drinkable water. But its ambition was monstrous. Want water. Need water. Give. Me. Water. Oh, back around 1900, the monster climbed up hills, looked down on mountains. Water, give me water. The monster saw Owens Lake, its blue Owens Valley waves, the boats carrying ore from shore to shore, its river irrigating fruit trees popping apple blossom orchards in the spring, manzanas up the road. The monster needed water to live; the Owens Valley needed water to live; the monster invaded to kidnap the water by pipeline.

  By the time of the major water felony in the year 1913 the monster was known as Los Angeles. To live and grow strong, the municipality of LA literally sucked the farming Owens Valley dry. Locals detonated parts of the pipeline named the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Locals kidnapped the LA politicians who came by train to sell the locals on their campaign that Los Angeles needed to live, and they did not. Trains of army men came up to quell the Owens Valley. Mule teams of fifty-two hauled the steel pipe (which in photographs looked like nuclear bombs) up the valley, and natural gravity siphoned the water down to the mouth of Los Angeles. DRY LAKE on the map means, in translation, Los Angeles invaded this land, Los Angeles stole its resources, Los Angeles became an imperializing empire. Los Angeles was the conqueror; this dry lake was the ecological scar the invading army left behind. A white mummy blowing the highest level of particulate pollution in the lower forty-eight states.

  Most years, 300,000 tons of dust blew off this dry playa. Was Los Angeles in 1913 the model for the United States in Vietnam? In Korea? In Vietnam, in Iraq? Was LA a fractal of its entitled federal parent?

  Vivienne and Andy inhaled the toxic air, which included arsenic.

  Once, empires conquered lands, and paper treaties sealed the deal. But when we conquer resources, we remove the land from the land.

  Martin Hirsch was the model of men; Owens Lake was a model of water. Vivienne looked out across the miles-long white winter corpse. The wind blew dead rotted matter into her eyes. Martin Hirsch was homeless. It could not be. Untended, sunburned. His skin in the photograph the biker showed her was peeled. It had old, unhealed exposure. Living on the street gave skin the look of disease, the look of bomb survivors, the look of prison. Our blue planet, its space, its air, had become the giant planetary prison. Trapped here, to inhale the arsenic off the once beautiful wet waters.

  She held out her arm. “Here,” she said to Andy. “Shoot me.” He took a picture of her arm. She pointed to her eyes. “I can’t see. Shoot it.”

  Vivienne was always the shootiste, never the subject. Now, screw it. Martin Hirsch lived on the street. What had happened to his cameras? To his archives? What happens to the picture file of a great war photographer if he heads down the methamphetamine highway and becomes a toothless smell with a paper cup?

  You could take a paper cup and cut the end out, and bellow to the world that America had been an environmental army, attacking itself. The heavens, troubled, could not breathe anymore, man’s acts made even heaven above a polluted danger. The oversalination of the dried-out lake sent the birds away, and the sky could be forgiven for begging better health care options.

  For a local Owens Valley resident to see his ancient heritage water, he would have to visit a water tap in municipal Los Angeles.

  They lied to the Martys, they lied to the armies, they lied to the birds, the water, the lakes... Was democracy really an elected form of lying?

  Vivienne took off her leather jacket. She took off her python vest. She put them at the soft side of the hard playa. Unknowing pale orange mutant grasses grew into late afternoon. Masses of soft grey-blue blew up and down. Here was the forensic evidence of poison. America conquered itself, experimented on itself, ravaged its own land, bombed its own western desert back to the Stone Age. America weaponized its own air, which for years concussed its citizens. The land was too big, the space was too large, America’s house was supersized, America busyworked into ruin, calling it love of country.

  Vivienne Pink, photographer of others, stood, topless, here at Owens Lake. “Shoot my tits,” she said to Andy. The thought of ever touching her camera again made her brain bounce her eyes around…her camera? It, too, was a lie. All bets were off.

  Her right nipple had sunk down into her breast, becoming a declivity with sloped brown edges, flat at the bottom. It was pebbly and orange on the flat part.

  No cars came. Vivienne took off her pale olive pants. He had first met her in the pink jacket and olive pants.

  A Christmas holiday week souvenir photo: a war photographer, two days after being in the vicinity of an atomic bomb exploding, stood in front of a lake whose lifeblood water had been sucked away to kill it dry. The photographer was naked. Her legs were apart, defiant. She first held up a finger but folded it back in. She put her hands on her hips. She made love to the lens. She had never done this before. Not with full intention. She had never been the model.

  Andy, her subject, shot her. He did not speak. She had made love to him with t
his camera. He had played the role of her. Now, she played the role of him.

  Vivienne could feel he wanted her, somehow, to bring the grief about Marty – Marty homeless; even her, young in Vietnam – out through her skin and bones. To use the agency of her cheekbones, her eyes.

  They both knew that here, now, the first time she posed, truly, with intention, adopting the art moves of the material for a camera, she looked like a ruin. Her glossy thick red hair was now dry whitened bloody patches. Her cheeks bloomed black blisters. Her eyes were still concussing from the bomb’s shock wave.

  They both knew there never had been photos of Vivienne Pink in her prime, in her glory. Once, she was young and beautiful. But there were no photographs to show it. But there were photos of them in a mirror with other misfits in similar deserts on the TV in the background. There were reflections of Vivienne remaining as ghost evidence.

  They both knew her book had changed. They both knew the agencies of this change were outside them, and within them.

  She posed with the feeling she might include some of these pics in the book. How the soldier-subject picked up a camera. The strange ways men come to art. Maybe by the end of the book, the soldier-subject becomes the soldier-photographer, showing his photos of Vivienne.

  Back in the Vegas hotel room, her camera had made love to Andy’s grief, and asked him to use his body to tell the story. Now Andy had the love camera. Now, he the subject was using the camera to make love to her ruination. He might be forgiving the world, while still hating it.

  Photo: Atomic Moxie, Owens Lake, December 31, 2006.

  Inside the car, Vivienne pulled on her pants, vest and jacket, closed her eyes, put her right hand flat on the window. Andy reached across her and did up her seat belt. He stroked the leaking black blisters on her cheeks. He called her Baby Pink, Baby Pink. He gentled her dried bird’s nest hair. Black matter was falling onto Vivienne’s pink leather jacket. The photographer had become nuclear evidence.

  She took the photograph of Martin Hirsch out of her jacket pocket. She handed it to Andy. He tapped the photo. “I saw this guy.” He leaned his chest against the steering wheel. Vivienne said nothing. “I saw this guy in Vegas last week, by the Marlboro Man, before I went into the homeless alley. He had that same Jungle Rot sign. The wooden arms.”

  Beyond the sadness that your mentor was a beggar now was the unbearable notion that you had been in the same city, by chance, where he was begging; that you might have walked past him; that you shot pictures in a high-windowed room, and your handsome visionary teacher was down there, one of the flashes on the edge of sunshine. Her camera, the lying rat.

  They drove away from Owens Lake, old California crime scene, trying to escape the new trick of the Divine Strake bomb. The air is a mean stalker.

  Along Highway 190, they passed the Olancha Dunes, where the movie Bagdad was shot in 1949.

  They arrived at the junction of 190 and US 395.

  Civilization was a small diner set in pines and willows at Olancha. Vivienne got out of the car.

  A line of newspaper boxes stood outside the diner in the dust. To Vivienne’s eye they looked like strange artifacts, odd bodies with something to say in their eye windows.

  They sat in a red leatherette booth, reading the Los Angeles Times.

  Saddam Hussein to be hanged by the neck on New Year’s Eve or earlier.

  The wind had knocked over transport trailers on the 395. Those Santa Anas were brutal.

  James Brown’s body was to be transported, the newspaper said, from Atlanta, Georgia, to New York City. It would be driven by the Reverend Al Sharpton, due to the coffin being made of pure gold and too heavy to fly. The gold coffin would be driven to the area of Harlem by white horses in a caisson, and James Brown’s body would lie in state to be viewed by his fans at the Apollo Theater, where they could pay their respects through the New Year’s weekend.

  President Gerald Ford had died on Tuesday, December 26. The normal long weekend of New Year’s Eve falling on Sunday, and Monday being New Year’s Day, the holiday would be extended, the paper said, and Tuesday, January 2nd would be a national day of mourning.

  Vivienne got a Cobb salad, Andy got a turkey club. They sat eating and reading, saying nothing to each other, like a married couple or old friends or long colleagues.

  Vivienne dove into a feature on Lynette Fromme. Wow, yeah, “Squeaky” Fromme. Of course, no wonder the Times had a piece on her: she had tried to assassinate President Ford. Squeaky Fromme of the Manson Family. Born as a good Santa Monica girl. On the Lawrence Welk Show at age eleven. A popular cheerleader type. Lynette had moved to Redondo Beach with Mom and Dad and not long after high school graduation was into booze and drugs and was on the street homeless. She moved to Venice Beach, where she met Charles Manson. She was nineteen. She and Manson teamed up, and well, will you look at that, Vivienne put her finger on the article, Squeaky and Charlie had lived together in the desert in Death Valley. She was twenty-one at the time of the Tate and LaBianca murders. She had carved an X into her forehead. She had agreed to participate in Manson’s deal with the Aryan Brotherhood: that in exchange for the Aryans giving Manson protection in prison, when any of them they got out Manson would have women waiting to service them. Squeaky had agreed to be one of those women.

  Vivienne read on: then Squeaky decided to approach the President of the United States, Gerald Ford, on September 5, 1975, in Sacramento. She was twenty-six at the time. She had worn a long red robe. She’d carried a Colt M1911A1 .45 semi-automatic pistol. She had pointed the pistol at Ford. A secret service agent had restrained her. The news cameras caught her protesting, “It didn’t go off.” Decades later she claimed she came to wave a gun at the president to get life. “Not just my life but clean air, healthy water and respect for creatures and creation.”

  Vivienne looked out the window of the Olancha diner to the Sierra highway. That was the thing about California, wasn’t it? It was so hard to tell the environmentalists from the mentally disturbed. Everyone inhaled the holy rhetoric along with the pollution.

  Yeah, here was the evidence, Vivienne saw, of just that thought. Just when you thought the assassination attempt was the deranged act only of a Manson Family member, another person tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, seventeen days after Squeaky. On September 22, 1975, in San Francisco this time, outside the St. Francis Hotel, Sara Jane Moore did in fact get a bullet out of her gun. Ms. Moore was a forty-five-year-old former nursing school student and accountant. The day before the assassination attempt, police had arrested Ms. Moore on possession of an illegal handgun, but had released her and taken away her .45. Next day, with a .38 in her hand, she stood in the crowd forty feet from the President of the United States. The new gun was unfamiliar to her. She had a deadeye aim but the .38 skewed six inches off, and the bullet whizzed by six inches from the president’s head. She put up her arm and tried again, but this time a disabled ex-Marine standing by tackled Ms. Sara Jane Moore and took her down. A chance gun, a chance Marine and in the fall of 1975 President Gerald Ford lived to see another day, in fact, thirty-one more years of them. And Ms. Moore was sentenced to life. And Ms. Moore, the quiet middle-aged accountant, said, “I didn’t want to kill anybody, but there comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.”

  All the pretty assassins, from the nice white suburbs.

  Who is a pod, who is a politician, who snatched the bodies, was it all the gun-toting accountants?

  Vivienne looked at Andy. “What day is it?”

  “It’s on the paper,” Andy said, not looking at her, keeping his eyes on the newspaper he held up unfolded, large enough to cover his face and more.

  “It says the 31st, it can’t be the 31st, did we lose some days there? Did we have a blackout? Andy, honey, are you on the lam?”

  “I might do time,” Andy said. “Listen, Baby Pink. I’ve done time. They won’t give me more than a year and a half, nine months, six, maybe no time. Fort Si
ll, maybe Miramar brig, maybe San Diego. I can still move out.”

  “But they’ll be gone,” Vivienne said.

  “Not yet.”

  “But…did you lie to me?”

  “What lover isn’t a liar, my love? Remember when you first sat down at that counter? If that couple had stayed a little longer, I might never have met you.”

  “You talked like you meant it. I mean, you flirted, then you ignored me, but of course I saw right through it.”

  “Oh you did, did you?” he said.

  “Yes. I did,” she said. “I could feel you wanting to say hello to me. You wanted company.”

  “Not by a fuck of a long shot. I didn’t want company, I wanted you.”

  “You wanted the money to pretend you wanted me.”

  “The role started feeling real. I was falling for you.” He got up, came to her chair, sat on her lap and kissed her. The café applauded. “Much obliged,” he said, and went back to his seat, not at all embarrassed.

  Remember when we first met, so long ago now, why just back at the middle of this week…when you colluded with my rat of a husband…?

  A MAN WALKED into the diner carrying a large baby. “Hey, John, how are you today?” the waitress asked. Apparently-John sat down at a table, placing the large baby on a chair beside him. The baby turned its head towards Vivienne: it was not a baby; it was a man whose feet were curled under his body, his right arm looked fused to the curled feet.

  A man about fifty came in, bushy eyebrows meeting in a V on the bridge of his nose, and a gnarled beard with dark brown, dark black, dark blue and green in it. He had on a little round cap, embroidered. He made a HFF sound like a hello with breath expelled only. The waitress brought him coffee. A regular.