Mount Whitney, snow topped in the glints of pre-sunset, shone and looked down.
“You ever see The Shootist?” the White Rabbit asked.
“Love it,” Vivienne said. “Love Lauren Bacall.”
“John Wayne was dying of cancer in that movie.”
“I know, he put up at Lauren Bacall’s boarding house. He dressed all fine in his Sunday best, in the morning he went out to kill himself. Great character.”
“The character was dying of cancer,” the White Rabbit said, “and the actor playing the character was dying of cancer. Left wing, right wing, cancer is the ultimate agnostic. You can see John Wayne dying in The Shootist. Beautiful movie.”
“I love Richard Boone. I would never kick that man’s voice out of my bed,” Vivienne said. “He wore those turquoise gloves. It takes a real gunslinger to wear turquoise leather. He wore turquoise leather and spoke Spanish without subtitles.”
“I would call them more of a teal,” the caterpillar chimed in.
“All right, not kill himself,” the White Rabbit said. “Get into a saloon shootout, suicide by Richard Boone. I liked his name: John Books. Books in his cover finery.”
“I think you are a poet,” the caterpillar said, sucking hard on his rolled weed. “You ever write for Sonny and Chernobyl?”
Alice came close to Vivienne. She whispered, “Wonderland is not well. Wonderlanders were downwind.” She lifted her pinafore skirt. Below her waist was a giant balloon-sized growth. “I must go back underground, to safety. May I conduct you to the sanctuary?”
32
LASCAUX IN CALIFORNIA
ALICE LED THEM to an area of soft cottonwood and low willow, like new baby hair on an open space. Alice tapped her foot three times. The ground opened: a small hatch of earth rose, a cottonwood door. “Come down to the secret,” Alice said. “No worries, it is non-atmospheric.”
Vivienne and Andy stepped into the hole and fell down to the bottom, where they were in a long narrow tunnel. Alice fell down beside them, gathering her pinafore skirt.
“We don’t have long,” Alice said. “Welcome to the sanctuary. Try not to breathe too much. Maybe fifteen minutes. They say you can’t come down here. They say it does not exist. This is your lucky day.” The hatch above closed. They were in darkness. “Close your eyes,” Alice said.
“Ma’am, it’s totally dark already,” Andy said.
“No it isn’t,” Vivienne said. “Alice is right. Your eye doesn’t know the real dark. You have to sit in the dark to know how much light there really is.” They closed their eyes and held hands, each of them with one hand in Alice’s hands.
“Okey-dokey,” Alice said. “Open your eyes. Walk with me down the tunnel.” Alice had a small flashlight. She shone it on the rock wall: horses. Beautiful horses in red and black outlines. A small foal, it had to be, nuzzling a larger mare. “They brought the horses, when the tunnel space was larger, they took a certain number of wild horses, to save them from the radioactive air. That foal, who is no longer with us, was born down here. A blind albino. Too bad his mother did not escape the fallout.”
“I was once at Lascaux,” Vivienne said. “The real Lascaux. These look like ancient horses.”
“Horses are ancient,” Alice said.
“Then they raced in the Westerns in all that radioactive hoof dust,” Vivienne said.
“Safety first,” Alice said. “Chin up. Use your time in the gallery.” It was the close-up tenderness that Vivienne could feel coming off the rock walls to her. The materials had dictated their own purpose. The small foal had been drawn with its tiny belly on the curve of a rock that looked like a belly. The walls had sculpted in organic evolution the shape of the art to come, once the artists went underground.
“They were working down here while they made Bad Day at Black Rock up above,” Alice said. “The new artists of the nuclear age. There is a door you must not go in, far in the tunnel. That is where the Deserter Community is. When they left the war they came to the sanctuary. I must not tell you; I have been told they will find me; look, while we have time.”
Vivienne was two inches from a horse’s eye. She could see how the eye, like the foal belly, had been in the rock, and the artist drew the eye outline in red, and the horse around it. Was it possible that when the bomb tests went underground, and the bomb testers said “No worries,” because there was no longer fallout in the atmosphere, that there was a whole natural world living under the Earth’s surface – the geology kin of the old marine seas, and still kin of the marine seas – which was being bomb-tested back to caves?
Andy was a foot onward. He was stroking a red cow and black bull. “No touching,” Alice said.
“I couldn’t help myself,” Andy said.
“Yes,” Alice said. “The desire to touch them is overwhelming. We must be intimate, and leave. If we visit one half hour, we take three hours off the cave paintings’ lives. Our carbon dioxide degrades their existence.”
Alice in the sanctuary had lost the cartoon voice. Alice shone her flashlight closer to the drawings of horses, cows, sheep, dogs, cradles with baby faces. There were creatures with vertical antlers, smudged snouts. Their heads were bowed, they walked in concert. The three-dimensional rock presented the chance for invention on the veined ochre undulations. A horse-looking creature with a deer nose and toes for feet moved on the undulating rock face. It looked like the origin of the horse species before they had hooves. Veins, eyes, mineral ruts, tsunamis. Sanctuary in a quarry.
On the other side of the cave was a large grey blotch on the ochre: the thing with smoke hair. A sketched prayer, a form of salvation, etches as a way to make silent cave music. The original storyboards of the cave. Vivienne ran her hand over a space where there were no drawings. She felt it curve under her own scratched up hand. Here and there, a heart was drawn with a long cord, here and there a stick or device had scratched over the animal faces.
When science goes on a manic jag, and elected officials become fallout spinners, the people will go to their underground Sistine Chapels, the humble rock tunnel locals, their souls like sheep dogs herding them to safety, to art, to oasis. The oasis may not have palm trees, or water, or be a shimmering mirage. It might be Lascaux-in-the-Desert.
If you could recoup Earth now, would you do it?
Marty Hirsch could not do it. He was monogamous with the bottle. Vivienne took a sharp stone at her foot and scratched on the tunnel wall: MARTY. Let the ages figure that one.
Her shoulders felt right. She held onto the stone. She pulled it across the rock: a long face, crazy lines for hair, crossed out eyes, caterpillar body. She looked down at her shoes. A dark rock. She picked it up and wrote LIE, then CROWD, then BONE. Alice did not stop her.
Vivienne ran her hands along the rock tunnel. She thought, What would it be like to work with stone, as a material?
Alice turned off her flashlight. “Close your eyes again,” she said. Vivienne reached out for Andy’s hand. She could hear his exhalations. “Open your eyes,” Alice said.
The Cheshire Cat in ginger robes appeared, holding a stoneware jug with the word MILK in blue paint on it. The Cheshire Cat shone a flashlight on the milk jug. Alice sat on the floor of the cave. The Cheshire Cat said, “We warned you: you must never say the word tsunami.” The Cheshire Cat poured milk on Alice. The milk was clear. The Cheshire Cat’s pitcher contained gasoline. The Cheshire Cat walked down the cave tunnel into the darkness.
Alice went under her skirt and took out a long wooden match. She struck it on the cave wall and lit the clear accelerant. Alice in Wonderland self-immolated, hidden underground at the Alabama Hills on December 31, 2006. The tunnel filled with smoke. When the Buddhist monks in Vietnam burned themselves alive to protest the war, they did it in the understanding that this was heart privacy forced in pain to make a burning scandal in public. Alice, in the new age of publicizing every nano of emotion, had made the act of heartbroken suicide private again, in the cave of the mountain sanctuary.
Here, with an audience of Andy, a war veteran, and Vivienne, a war photographer, Alice burned to char. Alice was gone. We radiate our tribulations out in our calls to exalted nowheres, yet the world radiates its harm back to us, in turn, by way of begifting us its mangled grace.
Andy knelt down and, in available flashlight light, took close-ups of Alice. They will tell other versions, and even if there are photographs, they will say it did not happen. Alice’s hands were like mitts of clotted ash. Her face was made of embers. Alice promoted safety. Alice was never safe.
Vivienne took some of the ashes from Alice’s eyes; she smeared them in their charcoal endeavour on the wall of the ochre cave: ALICE WAS HERE. Then Vivienne took a stone and ran it through that, crossing it out in a whitened line.
The White Rabbit stuck his head into the tunnel. “Hurry, you’re late. Important. Get up here.”
The White Rabbit hopped down with a long hose. He sprayed water on Alice. “Best leave now,” he said. “No problem. She was not pregnant. Keep worries under your hat.”
Vivienne and Andy climbed up the delicate rope ladder at the hatch. They were back in the Western movies location, the pinnacles in place, mute protagonists. The hatch closed. The entry to the tunnel was back in camouflage as part of the endless soft rock land at elevation, under the Alabama Hills pinnacles. Perhaps a jet nomad at a window seat on a plane looked down and saw two dots moving across protuberances.
Andy and Vivienne wandered to a movie set rock area. They sat down in a narrow space. Andy unzipped Vivienne’s pink leather jacket. He unbuttoned her python vest. He put his hand on her left breast. She put her hand on his crotch. He unzipped his gold jacket, inched it off, covered her shoulders. He had on a black crewneck sweater. She lay down on his lap. “I remember how we watched The Misfits, the day I met you,” he said, whispering in her ear. “You could be Monty, resting in Marilyn’s lap.”
“I think I’ve spent the better part of my life travelling through Montgomery Clift,” she said. She fished down in a pink jacket pocket, pulled out the white T-shirt. She lay back with the T-shirt on her face. Andy took a picture of Vivienne: who is this woman? Is this a woman? A human figure with a white garment covering her features, reclining in a Western passage with a gold jacket over a pink jacket over a scrap of reptile skin. Wild sagebrush hair.
IN THE HILLS of the Eastern Sierra of the place they call California, as the crow flies nine miles over 395, there once was a concentration camp, not too far from where they filmed the epic Western films. And they called the camp by the name Manzanar, in homage to the apples that once had grown so flourishingly there. Where white and pink apple blossoms sent pretty clouds falling in the juicy spring. And when World War Two had begun, and when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in old Hawaii, and the federal government of those United States made the wounding decision that they must concentrate its Japanese Americans, it scouted concentration locations. And Los Angeles, who had become the landlord of the apple orchards it devastated by siphoning off their water, offered them up for lease, becoming the landlord of Manzanar, as the story has come down to us, in legend. Just a hop north of Hopalong Cassidy and Rawhide Station.
In March 1942, population began arriving. At its peak, Manzanar had ten thousand people. Ten years later, Manzanar was a ghost spot with old watchtowers, old barbed wire, and the gardens that the camp citizens had created were also over.
Water, orchard, greed, no water, desolation, real estate, concentration camp, museum.
There is a photo by Dorothea Lange, which she took in 1942. The photograph is of a young man called Eddie, president of his high school senior class in sunny California. Eddie, all ready in his thick-cuffed rolled-up denim jeans, his coolly crushed fedora, his thin crewneck sweater, his sartorial sport jacket; Eddie sitting on his luggage, waiting for the train, at Los Angeles Union Station. But wait, Eddie is waiting for the train in May of 1942. Is school finished? It doesn’t matter. Eddie is waiting to be taken to a concentration camp. All-American Eddie is Japanese, and they are taking the class president away. They are taking all-American Eddie to Manzanar.
There is a photo by Ansel Adams, which the ranger at Scotty’s Castle showed Vivienne: Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1944. Sly, subversive, in black and white, taken from a concentration camp watchtower, it shows a mountain peak almost as high as Mount Whitney below brilliant white clouds shafting sunlight down. Most of the photograph is of rocks on low ground. The long view of history, the rocks remained.
If Ansel Adams had been Japanese, if Dorothea Lange had been Japanese, in 1942, and 1944, they would have been arrested – for possession of a camera. The United States of America made it illegal for anyone of Japanese origin, in the United States, to possess a camera. They could legally come into your home and arrest you if they discovered your act of treason, having a Kodak Brownie in your dresser.
When the state is a berserker, what happens to the citizenry?
BY THE TIME it was legal to own a camera again for those released from the American concentration camps, the nuclear age was in full swing. The winds, ordered in plans to blow west into what were called, officially, low-use populations, decided to blow east as far as the high-use Midwestern and Eastern cities. Like Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak Company. When atomic test Simon went off in late April 1955, the winds carried the radioactive rain and dust into the forming muscles and brains of newly born and elementary school–aged boomers and also into the Kodak film. Shutterbugs and pros noticed their film was all fogged. Yes, said Kodak, it’s from the bombs. So Kodak sent out regular updates to film aficionados, letting them know where they could buy unfogged unradiated camera film.
If it fogged the film, what did it do to the fetuses?
BABY, COME HOME to me, we say to the planet. The sky is filled with vanitas; the sky is filled with our own vainglory.
Besotted with the thrill of the atom, married to the bomb, off on toots of reckless environmental abandon, intoxicated by the nuclear spree feeling, supersizing vain hallucinations, the paranoia of the state bloomed like helter-skelter impulse control on a cocaine-fueled spring break that never ended. In between bombs tests, the atomic DT’s set in, and again came the blackouts that lit up the skies with iodine makings, with cesium drift. The deciders all tanked blotto jagged ruination upon us, then shaking, went stinko again and high; slow-motion speed bums made mock of elegant curiosity that brings us to science. The delicate insolence of the desert climate sat lonely. Scorned as marginal, the desert was our lonely heart in the middle of drought land. Lonely Avenue was where a ewe, born with its heart outside its body, wandered, hairless.
Sweet Van Gogh pear blossom cloud trees rise again. Dust the turquoise Aprils with bee pollen and hive buzzing. Rocks erode in granite, mica, silica, pinks. The modest fence of stakes is not done yet in the golden dusk, and our final sundowning has not hit us yet, we are alert to the powder the rock the shine, in words, in pictures. Tell it.
33
FIVE DAYS
“‘DESERT – DESERT, DESERT. And a cold wind is blowing and the sky is grey with furious clouds. I feel like an atom off in space between the moon and Spica!!’” Vivienne Toronto said to Andy San Diego, quoting Ansel Adams who wrote that in a letter in 1936 while he was travelling in New Mexico, a man in his thirties, long in thrall to the look of the Southwest, its radiance. And Ansel Adams made the trees and the rocklands emblematic in his photographs, and gave us a gift even he, Ansel Adams, did not know he was giving – how could he? He showed us what the sky of the Southwest looked like, what the rocks and shields and forests and badlands and tablelands and sierras and, yes, Death Valley looked like and how light loved it, before that light was radioactive. He had been born at just the right time, 1902, to be a tiny child in a 1906 earthquake, and to go forth with his musical imagery, his note perfect sightings, to show us the land before the air drifted into all things with its cesium: the paint of paintings, the skin of humans, the photograp
hic paper you print on. The grapes, the wine you drink. Canvas and epidermis. Ancient redwood forest; basin and range; the species origin in its new atomic lesions. And that is why he is the essence of the human in photographs: he gave us the gift of longing and missing the land itself before we knew it was such a blessing; he made us fall in love with the planet’s wild body. Here it is, it will never come again. We will never come again to see it.
Henri Matisse painted a swaddled pineapple in 1940 while the Second World War warred on in his country; Ansel Adams, in 1944, just down the road from a California concentration camp, went out at dawn in Lone Pine, and caught the majesty of the Eastern Sierra with fierce bright light coating the winter peaks, and below, hardly discernable, the bare-bright stick trees so tiny against the sierra, and tinier yet, a small horse grazing. Winter dawn alone when conflict poisons all things – this can save you.
The escarpments at the end of day gave that last glint before dying. Andy and Vivienne rode across Horseshoe Meadows Road past the ancient site of the Gunga Din temple. They turned left, nodding to Along the Great Divide on the right, and almost in darkness past Tremors, and down Tuttle Creek Road to meet the Whitney Portal Road. A few scattered lights pulsed down below in the town of Lone Pine. The temperature was dropping. The cold rocky vacancy was moments from darkness. They drove down to the Mt. Whitney Restaurant at the juncture with Main Street. They had bowls of beef barley soup, Vivienne Toronto her usual Cobb salad and Andy San Diego his usual turkey club. They had been together a few times only. They had been apart more. They had entered each other’s heads and organs; they had crawled under each other’s skin. The time apart etched the time together, like photographs you have never taken but which remain present, the ghosts that etch your dreams when the days get dark and the cold sets in, and you try and get back to that feeling of the photo not taken. The cave scratch withheld. One of them had shot with intent to kill a man, but they had not stayed to check if he was still breathing. She was married, but not to him. He had been married, but his wife died in that night crash. He was a soldier, maybe absent without leave. They ate their food, and listened in on two men sitting at a table by the window, looking out on dark and empty Main Street.
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