The bird in the painting was so humble; the dead bird of the world, on every sidewalk.
He left the bird and went upstairs to the Klee Room. He sat with his favourite Paul Klee, Arab Song. After Klee was in Tunisia in 1914, he painted Arab Song in 1932. It was a masterpiece of humility, on burlap. Pink and turquoise paint, an abstract figure that could be sand, or a monolith, or a woman peeking out from behind a chador. This painting was older than Iraq, as named and mapped by the British. Hell, Dennis Hopper was older than Iraq.
Val left the Klee Room and went to visit the Rothko Room. He sat with Green and Maroon, painted in 1953. The nuclear spring of eleven tests in three months occurred that year. Yet Rothko lasted. He painted the truth of doom so heartening, he made a living shiva of a canvas, so you came and sat and you grieved the world, and the offering lasted. Even as our necks drew the radiation to us, our souls drew the paint to our hearts. Forty-one Januaries ago, the Broken Arrow accidental nuclear bombs rained on Palomares, Spain.
Val went back downstairs to visit one more time with Ryder’s Dead Bird and say goodbye. He was a corner man with a simple dead avian on wood. He hoped the dead bird missed him.
He left the Phillips Collection and he walked up 21st and one block over to Connecticut, where he went into City Lights of China. He sat alone against the sky blue padding, on the turquoise leatherette chair on the blue-tiled floor, and thought of Vivienne. He sat alone in the country he came from, which he worked for, in some other place. It was cold and clear in the capital and Val Gold in his dusty silver fox hair and his charcoal grey sweater and charcoal grey jeans and ripped-up suede slip-on shoes looked, to the casual General Tso’s chicken-eating observer, like a foreign man on business in the nation’s capital.
It was a quiet Tuesday in early January of the year 2007, in Washington, DC.
He was as lonely as a man can be. A day ago he had been in the far reaches of the desert, in the inner heights of Death Valley, where no water flows to the sea. No one could see the desert on him, but they might wonder about the hollows in his cheeks and the set of his plump lips and the look in his eyes, staring as he ate as if he were facing the final boat boarding to the end. He lifted a cup of green tea in a toast, “Vivienne.”
In the morning, Val flew to Syria, and Dale picked him up in Damascus. They rode in from the airport in Dale’s bright green Austin-Healey much like the one that picked Val up back in Death Valley, back a billion years ago in the drop of water we call two days. But Dale’s car was painted flat, and it did not show your face.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The team at Wolsak and Wynn, gems all – Noelle Allen, Ashley Hisson, Emily Dockrill Jones – have been professional, detail oriented and open hearted.
If you’re a lucky writer, you work with an editor who feels the intention of your book, and desires to bring that intention into better focus. Paul Vermeersch has been that editor. His smarts, sense of play, work ethic and artist’s eye raised the level of Death Valley many notches.
There are people who believe you, and people who believe in you. My husband, Dennis Lee, believed in me, and the book, as I ghosted along in the work. I am grateful for his bedrock love.
I first laid eyes on the American Southwest desert area known as Death Valley in 1994. I trekked there on eight hiking and photography trips, letting the desert tell me how to tell its story.
Two photography exhibits, early in the game, fed into this quest. I saw American Ground Zero, the photographs of Carole Gallagher, at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1994. Gallagher spent years photographing downwind victims of the Nevada atomic bomb tests and collecting their stories.
In Barcelona in 2004 I saw an exhibit of photos by Michael Martin, Deserts/Desiertos, which galvanized my sense of the desert as soul oasis.
As I wrote, my desk companions were the photographs of Shōmei Tōmatsu, who documented life in Japan, especially in Okinawa, and in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings.
I have used quotations from the King James Version of the Bible in chapters 3, 10, 15, 20, 29 and 34. They are in italics.
Susan Perly has worked as a journalist, war correspondent and radio producer for the CBC. In the early ’80s her Letters from Latin America for Peter Gzowski’s Morningside reported from locales such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Chiapas. During the Iran-Iraq war she broadcast Letters from Baghdad, and she produced many documentaries for the weekly program Sunday Morning. Perly is the author of the jazz novel Love Street, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She lives in Toronto with her husband, the poet Dennis Lee.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, places and events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead; events or locales is entirely coincidental.
© Susan Perly, 2016
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Buckrider Books is an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers.
Cover images: vectorstock.com; timurock, istockphoto.com
Cover design: Michel Vrana
Interior design: Mary Bowness
Maps: Tannice Goddard
Author photograph: Dennis Lee
Typeset in Minion
Printed by Ball Media, Brantford, Canada
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Book Fund.
Buckrider Books
280 James Street North
Hamilton, ON
Canada L8R 2L3
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.
ISBN 978-1-928088-27-1 (ebook)
Death Valley Page 33