by Joe Ide
“Wow,” she said. “So this is where the magic happens.”
“Magic indeed.” He held his lapels with both hands and looked off at a legacy that was apparently on the ceiling. “I believe it’s a form of alchemy, hellfire transforming the very earth itself into boiling flames and the boiling flames into unyielding steel that will last through the millenniums and stand forever as a testament to the artistry of its maker.” He blathered on. Grace took pictures and feigned attentiveness, one eye casting around for the perfect spot. She let him talk until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She glanced at her pocket watch tattoo. “Oh heck. I’m late. Dad will be thrilled with the pictures.”
“I was only too happy to oblige,” Chester said. He walked her out, that big feverish mitt on her back. “I have a thought. Perhaps we might have lunch together. The Souplantation has a wide variety of salads and the clam chowder is scrumptious.”
“Oh, I can’t today,” she said with feigned regret. “How about I call you tomorrow?”
“Excellent, excellent, I look forward to it.”
As soon as Grace got out of the shop, she shivered to get the cooties off and hurried to her car. Jesus, he was creepy. She called Isaiah.
“How’d it go?”
She beamed through the phone. “I think it went fine.”
“Good. We’ll see what happens.”
Grace went back to the house and showered to remove any trace of Chester. She wished Ruffin was there, but Elena made them leave the dog at TK’s. She thought she’d help Elena cook dinner, but as she approached the kitchen, she heard Elena on the phone, arguing with her boyfriend. He lived in Temecula and rarely came to see her.
“Don’t say you miss me,” Elena said. “Knock on the door and tell me you have tacos.”
Grace wanted no part of that conversation so she went into the living room. Isaiah was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He had printed out Sarah’s pictures and they were spread out in rows. Grace sat down next to him and felt a zing as their knees touched. He didn’t acknowledge her. He was deep in the zone, she knew that now. He was rearranging the photos like a street hustler working a shell game. He stopped. She waited. He indicated the four pictures of the van parked under the carport.
“These were taken on different days,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was talking to her or to himself.
“Why would it take more than one day to pack?” she said.
“No, I mean they’re separate trips.”
“Are you sure? Everybody’s wearing the same thing. Same bikinis, the man’s wearing the same orange T-shirt.”
“The T-shirt is a little more faded in this one,” he said. “And look at the van’s registration tags. They’re different colors. Blue, yellow, red. I still don’t get this,” he said, tapping the words on the side of the van. EVER AFTER.
“What does it all mean?” she asked.
“It looks like your mom and her friends went on this trip every year, someplace special, like an annual event, but by the time you were a teenager, she’d stopped going. Why do you think?”
“My dad, maybe. He thought her friends were hippies and he hated hippies.”
“I think they went there.” Isaiah put his finger on the picture of the miniature house that was painted beige and set on the desert plain. Grace tried to make the connection but couldn’t.
“How can you tell?”
He indicated the picture of Sarah and her friends building something in the backyard. “That’s what they’re building,” he said. “The little house. See the cans of paint? They’re the same color beige—and see this?” He shifted his gaze back to the photo of the house and the tiny flea-size speck at the edge of the frame.
“What is that?”
“It’s the tip of a feather. From this.” He tapped the photo of the orange bicycle with the long tail feather stowed inside the van.
“Oh my God, you’re right!” she said, taken more than ever with this quiet man with his quiet ways. “But how do we know Mom’s gone there now?”
“We don’t, but maybe—” He zoned out again. She watched his eyes moving slowly over the photos centimeter by centimeter. “Here.” He tapped the photo of the guy reading the paper, part of the headline visible. 37 GO.
“Thirty-seven go?”
“I think the rest of the line is thirty-seven gold medals. The Olympics.” She was stunned.
“You follow the Olympics that closely?”
“The date on the headline is August. I can’t think of anything else that would fit.” She did a search on her phone.
“You’re right,” she said wonderingly. “The US won thirty-seven gold medals at the 2000 Games. But I don’t see how that’s connected to Mom.”
“The Olympics take place in August, and it’s August now.”
Grace summed it up. “Okay, so every August, my mom goes on this trip to the desert until my dad stops her, but now that she’s free to do whatever she wants she’s gone there again?” It was a reach and even if he was right, California was full of deserts and so was the whole Southwest. Isaiah’s shoulders slumped. He blew out a big disappointed breath, his sense of failure palpable.
“It’s okay,” she said. She put her hand on his shoulder. He stiffened. Damn, she thought. She’d embarrassed him. He didn’t look at her.
“I’ve got to go to my place,” he said. “Pick up a few things.”
“Can I go with you?”
No one was watching the house. As soon as they came in, that familiar feeling of loneliness and isolation overcame him. He wondered if she felt it too. “Could you grab some of Ruffin’s food?” he said. “The kitchen, the cupboard on the right.”
He went to the bedroom and packed some stuff in a duffel bag. He knew where everything was and left the light off. He hurried, feeling like she might leave if he wasn’t there. Even in the dark, he could see her painting as clearly as if it was propped up on the kitchen counter next to the toaster. He went still. Something was edging into his consciousness. He couldn’t identify it, not even vaguely, but he knew it was urgent. Pivotal. Revelatory. Good or bad, he couldn’t tell, or even if those labels applied. He could see pieces now, vague and unknowable, drifting around in an endless void. Slowly, they moved toward each other, and with that came a growing anxiety that made the progression even more momentous. The pieces massed together and conjoined, breathtaking in their scope and meaning. It was as if an exploded sun had reassembled itself, its shards and fragments returned to their proper places, its shining form filling the emptiness with light. He didn’t move for fear it would fall apart. He understood Grace’s sadness. He understood her real secret. He was startled when her arms reached around him. He looked down at her small hands resting on his chest and felt her body pressed against him. She turned him around and kissed him and he kissed her back and everything was fine.
She awoke the next morning and smelled good coffee and toasted bread, the warmth of him lingering like something aged and precious on the tongue. She yawned and sat up. Her painting was on the wall in front of her. At the studio, it was part of the atmosphere, blending in with everything else. Here, it was stark and shocking, her nightmares exploding out of the canvas like the maw of an incubus, engulfing her in its wet heat, laughing as it feasted on her newfound confidence, grinding it into the ridiculous fiction it was. She put her head in her hands. “I’m so stupid! What am I doing?” She went to the bathroom, washed her face, and waited until she calmed down. She joined Isaiah in the kitchen and she could tell from his expression he felt the change in her.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” He gave her coffee and she held the cup like an offering. She sipped in the strained silence. She wanted to reassure him, say We can still be friends, but that sounded fucked up no matter who said it or how. She tried diverting him back to the case. “About my mom? I know you did your best.” He turned away. She’d embarrassed him again. When they got to Elena’s, he went straight inside.
Grace watched TV with Elena. The program made no sense or maybe it was her. She worried about Isaiah, wondering if he was beating himself up. Or hating her. Finally, she couldn’t stand it anymore and knocked on his door. He didn’t answer, but she could hear him talking to himself. She went in. He was standing in the middle of the room, staring at a darkened window.
“Reno,” he said.
“Reno? What about it?”
“Your mom got a speeding ticket in Reno. In August of 2000.” That frightening memory again.
“Well, it’s the desert,” she said. She hesitated. Did she really need to keep challenging him? She had to. She had to find her mom. “But if they went camping, why there? There are way better places to go than that.”
He turned away from the window and looked at the floor. “The bicycle,” he murmured. “The bicycle…the bikinis…the hat…the house.” She could hear his gears whirring and wished she could get inside his head and watch them work. He said, “Your mom was going someplace where you can ride an orange bicycle with feathers on it, wear bikinis and silly hats. Someplace where you’d put a little beige house in the middle of nowhere. Does that mean anything to you? Do you associate any of that with Reno?”
“No. I’m drawing a blank.”
“Damn,” he said. He put his hands in his front pockets. They heard Elena calling them for dinner. “I’m going to wash up,” he said, and he left the room.
Grace remained there, thinking, her forehead wrinkled. She wanted to help, to make his theory work. Sparks in her memory were trying to ignite, the tinder stubbornly resisting. “What is it?” she said. It was agonizing. Spark. Spark. Spark. Another spark. And then…
A flame!
She ran to the bathroom and pounded on the door. “Isaiah, open up!”
He came out. “What? Are you okay?”
With her eyes open wide she said, “Burning Man!”
Owens got out of the Santa Fe city jail feeling older, dried up and derelict. She had a total of nineteen texts and voice mails from Walczak telling her to check out her Jerry and get her drunk ass home. She bought a bottle of Grey Goose, got a motel room, and had a couple of pick-me-ups. She drank a lot, but she didn’t think she had a problem. Yeah, sometimes she binged and stayed in her apartment blotto for a couple of days, but that was only once in a while. Her favorite thing used to be getting functionally drunk and going to Knott’s Berry Farm. It was nothing like the ranch she’d grown up on, but she liked it anyway. The rattling stagecoach with horses that smelled like alfalfa, the buildings made of old wooden planks. She liked to pan for gold, everybody looking at her because she wasn’t seven years old. People saw her uniform and said thank you for your service. There were Peanuts characters everywhere. She got banned from the park for offering Snoopy a slug of vodka from her water bottle. Owens worked behind the bakery counter at Vons, putting lemon tarts and banana cream pies into the display cases and spelling out HAPPY 70TH GRANDPA on birthday cakes. Her supervisor, Tina, called. A total bitch, her enormous belly a storage tank for a lot of the inventory. She wanted to know where in the world Owens had been for the last few days. “A better hell than yours,” Owens said. “And by the way? Fuck you.”
Owens volunteered after 9/11 because she wanted to help her country. She wanted to make a difference. Be a patriot. Then she got over there and what she was doing felt disconnected from anything to do with country or patriotism. It was like the house was on fire and you were somewhere pulling weeds. And that was what she brought back with her, that disconnectedness. The feeling that you had separated yourself from the human race and now you were something apart and broken and alone. She wanted Jimenez. Who else would have her? No normal man could know what she’d done and not leave in disgust.
The Grey Goose gave her a boost. She cleaned up and went to see her Jerry. His real name was Arthur Freeman. He owned a bookstore called Turning Pages. It was funky and cramped and stank of incense. Books about politics, war, and dead photographers were on the front table, a yellow Lab slept on the floor, yearning in yips. Owens meandered around and found what she was looking for above a table of close-outs: a framed photograph of Arthur, shaking hands with Michael Moore. There was no doubt about it. Arthur was Jerry and Jerry was Arthur. Same hair, beard, paunch, contours of the face. He was definitely the man who was with Sarah that night in the diner.
Owens approached the faggot mincing around behind the counter. Red hair, a Jewfro, a name tag that said I’M CAMERON. ASK ME ANYTHING!
“Good morning,” he said brightly. “How can I help you today?”
“I’m an old friend of Arthur’s. Is he around?”
“No, I’m afraid not. He went on vacation.”
“Went with Sarah, did he?”
Cameron smiled at the familiarity. “Yes, as a matter of fact. They took off yesterday.”
“Where’d they go?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”
“Are you sure? We was supposed to get together.”
“Well, you know Arthur,” he said with affection. “That’s the way he is.”
Owens went to her car and waited until closing time. Cameron came out, rolling his ten-speed—what else? She followed him to a coffeehouse—where else? And then to an old adobe apartment building, as funky as the bookstore—of course. She put on a ski mask and latex gloves and followed him as he walked his bike up the stairs. When he opened his apartment door, she said, “Hey.” He turned around. She stuck a gun in his face and said, “Say one word and I’ll shoot you in the mouth.” She gestured with the barrel and they went inside.
“Take anything you want,” he said. “Just don’t hurt Peaches.” Alarmed, Owens glanced around quickly and saw a marmalade cat, sitting on the arm of a chair, twitching its tail.
“Get out your phone,” she said. “Put in the passcode and give it to me.” He did as he was told. “Now stand over there, face the wall, put your hands on your head, and lace your fingers together.” She went through the emails and texts.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Cameron said to the cat, who wasn’t the least bit upset. “Everything’s fine.”
Owens saw what she wanted and pocketed the phone. “Turn around.”
He did. He had that familiar look of impending death. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”
“No, you’re safe.” She threw a vicious right and knocked him unconscious. Peaches yowled and scrambled under the couch. Owens went out to her car and called Walczak.
“Well?” he said.
“They went to Burning Man.”
“Burning Man? What the hell is that?”
You had to drive through Reno to get to Black Rock Desert, where the Burning Man festival was held. A seven-day affair that was way more than a festival. It was an entire metropolis, a pop-up population center on a vast desert plain of nothingness, not a tree, a bush, or a fire hydrant anywhere in sight. The website said it was…a culture of possibility…a network of dreamers and doers. A blogger said it was like Woodstock, the Rose Bowl parade, Halloween night in Hollywood, and the world’s biggest rave all rolled into one. Isaiah had asked Dodson to help and he was happy to get away from Chester fucking Babbitt.
Grace drove at top speed while Isaiah and Dodson looked at photographs of the festival.
“Damn, man, this is some dippy shit right here,” Dodson said.
There were tens of thousands of people gathered in an area as big as San Francisco. Acres of parked cars and RVs were neatly arranged in a huge U of concentric half-rings. Within the rings there were what they called camps. Groups of people banded together to create their own Xanadus of canopies, tents, exhibitions, art installations, performance stages, water dispensaries, and chow lines. The camps had names. 1001 NIGHTS, 17 VIRGINS, VILLAGE NOT FOUND, 7 DEADLY GINS, FIRST BANK OF BRC.
In between the U’s arms was the Playa. An immense space, a desert unto itself, too vast to walk across in the intense heat. Everyone had bicycles or drove some kind
of strange vehicle. Here and there, like bizarre oases, were harem-size canopies, geodesic domes, outlandish sculptures as big as buildings, and structures for which there were no names. An imperial road, wide enough for the Roman legions, led down the center of the U, into the desert and up to the Burning Man: a massive wooden stick figure, 155 feet tall, held upright by steel cables strong enough to withstand the powerful dust storms. It might have been a Nazca line character come to life or a totem for an ancient tribe of islanders, its eyeless gaze looking out over an endless sea of sand. A daunting place to find one woman, assuming Sarah was there at all. Isaiah had no idea how he’d approach it.
As they drove, he glanced at Grace several times, hoping for some sign that things between them were all right, but her gaze never wavered from the road. He wondered what had happened. Was the sex that bad? It didn’t seem to be. From his perspective it was intense, passionate, and beautiful. He thought it might be something else he’d done, didn’t do, said or didn’t say. He hated that he was so inept at this. Okay, maybe she was distracted because they were on their way to find her mother. That had to be it. Who wouldn’t be distracted? He’d stick with that explanation for now.
Dodson called Cherise and reassured her he’d be okay. Even through the phone you could hear her mother saying something about Earl Cleveland never running off to the desert. Dodson and Cherise went on talking about moving into a bigger apartment and taking the baby to the doctor, their closeness and partnership self-evident. Somehow, that raised the tension in the car, as if Isaiah’s needs and Grace’s rejection of them were on full display. They stopped in to get gas and buy bicycles and a bumper rack to keep them on. Isaiah said he could drive and Grace gave him a battened-down smile when they switched seats.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, her voice as blank as the washed-out sky. He took the wheel, and she contented herself watching the blur of drab scenery go by. Fresno, Merced, Stockton.