by Pam Houston
Which reminds me of going to see that dead body exhibit that traveled all around the world; the German guy who talked all those people into leaving him their bodies so he could make mobiles and whatnot out of them. In a glass case was an entire nervous system, a thousand little pathways of neurons and axons and dendrites and glial cells glowing a kind of fluorescent gold, nothing but black air hanging around it and still making the shape of the body.
Ruby and I stood in front of it for a good long while and studied how many nerve endings there were, how they tangled impossibly in the place where the brain would have been and creeped out in every direction imaginable, down to the pinkie finger, the littlest toe.
“No wonder!” Ruby said, at last, and I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
In Hailey’s dream she was interviewing a dog trainer to help her with Ripley, and the trainer said the problem was that she said way too many words to Ripley, that dogs like it better when you communicate with them in one- and two-word commands. In the dream Hailey said, “Is that so? Well have you met my friend Mary Ellen? She not only speaks in complete sentences, she also has excellent enunciation.”
That was the same night I dreamed I woke up and Rick had gone off somewhere, but he had left his cock and balls in bed with me, they were next to my leg, and I could feel something wet and sticky, which made me afraid they had been severed in some painful manner, but then I examined them and realized it was just a normal amount of moisture (they felt a little like the kidneys you pull out of a chicken), and in fact they had simply been unplugged from the urethra, which worked kind of like an iPhone charger, and he would be back to get them soon.
I gave Mary Ellen a sponge bath every day for two weeks, brushed out her hair in the September sun like Aunt Martha on the lawn of the nursing home. She wasn’t ready and then I wasn’t ready and then we were finally both ready on the same day. Doc came out to the ranch and gave her the smallest amount of the drug and she put her head down and went to sleep forever.
At the Acoma Pueblo, in 1629, the Spaniards cut the left foot off all of the strongest warriors to make sure they couldn’t run away, and then made them haul—one-footed—a hundred giant logs ten miles so they could build a Catholic church right on top of the sacred kiva. Today, at the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America, giant white ladders lean up against each mud-brick dwelling, the tops of the ladders pointed to tear holes in the sky so the prayers can get through.
DL #251
THERE IS A SUDDEN crackling sound and a blue light, like something out of a laser gun, flies down the center aisle of the Airbus, then all the cabin lights go out and the oxygen masks drop from the overhead bins. People reach for them, even though there seems to be nothing wrong with the cabin pressure. The man next to me even secures his before helping his young son, proving that some people actually listen to the security announcement.
Where on the continuum I fall, when this kind of thing happens—between Oh please not now that things are finally looking up and Well this sucks but it will sure solve a great many problems—has become my mental health measuring stick in this era of exponentially increased sky traffic, airline bankruptcy and accumulating metal fatigue.
This, I understand, is not at all the same as being suicidal.
We enter another cloud, the blackest so far, and the plane rocks heavily side to side. Two rows ahead, a nun says the Rosary. I hear a woman behind me throw up in a bag.
“Summertime in the Rockies!” booms the pilot’s jolly voice over the mayhem in the cabin. “Most of you probably realize we were just struck by lightning, but what you may not know is that the blast took out our number two engine!”
“He makes that sound like a good thing,” I say to the man next to me who has his eyes closed and is gripping his little boy’s hand. The little boy appears calm, staring out into the heart of the cloud, watching it go light and dark as electricity pumps through it.
“But not to worry,” the pilot continues, “we land these babies with one engine all the time. I am going to have to ask you now to get in the crash position, and if you are lucky enough not to know what that is, you will find it illustrated on the plastic card in the seat pocket in front of you.”
His voice is a ringer for Bob Barker’s. The plane does a belly flop through about 1,000 feet of air and that elicits a scream from almost everybody.
“There’s the ground!” the little boy shouts, and sure enough, we can now see the Salt Lake, the dry mountains, the weird moonscape of a golf course built on a landfill, the largest open-pit copper mine in the world.
The pilot crabs hard against the wind, bending the plane almost perpendicular to the ground, then straightens her out less than ten seconds before the wheels touch. A roar goes up in the cabin. The little boy’s father bursts into tears, two women across the aisle can’t stop laughing, the nun has her head flung back, eyes closed tight.
85. Calistoga, California
In the mud bath, there is a rococo-unpainted-ceramics-style bust of a lady coming out of the wall with a garland of flowers and fruit on her head. The woman in charge of burying me alive is named Evalina, she is at least eighty-five years old and no more than four feet tall. She has a long gray and silver braid and the kind of laugh lines anybody would aspire to. When she holds my hand and walks me from the mud bath to the shower and then again to the mineral claw-foot I feel like a big pink giant beside her. When I get too hot in the mineral bath she comes and sprays icy water on my stomach with a sweet little gleam in her eye.
The palm trees at Indian Springs remind me of the oases in the Tunisian Sahara, which remind me of Bugs Bunny cartoons. You drive for hours across the crusted mineral stains and miraged bands of heat of the Chott el Jerid but inside the oasis it is cool and damp and the air smells like fruitcake. Old men riding tiny donkeys look like centaurs and the birdsong is deafening and every date plantation has its own massive hand-carved wooden door.
Last night, the adorable waiter at Mustards said, “Anything else I can do for you ladies?” And Willow and Practical Karen and I laughed and laughed like three old biddies who had been, for a few hours, let out of the home.
Last time I ate at Mustards was almost twenty years ago and I was having a passionate argument with Ron Hansen and Bob Shaccochis about whether epiphany was a language-based moment or if it occurred, essentially, outside of language, and we sat there for hours, amidst the remains of organically raised lamb spareribs and crab chowder and glasses of big gorgeous wine and I thought, Wow, I am out with the big boys now!
A week ago at the ranch Madison woke me up at four in the morning. I was so sound asleep that she had to push and push and push on my back to rouse me. She said she couldn’t sleep and I know from experience what it is like to be eight and not sleeping.
I got up and we made cinnamon rolls from one of those fancy kits you buy at Williams-Sonoma. I am a good cook but I suck at following directions and I had never used a rolling pin in my life, so it took two and half hours to get them to the point where they could even go in the oven, but that was okay because by the time they were baking, the winter sun was coming over the mountain and we settled in at the kitchen table for a Rat-a-Tat Cat marathon while they baked, and it occurred to me that maybe the real reason I haven’t wanted a child all these years is because when you hurt for them when they are hurting it is the hardest hurting of all.
At lunch at Solbar, our waitress says, “I am sorry, we don’t have a specific menu that lists our nonalcoholic beverages, but if you would like me to I can verbalize.”
After lunch the sun comes out, and Willow and I go for a drive down the Silverado Trail in her rented Mustang convertible. Jackson Browne is singing “The Fuse” and the vines are a month past their prime and backlit. I am thinking about Hass’s reading, thinking about how the older we get the more we’re inclined to simply name the things of the world: a whole valley that smells of grapes fermenting in oaken barrels, the taste of doughnut holes dipped
in coffee-flavored crème anglaise, a great blue heron standing on one foot at the rippling edge of a pond.
I’ve made a new friend at the University named Quinn and at midnight I get a text from her saying half the English department got arrested for protesting the tuition hikes and the police brought riot gear, helicopters, and dogs, and that she and Pony, her brand-new gorgeous Texas-lawyer girlfriend, were spending the night with them down at the klink. The next text says, Did you get a mud bath? Is Mackenzie wearing her miniskirt? These things matter too in this complicated world.
Next to the giant pool at Indian Springs the hot water crashes and crashes up from the ground forever, and during our midnight swim Cinder looks like a beetle on her back with about seventeen water noodles sticking up from underneath her.
“It sounds like a dragon,” Cinder says, “like the dragon who lives at the center of the world.”
86. Thuburbo Majus, Tunisia
We get there by five-thirty and the guy at the gate says, in French, “We are supposed to close at six, but I am the night watchman, so you can stay as long as you want.”
This is how it goes with Roman ruins in Tunisia. Dougga was closed on Tuesdays, but they let us in anyway. In Sbeitla, there was one other couple besides us. Now we walk alone through the Capitolium and the summer baths. The sun is setting and I have to pee so I duck behind a pink marble column that has been rolled off into a hedgerow.
Rick says, “The lack of security is nuts around here. You know there’s got to be coins and artifacts all over the place. You could put anything in your pocket and walk with it. Hell, there’s no fence! You could drive a pickup out here late at night and cart off a column.”
When I was a park ranger at Natural Bridges National Monument, we would get in the mail a couple of small packages a month from people returning the potsherds they had picked up and illegally removed from the park. Some gave specific details about how their lives had spiraled downward since they picked up the potsherds: they lost their job, they lost their woman, their house was swept off the mountainside by a sixteen-foot wall of mud. Sometimes they included a homemade map, asking us to put the potsherds back in the exact place they found them, and I always tried my best to read the map, to get the broken pieces back to the right spot.
At Thuburbo Majus, the night watchman joins us from time to time, helpful but not intrusive. “This is the Temple of Baal,” he says, “the place where they killed all the babies.” He is speaking in French and I am translating.
Rick the ex-Baptist says, “Tell him I know all about the Temple of Baal.”
The night watchman takes us over the ropes to a section of the winter baths where the two-thousand-year-old tile is in perfect condition, textured like a braid, colored in the traditional patterns of the city of Kairouan. In another room, four delicate fish assembled from hundreds of tiny rectangles of colored tiles face inward, their tails indicating the four directions.
It is almost completely dark now, and the night watchman uses his cell phone to light up a hidden carving of Pegasus, and shows us, in the oversimplified shadows of twilight, how the Temple of Mercury lines up perfectly with the Temple of Peace.
Then he takes a clay lamp out of his pocket and puts it into Rick’s hand.
“Roman lamp,” the night watchman says, “14 AD.”
“Take a picture!” Rick says, holding his hand out to me. “Take a picture!”
My camera doesn’t want to take a picture into the pitch dark, but I trick it into working.
“My God!” Rick says. He is as excited as a nine-year-old with a pop gun, so excited he might pee, so excited that I know it hasn’t occurred to him what is coming next.
“Twenty dinar,” the watchman says, coolly, which equals about eleven American dollars.
Rick’s face crumples. He shakes his head, starts saying “No, no, no . . .” under his breath.
Generally speaking, Rick is not a person who cares very much about owning things, but if he were ever going to care about owning a thing, a Roman lamp from 14 AD would be right at the top of the list.
“This is exactly how artifacts leave their country of origin,” I say to Rick in English. “Make sure you really don’t want it before you say no.”
Still shaking his head, Rick hands me the lamp and starts taking big steps toward the exit. The night watchman grabs my arm, imploring in French, S’il vous plaît, madame; I have five children. S’il vous plaît, madame; you must understand I did not dig this up. The rain, madame, it uncovers this thing and I find it accidentally. S’il vous plaît, madame; it is the holiday, et mes enfants ont faim.
He shows me how I can shove the lamp deep in my pocket so that it will not be detected by airport security, Argile! Argile! he keeps saying, a word I don’t recognize, but eventually figure out means clay, as in, not metal, as in, will not make the airport detector shriek.
I am walking with the watchman and nodding, Rick a hundred yards ahead of me, when I look up and see that there is someone with a flashlight at the gate.
Rick stops dead in his tracks. Because Rick is a person who spends his life waiting to be caught at something he might not exactly have done, I know that he is now vividly imagining the next several years of his life in a Tunisian prison.
The man with the flashlight is approaching. I try to give the lamp back to the night watchman but he will not take it. I shove the lamp deep into my pocket. The guy with the flashlight reaches us, and we all say Bonsoir.
We walk in silence back to the gate. I can feel Rick’s heart beating across empty space. The man with the flashlight ducks into the gatehouse for a moment and I seize the opportunity.
“Come out to our car for a minute,” I say in French to the night watchman, and he follows me through the gate. By some miracle, the man with the flashlight does not follow him.
We sit inside the car with the light on and the door open and hold the Roman lamp in our hands. On it there is a figure of a Roman soldier. There is a hole for the wick, and a hole for the air. It is the essence of simplicity. It is made entirely of clay and it is more than two thousand years old.
“Ready?” I say to Rick, and he nods.
I take twenty dinar out of my wallet, and hand it to the night watchman.
“This,” I say, “is for your wonderful guiding. And this,” I drop the lamp into his hands, “belongs here. Merci,” I say. “Bonne chance,” I say. “Bonnes fêtes.”
87. Mount Princeton Hot Springs, Colorado
At Mount Princeton Hot Springs, the master masseuse’s name is Luca, and he is from Austria, but the conversation we have on the way to the treatment room is about Che Guevara. I describe the pain to him in strictly sports-medicine terms: severely degenerated L4-5 disk, acute pain in hip joint, referred pain down the left leg, almost constant. Surgery a nonoption.
Luca works on my shoulder for a while, and I say, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, my shoulder is all jicked up too.”
He says, “These things have a way of revealing themselves,” just before he gets in between my hip and my pelvis with his whole fist in a way that makes me feel, when he is finished, like I have a new hip, and in a way, while he is doing it, that makes forty-seven years of rage fly up to the ceiling in a funnel of black light.
I think of the lesbian performance poet I read with at the Make Out Room last spring, the one who, in two different poems, said the words, “I put my fist all the way up inside you to see if I could actually touch you,” which made me feel a little faint at the time, and not in a good way, and now Luca, with his fist in this place that feels to me at least as personal, says, “You okay?” and I say, “Yes,” and he says, “But just barely, right?”
I had been avoiding Mount Princeton Hot Springs since I read Rick’s therapy journal, in which Rick and Sofree spend a romantic weekend up there and Rick finally gets it up (after a month of debilitating not-yet-ex-wife guilt) and he and Sofree do it for the first time in one of the riverside pools, water droplets sparking off her
nipples like diamonds. But walking around Boulder with unmitigated back pain eventually began to seem like just one more way Sofree is winning. My first post-Sofree Mount Princeton massage was from a stringy sixty-year-old woman who introduced herself as a Fish called Wanda and I only cried once. The second time is Luca.
Later that night I get an email from Sofree that says, Solace now comes in the form of archetypal tales, in the knowing and honoring of what’s true: that Rick and I share this glorious girl child who makes us one in her very cells forever . . .
It is preceded immediately by one from Quinn that says, Flattery is a bad trap for people like us. Our curse is that we’ll do whatever you want us to but then we’ll hate you for it. It’s a kind of wild passivity, rebellious and compliant. It makes people who need REAL docility and FAKE conflict very confused.
Later that night, alone in a riverside pool I try to parce out the subtle differences between paralyzed by jealousy and made irrelevant by circumstances. I think, No wonder I have back problems, I have been holding my stomach in for forty-seven years, and even in a hot pool in pitch darkness, letting it out takes tremendous concentration.
88. Denver, Colorado
When the coldest postseason baseball game in history ends, at half past twelve on a Sunday night, and fifty thousand disappointed frozen silent people funnel out into the empty streets of LoDo, giant clouds of breath forming and rising above their heads like empty thought bubbles, it is hard not to think of Night of the Living Dead. It is hard not to wonder whether we use the small sadnesses in life to avoid or to access the large sadnesses. We will all be back tomorrow night to watch the Rockies lose for the final time this year.
Meanwhile, over at the Pepsi Center, my Colorado Avalanche have changed their mascot from Howler, who was a sort of Abominable Snowman type, a creatured embodiment of an avalanche itself, into Bernie, a cuddly, friendly, Saint Bernard with a little plastic cask around his neck. The change came after Howler allegedly assaulted a female fan wearing a Blackhawks jersey in the parking lot after a game.