by Pam Houston
Rick said, “I just hope their unsophisticated understanding of metaphor doesn’t wind up costing them any games.”
When I get out of my postgame shower Rick says, “You mean not drying off is a personal philosophy?”
I say, “I don’t mind having the towel near me, or even around me. I just don’t like to make the drying motion per se.”
He says, “Well what if you are late to go somewhere?” and I show him by shaking all of my limbs around like a dog.
The next night, out at Improv with Ruby, the comic who draws the occupation plumber, sings, “And even though my hands smell funny, I’m makin’ a shitload of money . . .”
In Tunisia, driving from Thuburbo Majus to Sidi Bou Said, back and forth under the still-standing Roman aqueduct, Rick said, “You know the next German who comes around at closing time is going to wind up with that lamp,” and I said, “Sure,” and he said, “There was probably a way to get it through security,” and I said, “Probably so,” and he said, “But the thing is, if you have a Roman lamp on your mantel that you paid a Tunisian night watchman eleven bucks for, you are pretty much an asshole, and if you sell it to some museum in Sweden for ten thousand dollars you are an even bigger asshole than that.”
89. Sedona, Arizona
The bottles I pick for my Aura-Soma reading are called The Puppeteer, Humpty Dumpty, Titania, and New Beginnings for Love. This is out of more than a hundred bottles, with a German woman named Nadira watching, getting ready to tell me what they mean. Nadira is beautiful, tall, slim, fierce and soft at the same time. We sit in a room with the bottles on a table between us. Outside the window, the cottonwood leaves against the canyon walls look like flame.
The Puppeteer is gold on the bottom and purple on top and means I am both wise and fearful and that I have been put into the fire many times like an ingot of gold, Nadira says, in her thick accent, and have come out each time a higher carat. If I buy this bottle for sixty-eight dollars and rub the oil inside it all along my hairline and my abdomen, I will free myself from codependency, overcome emotional naïveté, and ease shoulder problems. It may also allow me to establish access to incarnations in ancient Egypt.
Humpty Dumpty is the problem bottle, orange over orange, and its main theme is shock and all its consequences. I gather from Nadira’s expression that picking this bottle is a lot like picking the Death card in Tarot or the Coyote in Medicine Cards, and she tells me that if I buy this bottle for sixty-eight dollars I must apply it in a very specific way: around the entire abdomen; also from the left earlobe to the left shoulder in a small band downward. Then, beginning under the left arm, in a wide band down the whole left side of the trunk to the ankle. Doing this every day until the bottle is empty, Nadira says, will help me recover from disappointment resulting from spiritual deceit (such deceit, after all, she says, puts the soul into a state of shock) and gallstones.
Titania is clear on the bottom and turquoise on the top, and it’s all about clarity and artistic expression, which is nice because it is the right-now bottle and the other two are from the past. If I buy the Titania bottle for sixty-eight dollars and rub the oil all over my chest until it is gone it will allow me to release deep blockages, especially if they are related to the inability to speak about spiritual matters, reduce stage fright, and alleviate any problems I am having with implants.
“Implants?” I say to Nadira, thinking I have misheard, and she smiles prettily and draws her hands across her ample chest.
The future bottle is pink on the top and green on the bottom, and just when I am wondering whether new beginnings for love means Rick or some person even newer than Rick, Nadira says I should probably try to start with self-love first. If I pay sixty-eight dollars for this bottle it will enable recognition of the love that is already in my life, balance giving and taking in the love area, relieve all heart conditions, especially those of a psychosomatic nature, and help to cope with the impression of being a male in a female body or vice versa.
“I am so happy for you with zis reading,” Nadira says, clapping her hands together. “I feel that now you are going to have a really great life!”
90. Creede, Colorado
The doctor isn’t taking new patients so I agree to see the doctor’s assistant called Chip who is short and wearing hiking boots. When he asks why I am there, I show him the little spot that is flaking repeatedly off my face, and say, “Also, I have been in the sun my whole life.”
Chip says, “I don’t know you well enough to call you alligator face.”
I say, “That’s true.”
He looks at my face with his big lighted magnifying mirror and says, “There is one thing I have to tell you before we go any further and that is that I don’t cut on the face.”
I think, Well, I hope not, since you are not even a real doctor, but say, “How come?”
And he says, “Because the face is way too precious.” Then he says, “Now, if you are a really good friend of Kim’s, she might cut on your face.”
Kim is the real doctor. I am not her really good friend. I say, “I thought it was supposed to work the other way around.” Then I say, “Does that mean you think this thing is something?”
He says, “Oh, it is definitely something. It is definitely something all right. And let me tell you, if it is melanoma, then this is the very worst place to have it.” He makes a triangle with his hands on my face. “We call this right here the zone of death. Everything that is happening here is draining straight back to the brain, straight back to the brain, even as we speak.”
“Even as we speak,” I say.
I leave the office and go back to the ranch and call the Denver Skin Clinic and make an appointment with a real dermatologist. Five hours of driving later, she looks over every inch of my body and gives me a clean bill of health.
Two days later, back at the ranch, I am in the big red claw-footed bathtub and out in the living room I hear Colt talk Rick into opening up his computer so Colt can show him his most recent love connection on eHarmony. Colt has no computer, but he goes in early to use the one at work before anybody else gets there. Tassie has kicked him out again and this time she has moved in with a volunteer fireman.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” I hear Colt say, over the boot-up sound of Rick’s machine. Rick has never seen an Internet dating site, nor a blog, nor a Facebook page—he doesn’t even know how to text. I have already been shown the woman Colt calls Oklahoma City. She has posted ten pictures of herself on the site. She is a big girl—a horsewoman, says Colt—with round shoulders and massive, possibly enhanced breasts, and in all ten pictures she is wearing one or another halter top, two of them covered in gold lamé.
When Colt showed me the photos, I said, “Hmm. Wouldn’t you think she would have wanted to mix it up a little? One or two shots in her riding gear, or some sort of work attire?” and Colt looked at me as if I was even dumber than he thought.
“So?” he says to Rick, and I hold very still in the tub.
“Gosh,” Rick says, “she sure looks like she wants to have sex.”
“Well, I hope so,” Colt says, some mixture of defensiveness and confusion in his voice.
91. Wupatki, Arizona
There is so much wind coming out of the blowhole it is difficult to stand against it, but I try, for several minutes, up on the little metal grate that covers it, letting it tangle my hair and tear tears from my eyes. The air that is coming out smells cave-y and tastes like somebody else’s mouth, a little like in college, when your boyfriend would do a bong hit and then breathe it into your mouth, a kind of pot mixed with saliva mixed with Sysco Pizza taste.
Geologists say the earth cracks are tectonic in origin, formed over millions of years as the Colorado Plateau region buckled and stretched in response to plate movements. They got bigger over time because limestone dissolves in water. In the Second Mesa village of Shungopavi, the Hopi believe that the blowholes are openings to the wind god Yaponcha, and frankly the
ir story seems like the better one, because sometimes they blow out and sometimes they suck in and sometimes they just sit there like any other hole in the ground.
Today, though, the Wupatki hole sounds like the Earth is hopping mad and getting ready to do something about it, or like it’s releasing one giant breath that goes on forever or at least until the barometric pressure changes, when, according to the brochure, the hole will begin to suck.
The sun is setting on the nine-hundred-year-old pueblo above the blowhole, and I ask Rick what he is thinking about and he says, “How for the people that lived here, woman and earth crack meant the same thing, and how that really just echoes the argument between Plato and Aristotle.”
I think, Hmmmm, because it would seem to me that if you were inclined to draw some kind of line in the sand you would probably put the Native Americans on one side and Plato and Aristotle together on the other, and I say so, and Rick says, No, Plato is on the side of the Native Americans because he locates the ultimate reality inside what we would call a metaphor, and Aristotle thinks the metaphor is just something extra we have added on.
“So for Plato,” Rick says, “that tree is only a kind of washed-out copy of the thing that is tree-ness. And a painting of that tree is just a copy of a copy. The people are less important than the tree-ness, which you only get to when you die.”
We are back on the road, driving the twenty miles from Wupatki up under the cloud cap to Sunset Crater, where the landscape is gray and burnt. Cinder cones and lava flows line the roadway and the sky is spitting snow. One day between 1040 and 1100 this mountain blew its top, and very shortly after, the ancestors of the Hopi started building Wupatki. Maybe they were drawn by the volcano, or maybe they knew the ash would be good for crops, or maybe they just liked living on a part of the earth so alive that it breathed and belched and smoked and hurled flaming rocks at them without warning.
Rick’s got a master’s degree in philosophy and religion and I know very little about Plato and even less about Aristotle, but I am often propelled into arguing with him by something desperate and intuitive, so I say, “But the Native Americans were tree-ness, weren’t they? And sky-ness and mountain-ness? Wasn’t that the whole point for them, that everything was possible here?”
To my surprise, my nonlogic gives Rick pause, and then, as is often the case, I find out we had really, all along, been talking about Sofree.
“You must understand,” he says, “that I trusted the Universe fully. I decided for the first time ever not to watch my back. I jumped in with both feet and the Universe let me down.”
I want to say, I think that only works visa versa. I want to say, What self-respecting Universe would ever tell anybody not to watch his back? I want to say, None of this would make any sense without suffering. What I do say is, “It would be a pity if Sofree’s enticing you into sticking your dick in her became evidence against the Universe’s benevolent nature.”
“But what if truth is a woman?” reads a single-line chapter in Cliff Parker’s manuscript, and I wrote in the margin, “If it is, it isn’t this woman.”
But sometimes. Sometimes I am seized with a love surge so big and overwhelming for Rick and his sweet round red face and his freckled hands and even more than that his try, a try so big and shot through with so much doubt that it threatens to take him down at the exact same time it propels him forward, it is all I can do not to fall down with the force of it.
“You’re the big story here, Pam,” Rick says, on the one-mile Lava Flow loop trail. “It is quite possible that you have saved my life.”
92. Lucas, Kansas
If you pay ten extra dollars you can see Dinsmoor himself, seventy-five years dead and well on his way to skeleton-hood, his teeth pushing forward like the oldest horse imaginable, his wire-rimmed glasses growing in proportion to his shriveling eyes.
Dinsmoor married his first wife on horseback and his second, who was fifty-nine years his junior, in 1924, just after his eightieth birthday.
Forget the World’s Largest Ball of Twine; forget the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things. Forget every one of Dinsmoor’s two hundred larger-than-life concrete sculptures like the one of Adam and Eve where Eve offers Adam an apple of friendship beneath the Devil, five frolicking concrete children, and two love storks. It is the corpse that we will remember, that we will contemplate, on the long haul across Nebraska, or in our dreams, like the one I had the other night, where a woman—some woman—was it Cliff Parker’s woman? —was driving.
It was one of those earthquake dreams like I always have, where the ground turns into that ribbon candy you used to see at Christmas, the same pretty colors. What usually happens is that I am in some kind of sweatshop—maybe a garment factory—with all of these women from Africa and South America, and when the floor starts to change into ribbon candy, one of them says, “Don’t worry, it’s only an earthquake,” and I can see that there really is no reason to worry, that the whole point of an earthquake is to learn to ride it out.
But in this dream I couldn’t ride it out because this woman, whoever she was, had stolen my car, with me, and maybe even Rick and Madison, inside it, and I had to wrestle her to the floor of the car and pry her hand open, and I remember quite clearly saying, “Give me the keys, you crazy bitch.” But when I looked into her face it was Dinsmoor’s face, with the skin mostly gone and a shriveled-up apple inside the mouth, which was a nice addition, I thought, on the part of my dream life, because there had been no apple inside of Dinsmoor’s actual dead mouth, but you can see how if there were it could have been his idea of a joke, or a metaphor. That maybe, in death, he would finally taste the total apple-ness of an apple, which, as I understand it, is what Plato meant by entering the realm of the forms, or at least what Plato meant according to Rick.
93. Creede, Colorado
It snows so hard I can’t see the barn for a while. Twenty-four inches fall in eighteen hours, and then it takes a break for the day and drops another twelve inches overnight. At three in the morning there are wind gusts up to 60 miles an hour, rattling the house so hard it wakes me.
I am imagining the drifts, and the horses unable to get behind the barn, so I get up and spend the hours until daylight on Weather Underground, thinking maybe I can somehow help the horses by following the track of the storm in excruciating detail online, and keeping up on snow depths at unmanned weather stations all over the state.
At first light I brave the blizzard and head for the barn and there they are, all wild-eyed and fuzzed up against the wind, giant icicles hanging from their manes and tales and tiny ones from their eyelashes. I dig out the barn door and double up on the hay, give them some grain too, the low-carb kind on account of Deseo’s diabetic condition, make sure Roany hasn’t (as he often does) plucked the defroster out of the horse trough with his teeth.
When I get done with the horses, I build a snow kiva before it gets dark in one of the big drifts in front of the house. It is perfect to sit in and look at the mountains. It fits only me and has the exact right slant to be comfortable on my back. Also, it keeps the wind out, and makes me feel like a sled dog when I am inside it.
I realize that I have built the snow kiva, without thinking about it, on the very spot where Mary Ellen spent her last days. Janine would say Mary Ellen is one of the people who are helping me now, and she wouldn’t even mean it as a joke.
I take a nap on the couch with Liam and feel considerably better for it. It took him a year to learn to wag his tail and two to learn to lift his third leg into the 4Runner, but what he wants most in every situation is to be told how to be a good boy.
I get an email from Quinn that says, For whatever reason, someone at 96.9 FM has decided “My Sweet Lord” is a Christmas song and keeps playing it every other hour, in between “Santa Baby” and Mannheim Steamroller, and whoever that person is gets my sincerest thanks.
Alone here for two weeks I’ve taken to screaming at commercials, like the one that goes, “
What red-blooded American male would walk out on a football game to replace his normal headlights with Bridgestone [or whatever] FogMaster headlights . . .” and the punch line after lots of information about 25 percent more brightness is when the twenty-something daughter comes out of the house and he chucks her the keys it goes, “A man who knows it is easier to replace headlights than it is to replace a daughter.”
“Why can’t she replace her own goddamned headlights?” I scream at the TV. And, “So his red-blooded American maleness is suddenly reinstated because he has a daughter who has no mechanical skills?” This is how I can tell I am getting cranky.
Remember Jude? The Division I hockey player whose mother committed suicide four months after his brother died and four months before his father went to jail? His father took his own life just last Tuesday, another airport parking lot fatality, this time DFW. He jumped from the top deck, which is only five stories, lived almost all the way to the hospital, but not quite.
When someone jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge, the official code name for it is a 10-31. When someone throws himself in front of a BART train, they call it a trespasser incident, as in lead us not into temptation. Of the roughly thirteen hundred people who have tried to commit suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, twenty-six have lived. Most of those twenty-six have been willing to talk about it afterwards and they all have said some version of the same thing: As soon as my hands left the railing, I wanted more than anything to change my mind.
When Luca finished working the muscles that connect my pelvic bone to my sternum and wrapped me in the sheet in such a way that he could lift me into a sitting position with one fluid motion and no effort whatsoever on my part, he said, in his heavy Austrian accent, “Pam, have you ever considered there may be an emotional element involved in your back pain too?”