by Roger Wall
“Thought you were outside of history, huh?”
Nola’s story about outrunning history played in my mind, but I didn’t tell George.
“I understand from Alice that you were looking for your father,” George said. “Or his people down in old Mexico.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What’s it been? Twenty years?”
“Maybe eighteen. I was a baby when they disappeared.”
“It was a bad time, twenty years ago. Attempts to overthrow the government. Government fought back mercilessly. A lot of people were killed. Too many. That’s why we have the amnesty. ‘Controlled regrowth,’ is what they call it.
“There’s no record of them, your folks, only your DNA. Anything could have happened to them. Shot the night they disappeared. Split up and shipped off to work, if they had desirable skills. Died on the job. It’s pointless to look. You’ll never find out what happened.”
We stood, silent on the edge of the garden. The air had become a couple degrees cooler. I gripped two squares in the wire fence. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I could make out the shape of the shrubs.
“Almost twenty years, and your parents haven’t looked for you. Either they couldn’t, didn’t care to, or figured you were dead. If they weren’t dead themselves,” George said.
It never occurred to me that it might be my parents’ job to find me. I always thought it was up to me.
“It’s happened to all of us, Perry,” George continued. “Me, Alice, all the men and women on the wind farm. Every one of us has survived chaos and abandonment, lost family and partners. We’re all orphans. But you have to understand, there’s a place for you here. And you can stay as long as you want.”
I felt the map in my mind shifting. I recalled Otis’s stories about how the continents were once all together and then drifted apart and imagined my mind a miniature Earth. Otis’s stories about my parents flashed by, and I saw my father roping a deer. I felt myself smile and wondered if George noticed, or whether, as I, he was looking out into the darkness at the shrubs and jackrabbits.
Perhaps it is because I am living in civilization now, and not the abandoned natural world, that I have trouble feeling the presence of the singing wolves. I don’t completely understand this world and don’t consider myself completely in it. Working in the garden at the wind farm is nothing like working in the garden at White Earth River. Perhaps because the food I grow is extra, better tasting and fresher than the food everyone ate before, but extra. If we shut down the garden tomorrow, we’d still have vegetables for dinner. Alice would take a package out of the freezer or open a can. Not as good as vegetables from the garden, but vegetables nevertheless. We wouldn’t starve.
Sometimes I regard George and Alice as my parents. They live together, but they aren’t married and don’t share a bed, as Nola and I did and as Otis and Malèna once did. George and Alice are friends. They drink tequila and eat meals together. Sometimes they hug each other, but only as friends. Alice is saving herself for Sunny, her lover, who was relocated to the Center. George, I don’t know if he was married. He hasn’t mentioned a woman, a man, or children, and he looks too old for national reproductive service. George treats me well, as well as Otis did, but I don’t spend as much time with him as I did with Otis.
Alice first told me her story about losing her restaurant and Sunny one day while she was cutting up a basket of onions that I had pulled from the garden. “Imagine,” she likes to say, “if you had ended up in the Center and bumped into Sunny.” I don’t think that either possibility was likely, but I don’t tell her this because the idea of being in the Center seems to please her. She still thinks that someday she’ll be allowed to join Sunny. I would be sorry if she left.
In the evenings while the workers are eating and Alice and George are drinking tequila, I swim in the pool by myself. The pool reminds me of the deep holes in the White Earth River, although the water in the pool looks blue, because of the paint on the bottom and sides, instead of muddy green like the river. When I finish my swim, I sit at the wooden table in my small adobe house.
It’s sited in a grove of date palms, not far from the swimming pool. The dates fall on the ground, and I collect them to eat at night. They’re sweet. The house has a flat roof and is built of a mud mixture. Timbers line the ceiling, as in the cave, and a wooden bed frame and shelf for a lamp occupy one end of the room, a wooden dresser is situated along a wall, and a wooden chair and table are just inside the door. The table and shelf have the same type of lamps on them, a metal rod to hide the wire and a paper shade that dulls the light bulb to yellow. I rarely use the lamps. On the ceiling is a third light, which I discovered just recently. There’s enough space for me to walk back and forth between the bed and the table. Instead of willow mats, a wool rug woven in bright red, white, green, yellow, and black stripes covers part of the floor, which is concrete. A sink and toilet are hidden in a corner behind a screen of three old carved wooden doors hinged together. Eight windows, four sets of two side by side, break up the walls.
Sometimes I imagine my house as being in White Earth River, on the terrace below Windy Butte, instead of the Coachella Valley. If it were, I wouldn’t need electricity; my eight windows and door would surround me with more light than two lamps and a ceiling light could ever provide.
I like to keep the door open, the windows, too, with the curtains pulled back so at night I can look at the stars, the outline of the palms against the dark-blue sky. I listen for birds. A white owl lives in one of the palms. Sometimes it hoots.
Since I cannot build a fire in the house, I turn on the electric light and stare at it. This helps me think about the map in my head, how it is now stretched over the continent to include the five people I’ve known, all of whom have addressed me by a name different from the one my parents gave me, assuming they did name me, which I will never know.
Otis was the only person I loved, truly loved. I think about him every day and worry that I am so far from the juniper that his spirit will never find me. I regret that he died. I regret that we aren’t of the same blood and that I won’t be able to pass his blood on to my children.
I think a little bit about the stranger, but not too much, about how the currents took him to the bottom of the lake, where, as far as I know, he remains. I didn’t see his face, the expression on it, before he slipped below the surface. This bothers me; I don’t know why. I remember how it looked, earlier, when he was struggling to stay afloat: the pain, the sense of not knowing what was happening, the fear. Did he look that way when he went under? Or did he close his eyes? Or open his mouth to speak, only to have water fill his throat? I regret that he drowned, that I wasn’t able to save him. I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted him to leave me alone.
Other than Otis, I think the most about Nola. I suppose I loved her—for the couple of weeks that we spent together, anyway. I have tried to forgive her for leaving me but so far haven’t been able to. And if our lovemaking led to a child, well, that’s all the more reason not to do so. Alice said it is unlikely that Nola would’ve gotten pregnant unless it was the right time of the month. Our last sex, and any semen that Nola may have been able to carry away inside her, was a souvenir, a remembrance, Alice says, nothing more.
Only once has Alice shouted at me and defended Nola. She said that my beliefs about Nola were “naive,” that what Nola had done—offer me a chance to flee to the Center—was noble, and she only left me when she realized that I hadn’t fallen in love with her and was unwilling to give up my self-delusions. “You should have been grateful,” Alice said, “but no, you rejected your chance for a partner, a better life. Meanwhile, think of poor Nola, perhaps alone, maybe with your child.”
I don’t agree with Alice and think her defense of Nola is shaped by her own desire to be with Sunny in the Center. And maybe, too, the fact that she’s a woman and sometimes takes Nola’s side in the story. But I haven’t remained angry with her. I know she cares ab
out me. She’s given me a tablet of paper. “You should write down what happened, so you’ll remember,” she said.
“How could I forget?” I asked. “I remember everything that’s ever happened to me.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “When you get old.”
“But can’t I take medicine?” I explained how Nola’s parents had been extended.
“The government wouldn’t offer that to you,” she said. “So you need a record, for your children or a partner, if you meet someone and stay with them for a long time.”
Alice hasn’t kept a record of her life and says she’s too old to start now. Sometimes I wonder if she’s tired of hearing my story or worries that I’m tired of hearing hers or wants me to include her story along with mine. I suppose a little bit of everyone whom I’ve met will appear in my record. Nola filmed some of our time together with her hedgehog, and I wonder if she can remember me without pictures and movies. Or perhaps she doesn’t bother looking at them anymore. Perhaps she’s forgotten the sound of my voice.
For a long time I didn’t know what to call my story. I couldn’t come up with a fancy title as Otis had done for the story about his fake vision. Alice suggested I call it “During-the-Event,” my name, since it’s a story about me. I guess that’s as good of a title as any.
One thing I have agreed to, which both Alice and George consider “positive,” is to attend the dance the wind farm is hosting. Gaz will be there. Gaz is the woman who delivers chickens to the wind farm. She lives on an agriculture preserve in the Owens River Valley, which is a small farming district. The main region is still the Central Valley, but government planners decided that since Angeles del Este is much smaller than old Los Angeles, not as much water needed to be diverted to the coast. The Owens River Valley has some adequate soil, as it turns out, and its vegetables and animals support the solar facility in the desert east of the Owens River and also our wind farm.
Gaz is short for Gazelle, which isn’t her original name. Her parents named her Jennifer when she was born, but once she was old enough to run, they began calling her Gazelle because she has long legs and is thin and pranced when she ran, like the African gazelle they had seen in nature films, her parents told her. Eventually, she changed her name legally to Gazelle, just Gazelle, no family name.
Alice introduced us one day when Gaz made a delivery. We haven’t spent much time together. She delivers the chickens once a week in late morning. They are already slaughtered, so we can put them in the freezer without further preparation. Once we unload the chickens, it is time for lunch, which Alice lets Gaz and me eat alone together in the kitchen. Gaz grew up on a small sheep farm in the Owens River Valley. Her parents divorced when she was in school. Her mother moved away, but her father stayed on the farm. Gaz was living in another town in the eastern Sierra, Bishop, when the government started to reduce the population of the continent. Her father was spared because he was a farmer, and he arranged for her to work for him. She doesn’t know what happened to her mother. She was living in San Francisco.
I like the fact that she has a name that isn’t her original one. We have this in common. Also, she lost one of her parents. I like talking to her. She’s quieter than Nola was and not as muscular, though she isn’t weak. She can carry a couple chickens in each hand when we unload her truck.
Alice and George think it would be fun if Gaz and I danced together, as a way of getting to know each other better. I told them that the dancing I’ve done alone to grieve Otis’s death wouldn’t be proper to do with other people. They said that no one would know about the story behind my movements and that everyone unleashed their own wild steps when the music started. Then they both laughed and told me to get plenty of rest and drink a lot of water beforehand. They assured me that I was going to sweat. So I am awaiting this. The dance is next Saturday.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many readers critiqued my manuscript over the years, and their comments were invaluable in guiding its revision. I’d like to thank Jan Jaffe; Sybille Pearson, Don Raney, Phyllis Raphael, Louise Rose, and Steve Schrader; Susan Thomas; Greg Hrbek; students at the NY State Summer Writers Institute; Howard Norman; Dan Wigutow and Caroline Moore; Liz Cross; Will Nixon; James Rahn; Louise Fabiani; Alice Peck; Elizabeth Mitchell; and Christopher Rhodes.
Thanks to Andrew Luft and Daryl Farmer and Permafrost Magazine for hosting a literary contest; to Nate Bauer, Dana Henricks, Jen Gunderson, Martin Schmoll, Laura Walker, and Krista West, and the University of Alaska Press for putting it all together; and to Wiley Saichek for helping spread the word.
ROGER WALL
Roger Wall lived throughout the United States before ending up at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied fiction writing. He lives in New York and the Catskills.
During-the-Event is the 2018 Permafrost Book Prize in Fiction.