Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  It’s about three hours till the big wooden Man gets blazed and I want to be peaking when he topples over into his own funeral pyre. I’ve got no girlfriend obligations, no friends to slow me down, a CamelBak full of filtered water, a dust mask, and warm clothes on.

  Sage put clean bandages on my arm tonight, moments before she decided to take off with her new yoga friends, Dale and Kristin. She was getting ready to leave our tent and I leaned in to kiss her. She pulled away.

  “What?” She’s been hyper-hesitant towards me since our bad time at the rest stop. I can’t figure her out.

  She speaks, carefully, like she’s been thinking about this for our whole vacation. “Well . . . I’m having a strange feeling about you now, like something changed since you got hurt. You looked so scared. You just didn’t look like the guy I thought I knew. And I feel like luck or God or whatever is all that got us out of that place. I don’t think you could have protected me.” She breathed out heavily like she was about to tell me I had terminal cancer. “I just don’t feel safe with you anymore.”

  Sage kissed me on the forehead like I was some lost puppy about to get the gas chamber treatment, and then she stepped out of the tent and zipped it up behind her. If she would have stayed I’d have told her that I don’t feel safe anymore either.

  I’ll try and find her at the center of The Burn tonight. We can straighten things out.

  But first, I’ve got some mushrooms just dying to be ingested. I dig into the Ziploc bag and pull them all out, all the little bright purple stems and caps. Best to eat them quickly, the whole batch at once. They tend to taste like the shit they’re grown on.

  I’m chewing, and they’ve definitely got an earthy taste, but it’s one I can’t quite place, or at least I don’t want to, because the flavor most reminds me of the dust I huffed down when Mr. FBI cut me and pushed me to the ground.

  Stranger still, the wound in my arm begins to throb as I swallow the last bite of fungus. But the throb isn’t my heartbeat. The rhythm is not my own.

  THE DRUMS CAN EAT your blood. The drums can eat your blood. They move in circles. Sing words I can’t understand. Try to melt into the dirt. Try to crawl inside. We are swallowing everything. This whole desert runs on gasoline. We are not separate. All plunder. All rape. We are reptiles. We will eat your children. Keep your drums. Keep them away. Have a blanket, let it soak into you, join the stitches and I’ll skin you alive. Unravel. Consume. Swallow.

  Try to breathe. This dust storm can’t last. I’m surrounded. Can you hear them? Where’s Sage? She’s shrinking away. Gone. I’m cold. I’m naked. Why am I naked? Thirsty. The Man is burning somewhere; I can see the flash of the blaze through the dust, light gone soft in the storm filter. They’re around me. Every direction. I can’t keep them away. I can’t make them BE QUIET!

  This dust is ancient. A wall one thousand feet high, pointing at the moon. He appears like a cloud. The dead are alive again. We were one but you ate us to nothing. Wokova, your dance will bring the flood. Your armor will make us safe. We are all around you. Pull you back through yellow-black. We’ll keep you alive till sunrise and eat your tongue to steal your lies.

  Dancing in circles all around me. The sky is opening up and the spears are raining down. They will eat my heart. The drums are finding their way home. I can’t stop throwing up. I bit my way through my stitches to try and set the drums free. My blood is still pulsing on the ground. Tiny eyes in the soil. Watching. Waiting. Shit. Help me. Sage? If I’m still naked when the sun rises I will be burned black. Burnt to dust. Floating. Breathe me out.

  The land will return. The water will be made of flesh. Wokova is coming. The Earth will breathe again. Wokova is risen. Balance will return. The drums can eat your blood. The drums can eat your blood. The drums . . .

  YOU CAN TRY TO imagine it. You can picture what it must feel like to walk naked back to your camp covered in the dust of the playa, with a bloody arm and your own vomit dried on your chest. You would know how hard it would be to get the well-meaning hippies to leave you alone, to not drag you back to a med tent. Or you could imagine the fear that you see on the faces of people who came here for bliss, the people whose trips you are utterly devastating with your wrecked appearance. You can grasp all that.

  You might even be able to understand what it’s like to hear drums that can’t be real coursing through your bloodstream. You might be able to picture the phantom blurs of bodies dancing in circles around you as you shamble home. Could be a trick of the light, right?

  But is there any way to truly understand what it’s like to unzip the flap to your tent and find the girl you love lying there dead? To understand that she’s gorgeous and naked there, with her legs spread, so much so that you’re instantly aroused despite the fact that her eyes are wide open and staring at nothing and there’s old vomit pooled in her mouth and caked in her flowing hair? When you smell the booze on her breath, the stink of the alcohol that she’d sworn off by oath and will so many years ago, would you know that she’d found something to make her feel safe again? And would you be surprised to find you can only think one word?

  Would you ever understand what it’s like to be there at the foot of the dead, bathed in new sun, whispering the word “Wokova” like a holy prayer?

  .45S COME CHEAP. I’M just glad that Scott’s brother still lived in Aston. His place was an easy stop on the way back towards Kah-Tah-Nee. Even when I was little, Scott’s brother Dean always had crooked guns. No numbers. Said he bought them at truck stops from cranked-out drivers doing a little extra traffic on their long hauls. Didn’t say much more than that.

  Even now, when I show up at his place still covered in dust and withering away inside of a gray velour track suit, he isn’t the talkative type. He notices that my sleeve is crusted to my arm with blood and say he knows a doctor who can fix things without reporting them. I shrug it off. What can I tell him?

  I’d see your doc, Dean, but this open wound is the only thing keeping me from hearing the drums. In fact, it was healing up and I cracked the scab open this morning just outside of Merced on I-5. Didn’t want to see the shapes dancing around my car anymore so I took my house key and raked the wound until the blood started flowing again.

  Nope. I just keep quiet and buy the gun and feel its oil soaking into my skin.

  I’m confused by Dean’s question as I leave.

  “Hey, Darren, don’t you need to buy any bullets for that?”

  I keep quiet.

  THE SIGN TELLS ME I’m now entering the Kah-Tah-Nee reservation and I start to cry. Last time I saw a similar sign Sage was sitting there next to me, sipping on her coffee, planting sweet kisses in the soft spot by my ear. Now she’s gone, cooking away in a little tent in the desert until the wind spreads the smell of her and other campers come calling.

  And I’m back here, smelling gun oil in my nervous sweat and hearing the drums inside my blood. The wound has scabbed over again and the drumming is so loud I’m having a hard time staying focused on the road. I can try and think in the space between the drums, but I keep losing the plot and these words keep repeating in the place of logical thought.

  Wokova.

  Balance.

  Revenge.

  Fifteen miles. Seven. Almost there. These drums are smashing around in my head. I feel heat on my lips and chin and realize I’m bleeding from both nostrils. Bloodshot eyes stare back at me through a vertigo haze that makes me feel like the world is on permanent tilt.

  My body is in the grasp of tremors, shaking to this rhythm that was never mine. The sun drifts behind a mountainous ridge and dusk floats down, spreading gray light across the Sheenetz River. I can see the rest stop. My pulse is the sound of long-dead tribesmen calling down the flood.

  THEY ARE STILL HERE. The men in the shade. But now they aren’t laughing. Can they hear the drums too? Apparently Mr. FBI is their permanent mouthpiece for tribal affairs, because he’s stepping forward with his box cutter in hand and saying, “Man, you get in
an accident or something? You deaf? I told you not to come back to our place.”

  The drums are so loud now. Can they see me shaking? With the sun gone there is no more shade, just dim light and dark shapes. I feel a drop of blood slide off my chin. The four-hundred-pounder shouts out from beside the tree.

  “You lose your pussy somewhere, little man?”

  I raise the gun up with my ravaged arm. They register it quickly and appear more angry than scared. I level off at Mr. FBI and he doesn’t flinch. I’m not the first sick white man to aim a gun at him. He’s resigned to it. He looks straight at me with his one focused eye.

  “Pull the trigger, man. Because when you do, my friends will fucking kill you, and I’ll be free.”

  The dancers are around me now. They’re surrounding Mr. FBI and I, and they seem real. The drums get louder, too loud, and I grind my teeth together and I can feel the enamel cracking, my teeth splitting down the middle and now there’s this pain that accompanies each beat of the drum, this soaring red fire that courses up my gut every time another invisible hand falls to a skin pulled tight, and there’s only one way to make this stop before it tears me to shreds.

  Wokova. Balance. Revenge.

  They watch me as I lift the hand that isn’t holding the gun and plunge the fingers into the wound on my forearm. I’m scraping. I’m digging. Get the sound OUT.

  The wound opens and instead of dripping to the ground the blood sprays out fast, too fast, and too much of it, forming this thin mist that spreads quickly through the air.

  We are all in it now. The dancers. The Indians. Whoever I’ve become. We are all standing in this red mist, breathing in the drums. We are breathing my blood, our lungs pulling a lost pulse from the sky.

  Wokova. Balance. Revenge.

  REVENGE.

  I aim at Mr. FBI’s head and pull the trigger on the .45. His good eye goes wide as the hammer falls on nothing.

  Click.

  I pull the trigger five more times, letting each empty click echo through the sound of the drums.

  Revenge is here. And it is theirs.

  They are upon me in seconds, all of them. The sound of the drums, the mist we are breathing in, the sight of the gun, all of it has brought forth an old rage. Not anger and booze and cheap, easy hate.

  Rage.

  Box cutters become talons. Fists become great stones. Their ancestors dance around us while they consume me. My teeth crack against smooth river rock. They float away, broken bits of white bone flowing over red clay. A fist grabs the front of my dusty mohawk. Claws enter my scalp at the top of my forehead and then I feel fingers sliding under my skin and pulling up, pulling back. I can feel them sawing it free and my head drops down to the river stones as the men raise my scalp in the sky. They drink the blood that drips from the shank of skin and hair. They are chanting a name. Wokova. Bringing a flood to cleanse the Earth.

  Mr. FBI is chewing at the back of my neck, tearing at the skin with his few remaining teeth.

  They are becoming as hungry as we are.

  And I can see by the light of the new moon that the waters of the old river are rising fast.

  States of Glass

  The Caller ID reads “Unknown” but the man on my phone says he’s with the Thurston County Coroner’s Office in Washington. I know precisely zero people up North so I peg the call as a prank or a particularly grim dialing error.

  Darry is travelling on business, but I spoke with him this morning. He was fine.

  Mistakes like this happen every day, right?

  I can smell my breath on the phone, stale hints of cinnamon toast and mimosas light on the orange juice. The voice on the other end continues to intrude into my lazy afternoon, verifying my name is Elloise Broderick, and the sunshine coming in through the kitchen window suddenly feels too hot on my skin. That heat and the tone of the voice create a flash-fever in my belly that spreads quickly to my fingertips. I can imagine flowers wilting next to that warmth, petals curling, dropping.

  Delirium. The blood in my head whirlpools down, a tornado spinning out of existence, rendering me transparent. So when the voice on the phone says, “I’m sorry to inform you that your husband has been in a fatal traffic accident,” it’s easy to imagine that the “you” being addressed is someone else, maybe someone standing directly behind me, someone older, someone who has three kids and a half-paid mortgage.

  Not that the statement regarding the death of that other husband will hurt that person less. But it would seem, at least, appropriate. More real. Because my husband’s not dead. Can’t be. I’ve only had him two years since last October. The expiration date for a guy like him is so far off that I can’t even conceive of it.

  “You” could, though. The “you” being addressed on the phone has had her share of life, with its troubles, even its deaths. She isn’t the one with weekend bar-hopping plans and a yellow plastic cell phone in her hand that feels sweaty and toy-small. She isn’t the one getting nauseous, eyeing the distance to the kitchen sink because her belly might evacuate its contents. “You” understands mortality, may even have found some strange peace accord.

  Mistakes like this, I’m sure they happen all the time. That’s why I ask the misguided voice on the phone if I can see the body.

  Static, then a hesitant, “Yes . . . actually we are required to have someone, family or friend, identify the body, to satisfy coronial procedure. But you may not want to be the one who does this. The accident was high velocity, and the body . . . ”

  Then he’s telling me about the condition of this body that’s not Darry’s; how useless the dental records will be in the absence of, you know, teeth. He details the projected speed of impact, the rain on the roadway, the delayed response from authorities that allowed physical evidence to be dispersed by passing traffic.

  Even finger-printing is a lost option. The poor bastard that they think is Darry tried to shield his face on impact. His delicate, thick-veined hands are as much a part of the interstate landscape as his well-bleached enamel.

  Crow’s breakfast, all of it.

  His teeth now tucked in SUV tire treads, chewing up pavement.

  If he didn’t have his mind on the road before, well . . .

  I’d caught a bad case of gallows humor during my short-lived stint at the Windy Arbor elder care facility. An old man named Percy Heathrow caught me weeping in a storage closet, sorry little red-faced me unable to handle the sight of all these intentionally forgotten people slogging away their last years. He called me over. I came forward, chugging back snot and wiping the corners of my eyes with the inside of balled fists. He didn’t say anything, but his knobby hands floated down to his waistline and lifted up his shirt. I thought I was about to get perved on. Instead I saw a fresh colostomy bag hanging from the side of his belly, “SHIT HAPPENS” written on the plastic in black felt-tip.

  That got me through the week; that moment where Percy and I were in on the cosmic joke. Since then my humor’s veered obsidian black. So somehow my face harbors a misplaced smile even as this coroner dumps details.

  The kind of wreck Darry’s been in is called a “rear under-ride.” This is what happens when a car hits the back of a semi-trailer and keeps going. The Freehoff trailer Darry didn’t brake in time for acted like a guillotine on tires. Darry’s death would have been instantaneous.

  Because it’s not really Darry we’re talking about, I laugh quietly at this part. The voice on the phone said “instantaneous” like auto-dealers say “zero down,” like it’s a blessing. Like this guy they think is Darry died so quick, he might just come back.

  This information is conveyed in the programmed, caring polite-speak of someone who talks death all day. It’s me applying the realities, putting sauce on the steak. I remember a semi-snuff video Darry had me watch with him, how at the moment this hapless Russian girl got hit by a train she turned from a moving, breathing person to a flying sack of tissue and bones and nothing else. I’ve seen that side of death. I’m de-sanitizing
this whole affair. Easier work for the brain than coming to grips.

  “There are a few tattoos, Mrs. Broderick, that we believe could assist in the identification process.”

  I pictured Darry, home from getting his second tattoo, showing off the still-bleeding black cursive lines between his shoulder blades. There it is, stuck under his skin, my name marking him forever, more than any ring—Elloise. I’d run my fingers through the soft, warm ointment coating it and felt the abraded ridges where his skin had been torn by needles. This feeling, I think of it later, months later, while I’m masturbating. It helps me finish.

  I prefer those tattoos that look like Japanese tapestries—dragons and whirlpools, ornately-scaled fish. But I couldn’t argue with the intensity of seeing my name trapped under his skin.

  His first tattoo, some random black tribal band encircling his left arm, he had that before we met. The kind of mark that binds you to the Tribe of Other Dudes Who Think That Shit Looks Cool.

  His phrase for it was, “Purely aesthetic.”

  My response—”But it looks stupid.”

  We never spoke on it again. Verboten, you could tell from the silence following my comment.

  Yes, I know his tattoos.

  I ask for the address of the morgue before the voice can say anything else about identifying ink. The address is in Olympia.

  Darry’s “Introduction to Data Marketing” conference was in Olympia too, downtown, just off the water. Maybe I’d visit him at his hotel after I told the people at the morgue that I’m sorry I couldn’t be of assistance. Wish them the best of luck, offer telegrammed sympathies to “you.”