by Olivia Clare
“Little girl, that star on your forehead shakes when you sing,” he says after the first set. He tips me a roll of toilet flush coins. Goodyman loves Irving Berlin.
There have always been two intake pipes, two straws, they call them, from Lake Mead to Las Vegas, shuttling water. Then the lake water began to leave. To save us, when the water sank below the first straw they made plans to bore a tunnel for a third pipe. Water, dear to us as holy water to a pilgrim.
Indoor water was recycled. The population increased. Water for outdoors was a luxury. Within three months, the county pulled up all the residents’ grass. I have never needed green more than when it left me.
Pools were drained. Selling grass seed was illegal. Casinos lobbied to keep grass and water for landscaping, for precious golf courses; they needed it, they said, for the economy. Then Lake Mead, which we took for granted, sank below the second pipe. Plans for the tunnel they’d been hoping to build failed: there were delays and barriers; the project never happened.
It was cost-efficient to decrease the population, we were told. But they couldn’t make us leave. The state took over water companies. By law, meters were installed on all residential faucets and showers. On faucets and toilets in public bathrooms, too. We were allowed 7,000 units every two weeks at home. A glass of water was 175 units; a bath, 6,000. Next year, they said. Wait until next year. Next year will be worse.
Isaac and I tried to calculate things. They must ship water in from Lake Powell, charging much more than it cost. They wanted us out. Living in a desert would lay us bare. Half the population left; businesses relocated. So many neighborhoods abandoned; we were a ghost town in a living country. But Vegas has more tourists. The spectacle draws them to us.
Isaac and I have a game called Then What.
“Then what happens? When the water’s all gone?” he says.
“They’ll ship us out to space,” I say. “We’ll live on a pod. Just Vegas.”
“Then what?”
“I’m leaving you for the first pro poker player I find,” I say.
“And then?”
“We’ll have a kid we’ll name Max Bet.”
“No, really,” he says.
“I told you,” I say. “Venice.”
Willa comes two nights later, with an old-fashioned trunk as big as me, several tote bags, a laundry basket full of clothes and hats, a box of books. She takes the first month’s rent check out of her bra and hands it to me. Her room has a bed with a stained mattress, sheets, a bookshelf, last year’s calendar. The first thing I do is adjust the Faucet Meters in the bathroom and kitchen: our quota’s more than what mine alone was.
She goes to the kitchen and makes herself a small glass of water. The red digits on the Faucet Meter go up by one hundred.
“It’s okay,” she says. She looks at me. “Promise.”
We bring the Meters to the Water Center every two weeks. As roommates, we have sixteen thousand units per week. Eight thousand units each. If you have less on your Meter than your allotment, you get cash back. If you go over, there’s a fine. Go over three times, they turn off your water for a month. Willa drinks two long swallows. I hear water shuttling down. All those units gone down her throat.
“You look nervous,” she says. “Are you a nervous person? It’s something I should know, if we’re living together.”
“Sometimes,” I say. “Like everybody.”
“Oh, honey,” she says, watching me. “That’s not like everybody.”
We sit on the couch. It’s a strange apartment, large and shabby. Comfortable. Tape on cracks in the windows, a worn sofa and a couple of armchairs. I love living this way, economical and a little rustic. I’ve been here two years.
Willa’s dark blonde hair falls straight around her neck over that long gash she covers with makeup. Sun-spotted skin beneath her eyes. There’s a green eye tattooed on her wrist—a garnet-sulfur eye under her bracelets. She has on a cropped leather jacket. She is palpably sad and talkative, about a boy she just left. Packed up her things in her station wagon and came here, she says. Her hands reveal her; she doesn’t know where they should go.
“He was giving too much,” Willa says. “He didn’t have a job for a long time. He used to work for the Water Center before it was taken over. He gave so much that I didn’t know what he had for himself. Have you felt like that ever?”
“Sure,” I say. “At some point, probably.”
“I ended up sorry for him.” She laces her hands in front of her chest and holds them there for a second, solid, composed. “You know how that happens?”
I don’t; it seems unnecessarily complicated.
“We should get you a drink,” I say. “A drink drink. To celebrate you coming.”
“And some more water?” she says.
“Really? More?”
“Oh, god,” she says. “You’re a worrier. I could tell.”
Of course I’m not. Speaking of water, I say, I’m not bathing every day, and of course I don’t think she should.
“Honey, that’s gross,” she says.
I go to the kitchen and fill her water glass half full and open two beers. She loves to talk. She recites her horoscope. She says she once had a dream about sex with a wolf, and there are more details, but she won’t say what. Once she lived in Tonga for three months and worked for her grandfather’s company, pollinating vanilla plants. My parents are elementary school teachers, I tell her. And everyone has strange dreams.
Goodyman works for the state, so he says. He’s promised me a deal at the Southern Nevada Water Center. Three thousand more units, at least, in lieu of a tip. He’s drunk when he offers deals. He’d say anything to get things he wants. I mention this to Willa in the morning, and she makes herself another glass of water. He wants to fuck you, she says. He despises me, too, I say.
I have a work permit that means, should the time come, they won’t make me leave. I entertain on the Strip, I’m a commodity. I could sing waterless if I have to. Willa says her father was in the army, that veterans’ families get privileges, too. She’s moved in with two secret plants, black market ferns, and she waters them every two days. A man sells them in a tent in the lot behind Atomic Liquors.
“I didn’t even see you bring these in.”
“Look, it’s completely fine,” she says. “I need things growing. I need green. Otherwise, I just can’t. Nothing works. I’ve got no life without them.”
As soon as the words leave her, I feel they are mine. I tell her that this is what I’ve thought, have always thought. Green. Her ferns are shining, clean. Greener at their centers than I’ve seen. Ours now, I want to say.
I bring out my state-approved cactus.
“Susannah,” she says. “You little devil. Let me show you what else I’ve got.”
She brings a compact rectangular pot of soil, a tiny herb garden. Six herbs, including mint and parsley and tansy, ragged leaves like worn pages cocked down to the soil, near dead from stale air. An occult scent I never knew. Healing and hot.
“The fern man in the tent had it,” Willa says.
“They need water,” I say. “Lots and lots and lots of water.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” Willa says. “Let’s water the hell out of them.”
I make a small, high-pitched noise, a squeal I’ve never heard come from me. This is what I wanted without knowing. And I do it, I do it, a whole glass. Slowly at first, then all of it. If the Water Center fines us, we’ll drop the cash on the desk and leave. I’ve seen others do it. I’ve seen people throw green bills in state employees’ faces. Willa takes off her bracelets to run her hands under the water. The green tattooed eye on her wrist winks at me. She bends until her head drops down to the faucet to drink from it. She is wild as any green I might imagine she owns.
“Damn it, bring your ferns, too,” I tell her.
&
nbsp; “Yes, ma’am.” She salutes.
I give them water, and now we’re greedy. Bright streams of green unlock. We promise—we write on a piece of paper, we sign: “We will water them every day.” I line up our plants on the counter. I make myself a glass of water. Our garden smells of salty, green life. I break off the tip of a mint leaf and eat it. This is the way you see into: Eye of water. Eye of mint. Out the kitchen window, no clouds. Clouds are rare.
“You’ll have to water them, mostly,” I say. “When I’m working, I’m not here much.”
“When do you bring the Meters in?” she says.
“Tomorrow.”
“Watch this.” She takes another sip of water, pours the rest of the glass down the drain.
“What the hell,” I say.
“You’re panicking,” she says. “I knew you were one of those types.” She turns on the faucet and lets it run.
“What are you doing?” I lean over and put my hand on top of hers, twist the knob to off.
“Fucking with you,” says Willa. “You haven’t noticed? You haven’t even noticed. I rigged it.” She turns the kitchen faucet on again. Then she turns it on higher, to full blast. The red digits on the Meter move up by one.
“I rigged all the Meters,” she says. “The shower, too. Every hundred units, it’ll move up only one.”
“A hundred to one?”
“Something like that,” she says. “Maybe ninety. Eighty-five. Crazy, right?”
“When’d you do this?” I say, putting my hand in the stream of water.
“Last night. When you went in your room.”
“Will they find out?”
“Nope. I’ve done it before. At my old place.” She’s happier than I’ve seen her. My giver of water. “My ex showed me how.”
I tell her I am so happy. My Willa, my water. I tell her over and over. I’m drunk on mint. I tell her: I grew up in New Hampshire, with green all around. My father stayed in his study in the evenings, my mother downstairs at our piano, me in my room at my laptop and phone. We were a family of objects more than we were humans. My mother’s sheet music, the sound of my father’s door closing: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Meals or a concert together. A plain life, yet so much to have. A collection of isolated acts. And our yard was greener than green, and when I sit in my yard of rock here, all I can do is will it green.
When Isaac comes over, I tell him what’s happened. We can both shower after sex, not just use the sink. And he does, showers for three minutes, the water hitting his body, soft as hands. In the living room, Willa reads a magazine on the couch and drinks water. I introduce them. He sits with her. I bring us both glasses of water.
“Oh, we’re doing this now?” he says. “Drinking whenever?”
“We’re doing this,” says Willa. “We’re really doing it.” She holds up her water. “To the good stuff!”
“To Meters and people who fuck with them!” Isaac holds up his glass.
Something in Willa gets excited by him in the room. I see it. I’m prettier, I decide in a juvenile moment. I’m what he likes, brunette, curvy, petite, and Willa’s blonde and willowy. He’s wearing that T-shirt of the band I don’t know.
We tell Willa about Then What. We’ve never told anyone. Willa, what happens when the water’s gone?
“Mexico,” she says.
“Then what?” I say.
“And then we find a pool. We sit at the bottom and open our mouths.”
“We could do that lots of places,” says Isaac. He puts his full water glass down on the carpet. I wonder if he doesn’t know how to bring himself to drink it.
“By the time I got here,” I say. “They’d already drained the pool and hot tub.”
“Well, yeah,” says Willa. “How much money do you think they’re going to let you swim in?”
She tells Isaac her dream about sex with the wolf and comes to the part where she stopped before.
“The rest will disgust you.” She looks at me. “Susannah will judge me.”
“How do you know that?” I say.
“I can tell. You’re much more genteel than I am.” To Isaac she says, “What’s it like to be with someone that sweet?”
He looks at her. He’s interested in her, in what she has to say.
“I can’t get a read on her,” Isaac tells me later in bed, taking off his glasses and balancing them on the nightstand.
“Because she’s a stranger,” I say. But she isn’t. I think, she has never been a stranger to me.
At the Water Center the next day, everything works. We bring in the kitchen and bathroom Meters. Isaac’s come, too. He wants to see if we get caught. I estimate we’re double our water quota. A girl, twenty or so, in a collared shirt and nametag, scans bar codes on the Meters into a computer. She gives us fifty dollars cash for being less than our quota on the kitchen Meter.
“The city of Las Vegas thanks you,” she says.
Willa smiles at her.
“My name’s Ashley,” the girl says. “I’m supposed to say that bullshit. But you know, good job.”
“Well, that does it,” Isaac says to Willa when we’re back in her station wagon. “You’re a genius.” He rolls down the window. “A fucking genius!” he yells to the parking lot, sweat on his nose, sweat even on his lenses.
“Let’s go to the man in the tent behind Atomic Liquors,” I say with the cash in my hand. “Jesus, let’s get a birdbath. We’ll fill it up.”
“You’re cute.” Willa looks behind her to drive out of the lot, but she’s looking at me. She reaches and pats my knee. I take her hand and hold it. She lets me, she lets me more.
“Then what happens?” Isaac turns to me. He’s smiling as I’ve never seen him, with genuine joy. Willa takes back her hand.
“All the pigeons come back,” I say.
“All of California’s pigeons,” says Isaac.
“And all the birds in California and Utah!” I put my hands on his shoulders. “And hawks! And linnets! And nightingales. And eagles. And woodpeckers. And sparrows.”
“Sparrows! I love sparrows!” Isaac shouts. “Then what?”
“Jays,” I say. “Blue jays. And rain.”
“Rain?” says Willa.
“Birds bring it with them,” I say.
When I return from work at three a.m., Isaac’s there, with my red Japanese flower robe on over his T-shirt and jeans, his glasses sinking on his nose, watering our line of green in the kitchen with Willa. Help us, they say. They’re your children, too, says Willa. I’ve got to go to sleep, I say, kissing them both on the cheek. I have work tomorrow. Someone has to make money for our babies.
The next few days, Isaac isn’t in bed when I wake up; he’s with Willa, talking or watering the plants. He’s unabashedly comfortable with her, something in him springing up. Springing open. He’s a waiter on the Strip, and I hear him tell her he hates it. Just like that: he hates it. I don’t ask what they do in the day. I don’t know where her money comes from. I like thinking she just has it. She’s always in the apartment when I wake up. When I’m home from work in the early morning, she and Isaac are asleep on the couch in front of the TV.
Willa and I water the ferns, the herbs. She’s found a glass pitcher in one of the cabinets. I tell her about my ex-husband and his fiancée in Venice. He left me in New York two years ago, fled to Florence first, with Marisol. Now Venice. Mariner, I call him, with his Marisol.
“You don’t need him,” says Willa.
“I’ve got you,” I say. “You’re here.”
“Yeah,” she says. “And this.” She turns on the faucet and lets it run. The Meter moves up one unit.
I imagine a miniature version of myself walking through the forest of the herb garden, leaves upright, a green-gold-green above.
“If they ever make an amusement park here,” I say. �
�It should have tons of trees.”
She refills the pitcher, waters the mint, blooming in mint-bright clusters. I think I see mint grow as water hits the leaves. My green. My green Willa. She did all of this.
“How much do you like him?” says Willa. “Isaac. Give me a number, one to ten.”
“God, I don’t know,” I say. “Thirty thousand units.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all we have a month,” I say. “That’s love.”
That week Willa asks to borrow fifty dollars, and I give it to her. She comes with me to the club, has made herself up with gold eyes like mine. My Willa in a green dress. She watches me sing from the bar. A couple of members of the band tell me they think she’s fantastic looking, sexy, “the right amount of edge.” When I’m halfway through a Gershwin number, I see Goodyman up at the bar, chatting with her. He’s the kind who comes to the club in his three-piece suit from work. He buys her a water, gives her a roll of flush tokens she puts in her bra. He sends a kiss to me in the air.
During a break in sets, I go out on a backstreet of the Strip for a smoke in the desert dirt. There’s a man singing outside, bellowing with deep dust in him. I hide my water bottle in my purse. He’s always there. Peeling toenails, sandals the color of the road. Dressed in layers of holey rags coming apart at the shoulders, descending in flaps like a brown and rust tulip unpetaling. I put a toilet flush token in his hand. He puts his other hand around mine and holds on for a second. I give him another token. I don’t know how he’s here. By law, they shipped all of Vegas’s homeless out to Utah months ago.
Someone’s followed me. It’s Goodyman, a full drink in his hand. He’s got on a bright white shirt, black vest, the material straining over his pooch of a belly.
“Little girl,” he says. “You giving away your wares?” He takes a drink of an amber something in his glass. “Your tokens, Susannah? Your jetons? Toilet time?”
“How much you had so far?”
“Not a drop all week till tonight,” he says. “Been sobering up.”