by Joe Hill
“Now there’s an education for a couple, huh? Charles Darwin agrees with me. Says it’s the most remarkable pollination system in nature. ‘There is no romance more dire and pure than that of the desert moth and the Joshua.’”
“Dire?” the girl asks. And learns from the ranger that the Joshua trees may be on the brink of extinction. Botanists believe they are witnessing a coordinated response to crisis. Perhaps a drought, legible in the plants’ purplish leaves, has resulted in this push. Seeds in abundance. The ancient species’ Hail Mary pass. Yucca moths, attracted by the flowers’ penetrating odor, are their heroic spouses, equally dependent, equally endangered; their larval children feast on yucca seeds.
“It’s an obligate relationship. Each species’ future depends entirely on the other,” the ranger says, and then grins hugely at them. The boy is thinking that the math sounds about right: two species, one fate. The girl wonders, of their own elopement, who is more dependent on whom? What toast might Charles Darwin make were they to break their first vows and get married?
So they obey the ranger, drive the Charger another quarter mile, park at the deserted base of Warren Peak.
Angie says she has to pee, and Andy sits on the hood and watches her.
They set off along the trail, which begins to ascend the ridgeline east of Warren Peak. Now Joshua woodland sprawls around them.
This is where the bad graft occurs.
For the rest of her life she will be driven to return to the park, searching for the origin of the feeling that chooses this day to invade her and make its home under her skin.
Before starting the ascent, each pauses to admire the plant that is the park’s namesake. The Joshua trees look hilariously alien. Like Satan’s telephone poles. They’re primitive, irregularly limbed, their branches swooning up and down, sparsely covered with syringe-thin leaves—more like spines, Angie notes. Some mature trees have held their insane poses for a thousand years; they look as if they were on drugs and hallucinating themselves.
The ranger told them that the plant was named in the nineteenth century by a caravan of Mormons, passing through what they perceived to be a wasteland. They saw a forest of hands, which recalled to them the prayers of the prophet Joshua. But the girl can’t see these plants as any kind of holy augury. She’s thinking Dr. Seuss. Timothy Leary.
“See the moths, Angie?”
No wonder they call it a “pulse event”—wings are beating everywhere.
Unfortunately for Angie, the ranger they encountered had zero information to share on the ghostly Leap. So he could not warn her about the real danger posed to humans by the pulsating Joshuas. Between February and April, the yucca moths arrive like living winds, swirling through Black Rock Canyon. Blossoms detonate. Pollen heaves up.
Then the Joshua tree sheds a fantastic sum of itself.
Angie feels dizzy. As she leans out to steady herself against a nearby Joshua tree, her finger is pricked by something sharp. One of the plant’s daggerlike spines. Bewildered, she stares at the spot of red on her finger. Running blood looks exotic next to the etiolated grasses.
Angie Gonzalez, wild child from Nestor, Pennsylvania, pricks her finger on a desert dagger and becomes an entirely new creature.
When the Leap occurs, Angie does not register any change whatsoever. She has no idea what has just added its store of life to hers.
But other creatures of the desert do seem to apprehend what is happening. Through the crosshairs of its huge pupils, a tarantula watches Angie’s skin drink in the danger: the pollen from the Joshua mixes with the red blood on her finger. On a fuchsia ledge of limestone, a dozen lizards witness the Leap. They shut their gluey eyes as one, sealing their lucent bodies from contagion, inter-kingdom corruption.
During a season of wild ferment, a kind of atmospheric accident can occur: the extraordinary moisture stored in the mind of a passing animal or hiker can compel the spirit of a Joshua to Leap through its own membranes. The change is metaphysical: the tree’s spirit is absorbed into the migrating consciousness, where it lives on, intertwined with its host.
Instinct guides its passage now, through the engulfing darkness of Angie’s mind. Programmed with the urgent need to plug itself into some earth, the plant’s spirit goes searching for terra firma.
Andy unzips his backpack, produces Fiji water and a Snoopy Band-Aid.
“Your nose got burned,” he says, and smiles at her.
And at this juncture she can smile back.
He kisses the nose.
“C’mon, let’s get out of here.”
Then something explodes behind her eyelids into a radial green fan, dazzling her with pain. Her neck aches, her abdomen. The pain moves lower. It feels as if an umbrella were opening below her navel. Menstrual cramps, she thinks. Seconds later, as with a soldering iron, an acute and narrowly focused heat climbs her spine.
At first the Joshua tree is elated to discover that it’s alive: I survived my Leap. I was not annihilated. Whatever “I” was.
Grafted to the girl’s consciousness, the plant becomes aware of itself. It dreams its green way up into her eyestalks, peers out:
Standing there, in the mirror of the desert, are a hundred versions of itself. Here is its home: a six-armed hulk, fibrous and fruiting obscenely under a noon sun. Here is the locus that recently contained this tree spirit. For a tree, this is a dreadful experience. Its uprooted awareness floats throughout the alien form. It concentrates itself behind Angie’s eyeballs, where there is moisture. This insoluble spirit, this refugee from the Joshua tree, understands itself to have leapt into hell. The wrong place, the wrong vessel. It pulses outward in a fuzzy frenzy of investigation, flares greener, sends out feelers. Compared with the warm and expansive desert soil, the human body is a cul-de-sac.
This newborn ghost has only just begun to apprehend itself when its fragile tenancy is threatened: Angie sneezes, rubs at her temple. Unaware that this is an immunologic reflex, she is convulsed by waves of nostalgia for earlier selves, remote homes. Here, for some reason, is her childhood backyard, filled with anarchic wildflowers and bordered by Pennsylvania hemlock.
Then the pain dismantles the memory; she holds her head in her hand, cries for Andy.
This is the plant, fighting back.
The girl moans.
“Andy, you don’t have any medicine? Advil . . . something?”
The vegetable invader feels the horror of its imprisonment. Its new host is walking away from the Joshua-tree forest, following Andy. What can this kind of survival mean?
Although they don’t know it, escape is now impossible for our vagabonding couple. Andy opens the sedan door, Angie climbs in, and in the side mirrors the hundreds of Joshuas shrink away into hobgoblin shapes.
“Angie? You got so quiet.”
“It’s the sun. My head is killing me, honey.”
Dispersed throughout her consciousness, the tree begins to grow.
Andy has no clue that he is now party to a love triangle. What he perceives is that his girlfriend is acting very strangely.
“Do you need some water? Want to sit and rest awhile?”
At the motel, the girl makes straight for the bathroom faucet. She washes down the water with more water, doesn’t want to eat dinner. When Andy tries to undress her, she fights him off. Her movements seem to him balletic, unusually nimble; yet, walking across the room, she pauses at the oddest moments. That night she basks in the glow of their TV as if it were the sun. Yellow is such a relief.
“I hate this show,” the boy says, staring not at the motel TV but at her. “Let’s turn it off?”
Who are you? he does not bother to ask.
Calmly, he becomes aware that the girl he loves has exited the room. Usually when this sensation comes over him, it means she’s fallen asleep. Tonight she is sitting up in bed, eyes bright, very wide awake. Her eyes in most lighting are hazel; tonight they are the brightest green. As if great doors had been flung open onto an empty and electrically l
it room.
The Joshua tree “thinks” in covert bursts of activity:
Oh, I have made a terrible mistake.
Oh, please get me out of it, get me out of it, send me home.
“The headache,” she calls the odd pressure at first. “The green headache.”
“Psychosis,” at 4 a.m., when its power over her crests and she lies awake terrified. “Torpor” or “sluggishness” when it ebbs.
Had you told her, The invader is sinking its roots throughout you, tethering itself to you with a thousand spectral feelers, who knows what she would have done?
The next day they wake at dawn, as per their original plan: to start every day at sunup and navigate by whim. They go north on 247, with vague plans to stop in Barstow for gas. The girl’s eyes are aching. Partway across the Morongo Basin, she starts to cry so hard that the boy is forced to pull over.
“Forget it,” she says.
“Forget what?”
“It. All of it. The seafaring stuff—I can’t do it anymore.”
The boy blinks at her.
“It’s been four days.”
But her lips look blue, and she won’t be reasonable.
“Leave me here.”
“You don’t have any money.”
“I’ll work. They’re hiring everywhere in town, did you notice that?” A job sounds unaccountably blissful to the girl. Drinking water in the afternoon. Sitting at a desk.
“What? What the hell are you talking about?”
The boy scowls down at his arm, flipped outward against the steering wheel. She keeps talking to him in a new, low monotone, telling him that she loves the desert, she loves the Joshua trees, she wants to stay. Dumbly he rereads his own tattoo: Ever unfixed. For some reason he finds that he cannot quite blame the girl for ruining things. It’s the plan he hates, their excellent plan, for capsizing on them.
The crumbly truth: the boy imagined that he’d be the one to betray the girl.
“Andy, I’m sorry. But I know that I belong here.”
“O.K., just to be clear: When you say ‘here,’ you mean this parking lot?” The sedan is parked outside Cojo’s Army Surplus and Fro-Yo; it’s a place where you can purchase camo underwear and also a cup of unlicensed TCBY swirl. “Or do you mean this?” He waves his arms around to indicate the desert.
Had they continued, just a short distance northwest of Yucca Valley they would have reached the on-ramp to I-15 North and, beyond that, the pinball magic of the tollbooths, that multiverse of possible futures connected by America’s interstate system.
For the next two hours they fight inside the car.
Round clusters of leaves shake loose in front of her eyes, greeny white blossoms. If she could only show him the desert in her imagination, Angie thinks, the way she sees it.
When it becomes clear that she’s not joking, the boy turns the car around. Calls Cousin Sewell in Pennsylvania, explains their situation. “We want to stay awhile,” he says. “We like it here.”
Sewell needs to know how long. They’ll have to put the car on some conveyance, get it back to Pennsylvania.
“Indefinitely,” the boy hears himself say. Her word, for what she claims to want.
They decide to pay the weekly rate at the motel. They go for walks. They go for drives. Her favorite thing seems to be sitting in a dry wreck of a turquoise Jacuzzi they discover on the edge of town, some luckless homesteader’s abandoned pleasure tub. And he likes this, too, actually—sitting in the tub, he finds it easy to pretend that they aren’t trapped in a tourist town, that they are sailing toward an elsewhere. And he loves what happens to her face right at sunset over the infinite desert. Moonlight, however, affects her in a way that he finds indescribably frightening. The change is in the eyes, he thinks.
II. Emergence
Two weeks later, in late April, their money runs out. They’ve spent the days outside, Angie doing stretches in the motel courtyard, Andy reading his stolen library books from back east, waiting for the bad enchantment to break. Andy tells Angie he is leaving her. They have no vehicle, the rental Dodge having been chauffeured east by a genial grifter pal of Sewell’s. Angie nods, staring out the window of their room as the rain sweeps over the desert. All the muddy colors of the sky touch the earth.
“Did you hear me? I said I’m leaving, Angie.”
That afternoon Andy gets a job at the Joshua Tree Saloon.
Then there is a period of peace, coinciding with the Joshua tree’s dormancy inside of Angie, which lasts from April to mid-May. In the park, the Joshuas’ blossoms have all dropped off, leaving dried stalks. Andy does not even suggest “moving on” anymore, so thrilled is he to laugh with Angie again. He comes home with green fistfuls of tourist cash, reeking of Fireball and Pine-Sol. O.K., he thinks. Oh, thank God. We’re getting back to normal.
Then one day, after a spectacular freak thundershower, Angie tells him that he needs to go home. Or away. Elsewhere, a bedroom other than the motel.
She feels terrible, she doesn’t know what she is saying.
Get me out of it, the plant keeps throbbing like a muscle in Angie’s mind. A rustling sound in her inner ear, the plant’s footsteps. A throaty appetite makes her imagine stuffing herself with hot mouthfuls of desert sand. Once Andy leaves her, she’ll have a chance to inspect her interior, figure out what’s gone haywire.
“Let’s go to Reno,” Andy says. He feels quite desperate now, spinning the radio dial through seas of static. His great success this week at work was formalizing, via generous pours of straight gin, a new friendship with Jerry the Mailman, who has given him access to his boxy truck.
“Go to Reno. Win big. I’ll be right here. I don’t want to leave the desert.”
Why doesn’t she? The girl grows hysterical whenever Andy drives toward the freeway that might carry them away from the Mojave. She feels best when they are close to Warren Peak and the Black Rock Canyon campground.
For the next two weeks, she keeps encouraging Andy to leave her. Sometimes she feels a lump in her throat that she can’t swallow, and it’s easy to pretend that this is a vestige of who she used to be, her Pennsylvania history, now compacted into a hard ball she cannot access or dissolve; for Andy’s sake, she wishes she could be that girl again. Dimly she is aware that she used to crave travel, adventure. She can remember the pressure of Andy’s legs tangled around her, but not what she held in her mind. The world has grown unwieldy, and there are days now when the only thing that appeals to her is pulling up her T-shirt and going belly flat on the burning pink sand beyond the motel walkway.
One night Angie turns to face the wall. Golf-ball-sized orange-and-yellow flowers pattern their wallpaper. Plus water stains from ancient leaks. She has never noticed this before. Under the influence of the Joshua, she sees these water stains as beautiful. That Rorschach is more interesting than TV. “What do you see?” she asks the boy.
“I’m not in the mood,” he says, having at last been granted the opportunity to have a mood, after days and hours spent trying to rekindle her appetite for pleasure, for danger. He realizes that he has cut all ties for her, that he has nothing he wants to return to in Pennsylvania. It’s a liberating, terrifying feeling. If she leaves him—if he leaves her—what then?
Now the plant is catching on to something.
In its three months of incubation, it grows exponentially in its capacity for thought. Gradually the plant learns to “think” blue, to “smell” rain through a nose.
Unfurling its languorous intelligence, it looks out through her eyes, hunting for meaning the way it used to seek out deep sun, jade dew, hunting now for the means of imagining its own life, comprehending what it has become inside the girl.
The Joshua tree discovers that it loves church! Plugging one’s knees into the purple risers, lifting to enter a song. The apple-red agony painted onto the cheeks of the sallow man. All the light that fills the church drifts dreamily over the Joshua tree, which stretches to its fullest extension inside the g
irl during the slow-crawling time of the service. It approves of this place, which resembles a massive seed hull. Deeply, extrapolating from its forays into the earth, it understands the architecture and the impulse. Craving stillness, these humans have evolved this stronghold.
“How was it?” Andy asks, picking her up. He refused to go with her. Sundays are his day off. “Delicious God-bread? Lots of songs?”
“It was nice. What are you so jealous about?”
“Angie, you never said.”
“Mmm?”
“I didn’t know you were religious.”
Her head bobs on the long stem of her neck, as if they were agreeing on a fascinating point.
“Yes. There’s plenty we don’t know about each other.”
I can still get out of this, he thinks. Without understanding exactly how the trap got sprung, he can feel its teeth in him.
“You should come in next time,” she offers. “You’d like the windows.”
“I can see the windows right now.”
“You’d like being on our side of them.”
Seed hull, the girl thinks, for no reason.
Sometimes, to earn extra money, she watches kids who are staying at the motel. Six dollars an hour, four dollars for each additional kid. She is good at it, mostly.
Timmy Babson hates the babysitter. Sometimes her eyes are a dull, friendly brown and as kind as his sister’s; sometimes they are twin vacuums. This is already pretty scary. But tonight, when he looks over, he sees the bad light flooding into them. Not yellow, not green. An older color, which Timmy recognizes on sight but cannot name. And this is much worse.
His own eyes prickle wetly. His blond hair darkens with sweat; pearls of water stand out on his smooth six-year-old forehead. The longer he stares back, the wider the gaze seems to get, like a grin. Her eyes radiate hard spines of heat, which drill into him. Timmy Babson feels punctured, “seen.”
“Jane!” Timmy screams for his mother, calling for her by her first name for the first time. “Jane, Jane! It’s looking at me again!”