by Joe Hill
On her good days, Angie tries to battle the invader. She thinks she’s fighting against lethargy. She does jumping jacks in the motel courtyard, calls her best friend in Juneau from the motel pay phone and anxiously tries to reminisce about their shitty high school band. They sing an old song together, and she feels almost normal.
But increasingly she finds herself powerless to resist the warmth that spreads through her chest, the midday paralysis, the hunger for something slow and deep and unnameable. Some maid has drawn the blackout curtains. One light bulb dangles. The dark reminds Angie of packed earth, moisture. What she interprets as sprawling emotion is the Joshua tree. Here was its birth, in the sands of Black Rock Canyon. Here was its death, and its rebirth as a ghostly presence in the human. Couldn’t it perhaps Leap back into that older organism?
The light bulb pulses in time with Angie’s headache. It acquires a fetal glow, otherworldly.
Home, home, home.
Down, down, down.
Her heels grind uselessly into the carpet. Her toes curl at the fibers. She stands in the quiet womb of the room, waiting for a signal from the root brain, the ancient network from which the invader has been exiled. She lifts her arms until they are fully extended, her fingers turned outward. Her ears prick up like sharp leaves, alert for moisture.
She is still standing like that when Andy comes home with groceries at 10 p.m., her palms facing the droning light bulb, so perfectly still that he yelps when he spots her.
How old such stories must be, legends of the bad romance between wandering humans and plants! How often these bad grafts must occur, and few people ever the wiser!
In 1852 the Mormon settlers who gave the Joshua tree its name reported every variety of disturbance among their party after hikes through the sparse and fragrant forests of Death Valley. One elder sat on a rock at the forest’s edge and refused to move.
1873, in the lawless town of Panamint City. Darwin in 1874; Modoc in 1875. During the silver boom dozens of miners went missing. Many leapt to their deaths down the shafts. The silver rush coincided with a pulse event: the trees blossomed unstoppably, wept pollen, and Leapt, eclipsing the minds of these poor humans, who stood no chance against the vegetable’s ancient spirit. Dying is one symptom of a bad graft. The invasive species coiled green around the silver miners’ brains.
1879: All towns abandoned. Sorted ore sat in wheelbarrows aboveground, winking emptily at the nearby Joshuas.
In 1922, in what is now the southern region of the park, near the abandoned iron mines of Eagle Mountain, a man was killed by the human host of a Joshua tree. It was not difficult to find the murderer, since a girl was huddled a few feet from the warm body, sobbing quietly.
“A crime of passion,” the young officer, who tended to take a romantic view of motives, murmured. The grizzled elder on the call with him had less to say about what drove anyone to do anything.
All the girl could remember was the terrible, irremediable tension between wanting to be somewhere and wanting to be nowhere. And the plant, crazed by its proximity to rich familiar soil, tried repeatedly to Leap out of her. This caused her hand to lift, holding a long knife, and plummet earthward, rooting into the fleshy chest of her lover, feeling deeper and deeper for moisture.
The Joshua tree’s greatest victory over the couple comes four months into their stay: they sign a lease. A bungalow on the outskirts of the national park, with a fence to keep out the coyotes and an outdoor shower.
When the shower water gets into their mouths, it tastes like poison. Strange reptiles hug the fence posts, like colorful olives on toothpicks. Andy squeezes Angie’s hand and returns the gaze of these tiny monsters; he feels strangely bashful as they bugle their throats at him. Four months into his desert sojourn, and he still doesn’t know the name of anything. Up close, the bungalow looks a lot like a shed. The bloated vowels of his signature on the landlord’s papers make him think of a large hand blurring underwater.
Three Joshua trees grow right in their new backyard.
Rent, before utilities, is $400.
“We can’t afford this,” he tells the girl, speaking less to her than to the quiet trees, wanting some court stenographer in the larger cosmos to record his protest.
The landlord, who is a native of Yucca Valley, is taking the young couple through the calendar. His name is Desert John, and he offers these Eastern kids what he calls Desert John’s Survival Tips. With laconic glee, he advises Andy to cut back the chaparral in their backyard to waist height in summer, to avoid the “minimal” danger of baby rattlesnakes. He tells Angie to hydrate “aggressively,” especially if she’s trying to get pregnant. (Angie starfishes a hand over her belly button and blanches; nobody has said anything to suggest this.) With polite horror, the couple nod along to stories of their predecessors, former tenants who collapsed from heat exhaustion, were bitten by every kind of snake and spider: “Fanged in the ankle and ass, I shit you not, kids. Beware the desert hammock.”
Average annual rainfall: five inches. Eight-degree nights in December, 112-degree July days. Andy is thinking of Angie’s face on the motel pillow. He calculates they’ve slept together maybe fourteen times in four months. In terms of survival strategies, in a country hostile to growth? These desert plants, so ostentatiously alive in the Mojave, have got zero on Andy.
III. Establishment
Once, and only once, the three of them achieve a perfect union.
It takes some doing, but Andy finally succeeds in getting her out of the house.
“It’s our anniversary,” he lies, since they never really picked a day.
He’s taking Angie to Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, a frontier-themed dance hall frequented by bikers and artists and other jolly modern species of degenerates. It’s only six miles northeast of their new home and burns like a Roman candle against the immensity of the Mojave. Through surveying expeditions made in Jerry’s truck, Andy has delimited the boundary lines of Angie’s tolerance; once they move beyond a certain radius, she says that her head feels “green” and her bones begin to ache. Pain holds her here—that’s their shared impression. So when Andy parks the truck they are both relieved to discover that she is smiling.
The Joshua tree discovers that it loves to dance! Better even than church is the soft glow of the hexagonal dance floor. Swung around in strangers’ arms, Andy and Angie let themselves dance until they are sick, at the edge of the universe. Andy lets Angie buy him three shots of rum. A weather seizes them and blows them around—a weather you can order for a quarter, the jukebox song.
It is a good night. Outside the dance hall, the parking lot is full of cars and trucks, empty of humans. The wind pushes into them, as hot as the blasts of air from a hand dryer. Angie draws Andy’s attention to the claret cup of the moon. “It looks red,” she says. And it does. Sitting on a stranger’s fender, listening to the dying strains of a pop song they both despise, Andy asks her softly, “What’s changed, Angie?”
And when she doesn’t or can’t answer, he asks, “What’s changing now?”
A question they like better, because at least its tense sounds more hopeful.
The Joshua tree leafs out in her mind. Heat blankets her; for a moment she is sure she will faint. Her vision clears. “Bamboleo” plays inside the dance hall. Through the illuminated squares of its windows, they can see the waving wheat of the dancers’ upper bodies. Mouths gape in angry shock behind the frosted glass; they are only singing along to the music, Angie knows. Outside, the boy presses his mouth against hers. Now he is pressing every part of himself against the girl; inside her, his competitor presses back.
“Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Let’s go back inside.”
In the end, the three of them settle on a compromise: they dance in the empty parking lot, under stars that shoot eastward like lateral rain.
For a second the Joshua tree can feel its grip on the host weakening. The present threatens its ex
istence: the couple’s roaring happiness might dislodge the ghostly tree. So it renews its purchase on the girl, roots into her memory.
“Remember our first day, Andy? The hike through Joshua Tree?”
Compared with that, Angie thinks, what is there for us in the present? “Nostalgia,” we are apt to label this phenomenon. It is the success of the invading plant, which seeks only to anchor itself in the past. Why move forward? Why move at all?
“Is this the spot? Are you sure?”
Andy spreads out the blanket. A soft aura surrounds the low moon, as if the moon itself were dreaming. The red halo reminds him of a miner’s carbide lantern.
At first, when the girl suggested that they drive out to the park, he felt annoyed, then scared; the light was in her eyes again, eclipsing the girl she’d been only seconds earlier. But once he’d yielded to her plan the night had organized itself into a series of surprises, the first of which was his own sharp joy; now he finds he’s thrilled to be back inside the Black Rock Canyon campground with her. (The Joshua is also pleased, smiling up through Angie’s eyes.) It is her idea to retrace the steps of their first hike to Warren Peak. “For our anniversary,” she says coolly, although this rationale rings hollow, reminds Andy of his own bullshit justifications for taking out a lease on a desert “bungalow.” He does not guess the truth, of course, which is that, slyly, the Joshua tree is proliferating inside Angie, each of its six arms forking and flowering throughout her in the densest multiplication of desire. Leap, Leap, Leap. For months it has been trying to drive the couple back to this spot. Its vast root brain awaits it, forty feet below the soil.
Angie has no difficulty navigating down the dark path; the little flashlight around her neck is bouncing like a leashed green sun. Her smile, when she turns to find Andy, is so huge that he wonders if he wasn’t the one to suggest this night hike to her. Something unexpected happens then, for all of them: they reenter the romance of the past.
“Why didn’t we then . . .” all three think as one.
Quickly that sentiment jumps tenses, becomes:
“Why don’t we now . . .”
When they reach the water tank, which is two hundred yards from the site of the Leap, Angie asks Andy to shake out the blanket. She sucks on the finger she pricked.
Around the blanket, tree branches divide and braid. They look mutinous in their stillness. Andy can see the movie scene: Bruce Willis attacking an army of Joshuas. He is imagining this, the trees swimming across the land like sand octopuses, flailing their spastic arms, when the girl catches his wrist in her fingers.
“Can we?”
“Why not?”
Why didn’t they, Andy wonders, back then? The first time they walked this loop, they were preparing to do plenty. Andy unzips his jeans, shakes the caked-black denim off like solid dust. Angie is wearing a dress. Their naked legs tangle together in a pale, fleshy echo of the static contortionists that surround their blanket. Now the Joshua tree loves her. It grows and it flowers.
Angie will later wonder how exactly she came to be in possession of Andy’s knife. Its bare blade holds the red moon inside it. She watches it glimmer there, poised just above Andy’s right shoulder. The ground underneath the blanket seems to undulate; the fabric of the desert is wrinkling and flowing all around them. Even the Joshua trees, sham dead, now begin to move; or so it seems to the girl, whose blinded eyes keep stuttering.
The boy’s mouth is at the hollow of the girl’s throat, then lower; she moans as the invader’s leaves and roots go spearing through her, and still he is unaware that he’s in any danger.
I can Leap back, the plant thinks.
Angie can no longer see what she is doing. Her eyes are shut, her thoughts have stopped. One small hand rests on Andy’s neck; the other fist withdraws until the knife points earthward. Down, down, down, the invader demands. Something sighs sharply, and it might be Andy or it might be the entire forest.
Leap, Leap, Leap, the Joshua implores.
What saves the boy is such a simple thing. Andy props himself up on an elbow, pausing to steady his breath. He missed the moment when she slid the knife from the crumpled heap of his clothing; he has no idea that its blade is sparkling inches from his neck. Staring at Angie’s waxy, serious face, he is overcome by a flood of memories.
“Hey, Angie?” he asks, stroking the fine dark hairs along her arm. “Remember how we met?”
One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.
Angie has never had sticking power. She dropped out of high school; she walked out of the GED exam. Her longest relationship, prior to falling for Andy, was seven months. But then they’d met (no epic tale there—the game was on at a hometown bar), and something in her character was spontaneously altered.
He remembers the song that was playing. He remembers ordering another round he could not afford—a freezing Yuengling for himself, ginger ale for her. They were sitting on the same wooden stools, battered tripods, that had supported the plans and commitments of the young in that town for generations.
The Joshua tree flexes its roots. Desperately it tries to fix its life to her life. In the human mind, a Joshua’s spirit can be destroyed by the wind and radiation fluxes of memory. Casting its spectral roots around, the plant furiously reddens with a very human feeling: humiliation.
What a thing to be undone by—golden hops and gingerroot, the clay shales of Pennsylvania!
It loses its grip on her arm; the strength runs out of her tensed biceps.
The girl’s fingers loosen; the knife falls, unnoticed, to the sand.
The green invader is displaced by the swelling heat of their earliest happiness. Banished to the outermost reaches of Angie’s consciousness, the Joshua tree now hovers in agony, half forgotten, half dissolving, losing its purchase on her awareness and so on its own reality.
“What a perfect night!” the couple agree.
Angie stands and brushes sand from her skirt. Andy frowns at the knife, picks it up.
“Happy anniversary,” he says.
It is not their anniversary, but doesn’t it make sense for them to celebrate the beginning here? This desert hike marked the last point in space where they’d both wanted the same future. What they are nostalgic for is the old plan, the first one. Their antique horizon.
Down the trail, up and down through time, the couple walk back toward the campground parking lot. Making plans again, each of them babbling excitedly over the other. Maybe Reno. Maybe Juneau.
Andy jogs ahead to their loaner getaway vehicle.
The Black Rock Canyon campground is one of the few places in the park where visitors can sleep amid the Joshua trees, soaking up the starlight from those complex crystals that have formed over millennia in the desert sky. Few of these campers are still outside their tents and RVs, but there is one familiar silhouette: it’s the ranger, who is warming his enormous feet, bony and perfectly white, by the fire pit. Shag covers the five-foot cactus behind him, which makes it look like a giant’s mummified thumb.
“You lovebirds again!” he crows, waving them over.
Reluctantly, Andy doubles back. Angie is pleased, and frightened, that he remembers them.
“Ha! Guess you liked the hike.”
For a few surreal minutes, standing before the leaping flames, they talk about the hike, the moths, the Joshua woodland. Andy is itching to be gone; already he is imagining giving notice at the saloon, packing up their house, getting back on the endlessly branching interstate. But Angie is curious. Andy is a little embarrassed, in fact, by the urgent tone of her questions. She wants to hear more about the marriage of the yucca moth and the Joshua—is theirs a doomed romance? Can’t the two species untwine, separate their fortunes?
Andy leaves to get the truck.
And the pulse event? Have the moths all flown? Will the Joshua tree die out, go extinct in the park?
A key turns in the ignition. At the entrance
to Black Rock Canyon, Andy leans forward against the wheel, squinting through the windshield. He is waiting for the girl to emerge from the shadows, certain that she will do so; and then a little less sure.
“Oh, it’s a hardy species,” the ranger says. His whiskers are clear tubes that hold the red firelight. “Those roots go deep. I wouldn’t count a tree like that out.”
ALAYA DAWN JOHNSON
A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i
FROM The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
KEY’S FAVORITE TIME of day is sunset, her least is sunrise. It should be the opposite, but every time she watches that bright red disk sinking into the water beneath Mauna Kea her heart bends like a wishbone, and she thinks, He’s awake now.
Key is thirty-four. She is old for a human woman without any children. She has kept herself alive by being useful in other ways. For the past four years, Key has been the overseer of the Mauna Kea Grade Orange blood facility.
Is it a concentration camp if the inmates are well fed? If their beds are comfortable? If they are given an hour and a half of rigorous boxercise and yoga each morning in the recreational field?
It doesn’t have to be Honouliui to be wrong.
When she’s called in to deal with Jeb’s body—bloody, not drained, in a feeding room—yoga doesn’t make him any less dead.
Key helps vampires run a concentration camp for humans.
Key is a different kind of monster.
Key’s favorite food is umeboshi. Salty and tart and bright red, with that pit in the center to beware. She loves it in rice balls, the kind her Japanese grandmother made when she was little. She loves it by itself, the way she ate it at fifteen, after Obaachan died. She hasn’t had umeboshi in eighteen years, but sometimes she thinks that when she dies she’ll taste one again.
This morning she eats the same thing she eats every meal: a nutritious brick patty, precisely five inches square and two inches deep, colored puce. Her raw scrubbed hands still have a pink tinge of Jeb’s blood in the cuticles. She stares at them while she sips the accompanying beverage, which is orange. She can’t remember if it ever resembled the fruit.