by Sejal Shah
I did not show this woman what I had carried in my backpack: the program guide for Burning Man—just as thick as one for an academic conference.
“What Where When: Fertility 2.0.” On the cover, a photo of pink synapses and what looks like coral, organic material. When I flipped through the guide, I saw some of the various offerings:
Naked Pub Crawl
Grateful Dyed
Mass Unicycle Ride
Clarity and Sex: Negotiating Sex on the Playa
Geology of the Black Rock Desert
Past Life Regressing Meditation
Human Energy System Healing
3rd Annual Healthy Friction Circle Jerk
I was just trying to hitch a ride.
Here is the beginning: before we left Berkeley and drove toward the desert, Cinque said, “Do you know other people there? Because maybe you should get in touch with them, too.” Cinque had found me the ticket to Burning Man. His question should have clued me in. It did, but I still wanted to go. I was in California; I was not, for the first time in nearly a decade, preparing classes for the fall semester. I was adrift. I did know people in Black Rock City but had no way to get in touch with them without texting or phone. And we were camped in the periphery, far from Center Camp, which had a ride share center.
Cinque has skin the same color as mine, green eyes, parents of different races, a disarmingly beautiful smile, and a temper he is quick to lose. I met him at a meditation center in Massachusetts, when we both worked in the kitchen. By the time we left, I had developed a minor crush.
On a quiet street in Berkeley, we packed and repacked the cars. The light was falling, orange and pink streaking the sky; we could hear the people across the street on their terrace or roof deck grilling, glasses clinking, laughter. They shouted to us, “Burning Man?” “Yeah,” we hollered back. “Have a great burn!” they said. They returned to their grilling and drinking.
I half-wished I was on a deck with my own friends, staying. Cinque was riding with Leah, a woman he had met on a ride share board. He had secured me a place with his friend, John, who needed someone to share gas money. Cinque told me Leah was going to leave on Saturday, before the Man burned, and I could get a ride back with her.
Leah adjusted something on her bike with bike tools. She was in her early twenties and unfriendly. Before we climbed into our cars, I asked Leah if she was leaving Saturday like Cinque said, and if I could go back to Oakland with her. Leah said, “I’m not leaving until Sunday, after the Man burns.” I can’t remember now if Cinque was in hearing distance of this conversation or if I approached him after and told him. This is where everything gets fuzzy, slow-motion. The last light disappearing, night and stars emerging, a beneficent moon rising. Cinque said nothing.
It was the moment for me to pull out, but I had dropped two hundred on a ticket and another hundred on food and supplies. I had asked my uncle’s downstairs tenant for a ride to Berkeley. I had borrowed an old boyfriend’s sleeping bag (Chris had made a special trip to drop it off at my uncle’s house). Chris said, “Don’t do any drugs.” I said, “I won’t!” and shot him an eye roll. “I’m not interested in that.”
I had bought a case of water and a sack of oranges at Costco and packages of prepared food from Trader Joe’s. I had bought the last package of baby wipes from a Walgreens in Oakland, which I stopped into with my childhood friend, Anne. She suggested the wipes, and also lent me her headlamp. She had been to Burning Man many times but was taking a break. It seemed too late to back out, to call up my uncle and go home loaded with sacks of oranges, apples, water, and a sleeping bag and headlamp I no longer needed. I decided to be hopeful and maneuvered myself into the blue Honda. Where else is there to go but forward?
I found a way out. At the end, when I was in our far-off camp, a light blue Prius crept toward us. Aviva, whom I met at a camp devoted to dance, helped me haul my two backpacks and sleeping bag over to the car. I left food, my bike, a bottle of wine, and garbage for my campmates to contend with. I was leaving Burning Man before the Man burned. (“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said.)
I didn’t know if I should go with Nate, camping next to us, who had also decided he was going to leave before the Man burned. He created video games, seemed nice, we had even attended the same state university. But I had the sense as though he was looking for something, and I didn’t want to drive many miles and stay in a hotel room halfway to Oakland to find out what it was he was searching for.
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” I murmured, even while we pulled away from the camp. I was in the car and Aviva was driving. I decided to go with her. I didn’t know if it was the right decision. And then I was asleep for a long time, those drugs, no sleep, relief. Twice, on our way to the Bay Area, there were no bathrooms and we pulled over. I unfolded myself from the front seat, dashed to the side of the road, untied my drawstring pants and squatted. Weeks later, Aviva said she didn’t realize how out of character that was for me.
These days, when I am far from the heat and confusion and sweat and exile of Burning Man, when I am wondering when I will find my next job, a partner, a place to live, I remember driving down my street on my way to the store or to the gym and pulling over. It was WDKX, the local urban station. There was a preacher preaching (it was Sunday morning) and he said, once and again and again: Your wilderness is not permanent. Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent. There were capitals in his words. All capitals. YOUR WILDERNESS IS NOT PERMANENT.
I was so scared in the desert, without friends, unable to reach anyone, a phone drained of power, a spirit without charge, and so many things in those days seemed hopeless: finding my way around Black Rock City, having enough water in my water bottle, enough sunblock on my face, enough food, energy bars; a bandana against the dust storm, a program guide, being present enough that I could find my way home. I stopped worrying about the fact that I had failed. I regret not taking more pictures, but the desert demanded I stay present.
Cinque said, when I talked to him a few months later, “You manifested that situation when you worried about things. You made things difficult for yourself by worrying. I knew you would be able to get out of there okay.” I thought he might apologize for the misinformation. There was no apology.
“I had nothing but good intentions,” he said. “I knew you wanted to go,” he said, “and I did what I could do to make it happen.” That was true; he did. I almost didn’t see the beauty at Burning Man—the pageantry, the terrifying spectacle of biking in a wind and dust storm, the enormous desert night sky, the exhilaration because I was so worried.
At any particular moment, your wilderness, wild as it is, is not permanent. We danced and kissed, and rode our bikes around the desert, tripping. Cinque and me, apparently (he tells me; I have only a vague memory). I ventured beyond what I had seen or done before, not knowing enough to pay the fee to camp with a larger, organized camp with meal plan options. I wanted to see what brought people back to Burning Man again and again. I wanted to go beyond what I knew. I wanted to break some rules.
I was angry at Cinque for promising me a way home that did not exist, and I was angrier at myself for getting in the car at all when I could have eaten the price of the ticket and stayed in Berkeley. I wanted to be like the free spirits and pot dealers I’ve known; I wanted to just go. All my life, I have been biking with brakes on.
We want to be able to move. We want to be able to do what we want to do. I wanted to go to Burning Man and needed to get to Big Sur after, which I had planned my whole year around. I wanted to see the spectacle. Maybe the dust and sparkle would rub off on me, maybe I would strengthen my nerve, maybe I would learn to have some balance, to ride out my anxiety; maybe I would coast.
Instead, I forgot to take my antidepressants, drank scotch, took acid, and had no way home.
In the only pictures I have from my four days at Burning Man, I am wearing a black T-shirt with the words “Savage Beauty” written in white let
ters. The shirt references the title of the biography of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; it was part of a fundraiser for a writer’s colony in Upstate New York. No one who saw me in the desert would have known that. I had not brought anything with me that looked particularly savage. I knew I was no savage beauty. I was just brown. It started to feel like a bad joke. I left the T-shirt in California.
Now I wish I had taken it. I wanted to be both savage and beautiful—what woman doesn’t? I felt neither in the desert; the desert was both. I was both, too, but who knows that kind of thing at the time? I was more accustomed to writers sitting around in idyllic retreats than radical self-reliance. I want to say I found a fierceness in myself—but did I? I found some sort of hidden nerve to bike miles in the blazing sun to find a way to leave. I talked myself out of panicking when alone in the night and darkness.
It’s some months later, but I am still thinking about what being there meant. Was it okay to ask for such a big favor—eight hours out of her way—from someone I had just met? I did it. Was it okay to break into someone’s car? I did that, too. I was no longer living in New York. I had moved back to my sad upstate city. I had left the epicenter. I wanted to burn. I wanted to be free.
Many years ago, I spent a week in Paris. I thought I would visit the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. I went to the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay but not the Louvre. I did not see the Mona Lisa; I did not climb the Eiffel Tower either. I went to the desert for Burning Man and did not see the Man burn—the culmination, the catharsis, the highlight, the point. It was me burning, my old self, that I had been after all along. I wanted to shake it loose, my old ways, rules, teaching. I was a phoenix; I wanted to burn. I was a circle of stars, silver in the night sky. It was me: I was the spectacle in the desert I had traveled so far to see.
[2012, 2019]
Deluxe
ONE
She is the last of her siblings who is alive; Mother says she is tired. (Ba will never say she is tired.) Ba is my mother’s mother. She walks, leaning on the walker, from one side of the basement, the foot of the stairs, to the bar at the other end. This is exercise. There is a wet bar with its own sink and no drinks. (A bar in the basement: it was a ranch house of a certain era.) Fluorescent tube lights, white and red. Stickers of sexy ladies tattoo the walls, a remnant of previous owners, thirty-five years ago; the decals still glow, voluptuous pinups, Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, spilling out of their green and red silk camisoles and chocolate-brown fur stoles, sitting with legs crossed or lounging on one hip. Across from the bar sits the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses, Krishna, Laxmi, Ram-Laxman-Sita-Hanuman-the-monkey-god, Ganesh-the-elephant-god, Shiva and his trident, purple and magnificently furious. To be magnificently furious! The occasional background holy cow. The pictures show no children except a blue baby Krishna, scooping butter from a clay pot, but I know that many of them, these gods and goddesses, are parents.
TWO
Children are hanging off the bars. One child sits on a leather platform; another child pushes the walker. The platform is a shelf with no discernible use. We need things that have no discernible use. These children belong to me; they are my nephews. I like to use the word “my.” Children monkey bar across the walker—no, not really, but they are monkeys, they are squirrels, they are boys who love cars. They are boys: they love motion. They twist, shout, change direction, repeat, repeat. They push their great-grandmother’s walker across the kitchen floor in a spacious, five-bedroom, nineties-built home in eastern Massachusetts decorated with luxe European antiques, not far from water.
For these boys, everything spins, everything is a toy, wheels equals toy equals theirs. They appeared on a hot August day, nearly seven years ago, in a hospital in Boston, C-sectioned from their mother’s abdomen. For them, scooters, skateboards, bicycles, four-wheeler motorized car, motion and mobility and running away from me and from each other, matters. Yet another set of boys, with wheels or without them, running in the opposite direction. “Chase me,” they shout. “Get me,” they say. “Gonna get me?” they ask hopefully, they implore.
THREE
It’s a Cruiser Deluxe Classic Walker with Detachable Flip Back. My grandmother has one at our home. My father uses a simple metal one at the hospital. Prostate cancer. Everyone gets it, but still, we were surprised. They say doctors make the worst patients. My mother (not a doctor) says they are right. He would rather be home, he would rather be at work, but wouldn’t everyone? No one likes hospitals, but not everyone signs up to work in one. I watch him lean on the simple walker, and the cords and fluid bags trail him like confetti. They are tiny children trying to outrun themselves, or even tinier ones, determined—and shrill—to nurse.
FOUR
You will use this for your knee replacements, your hip replacements, your heart when one of the boys you chased (not remembering they are supposed to chase you) breaks your heart. You stopped eating for weeks. You hung your handwashing off the bars to dry—the periwinkle blue bra you bought at a tiny store on the Upper East Side and the only lace-edged black silk underwear you ever owned. You were embarrassed that you bought beautiful underwear for a man who found you, at best, likable, who refused to say “love.” “I like you, “ he would say. “Hey cutie. “ And somehow this didn’t make you sad or angry for years. (Now, once angry, you don’t know how to stop.) Who was that person? And was she, though in her twenties, already limping along behind a cart of broken bones?
FIVE
At the front of the big box store, next to the mall, they are lined up, to the side, congregating; they are parishioners after church. Strollers, walkers, canes, crutches, walking sticks. The cane displays a curved metal handle and is propped against the wall next to a single crutch. They are restless, ladies waiting outside for their sons to finish karate, nursing a cup of coffee. They are parents leaning on the fence at summer soccer, waving to their children, exchanging sangria recipes. But where are the people? The mall has eaten them up, swallowed them alive as malls do. Mostly they return, but burdened now by packages, brown paper bags, clothes with tags, more things they heap on the strollers or hang from the walkers or the wide red and gray shopping carts, which also loiter near the entrances and exits, waiting for trouble.
SIX
If you have a child, when you are old you will have someplace to walk your walker: a smooth place. I have no children. I don’t know when the irreversible collapsing will begin (it has already begun). The shortening, the shrinking, the pulling back into itself, the declaring, the rusting out, the turning. Where will I walk my walker? (Black, ridged plastic handles, smooth metal bars, a corruptible body, heavily leaning?) I am afraid to imagine fluorescent lights and white tiled floors, cool and patient and horrifying, a hospital or facility, assisted living, but I can imagine it anyway. I imagine it anyway. I should be doing other things (at this age), but I take the time to imagine it, anyway.
[2012]
Thank You
You will never know me, will never know your father once professed (many times, over a few months, the way boys will) to love me; will not know the first time we made love you were in your bedroom next door sleeping, and we paused to listen when we heard you (I worried, unused to this situation) call out in sleep.
Your father showed me pictures of you in a pale pink leotard and translucent white skirt, a series capturing your curly hair and sparkly eyes, and assured me you’d love me. But you will never meet me now, and I will never meet you, though I heard months of stories about you and gave you two books, both of which I heard you loved.
One was a small blank book I made at a community bindery, stitching the seam, knotting the thread—the first one I had ever made. I brought the book to our first date, blind. You told your father something he said he’d never heard you say before: I love this book so much I’m not going to say thank you. I wonder now—from whom did your father say the books came?
After returning from a friend’s Mardi Gras Vodka Baby Shower in New York, I sa
ved a string of shiny purple beads to give to you, guessing from your dance recital pictures you might like them, maybe even love them. But I don’t think he gave them to you. I’m guessing, though.
The first time your father and I went away for the weekend, I was surprised to see your car seat in the back, the legion of stickers festooning your window. I was surprised by my surprise. Although I never met you, you were everywhere.
The last time I saw your father he was looking out his apartment window to make sure I reached my car. “Text me,” he had said, “when you get home.” He wanted to know I was safe. Snow upstate, night driving, can be treacherous. This is the last thing he ever said to me.
I will never have the chance to love you, to be your dad’s annoying girlfriend or your evil stepmother or your big sister or your babysitter or your sort-of friend.
I broke up with him that night, frustrated at living in the small space between your bedtime and his; disappointed at not meeting you, at not being invited (rather, uninvited) to meet your grandmother, the famous Connecticut writer. “Let’s at least try,” I later wrote in an email message, sent hastily the night after I ended things. I wrote: “I miss you and I love you.”
Maybe he loved me so much, your father, that he decided he would also not say thank you and also never reply. He had eyes that shone when he talked about you and also when he looked at me, across a low-lit restaurant table covered with oyster shells and chardonnay, his favorite, you know. “Thank you for loving me,” he once said to me. We had marveled, then, at our good luck. I drank chardonnay, too, to match, though it’s not my favorite. I hoped I might someday count, though not as much as you—never as much as you (that’s not what I wanted, either).