The Lightest Object in the Universe: A Novel

by Eisele, Kimi

  Carson’s mind went to Beatrix—her eyes, her hair, her head. “Damn pretty,” he said.

  Felix looked over at him. “What are we talking here, pretty-vegetation pretty or pretty-woman pretty?”

  Carson smiled again.

  “Oh shit. Say it isn’t so. Don’t tell me you’re pulling for some woman out there. Are you? Is that what you’re doing?”

  “She’s almost mythical now,” Carson said. “It’s like she takes up the whole sky in front of me sometimes.”

  “Write that down—she’ll want to hear that. What’d you say your name was?”

  “Carson.”

  “Well, Carson, I’ll get you as close to that myth as I can.” He pressed down on the accelerator and sped through the desert.

  Flash rang the tambourine at the Gold Mine fence, and a black-and-tan dog wandered out from behind the parked van. “That’s not the same dog as before,” he said. The dog was scrawny and missing patches of fur. Three more dogs came running behind it, barking.

  “Something’s not right,” Flash said.

  Beatrix kicked some stones loose from the dirt. “Here,” she said. “Load up your pockets, just in case. Frida?” she called out. Then again. When it was clear she wasn’t there, Beatrix said, “I don’t think we brought wire cutters.”

  “I don’t think Frida would appreciate you cutting through her fence,” Flash said, rubbing his hands together.

  “Um, I think Frida would be okay with it if she knew it was for a good cause.”

  “The Red Raven?” Dragon said. “That’s your cause?”

  Beatrix blinked. “Yes. It is,” she said. She wasn’t exactly sure when she’d become so fervent a champion of a radio drama, but right now it was all that seemed to matter. “Problem?”

  “Nope,” Dragon said. “I think it’s a good—”

  A shout interrupted him, and a figure crested the top of the hill on the other side of the fence. A boy in a black balaclava, holding a machete.

  Another kid appeared, and then another, until there were nearly a dozen kids at the top of the hill—many in balaclavas—sticks and chains at their sides. Beatrix wondered what Subcomandante Marcos would say to that. Pilfering idiots, she thought.

  “No trespassing!” one of them shouted.

  “Where is Frida?” Beatrix called out.

  “She’s not here anymore,” said the kid with the machete, now making his way down the hill, the others following.

  “What do you mean, she’s not here?” Beatrix said, starting to panic.

  The kids stopped some ten to twelve feet away from the fence and held their ground. Their clothes were filthy and torn. One was barefoot. Another wore flip-flops. They looked like inexperienced child soldiers—unyielding, lost, and too young to be holding weapons of any kind.

  “She’s gone,” the leader said. He was scrawny with loose, filthy jeans. Even his fingerless gloves seemed too big. His brown eyes squinted through the holes of the face mask. “No longer with us.”

  “Oh good God,” Beatrix whispered, feeling her knees give out. She scanned the crew in front of her. They were so wretchedly dirty, so young, and so angry.

  The leader boy stepped forward. “The Gold Mine is closed for business. Permanently. Now get the hell out of here if you don’t want any trouble.”

  “We need something here,” Beatrix said, remembering their mission. “Would you consider selling us something?”

  The boy shook his head. “I said, we’re closed for business.”

  “Beatrix, come on,” Flash said. “Let’s just go.”

  “We’re just going to let them scare us off?” she said. She turned back to the fence. “Shame on you! Big fucking shame on you.”

  “Easy does it, Beatrix. We’re not going to let them get away with it,” Flash said, pulling her away from the fence.

  “What are we going to do?” Beatrix said, defeated.

  “You know exactly what we’re going do,” Flash said.

  “What?”

  “We’re gonna organize.”

  Charlie was waiting for them at home on the front porch. His hands were on his forehead, and he looked distressed. “Frida was just here. She said T-Rize took over the Mine. Did you see them?”

  “Frida’s okay? Thank God,” Beatrix said.

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “She said get a team of PBB riders together. We’re going to go reclaim the Gold Mine.”

  “Good thing we have a secret weapon,” Dragon said.

  “What’s that?” Charlie asked.

  “You,” Flash said.

  Charlie ran his hand through his disheveled hair and grimaced. “Really?”

  “Really,” Beatrix said. “Because at the moment the Red Raven is tied up.”

  “Here’s where you channel your own superhero,” Flash said.

  “You got this,” Dragon said, patting Charlie on the back.

  One night in late October, the tickle lodged itself so stubbornly in Rosie’s throat that she could not sleep. In the moments between coughs, she lay staring at the God’s eye, which she had left up defiantly. She leaned over the edge of her bunk and peered down at her abuela, who looked angelic, lying still.

  She finally slept, waking at dawn to the sound of knocking. A voice from outside called out, “It’s time. It’s time.”

  Rosie slid down under the covers.

  “Come, Rosie,” her abuela said. “Now.”

  Rosie didn’t move for a few moments, but then the cough came and she could not suppress it.

  “Rosie, mi hijita, it’s time.”

  The tickle violent in her throat, Rosie grabbed a bottle of tincture and tucked it in her pocket. She and her abuela walked out of the tent and met dozens of others wrapped in coats and blankets already moving along the path.

  The air was damp and smelled of wet earth. A team of men in white led them along a narrow trail flanking the river, then through the grasslands, until the sun reached across the landscape, hitting them in the eyes. As they reached a slope of naked trees and began to ascend, some people removed sweaters and jackets, tying them around their waists or simply dropping them to the ground. Rosie kept her layers on, unable to warm up her hands even inside her mittens. She walked slowly and reluctantly.

  They reached a small clearing, and Jonathan Blue appeared. His voice was as clear as ever. “This is the morning. It is here. Thank you for your patience. Bless the blue sky. Bless all of you.”

  Rosie trembled, her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket.

  “Today is the day, my friends. Today is the day you become whole. Feel your feet on the ground. Feel that support. Root. And by rooting, we will rise. This is not a renunciation. This is a joining. This is becoming a seed. In darkness, we find the light. Everything is now possible.” Jonathan Blue held his arms up to the blue.

  Rosie felt a tingling sensation all the way down to her feet. “Abuela,” she said, and shook her grandmother’s arm.

  The men in white passed around something that looked like a Hershey’s Kiss, only flatter. She guessed that it didn’t taste anything remotely like chocolate. “Partake,” one of the men whispered as he held out the tablet to Rosie. She looked around for Jesús and spotted his cowboy hat on the other side of the group.

  Her abuela ate the tablet right away, nodding for Rosie to eat, too. Rosie put the not-chocolate in her mouth. It was bitter and waxy, like resin from a tree. She coughed again, but her abuela, so used to the sound, didn’t seem to notice. Rosie spit the tablet into her hand.

  They were ushered back into the woods and along a thin trail. Rosie wanted to try to catch up with Jesús, but she’d have to get around a man in a white smock. The trail turned rocky and ascended again. She turned around and saw hundreds of people behind her, and still more coming up the path—a slow, dazed herd. Everyone from the tents. All of them.

  “Abuela, look.” But Abuela, ever determined, was focused only on her feet, on moving them up the hill.

  “Abuela,” she
said, “we must stop,” but her grandmother didn’t hear her. Rosie pinched her abuela’s arm hard, trying to startle her out of her trance.

  “Abuela,” Rosie said again, tears running down her cheeks. But as she turned, Abuela looked weird. She was staring right at Rosie, but her eyes didn’t seem to focus. People staggered past, and her abuela fell into step behind them. Rosie stopped. Her grandmother’s bun disappeared into the ranks of people ahead, one gray knot among the black, the blonde, and the red.

  Two men in white stood talking, pointing at Rosie, and she willed her legs to move. Hoisting her skirt, she scrambled off the trail and into the trees. She heard shouts and footsteps behind her, and in her haste, she tripped and fell. She turned around and saw a man in white, and just beyond him another figure, the top of his cowboy hat catching the light.

  “Jesús!” she cried.

  The man in white stopped and turned around. She had given Jesús away. He waved his arms. “Rosie, no pares. ¡Vete, vete!” Rosie, don’t stop. Go, go! “¡No comas nada de lo que te dan! ” Don’t eat anything they give you!

  Rosie started back toward him, but she saw his hat fall to the ground, and then his body. The man in white yanked him up by the arm and pulled him back into the line. “Rosie, go!” Jesús called out.

  Rosie ran, and she kept running until she could not run anymore. She stopped to catch her breath, her sides heaving. She listened to the morning, the intermittent chit-chit of birdsong. She pressed her hand to her pocket, where the small bottle of her abuela’s tincture was nestled, and felt a small relief.

  Into the quiet came Jonathan Blue’s voice, lifting above everything, its deep, clear tone like a red flare in the sky. But the sound was far away, somehow echoing toward her. She crept from the trees to a small outcropping. She flattened herself to a rock and peered down at the edge of another steep ridge, where the crowd was gathering. Far below it, she could make out the shine of the river and, along its banks, mounds of overturned soft brown earth, freshly dug. She remembered Jesús’s blisters. RiverNorth, Mary had said. Garden beds? Those were not garden beds. Rosie sucked in her breath.

  “Our greatest goal, now realized,” Jonathan Blue proclaimed. “What does the spirit want to do? Rise, rise, rise!”

  The people in the distance were small, like little birds. So many of them. An ocean of birds. A continent of birds. They fluttered to the rim of the ridge, and then they moved beyond the rim, and then they disappeared. Rosie could not believe what she was seeing. Birds swooping, birds plunging, birds without wings.

  Rosie blinked and blinked again, and felt as though all the blood were draining from her body. She looked to the sky to see if maybe some of the people had been chosen and were actually rising. She wanted to see them up there, the bird-people. She wanted everything Jonathan Blue had promised to be true. And maybe it was. Maybe everything he promised was over that ledge, and they found it as the ground gave way beneath them. Maybe they fell into something soft. Like a cloud. Or the sea. But Rosie couldn’t see that. All she saw was the dropping of the birds and the blue of the bare sky. A terrible, empty blue.

  A sound rose into Rosie’s throat where the tickle had been. As she opened her mouth to let it out, one last figure in the distance came into view. It was Jonathan Blue, standing at the edge, his giant wing-like arms reaching out from his sides, as if proclaiming victory.

  You cruel beast, Rosie wanted to shout, but no words came out. She put her hands to her throat to coax them. Nothing. She clawed at her neck and pushed so hard her tongue flailed in her silent mouth, and then there was a cry. A shrill whinny that descended into a low cello-like thrum. It emptied from inside her with force and rancor, but it did not seem to reach him. He who stood motionless, arms lifted, head lowered. Rosie kept her eyes on him, seething, until the sound inside her dried up and until, without warning, Blue himself stepped from the ridge and went over.

  CHAPTER 17

  Carson woke abruptly as the truck made a sharp swerve, knocking his head against the window. He was fairly certain he’d heard a thud.

  “Coyote, dammit,” Felix said, slowing to a stop.

  The truck seemed unharmed, but the coyote was folded in half. Blood streaked across the side of its head and oozed onto the macadam.

  “Shit,” Felix said. He got out of the truck and paced, then stopped and whispered something at the sky.

  Carson bent over and scooped up the coyote. Its head dangling over his forearm, the limp creature looked like a fur stole. “Dinner?” he said to Felix.

  They put the animal in the back and drove on.

  They passed a billboard showing smiling retirees in front of gargantuan homes with green lawns. desert rose, the sign proclaimed. Marking the entrance was a high metal gate decorated with metal roses. Felix maneuvered past an empty security booth and drove over the sidewalk into the neighborhood, crushing a hedge of dead shrubs on the way.

  “The desert roses,” Carson said.

  “Not anymore,” Felix said.

  More dead rosebushes along the main road led to a series of cement fountains, dry and bleached white, like bones on the sand. As they coasted down the hill, the fountains gave way to tall palm trees, which cast thin stripes of shade across the pavement.

  “This development was never even finished,” Felix said as they passed driveways branching off toward empty plots. “But, damn, the houses they did finish are colossal! This must have been a foreclosure jamboree.”

  “Or a casualty of the energy crisis,” Carson said. “How would you have heated or cooled these mansions?”

  “Exactly. Looks like everyone flew the coop,” Felix said. He looked at Carson. “Where to, sir?”

  Carson pointed to a two-story cream-colored house with red trim, a three-car garage, and an expansive lawn of brittle brown grass. “There.”

  They pulled in and went to the front door. Felix picked the lock with his knife. The house was cavernous and cool, and their footsteps echoed across the white tile floors.

  “Built for the wannabe rich and left for the wandering poor,” Felix said, waving his hands at the ostentatious details—a glass chandelier overhead, sculpted niches that held art objects, a white marble staircase with an ornate gold-leafed banister. In the center of the wide circular living room was a fireplace surrounded by glossy white bricks.

  Carson slid across the floor in his socks and opened the floor-length blinds, which covered a wall of windows and glass doors. The afternoon sun flooded in, nearly blinding them. Outside, an amoeba-shaped swimming pool filled with muddy water took up most of the yard.

  “I wouldn’t get in there if you paid me,” Felix said. “Who knows what kind of disease is lurking in that water. All that bourgeois crud.”

  Carson remembered Jimmy Weed, the seed collector, how he’d launched himself fearlessly into that similarly murky pool months ago. Where might he be now?

  Felix knocked on one of the walls. “Listen to that, would you? Built and bought with paper.”

  They retrieved the coyote from the truck and laid it out on the front lawn. Carson worked to remove the hide while Felix dug a shallow fire pit with a shovel he had in the back of his truck. They found cardboard and a child’s desk in the garage, which they broke down as tinder and piled into the pit. Carson arranged the coyote meat on a screen from the fireplace and set it over the flames.

  Cooked, the animal was stringy, lean, and almost sweet. Carson chewed vigorously, feeling virile.

  “Not bad,” Felix said. “Not so bad at all.” He tossed a bone to the lawn. “Happy Halloween, by the way.”

  Carson had lost track of the days. He held up another piece of meat. “Happy Halloween.”

  Carson considered his luck. He’d been on the road for over seven months now. And he was still alive. By some miracle of fate, he’d just been catapulted three hundred miles in a single afternoon, thanks to this man and his truck. Could he actually make it all the way to Beatrix? “Sometimes I think I’m just plain nuts,” he s
aid. “It’s possible she won’t even remember me.”

  They retreated inside. Felix sat on the living room floor, legs straight out in front of him, stretching. Matter-of-factly, he said, “Someone always dies first.”

  “What?”

  “No way around it. Someone dies first. Love equals loss.”

  Right. Carson knew that as well as anybody.

  “There’s no such thing as a road without consequence. You can have consequences now or later—it’s your choice. But there ain’t no getting around loss. And you know what? No one missing thing is any heavier or lighter than any other missing thing. There’s no magic scale. We’ve just gotta be brave.”

  Gotta be brave, Carson repeated to himself.

  “What’s she like, this Beatrix?” Felix said. “Is she hot?”

  “She’s . . .” He paused a moment, thinking. “She’s a force. Her mind is always moving. But then she notices something and latches on with a fierce grip. Things the rest of us notice and maybe worry about for a bit but then move past—she digs in. But she’s soft, too, a container of compassion.”

  “Well, then, traveler, you have a lot to be brave for,” Felix said. “In Vietnam, whenever I met a guy who didn’t have any reason to be brave, I got worried.”

  “You were in Vietnam? Jesus, Felix, you don’t look a day over, what, fifty-five. How old are you?”

  “Old enough to have been in Vietnam.”

  “Is that where you lost your eye?”

  “No. I gave that away. Someone needed it.”

  “You gave it away?”

  “To a little girl, the daughter of a friend. A dog bit her in the face, and they couldn’t repair her eye. Let’s just say I wanted to see better what was right in front of me. Don’t need stereo vision so much for that. Besides, as we’ve discussed, the future is problematic.”

  “And the past is dead,” Carson said, smiling.

  “Good one,” Felix said. “You know what’s cool, though? On good days, I don’t see just what I see, but what she sees, too.” He rolled onto his back and lay flat, his eye open to the ceiling. The bottoms of his feet were calloused and filthy.