You got ten more minutes of two-lane blacktop, said the man who greeted us at the airport in Stovepipe Wells, pointing a long, sinewy finger due east. After the turnoff you’re going down one lane of gravel for ’nother forty minutes, okay, but that road winds around the valley and takes you all the way to the playa.
We convoyed in two Jeeps Frank had rented ahead of time. Jonjay drove the Jeep in the lead, he said he knew where to go, and Wendy, trusting in him, followed behind and chewed her teeth. Off we went. To our right were the Funeral Mountains and the Kodachrome Basin State Park. To our left were the Cottonwood Mountains and the Racetrack Playa. It was hot in the shade. We had the air conditioning blowing. We took Scotty’s Castle Road just like the man told us to, a single lane of gravel that bummed along through the flat wide valley of pale Martian borax and dolomite until the Cottonwoods mellowed out into soft, very high hills. The undulating rifts of the blond-white borax formed deep-riven troughs between bladethin peaks. The scrub shaded the Cottonwoods above these dunes. The rock was striped with rusty pink belts.
Our Jeeps passed alluvial fans spreading jewelled pebbles down the mountainsides. At Death Valley Junction, shade—taking as many pictures as we could of these eerie cones and tides of red-and-white rock, like sleeping dragons with swollen bellies covered in boiling-hot sand—the heavens granted us a penny-sized cloud.
From the overpoweringly conspicuous lavishness of Fleecen’s private jet to the bedrock of this vaporous toaster, inhabitable only by coyotes, roadrunners, snakes, lizards, spiders, and other bloodsucking vermin immortalized in cartoons, we were glad our Jeeps sealed us in, cold and protected.
Driving about five miles an hour through narrow crevasses in the rock, we saw a gaunt hare with veined ears like lacrosse sticks do nimble sporting herd movements. The tiny haggard Joshua trees that populated the many nooks and shelves were like pencil sketches of biblical wisemen stooped over against the howling heat. And the chuckwalla lizard we saw was unreal, more like a medieval symbol not meant to be taken literally. Above us the enormous sun exploding over the mountains sent fuggy overripe heat down to our level.
Piper Shepherd asked if we were circling around and around a burning maze or if we would ever breach this crack. Death Valley, what sort of game are you playing here? he said.
Not me, Kravis said, rubbing his hands together. I love these tiny gaps we’re skating through, this is my mien, these tight narrow margins.
Very outer space, said Mark Bread with his nose to the window.
Kravis sniffed him. Who the fuck is the source of that B.O. smell that’s floating around? It’s asphyxiating.
That’s me, Mark said, and giggled. Justine asked me to bring some from the hamper. He enigmatically patted his pocket.
If she’s in then so am I, said Kravis, slapping his own cheeks.
Frank’s wife told Jonjay to stop the Jeep. She was getting out. She trotted off down the road to the second Jeep and Wendy stopped driving and leaned out the window and asked her what she could do for her.
Someone trade seats with me for a while, Sue said. I’m tired of hearing those men and their euphemisms. One of them claims he can do fifty pushups the other claims he only eats doughnuts. And the little one is a crab.
I’ll go sit with the boys, said Justine, no problem. I can dish it out.
You don’t want to do that. That man Kravis is an asshole, Sue said as she buckled on a seatbelt. I kind of wanted to strangle him.
Who is he? Wendy said. Why is he here?
This is the first time I’ve met him, Sue said. However, she’d heard Frank complain about him for years. Quinn Kravis was a pseudoclient of Frank’s who raked in millions exploiting tiny fluctuations in the exchange rates of international currency. Say there’s a spike in U.S. currency—he’d buy half a million British sterling and wait for the markets to back out and then sell the pounds at a tidy profit. Son of a laundromat owner, Kravis married rich—Hala Kravis was the daughter of Jamal Shahbandar, the Middle Eastern scientist who’d made his fortune selling chemical weapons like cyclosarin and VX to the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, before going into hiding in of all places Hoboken, New Jersey. Hala, an Iraqi-American glamour model in the pages of Vogue Italia at fifteen, met Kravis at a benefit for the Frick Collection when she was twenty-two, would bear him three children and call an eleven-bedroom estate in Westchester County home, with its mob neighbours and melancholy view of white sand and slate-grey Atlantic squalls. On their wedding night, Hala floated Kravis a million dollars of Shahbandar family money to start his private arbitrage equity firm, and after sex, instead of a cigarette, he started trading from the phone on the nightstand in their Beverly Hills honeymoon suite. Over six years as an arb scalping millions off the world financial market’s minor discrepancies, Kravis had managed to rope Hala’s entire inheritance into his investment stable—this family’s billion, plus the investors Kravis persuaded to throw millions more at his feet before he rolled the dice, made his arbitrage office one of the biggest bullies of Wall Street.
A truly toxic personality, Sue said. Frank meets the worst sorts of men—great for my fiction, awful for real life. Socially, cretins. Even the Feds think Kravis is up to no good. He’s in the paper quoted saying greediness is next to godliness. He’s a dracula. Bet you he’s hitting on Justine as we speak.
What we saw when the mountains of Death Valley finally separated was this: Racetrack Playa’s flat white surface shimmering with blue heatwaves for miles around, like a giant skating rink or a lake, an enormous mirror. We got out of the Jeeps and took our first tentative steps along the surface, cracked into plates of dried mud. The wind blew in our ears. Purgatory. No one else around. Silence. Inside the bowl of time. Flat. Totally flat. For three miles in all directions. A frying pan. Surrounded on all sides by the rust-red Cottonwood Mountains shimmering in the heat. A blue dome over us. This intricate mosaic under our feet. The playa was cracked into hundreds of thousands of hexagonal tiles. A beautiful network of clay tiles made in extreme conditions. The air smelled of sand. The heat was an inescapable, dusty. Breathing burned. We did not adapt. Stunned, we spread out across the playa together and alone, toured the flatland from end to end, becoming dots to one another, to ourselves, our bodies becoming then vanishing, becoming again, then dots within our minds the longer we spent walking the Racetrack Playa.
What interested Jonjay about the playa was the sailing stones. These were practically the only other objects around to disturb the flat playa besides us, and we could see them coming from far away. There on the blank slate of the playa were inexplicably dozens of huge stones, and not only that, these stones had somehow, over time, moved, and left behind irregular swooping meandering paths in the dried mud, like drunk stones out for a stroll. Some of these stones had moved hundreds of feet across the basin.
Jonjay wanted to use large sheets of archival newsprint to do rubbings of the tracks, to record the movements of the stones as accurately as possible. Each stone might need fifty or more sheets of paper to get a complete rubbing of the entire path, which is what he wanted. The tracks behind the stones weren’t elegant, these weren’t tricks like the eerie mandalas found in crop circles. The stones indented the hardpacked snakeskin ground in aimless zigzags. No pattern at all. There were dozens of stones, hundreds of feet of paths to cover. This might take him more than an hour.
Hold on a minute, Rachael said. How many stones to you want to trace? Surely not all of them?
And how do you expect me to show these? My gallery isn’t infinitely big. You waited years for this? You’re never not infuriating.
Justine stood with her hands at her hips and watched as her artist got down on his hands and knees with a stack of paper and a box of charcoal and began to trace the long, chaotic lines. He wanted us to move methodically from the start of the stone and down along each long track, page after page, capturing as much of the detail as possible of the depressed mosaic floor of the playa.
Sue hugged herself and sai
d, I would feel safer if I had on an astronaut’s suit.
Frank got down on his hands and knees to help Jonjay. People push these around on a prank, right? he said. How else does a rock move?
That’s what I say, too. People pushing. Justine turned her back to the wind so her hair flew in front of her face and she squeaked every time a pebble nipped at her calves. Eek! Beam me up, Scotty. I hope someone remembered to bring a bottle of something strong to this planet. She opened her purse and took out a forty of vodka. Ah, there we go. Mark, care for a swig?
She and Mark proceeded to get lit.
The temp was hovering in the hundred-and-one territory. It was October. The sky looked chlorinated.
Possibly pushing, Jonjay said and handed Frank a stack of paper. Plenty of theories flying around. But if you try pushing one now, it won’t be easy to, and it won’t leave behind the same kind of groove. And that’s a lot of stones to push around—look, there’s dozens of them out here. Who’s going to do that? For hundreds of years? The pioneers who came through here wrote about it in their diaries.
Then what is it? Frank was doing as told, doing a charcoal rubbing of the trail next to Jonjay’s.
Some say aliens. We’re a few hours’ drive from Area 51. But what kind of dunce alien communicates via dolomite in an uninhabitable desert? Special magnetic force field maybe. Except dolomite isn’t magnetic.
Telekinetic spy training ground, said Mark.
Might be. I’m with those who say natural phenomena. Rain. Ice. Frost. Wind.
Of course, said Frank. Natural’s all there is. And you’re right. These trails are much too random for human intervention. Humans can’t resist patterns.
Here are patterns, said Rachael of three parallel grooves, as if the stones were in a neck-and-neck race spanning centuries.
But no patterns over there, said Frank. And besides, these are hardly parallel just because they’re all in a line. Yeah, wind could do this.
Except if I can’t push one, how can wind? said Jonjay. Whatever it is, it’s a drawing nature made. I’ve always wanted to come here.
The paths do give them personality, said Sue. There’s some weird feelings I get from the stones, like they are alive, there’s a presence to them. Don’t you feel it? Maybe there is a sentient phenomenon going on here. I wonder if they’re watching us from their lifespan of eons.
Torchlight blinding. Ears ringing with heat’s tinnitus. Sweating under unmitigated solarity. Ultraviolet headaches. Heatstroking. The sun and heat didn’t affect Jonjay the same way it burned us. He took breaks to drop off stacks of paper at the Jeeps, one stack per stone, labelled accordingly. Then he would wander the playa for a while, gazing here and there and studying the ground for stones with an especially interesting path. Meanwhile we took breaks back at the Jeeps and guzzled from icecold thermoses of water and ran the engine for a blast of air conditioning.
Kravis wasn’t going to get down on his hands and knees, not for art. Not in his Gucci casuals. On a tour of the playa, he found an abandoned park ranger’s shack made of clay and bleached wood beams warped by the scorching time under the sun, and, in the mood for some shade, he went in. We followed him in a short time later, not knowing he was inside. We found a charming black cookstove, a card table, two wicker chairs, and a cot upon which we caught Kravis asleep. It was cool indoors compared to the playa’s frying pan, and the walls were covered in watercolours of haggard soldiers, sirens at the lagoon, dragon mountains, and other local Death Valley vistas spun into the floss of lonely fantasy. Not bad amateur art, we thought.
Hip studio, said Kravis as he sat up and yawned, put his sunglasses in his shirt pocket. Imagine this is your job, working out here, the kind of cosmonaut you’d become. Bet you anything there’s a bottle stashed somewhere, probably under the mattress. Ah, there you have it. Wild Turkey—this man knew his business. Kravis found a tin mug hanging by a hook in the ceiling. And our lucky day, folks. Who wants to fight fire with fire?
He skulled the mug and licked his lips. Poured himself another shot before passing bottle and mug on to us.
Mark Bread proceeded to roll a two-paper joint for a hotbox.
We shouldn’t be seen together, Kravis confessed. Not us—me and Frank, I mean. We’re in cahoots, but you know, that’s not kosher. Fuck it, I say. Who’s looking? Idiots, that’s who. He laughed. Give me back that bottle.
Dust the colour of coffee grinds swept across the ground in the wind, up into our faces where sweat dissolved the grains into lines of mud.
An hour later there were four of us walking together across the playa, Wendy and Sue in front, parallel like two stones. They had talked about what Wendy was up to, and what Sue was working on now, a short story about a renowned psychotherapist who leads a double life as a polyamorous drug addict.
I’m in psychotherapy for my teeth, Wendy told Sue. I have bruxism. Sue said the girl in her dormroom in college was like that, Sue could hear her teeth squeak and crack all night long. Wendy had tried a slew of doctors and treatments but none of them had cracked her code, she was wry and defensive and blind to herself as ever. She hoped for a consultation with the celebrated repressed-memory expert Dr. Lawrence Pazder, who was on tour of America.
I still brux, she said. I brux all night long. I call it bruxing, not grinding. I brux my teeth.
You must suspect something. What do you think is at the root?
I’m stuck between me and myself, Wendy said and turned her gaze towards Jonjay in the middle distance rubbing on his hands and knees. That’s my problem. I’m what I’m biting down on.
Sue said, Maybe you and I are quite alike. I feel the same way sometimes, like I’m caught between the person I am and the one I want to be. Being married young, I guess my experimentation went into in my fiction. But my stories are getting more traditional, so … I’m looking for more out of life these days.
It’s like I experiment with people too much and end up drawing a traditional strip. Gee, why are we talking about these things, I’m sorry, I hardly know you.
I don’t mind, said Sue. People fascinate me. Usually what’s on our minds isn’t what we talk about, we circle and circle but never get there. But I can tell you’re an open person. You must be like this with everybody. You’re not a private person, you’re not shy to talk.
That’s true, Wendy said. I can talk and draw.
Maybe it’s not that you’re trapped between your teeth. Maybe they grind because you’re so open. After hearing so much from Frank about your success the past few years … well, now I regret we didn’t meet sooner. We could be fast friends.
Totally. Let’s be. So, what’s Frank say about me? I can’t help but wonder.
Oh, you know. He says how talented he thinks you are, and how many deals you’ve helped him make, and I can tell he likes you personally. Now I see why he does, because you’re smart and adorable and you draw all day. You’ve got the best life. I can see why with a personality like yours you’re so close to someone so reclusive as Jonjay.
Jonjay-in-the-box? Look at him, harmless as a kitten, but get to know him and I promise he explodes in your face. But then you sit around and wait for the next time he pops up. The one that got away is my roommate, imagine that, Wendy said guilelessly. Jonjay is the real reason I grind. My life would be completely different without him.
Presently we joined up with Piper Shepherd, who stood beside the dolomite Grandstand regarding the landscape through slitted eyes, disillusioned with the desert or himself. He bared his teeth against the wind spitting shards of sand at his face. The Grandstand was a volcanic outcropping of batwing rocks, black and broiling hot, the only unflat thing in a three-mile span, it could be the remnants of a burnt-out alien craft. From its peak we could survey the entire surface of the playa shimmering in heatwaves. Sue climbed to its peak and stood beside us with a hand over her eyes and said, My god, this place is desolate, the embodiment of goodbye. Death Valley is like walking into that word, really getting a sense of it
s scale against the puniness and fragility of the human heart.
Then she got a pocket sketchbook from her handbag and a Pentel, and, with the cap in her mouth, began to write. Once in a while she took a deep breath and wiped her eyes and nose against the back of her hand as if she were quietly crying.
Wendy came around from the other side of the rocks to join Piper in the shadow they provided. The temp dropped a degree. Piper’s face was hidden under the brim of a straw hat. He pulled a kerchief from the breast pocket of his white cotton blazer and mopped his neck.
Ice water? she said, holding out her thermos.
They sat down on a natural bench of dolomite and shared the water. Dust clouds pirouetted in front of them, then vanished.
It’s hard to believe it’s almost Christmastime, Wendy said.
Piper choked and laughed. Christmas is banned here, he said. Death Valley is a Santa-free zone. Nobody opens presents in Death Valley. What the hell.
For the longest time now I’ve imagined if I ever made a Strays Christmas special it would take place in the middle of a hot hot summer. Maybe one of the animals hears what Christmas is all about and gets the date wrong. So all the animals plan a big Christmas celebration with gifts and dinner feast and songs and everything, only to learn it isn’t Christmas for six more months.
But you are making it already, aren’t you? That’s the rumour, isn’t it? Yes, I heard about this project, in fact, said Piper. He drank the last of the ice water. You mentioned it in an interview.
Are your TV channels looking for a cartoon special that could air in July and again in December?
If it’s good, Wendy, perhaps. It is rather unorthodox to make it yourself, you know, and sell it to us finished. Normal way to go about this is—
Naw, I’m a control freak, said Wendy. This one is too important to me. I don’t want to pass a script off to Hanna-Barbera or some know-it-all who rewrites my ideas. I’d rather make it on my own and risk it never gets seen. It’s my money, after all.
The Road Narrows As You Go Page 24