Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  It’s the hottest week in the world. In Sweden a forest fire has crossed the Arctic Circle. In Oman the overnight low is 120 degrees. Near a small German town famous for its asparagus, long-deserted bombs are exploding beneath the trees. And just downstream in Czechia a Hunger Stone has emerged in the Elbe, the water having hit a record low. “If you see me, weep,” it reads, the words etched desperately four centuries before. A second message emerges upriver: “We cried—We cry—And you will cry.” But the dead are loud as toasters. The fish flash in the mud. Meanwhile, further north, seen only from the sky, ghost landscapes rise up via drought: the blueprint of an eighteenth-century mansion on a lawn, a WWII airfield beneath a Hampshire farm, an elaborate Victorian garden long ago erased. Looking at the drone shot of that nonhouse on her phone, she thought of pressed flowers gone brown—no, those cyanotypes of seaweed she saw once on display. A woman named Anna Atkins laid carefully dried specimens on chemically treated paper. Left out in the sun, the seaweed burned its own pale shadow onto a deep blue page. The smell of Kentucky is flammable, damp. The refinery like a spaceship. “This Blue Drama,” that exhibition was called.

  “In 1672,” her son informs her, “Robert Boyle read an entire magazine by the light coming off a piece of rotting veal.” From Delaware to Kentucky, they’ve counted fifteen deer by the side of the road. Once the sun set, the deer began to glow. “It was a neck,” he says. “It was this disgusting fatty piece of baby cow neck.” At a cement table by a grassy field they eat warm melon and pretzels and hard-boiled eggs. A red-winged blackbird trills on a stalk. An old man in the darkened lot moves toward them like a glacier. “I love summer,” her son says, oblivious to the stranger, listening to cicadas ringing on and on. “We should just keep driving to wherever it’s summer, and when it’s not summer there we should drive to wherever it’s summer next.” The air is thick with meadow grass and bugs. On the one hand, on the highway, traffic rushes past, but pale moths twist over the field as if there were no time. A part of her whorls outward with those moths, out and out to native plants as weedy as her kid—a crooked stem aster, a blazing star. When she was small, smaller than he is now, and quiet, much quieter than him, her mother wallpapered their apartment in a stylized jungle print. The leaves on the banana trees curled away like ribs. The eyes of the jungle cats looked out like human eyes. Every night when the lights clicked off she saw men stepping between the leaves and right off of the walls. They were quiet as leopards so as not to wake her mom. At last, the stranger has arrived. “Hello,” she says. Her son turns. The old man opens a toothless mouth. He is trying to tell them something, and they are trying to hear it, but it takes him thirty years to get it out. “I know,” she says when he is done. He turns his gaze to the clamorous field. “No,” he shakes his head, “you’ve got a long way to go.”

  Night comes to Kentucky with red clouds and green sky then the fields are dark. No breeze blows. Some satellites shine. With the old man asleep in the seat beside her and her son asleep in the back, she is the only one to see the electric billboard in the middle of nowhere that says “Jesus Recycled Humans.” The road rises up. Two weeks at her mother’s house has emptied her all the way out. O house in Delaware, bought by a dead husband. O house, a vast expanse of white. That first morning she stepped into the yard and everything was wrong—pool, umbrella, plastic shark. As if she’d never been there. “On the rocks?” her mother hissed before even brewing coffee. Several minutes ticked away as she waited for panic to pass. But the sun was clearly rising on the wrong side of that yard. Or else she’d woken back to front, and this was what it was like to face the ass side of your mind. The road rising steeply, the trees nearer the road, the moon like a beacon now between sweet gum and ash and pine. In Pennsylvania, she knows, there is a house made of glass where you can stand in one spot and watch the sunset and the moonrise at the exact same time. How comforting it sounds. Up on a hill, surrounded by woods, invisible from the road. “Who’d want to live in an invisible house?” rings her mother’s voice in her mind. Then a neon something flashes past and she remembers a half-forgotten class about the beginning of everything back before the bang. A whole semester of lectures on the origin of the world—a yawning gap there was, to start, and regions of fire and frost, and salt, but nowhere grass. In every direction the fields run gray, as if the night absorbed their green, but once upon a time all matter and light were one—and then the stars and then the fireflies and then the grass. She has no idea of the time. The clock on the dashboard tells her it’s tomorrow. She searches out her phone on the floor, but the car swerves, surprising her, and the old man stirs in his sleep.

  For hours the road just goes. Traffic has thinned and her mind makes little visits to that story she read at the beach. “Oh, but I do want to be a bee frightfully,” said the child called Kezia, who sometimes dreamed of camels. But she wasn’t allowed to be a bee. She had to pick something else if she wanted to play the game: a rooster, a bull, a donkey, a sheep. Then when she raised her eyes from the book it was as if the story had dreamed the bees. Tiny golden bees were hovering above the sand. And the waves were going nuts, since somewhere out there a tropical storm was turning and headed in. So they fled her mother’s house, days of endless rain—fast through West Virginia and Kentucky heading home.

  It’s the hottest week in the world. In Siberia the permafrost is collapsing into holes. In California the tide at night blooms an eerie blue. A wildfire in Texas caused a storm with one-inch hail. Then a billboard warns her HELL IS REAL and like a joke the road descends to another refinery and its pipe stacks shooting flames into the sky. All is passing memory, she thinks. In the largest of those Siberian holes, what scientists term a “mega slump,” they’ve discovered an ancient forest and plants untouched by the light of the sun for forty-five thousand years. The locals are afraid. They call the slump a door and claim it makes sounds in the dark. Their hands are cracked and shaking. Who wants to crawl inside? When they walk across the tundra the ground beneath their boots turns to jelly with every step. First it’s one hole and then another and then at the bottom of the deepest hole they find a frozen lake. The ice is black and solid, but someone sees something inside. He gets down on his hands and knees. He brushes away the snow. “Look!” she says, she can’t help herself, sparks from the refinery are drifting through the night sky like luminescent plankton. The old man’s toothless mouth expels cool air and bats. “Where are we?” cries a voice in the car. The road begins to turn. They are driving upside down on the bottom of the planet. She wishes she could tell him the truth. She says, “We’re almost home.”

  Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent

  Sejal A. Shah

  I think we’d like to make love now. The woman saying these words had red hair and very pale skin. She wore sparkly eyeliner, purple. She lay next to a man beneath a brown sleeping bag. The words repeated: a murmuring, a shimmer, a cat walking across covers. It seemed like a reasonable request. My eyes flickered open. I looked at their bare shoulders and collarbones. (Why were they saying this to me?) The night, absent of stars, wound itself around us. I lay curled near their blanket-covered legs. I closed my eyes and fell back to sleep.

  I opened my eyes. The night lifted, a navy-blue scrim rising. The white man had dreads. The white woman told me that she had been a sixth-grade teacher. I was a teacher too, I said. The man grinned. He reminded me of a former student who often argued with me and liked to talk. A lot. He was tall but hunched over, always wore an olive-colored jacket, and something about him seemed oddly animal-like, but not in an unpleasant way. I paused. Then: What am I doing in your car?

  I dropped acid, I said, but the guy I was with—I made him promise that I would get home OK. (I’m going to kill him, I thought. This is not OK.) And I don’t have a ride out of here; I’m stuck.

  It’s OK, they said. You’re fine. Burning Man is a safe place. It’s different than the outside world. They laughed and said, It’s a story. You’ll find a ride. But we really would
like to make love now.

  I opened the door of the SUV. The cold air, the sun breaking at the horizon, long rays, long shadows. I did not want to leave the nest of the car, but knew it was not cool to keep two people at Burning Man from having sex. I did not know where I was in relation to my camp, I was afraid of being lost, I was mortified things had gotten—that I had gotten—out of control. I was in the desert with no way out. We woke up, they said, and there you were.

  *

  I don’t remember much about that night, except the temperature dropped in the desert once the sun set. If I am cold, there is almost nothing I will not do to get warm again, including breaking into a strange car close to midnight. I do remember this: hundreds of points of light lit the inky darkness, glittering until the dust storm arose. The night sky stretched, yawning to show the Milky Way’s silvery ellipse, an elongated spirograph, spinning. Stars shot out here and there, crisscrossing the sky. We snapped on light sticks as bracelets, as chokers—slender bands of fluorescent yellow, green, red, blue, orange: everything carnivalesque.

  We biked toward the art structures, blazing in the darkness: the figure of a woman arching, hands clasped in a balletic pose, the temple outlined in the bright colors of Christmas-tree lights, almost winking. We rode through swirls of dust until the outlines of art structures appeared, magic, lit up against the dusty nocturnal sky. And then I was by myself. I was alone. I didn’t know where my camp was; I could not locate anything, no landmarks. I didn’t recognize myself but for the desperate attempt to vanquish the cold—my personal Kryptonite. The cold makes it hard to stay within the contours of your own skin.

  When I realized I had been sleeping next to strangers—on top of their blankets, curled in their bed, that I had broken into their car—I began to cry.

  I climbed out of the cocoon of their car. Don’t forget your hat, the sparkly-lidded woman said, smiling. I stepped out into the waning nighttime sky, a violet haze, clutching my white wool hat. The blazing sun just rising in the desert, the morning sun roaring up, then clearing the horizon. I didn’t have a watch on me. It was cold out, frigid even. I blinked, trying to see with dried-out lenses, to orient myself and find my way back to my camp and tent.

  Months later, telling this story to my friend, she says: I bet they have been telling this story to their friends too.

  *

  Burning Man comes with its own survival guide. That should have been a clue as to what lay ahead, but it only made me more curious to see why people went, and why they kept returning. The Survival Guide states: “Burning Man takes place in the beautiful, remote, and inhospitable Black Rock Desert of Nevada … you are responsible in every regard for your own survival, safety, comfort, and well-being.” The Man: an effigy burning, sharp flames flaring, engulfing, releasing the old year’s demons, smoke against the black-blue sky, then fireworks, shooting curved lines into the sky. The flames leap higher, he collapses, a shout rises, a cheer; only night and darkness to witness. I missed it, but this is what I imagine, what other people described. I had promised to work at another retreat center, and it meant leaving early, before the Man burned. The festival occurs every August, the week prior to and through Labor Day Weekend. It’s not great timing for a teacher or professor. It’s terrible. Did they plan it this way?

  Whether or not the timing was intentional, the fact is that I was not teaching for the first time in years. I was there. In Nevada. For me, Burning Man was a week of exceptions:

  I ate bacon that week (I am a vegetarian. Normally.) I dropped acid (twice, the same night) and then remembered almost nothing about it. I’d never done anything outside of alcohol and pot—nor had I had much curiosity. I came of age in the Reagan era: just say no. I had done just that. I was thirty-nine, a month away from my next birthday. I had lost my job, had moved back in with my family, no partner or lover. I was lost—not just on the Playa, but in my life.

  *

  Before the morning I woke up in a stranger’s SUV, I strapped on motorcycle goggles and rode a too-small mountain bike through that nighttime dust-and-wind storm in the desert. Later, I found out it was the kind of evening many people decided to stay in their tents. The four people I camped with fastened light sticks, suited up, ventured out, and took acid. I did it too, but didn’t mean to. Just try it, they said. They handed me their extra light sticks, not just as costume or decoration, but so other riders could see me in that dusty, windy darkness. They dropped acid. I thought I would say no. They had a pack of sugar cubes and handed me two. I took them. (What was I thinking.)

  We rode through this mysterious moonscape studded with lit-up large-scale art installations, each of the structures emerging from the dust only as we approached. We pointed ourselves toward one in particular: the temple, made of ornate, filigreed wood, papered inside with handwritten messages, letters, pleas, prayers, photographs, eulogies for people who had passed, wishes for forgiveness. The temple radiated power, resonance, sadness, weight.

  *

  The crowning event and spectacle of the festival is a large bonfire, in which the figure of a man is burned. I did not witness the burn. Other art is also created and then burned: ephemeral art. A city of nearly fifty thousand, Black Rock City, amasses itself for this week. You must bring your own water, your own food, a bike, costumes. I had never been to a festival of this size—a music festival or any kind of festival. Who were all of these people who hauled their own water and food to a festival? I couldn’t understand the appeal.

  The ten principles of Burning Man include radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy. Radical Self-Reliance: “Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources.” Did I rely on my inner resources? I did. Did I ask too much of my camp mates? I did. I haven’t asked them; they haven’t said.

  *

  School was a system I understood. But I struggled in that job. I was a good teacher, but felt defeated in the end. I began to hate my job. Months before I would have applied for tenure, my contract was not renewed. The first big failure in my life: humiliating, public, irreversible. Though I had been thinking about leaving, the letter stunned me and shocked my friends and colleagues.

  No job, some unemployment benefits. I left New York, traveled for three months in India, my own eat pray love, studying yoga, staying with friends and relatives. Then I moved home. No regular job allowed me the opportunity to travel. I planned to work on a project with a friend in Seattle, stay with my uncle in the Bay Area, and work for a month in Big Sur. In Oakland, with three days to prepare, I decided to go to Burning Man.

  *

  Burning Man runs on a gift economy. I was not prepared. The only gifts I carried with me were a bottle of gold nail polish and artisanal salted caramels wrapped in parchment paper, bought from a farmers market in Columbia City, Seattle. I left a small brown box of them with the Oakland couple who shared their shade structure with me. They ate bacon and made coffee and shared that with us too.

  The one caramel I had put in my pocket made it through the laundry without melting over everything. At the laundromat, a woman approached me and said, Where are you going? I managed to croak out, I’ve been camping. I could still barely speak, but I had spread out my clothes at the laundromat as I washed both my bags and clothes; dust and sweat coated everything. She said, I’m reading a book about a woman who is camping—and brought out a hardback book with a single hiking boot on the cover. Wild.

  This heartened me. I’d met the writer once and taught one of her essays, “The Love of My Life,” for years. It was an essay my students and I all loved. It was an essay that sometimes brought me to tears, even in class. Nothing I had done seemed as brave as her journey; still, I was flattered to be put in that category of adventure, of nerve. I think this is what I had wanted all along—to strengthen my nerve.

  I did not show this woman wha
t 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

  Third 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, Chris said, Do you know other people there? Because maybe you should get in touch with them too. Chris 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 unemployed, 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.

  Chris has skin the color of mine, green eyes, parents of different races, a disarmingly beautiful smile, and a temper he was 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.