A Good Day for Seppuku

WHAT THE LILIES KNOW

A my Gold hears the rumor and instantaneously recognizes it’s true. She’s being denied tenure. Then Alfred Baxter Coleman ambushes her in the corridor. Alfred Baxter Coleman, the ABC of the History Department, stage whispers the terminal news to her. He executes his standard mock Indian mime, emitting a sort of emphysemic whoop, and his arthritic fingers anemically slap his thin lips, sporadically, with no discernible rhythm. Whoop whoop. He ho. He ho.

What he actually says is, “No way, Sweetie. Told you.”

He’s intimated this for months. Amy ignored him.

She stumbles into her office and reaches onto her desk to steady herself. She picks up the first object she chances to touch. It’s her phone book. She holds it in her palm like a magic stone, an amulet, a medicine bag. The pages are fragile as petals or antiquities. It’s an artifact with disasters between the lines.

On this particular morning, she dials her mother. Then she waits for her mother to answer. Raven Gold is an integral component in her arsenal of weapons of personal destruction. Raven is the core, her plutonium centerpiece. Amy needs an action to definitively express her rage and grief, something like a hand grenade or bullet. Raven can pull the trigger.

Cellular service, with static intermittent voids and uncertainties involving wind currents and angles, has finally come to Espanola. Theoretically, they can now communicate directly. But Amy Gold cannot talk to her mother. They speak as if with flags the way people do at sea when conditions are mutable, possibilities limited and primitive. They choreograph pieces of cloth. The planet is compressed into a basket of fabrics. They wave at each other with rags.

Raven removes language and logic. Cause and effect are illusions. Raven has an unscripted life. No scrawls in the margins, and no footnotes.

Her mother has a cell phone now, but Amy is still rendered childlike and vulnerable. She presses the phone hard against her ear until the metal hurts. This is foreshadowing. Amy counts the rings. Twenty-five.

“They didn’t give me the job,” Amy begins, her thoughts spinning chaotic and circular.

“You’re surprised?” Raven laughs. “You’re not a team player. You always wanted a rank and serial number. The right uniform. Play first string for the military industrial complex.”

Out the fifth floor window ersatz palm trees are stunted by sun, and the air is oily and smeared. Outside is a slice of Los Angeles in early summer. Hills are a brutal stale green with brittle shrubs like dry stubble.

“Do you know how long it’s been?” Raven asks, softer now. “Since you called?”

“To the hour,” Amy answers. She tells her mother precisely how many years, months and days passed since their last conversation.

“I’m impressed,” Raven admits.

“You’re always impressed by the wrong things,” Amy says. “Men who add fast without scratch paper. Chess players and piano players, no matter how mediocre. Women with trust funds who sew their own clothes and bake breads.”

“I’m a simple country gal. You were always too smart for me,” Raven offers.

“I want to see you now.” Her words are sudden and tumble into the hot-stripped morning like dice hitting a wall and she wonders if she means them.

“Then get in your car. You’ll be here tomorrow,” Raven says with surprising urgency. “Just check that AA crap at the border.”

“I’ll leave half my IQ, too,” Amy offers. “As a sign of good will.” After a pause in which Raven fails to construct a reply, Amy asks, “How will I find you?”

“Ask in the plaza. Anyone can tell you where.”

Her mother hangs up. No more details. Just anyone. In the plaza. It’s like a treasure hunt. Or eating peyote and letting it happen. That’s what they did for years. Let it happen. They camped on mesas and the rims of canyons. Raven had a boyfriend with a jeep and a sawed off 12-gauge under the seat. His 9-millimeter was in his backpack, and he had a .32 semi-automatic in his pocket. A man, one man or another, who played drums or bass in a band, just returned from Australia or Japan. They stayed in the juniper forests for weeks. Finally, insect bites, sunburns and infected cuts made them return. Sometimes Raven just wanted a hot bath.

“I demand perfume,” Raven laughs, half-dressed on a plateau, her bare shoulders sculpted as if by centuries of wind and a gifted potter’s hands. “I must have musk and a new hat with an extravagant feather.”

They find towns with a hotel sporting an old west motif. Durango or Aspen, Las Cruces, Silver City or Santa Fe. Her childhood is a sequence of lead glass windows and crimson floral carpets, mahogany paneling and authentic antique saloon doors. The card tables and upstairs brothel are gone but somehow manage to assert themselves, not quite visible and completely intact. Chandeliers emit a tame filtered light like pueblo churches. Late afternoon is cool, and the amber of honey and whiskey. It’s the color of an afternoon shoot-out.

It’s the era of the commune and just before boarding school. Raven’s boyfriends have what they call business in town. They take unplanned flights to Los Angeles and Miami. Raven drives them to and from airports. Small planes land on salt flats in the desert where there are no roads, and Raven has flares, flashlights, and a basket of still warm tamales and rum in a jug. Amy is wrapped in a down blanket in the backseat. Why do they lean into one another whispering? She knows they’re dealing drugs.

Amy doesn’t confront her mother. They already speak in code, in a network of implications and arrested partial sounds like passwords. Between them, flannel and denim and gingham scraps wait to become a quilt that won’t be stitched. Plans for a house built of adobe on the mesa above Espanola that her mother somehow owns stay a rolled-up document, a parchment hollow inside a rubber band. It’s a navigational chart for a sea they won’t sail. Their ideas drift off, despoiled, weightless; they abort themselves.

Amy is leaving. She’s been accepted to a boarding school in San Diego. The provost pronounced her test scores impressive. He’s encouraging. It’s possible a college scholarship may eventually be granted. In hotel rooms with lead glass windows and red velvet curtains, she studies brochures for colleges in Vermont and Massachusetts.

In between, she just lets it happen. They return from the mesas, their vision quest Raven calls it, with their filthy clothing, ammunition and stray pieces of peyote stuffed randomly into plastic bags. It’s the best hotel in town and the bellman carries their trash bags with the gravity afforded real luggage. Raven is instantaneously elevated to Madam.

It’s usually a suite. Her mother’s boyfriend of the moment enters cautiously, his hand touching the gun in his pocket. He eases into rooms, opening closet doors and shower curtains. He glances at the street below, scanning for indications of an ambush by DEA agents, Zeta flunk-outs trying to make a name for themselves, or freelancers.

After weeks in canyons of juniper, sage, and pinion, cafes and boutiques are a fascination. It’s another form of foraging. She spends afternoons in tourist gift shops. She’s lost so much weight on their plateau vision quests, eating only dried fruit, crackers and an occasional rainbow trout, she fits into size 2s on sale racks in Pocatello, Alamosa and Winslow, where the women have either run away or gone to fat the way domesticated animals do.

In an Indian casino near the border she buys a hot pink mini skirt for 2 dollars. It feels like abraded Teflon. Eventually Raven has to cut it off her with scissors. Amy buys a silver blouse the texture of steel wool. She stumbles in neon pink spike heels and pretends she’s Brazilian.

She rides a dawn bus to work from the favala. She’s a clerk with ambitions. Her name was Gloria but she’s changed it to Marguerite. Her married boss takes her to hotels on Sundays after mass. Through the slatted terrace blinds, birds and cathedral bells in cobblestone plazas drift in, and the festive fluttering bells from old trolley cars with electric spokes that sizzle. A choir of indigenous orphans from the mountains offers an incoherent rendition of “New York, New York” and “Take Me Out To the Ball Game.” It’s mutilated by distance, intention and what resists translation. Nuns draped them in novice habits and glued gauzy angel wings to their shoulders. They’re barefoot and hungry.

Further, men in cloaks of magenta and electric blue feathers from jungle birds play flutes. In the plaza spreading beyond the cathedral, swarms of pigeons and yellow butterflies almost touch the faces of old women selling dried corn strung like beads and Chiclets arranged like miniature pyramids. Beyond, there’s something rhythmic and insistent that might be an ocean.

We are all clerks with ambitions, Amy decides then, stretching her insect bitten legs out on a brocade bedspread in a restored hotel suite in Colorado or New Mexico. She is fourteen or fifteen years old. Raven and her boyfriend are out doing business. They leave three hundred dollar bills on the brocade and instruct her to get an ice cream soda and go shopping.

Beyond town is thunder, glaciers on mountain peaks, then desert and finally San Diego Pacific Academy. Amy Gold imagines boarding school will be similar to the commune. But the sleeping and eating arrangements will be superior. San Diego Pacific Academy has desks and electricity and a library. Bells ring and they have specific and reliable meanings.

Now it’s noon in Los Angeles. She packs her office. It’s the end of the semester and she won’t be back in the fall. Alfred Baxter Coleman, chair of the promotion and tenure committee, has successfully convinced his colleagues they don’t need her. She’s only half-Indian, after all. Christ, she was born in Laguna Beach. They’ve hired a Palestine to replace her. It’s a more profound historical statement and irrefutably global.

Amy wraps a pottery vase in the school newspaper. Ink encrusts her fingers and she feels soiled to the bone. She doesn’t want to put her books in cardboard boxes again. It’s an obsolete rite of empty repetition. It’s the opposite of propitiation. It’s failure in a cardboard box the size of an infant’s coffin. Even her fingers resist.

The square book caskets. She’s been carrying dead texts from state to state, up and down flights of apartment steps bordering alleys and parking lots, Bougainvillea and Oleander strangling on cyclone fences. Amy realizes she doesn’t want the books anymore, period.

What she wants is a wound that bleeds and requires sutures and anesthesia. What she wants is a cigarette. Amy gathers her cosmetics and tape cassettes from her desk drawer. She takes the gym bag with her tennis racket, bathing suit, jeans, diamondback rattlesnake boots, flashlight and mace. She wraps her raincoat across her shoulders and thinks, I’m down the road. I’m out of here.

She wants someone to call, “Professor Gold?” Then she can reply, “Not anymore.” Her response will be fierce and laconic. It will deconstruct itself as you watch. Then it will explode in your face.

Amy Gold shoves U2’s Joshua Tree into the cassette player. She replaces it with a ZZ Top cassette. Yes, it’s an afternoon for the original nasty boys from Texas. They provide a further dimension to the concept of a garage band. After all, you don’t have to just rehearse there. You can throw a mattress on the floor, invite your friends, drink a case of bourbon, shoot coke and orchestrate a gang rape. Maybe she should get down even further. Maybe it’s an afternoon for chainsaws and a massacre.

She turns onto the freeway, and considers her final encounter with Professor Alfred Baxter Coleman. In instant replay, her knees wobble and she almost falls down. But she doesn’t. She manages to stay on her feet and give Alfred the finger. If she wasn’t having a seizure of vertigo, she would mace him.

Los Angeles is at her back, a solid sheet of grease that’s not entirely unpleasant. That’s why she’s been able to inhabit this city. Ugliness is a kind of balm. Beauty makes her uncomfortable. She instinctively averts her eyes from a flawless face the way some recoil from a car crash.

Amy Gold relentlessly attempts to annihilate all certified versions of perfection. The conventionally sanctioned snow-dusted mountains above wild flowers in alpine meadows that look designed to be photographed and sold as posters. She’s repelled by images resembling calendar covers. They’re faux artifacts of what you didn’t actually experience. And she loathes towns with contrived lyrical names that could be the titles of country western songs. They’re an accompaniment for the plastic scorpions tourists buy in stores with moccasins made in China and ceremonial headdresses of dyed turkey feathers.

That’s why she left Raven the southwest interior of the country. Amy took the coasts and gave her mother everything else. That is their real division of assets. She took abstraction, hierarchy, and systematic knowledge and left Raven the inexpressible, the preliterate, the region of magic chants and herbs. It was a sort of divorce. Her mother could have Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, and she would get her doctorate.

Raven accepts landscape as her due. She expects and collects it. Raven, staring at a sun setting in a contagion of magenta and irradiated purple. It’s begging to be absolved. Raven nods in acknowledgement, shaking her waist-length black hair as clouds pass in a flotilla above them. She pauses, as if expecting the skies to actually part.

Raven, wind-blown and barefoot is prepared for the sky to form a tender lavender mouth and confess everything. It’s the third or fourth day of a peyote fast, and her mother is a pueblo priestess, accustomed to tales of routine felonies and unavoidable lies. Transgressions aren’t absolute. They’re a matter of interpretation. Raven takes her form of communion beneath an aggressively streaked sunset the texture of metal. Amy knows the sky is a conventional polite lie. It’s politically correct misdirection. There’s something else behind clouds, a subterfuge of malice.

Her childhood is incoherent, images that stall stylized and suspect. They might be postcards. That’s curious, she realizes, they didn’t take photographs. Even when her mother married the magazine photographer, there were no cameras, no visual artifacts.

“You can’t paste this between album pages,” Raven says, standing in a meadow, her bare arms stretched out like twin milk snakes. Her paisley skirt is ripped to her thigh and wind-swirled. This what, precisely, Amy wants to know.

“Experience can’t be reduced to a 4 by 6 inch still,” her mother says. “People stick their loves in cellophane prisons. They incarcerate images. Then they put these cemeteries on coffee tables. They’re mockeries.”

Raven is topless on a mesa festooned with pinion and juniper, tilting her face to the sky, memorizing a spectrum of purple that runs from lilac and velvet iris to crushed antique maroon. It’s an alphabet bordered by cobalt and a magenta that’s gone a step too far, and committed itself to red. Amy wonders what can be distilled from such a sequence. You can’t arrange it like paint on a palette, or orchestrate it to sound like flutes or ferry bells. You can’t order it into stanzas or paragraphs. In short, it’s entirely useless.

Her mother exists in a series of indiscriminate moments, each already pre-framed and merely waiting for lighting cues. Raven poses with a canyon lake as a backdrop. Amy half expects afternoon to dissolve into a car commercial. This is what she resists. No to the plateaus of northern New Mexico. No to the vivid orange intrigue of sunsets you could stencil on T-shirts. No to men who spend summers in sleeping bags, backpacks filled with Wild Turkey and kilos of cocaine. No to Raven in August, scented with dope and pinion, sleeping oblivious under lightning and an outrage of stars.

“I’ve been tattooed,” Raven laughs in the morning, making coffee over a fire of purple sage. “Look.” she angles her face toward the new boyfriend. Her face is tanned peach, without a single line or freckle. Amy possesses a secret accumulation of invisible injuries. They’re the most exquisite. If there’s an entity Raven calls Buddha, it is these clandestine self-inflicted lacerations that attract him.

“You can live myth or be buried by it. It’s your choice,” Raven says. It’s her cocaine voice, vague and distant and leaking light. “I’ve been more intimate with this canyon than all 5 husbands combined,” she confides. “It’s revealed more. And it’s been more generous.”

Amy is on the periphery, simultaneously chilled and parched. She is not a team player. The sky is relentlessly alien. Plateaus are layered like a chorus of red mouths that have nothing to say to her.

Before nightfall and the desert, Amy Gold stops for gas. In a convenience store, fixed in the glare of anonymous waxy light, she decides, on inexplicable impulse, to change her life. She deliberately buys a pack of cigarettes, though she hasn’t smoked in eight years.

“Vodka,” she says, pointing to a fifth. The two-edged syllables are inordinately pale and mysterious, like something you can’t procure on this planet. I’ve been too long without the traditions, she thinks. Eight years. I’m estranged from my true self. I’m broken off at the root, amputated. I must graft myself back.

She wonders if she can still score amphetamines in a truck stop. They’re probably just kitchen bennies. White crosses, manufactured in basement labs, and sold as the trucker’s other fuel. Last time she copped roadside speed, she got a two-day stomach-ache and the sensation that a 747 was landing on her head.

Danger excites her. Once she glided between trucks somewhere near Albuquerque, walking between the enormous cabs oily with bold unapologetic streaks of red and yellow like war paint. There are enemies and rogue bands everywhere. She notes the enormity of the wheels. The truck stop is a metal graveyard not unlike elephant and mastodon burial grounds.

We know ourselves through architecture and indecipherable charred hieroglyphics. To see the monumental trucks at rest is like watching men when they don’t know they’re being observed. Men in their natural state. Their posture softens, they slap each other on the back, show one another their rings and tattoos, and laugh often and easily.

She is with Big Jeb. He’s impatient. There’s a new girl in the aluminum trailer behind the restaurant. 15 and a natural blond from Alabama.

“It’s show time,” he says. He nudges the small of her back. It’s the way a cat rubs against your leg.

“Got any whites?” she asks in her fake southern accent, leaning into a fierce crimson cab, her lips stretched into a smile that hurts her teeth. And, of course, the driver does.

“You mad?” Big Jeb asks later.

Amy translates his question. He means angry. She says no.

“Well, don’t tell your mother,” he says. His voice is light. It’s not a threat. He’s asking for a favor.

Amy smokes a cigarette, sips vodka and smiles. She takes another drink. There is no other way to cross the Mojave, she assures herself. At 3 a.m. she turns off the highway, finds a fire road, places her gym bag under her head as a pillow and falls asleep gripping the mace in her right hand.

She wakes stiff and feverish and drives to Santa Fe, singing with ZZ Top and drinking vodka from an orange juice bottle. Did she learn that from Wade or Gus? Who coached her on the southern accent and how to carry, conceal and shoot a weapon?

“I did all I could,” he tells Raven. She is leaving for San Diego Pacific Academy. He sounds disappointed. Her mother nods sympathetically.

Amy is startled to realize that Raven’s boyfriend was serious. Was it Big Jeb or Big Sam, Hawk Man or maybe Wade? Who positioned beer bottles on sand banks with tender precision and showed her how to put bullets in them? Who captured snakes for her to shoot, and bent to demonstrate how to remove the rattles and make them into earrings? Who explained spoor on trails and how to determine what coyotes, raccoons and rabbits had been eating?

Amy didn’t encounter men with multi-syllabic names until boarding school. She was stunned when strangers voluntarily offered their last names. It hadn’t occurred to her that people reveal this information. When asked, she automatically provided an alias. Marguerite.

Amy Gold checks into a new hotel near the plaza in Santa Fe. She’s disoriented. Everything is some manifestation of adobe, cement and mud. Buildings are a tainted orange and degraded pink. Houses are set behind walls like African compounds. The walls are designed to keep the inhabitants in. They’re ubiquitous, as if mandated. Here dirt and all its forms are not only obligatory, they’re deified.

She’s erased clay in all its permutations from her repertoire. In the millennium, we survive by aliases, photo shop and selective amnesia. It’s a new spiritual expression. It’s the first global mantra. We reclaim ourselves so that we can discard and bury them. Our AOL and Yahoo versions were insipid squalid forays into the wilderness within. We know better now.

In her senior year at San Diego Pacific Academy, her elective choices were pottery studio or wood world. She chose the later. The boys built a two-story house with a graceful staircase and balconies. She made small boxes and glued sequins and chipped tiles on them. Her latches fall off. She says they’re jewelry boxes. She defends herself. She’s a clerk with ambitions and no, they don’t have to close. They’re conceptual. The wood master wants to flunk her. But she already has a scholarship to Stanford.

The swimming pool is deserted. Everyone must be buying necklaces of plastic dyed to mimic turquoise and fringed jackets made in Thailand. Or else they’re stumbling up Canyon Road in their new boots that don’t fit. Canyon Road, with it’s 2,000 galleries, features what you’ve already seen. You know what’s on the walls and pedestals before you walk in. Tourists find the familiar reassuring.

It’s landscapes of Rio Grand gorges rendered in O’Keefe reds that look like lacerations. Then the heads of Indians in bronze. And bronze horses. And bronze Indians on bronze horses. It’s the third or fourth derivative generation. Still lifes of vagina sunflowers. And landscapes reiterating their original psychedelic palette. Now they’re actually spraying them with glitter.

Amy stands at the edge of the swimming pool. The water reminds her of Hawaii. The blues are so vivid and unadulterated, the elements seem participant.

As a child, she lived in Maui for three years. Her mother was married to Jerry Garcia’s photographer. Ed. Big Ed. The ocean beyond their lanai possessed a clarity only certain sunlight, strained and purified by currents and anointed cloud configurations, can impart.

The swimming pool is the turquoise of traditional Indian jewelry. There’s an enticement to this blue, with its suggestion of revelation and sacrament, of opening an enormous chamber into the world as it once was, into thunder and stone and sacrifices designed to engender an incandescent intelligence. It’s the turquoise of time travel, camouflaged salt flats at dusk, and prayer.

This terrain renders ideas and artifacts inconsequential. That’s why everyone was moving here, the ones who hadn’t migrated to Hawaii or Mexico. But she has no interest in this obvious and generic surrender. Such a seduction would admit the squalor of her ambitions and what they imply, namely the incontrovertible value of acquiring systemic knowledge. Amy swims three hundred laps. It does not clear her head.

She sits on the bandstand in the plaza. Late afternoon is the adobe of dust and apricots. The sky is a swarm of storm clouds and two rainbows appear in precise twin arches. As they break into Cubist fragments, Amy realizes they’re the DNA of the sky. Then she looks across the plaza, directly at her mother.

“Amethyst,” her mother calls, already moving towards her, awkward and determined. They embrace and Raven smells unexpectedly sweet, like vanilla ice cream and spring grass.

Raven’s hair is entirely white and tied into a ponytail with a piece of rawhide.

Raven in dusty black jeans. Her Saturday night end of the trail outfit. And she’s profoundly tanned. It’s not a skin coloration one can receive through ordinary daily living. It’s clearly a statement, no doubt the result of pronouncing the diminishing ozone layer an establishment rumor that has nothing to do with her.

“Too many tourists,” Raven says, talking out the side of her mouth. “Let’s go.”

Amy follows her mother’s jeep along the highway toward Taos, and then off and onto a road so sudden and narrow it seems hallucinatory. They wind up a dirt road of sharp curves and loose gravel. Her mother parks alongside a tiny yellow trailer.

“It’s temporary,” Raven says, indicating the frail structure with a dismissive flutter of her left hand. “Like life.”

“Right,” Amy answers. They are proto-humans, banging on stones. Language has barely been invented. They communicate by drums and smoke singles. She follows her mother, climbs three stairs into the trailer, and pauses, all at once listless and exhausted.

“Old hippies don’t die. They just quit drinking, take their milk thistle and liver enzyme counts.” Raven offers an unconvincing smile.

“Liver enzymes?” Amy wonders.

“Hep C,” Raven says.

“You have hepatitis C?” Amy is startled.

“We all do,” her mother replies, flat and off-hand. “I hope to live long enough to get Medicare.”

“Medicare?” Amy repeats.

“Medicare is just a word, like democracy and justice. It barely exists,” Raven says.

Her mother sits cross-legged on the floor at a low table, a child’s table, rolling a joint. When she offers it to her, Amy takes it. She left AA at the border. And half her IQ. Wasn’t that the deal?

The trailer is so minimal it seems unoccupied. There’s a tape deck that runs on batteries, a plate in what must be the kitchen and a bowl of bananas, strawberries and two onions. What’s become of the Navajo rugs, the carved oak furniture, the Mescalero Apache tribal wall hangings, Hopi baskets and masks? And where is the Santa Clara pottery?

She remembers the era they called the Harmonic Divergence. The commune dwindled. It dried up overnight like creeks in summer. First AIDS. Then the crisis no one anticipated. Their foundation was the exploration of human consciousness. Insidiously and inexorably, their beliefs were culturally degraded, marginalized and then outlawed.

They were a band of conceptual renegades, biochemical pioneers in an aesthetic frontier that was abruptly fenced. Suddenly, satellites provided surveillance. They were shorn of legitimacy. There’s no glamour in being a designated leper. Criminals have no justification. But there were treatments for their aberrant inclinations. Antidepressants. Rehab. AA. Support groups and disability payments. Everyone took the cure.

“I’m too old for this,” one of the Big Bobs or Big Jebs said. “I’m not taking a dump in mud in winter. Not at 45.”

There was attrition. Drugs were now controlled by men with computers in Nassau and Houston. Big Wade and Big Jake had arthritis and diabetes and the wrong skillset for the emerging global market place. They dispersed, took their medications for depression, and meditated in shacks on canyon rims, proclaiming themselves Zen masters. They had tape decks and bags of Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Metformin. And shelves of SSRis and Tricyclics. Nothing worked, but it was free. Some found apartments in town with electricity and watched CNN on 16 inch black and white televisions.

The Espanola property accrued to Raven. She was the last one left, keeping the faith in derelict rooms lit by kerosene lamps, incense and candles. Rooms collapsed around her. The roof fell down in chunks and walls disintegrated into powder. That’s why she purchased the trailer. And what was that green square outside? Was Raven growing marijuana?

“Corn.” Raven is amused. “Subsistence economy. Tomatoes. Squash. I put seeds in the ground. I eat the plants. A simple life. Much too boring for a professor like you. But you always thought me dull.”

Not dull, Amy wants to correct, just affected, predictable, and formulaic. The trailer reminds her of a boat, ingenuously compact, deceptively pulling in or out of the miniature closets and cabinets. They had a boat in Maui, she remembers later, when winds rise and batter the metal sides in a sudden squall with lightning.

They are laying side by side on twin cots like berths, rocking. The trailer sways and Amy thinks, We are floating through metaphors and into symbolic oceans, clutching our charred text as life preservers. We make a telephone call. Or stand in the glaring light of a liquor store on the edge of the Mohave and the course of our life is changed.

Once during the thunderstorm, Amy sits bolt upright and for an inconclusive moment, thinks she sees Raven standing naked at the tiny window, weeping. Her mother by moonlight, whitened, whittled.

“I’m a moon crone,” Raven says, directly to the night.

Her mother has sensed her movement, her intake of breath. “I’m 52 and haven’t had a period in years. I’m on hormones and I’m still burning up.” Raven turns toward her and speaks into the darkness. “You don’t have to fear me anymore. I’m not a competitor. You removed my 9 heads. Hydra is gone. You beheaded me. See me as I am.”

“Are you lonely?” Amy wonders, uncertain. She’s an ethnographer and Raven is her subject.

“Lonely?” her mother repeats. “I have two friends. New Mexico and Bob Dylan. He wrote the soundtrack for my life. When he dies, I’ll be a widow.”

Amy wakes at noon. Raven has assembled sleeping bags, a tent, stacks of camping equipment and a variety of canvas bags under the awning in front of the tiny yellow trailer.

“Let’s rock and roll.” Raven is enthusiastic. “Mesa Verde. I feel a spiritual experience coming.”

This woman has absolutely no sense of irony, Amy thinks. She inhabits an era of oral tradition, intuition and omens. The constellations aren’t named. One worships flint and thunder, bargains with stars and drums in solitude.

They drive north, Raven taking the curves too fast. Amy assembles a random list of what she hates about the Southwest. How everyone is making jewelry and searching for shrines. Santa Fe is an outdoor theme mall. Silver is a wound that gleams. It’s a cancer. It lays itself out in strands of necklaces and belts, a glare of dead worms, obscene. The entire Navajo nation is home in a stupor, smoking chiva and crack and watching TV while numbly pounding out conches and squash blossoms. It’s sickening.

Amy remembers a town on the way to Las Cruces. Shacks where she sees lava mountains out a broken window. Her real father is coming down from the reservation to see her. He’s out of prison. Amy hasn’t met him. Big Ed or Big Jeb are buying pot. Or maybe selling it. The adults are eating peyote.

Her mother and a woman she doesn’t recognize sit on the floor in the lotus position, stringing necklaces and laughing. The TV is on maximum volume, picture and sound wavering, ghosted and distorted. She became dizzy, and perhaps she fainted. She is carried to a car. It’s a special day. She is certain. Yes, it’s her thirteenth birthday and her father doesn’t come down from the reservation to see her after all. Later, the woman reaches through the car window, dangling necklaces. She offers her beads, silver and turquoise. Amy shakes her head no.

“Mesa Verde is a revelation,” Raven reveals. “The Buddha must have built it.”

“Didn’t extraterrestrials do the construction?” Amy asks. “Aliens from Roswell with green blood and implants in their necks.”

Raven smokes a joint. Amy Gold turns away, angry. She rejects the concept that enlightenment can be geographically pinpointed, that one can chart a route, follow a map, drive there, and purchase a ticket. Spirituality has been reduced to another commodity. Can’t Raven comprehend that? Probably not.

Amy experiences a disappointment so overwhelming it erases the possibility of speech. She drinks from her vodka bottle surreptitiously, leaning against the car window while afternoon falls in green and blue pieces against her face. The time space continuum is fluid and it’s flowing across her skin. It’s breaking across her flesh in a series of glass splinters.

They spend the afternoon in Indian ruins, peering through holes and slots implying windows. They climb reconstructed steps and wood ladders into the cliff dwellings. The repetition of identical ceremonial rooms is relentless. She feels sullen and futile.

“You’re still a bitter child,” Raven says, voice soft. It’s not an accusation. “You have a one word vocabulary. All you say is no.”

“You’re the queen of yes. What did it get you?”

Silence. Amy is wondering what the Anasazi did, how they lived. They smoked pot, no doubt, and strung beads, got drunk, hunted and gathered herbs. In between, they engaged in acts of domestic violence and child abuse. Now a slap, then a torn hymen. Human nature hasn’t changed. In 641, a pope decreed that a man could have only a single wife. But there’s no evolutionary adaptation to support that opinion.

Amy wants to discuss this with her mother. But Raven doesn’t have the attention span. They crawl through a tunnel, dust settling across her forehead like another coating of adobe or clay, a decorative filigree. They stand on the rim of the canyon, their shoulders brushing. It begins to rain; thunder echoes off rock and the ground shakes. It’s like being in a shooting range.

Raven is out of breath. “It’s the ancient ones talking,” she manages.

“Christ,” Amy says. “You’ll end up a tour guide.”

“Big Red’s a guide in Bandolier. He’s got a uniform and a pension,” Raven tells her with a rare edge. Is she jealous?

Amy touches the emergency pint of vodka inside the rain poncho her mother handed her. When she isn’t watching, Amy finishes the bottle.

“You don’t have to drink like this,” Raven said. “Pot is easier on the liver. And it’s more enlightening.”

In a deserted campground, they walk in mud up to their calves. Raven is wearing a stylish leather coat. It simply materialized. It’s like that with her mother, the costume changes, the inexplicable appearance of accessories, the silver belt pulled from a bag, the mantilla that’s both a veil and shawl. Amy is shivering.

“West and south,” Raven decides. “The first decent hotel where it’s hot.”

Gallup is a few disappointing blocks of pawnshops and liquor stores that seem to be lingering posthumously. A community center with windows broken, and a tennis court with the pavement ripped. The net has been hacked up with knives. She imagines playing on the court, bits of glass making her footing slippery. She could fall, sprain an ankle, get cut. But that scenario is too simple. The wound she’s searching for, what she’s stalking, is more profound and permanent.

“The whole infrastructure is going,” Amy notes, glancing at the gutted swimming pool, the brown lawn laced with glass. “It’s not just the cities.”

“My infrastructure is going. But government pills and AA aren’t my answer.” Raven stops the car. There is a pause.

“Listen, I had boyfriends,” her mother begins, almost whispering. “When you were 10, I was the same age you are now. But nobody laid a finger on you, Amethyst. You are my jewel. Everybody treated you right. I made sure.”

Late afternoon is a chasm of shimmering crimson that seems vaguely Egyptian. Raven gets out of the car and hands her the keys. “Your turn,” she says. “Surprise me.”

Amy drives west across desert. She stops in a liquor store, buys four pints of vodka and hides them. She drinks and drives until Raven wakes up, moaning. They’re almost across Arizona.

“What’s this?” Raven asks, mildly interested. She rubs her eyes, can’t find her eyeglasses and opens her map. She examines it, concentrating. The map is upside down.

“Laughlin. It’s a déclassé Vegas on the Arizona-California-Nevada border. Feeds off the retirement dollar. It’s nickel and dime all the way. They let them park their trailers free. Hope they’ll toss a quarter in a slot machine on the way to the john. It’s the collapse of western civilization. The final capitalist terminal. You can watch the empire fall here. Come on. We’ll love it.” Amy is incredibly festive.

She pauses in the oasis of lobby surrounded by casinos. They’re cavernous. They’re the magic caves where Ali Baba and the 40 thieves hid their gold goblets and chests of coins and rubies.

It’s oddly familiar, the assault of neon on walls, the leaden clinking machines and spinning wheels. Then the islands of green felt of card and dice tables. She understands this electric palette. The neon ceiling is like a cathedral. The neon-draped walls are layered in birthday cake pink and yellow icing. Come on. Spend a buck. It’s a holiday.

Here are men in cowboy hats and boots with spurs who recently won a minor event at a second tier rodeo. They have the prize money in their socks. And men who just buried their wives and have ten thousand insurance dollars in their sports jacket pockets. This is what they got for their 30 years, five of it spent going to and from chemo. The money is in a roll with a rubber band around it like another type of ring. This time, they’ll marry fortune.

Here are women who just sold their mothers’ wedding rings for four hundred dollars, their divorced husband’s bass boat and tool set. Nearly three grand in total. They wear flower print cotton dresses, and acres of pink and what might be bathrobes. They sit on stools, considering each quarter with deliberation, calculating their possibilities and counting their change. They extract one dime at a time, rationing themselves, and waiting for the right second, the anointed juncture, to spring forward and pull the lever.

Everyone moves in exaggerated slow motion through the neon drifting from the ceiling and sliding off the slot machines, making the air thicken like cornstarch. All carry coins in plastic cups the size of ice cream sodas, faces devoid of expression. Their limbs are stiff, arthritic. They look jetlagged and confused. They look like they need wheelchairs and want to go home.

Women on social security in mini skirts and fishnet stockings thread their way between the mock islands, carrying trays of free drinks. Only the dealers are swift, flipping out cards like whirling dervishes. Here come the royals. You’ve barely added up your hand and they’re already reaching across felt and raking the chips back in.

Bells are the punctuation, the music of the casino. Bells signaling a payoff and the impending cascade of nickels and dimes. Bells announcing the start of a new keno game. These bells don’t ring with the authority and purpose of churches. Or the promise of thrill like ferry and carnival bells. They don’t mark the hour. They’re designed to keep you from the walking coma you suspect you’re in. They’re like alarm clocks. Then the blast like a siren that doesn’t require translation. Jackpot.

This is the new American score, Amy thinks. It’s not a house, forty acres with a pond and mule and some stray grass to barbeque on anymore. Medicare is just a word, like democracy and justice. This is the global world of the dwarf dollar and the failure of gods and tradition and language itself. There’s been a mass reduction. Even fantasy is truncated, amputated, stuck in a box in the basement. In this new century, we just want one good weekend.

They have a suite on the 17th floor with a view of the Dead Mountains, a swath of the Mojave, and the whip-thin blue chalk line of the Colorado River. Millions of women and men are also standing at windows, at this precise instant, realizing their lives are nothing they thought they would be. Sun is a slap across their mouths.

Amy Gold feels a rising excitement as they ride the elevator back to the lobby. She listens to bells from slot machines and the constant tumbling nickels flowing into steel shells suggesting mouths. Of course, this is what you hear at the end of the world. It isn’t a whimper after all. It has nothing to do with anything human. It’s the sound of symbols in motion. It’s the sound of tin.

Raven is changing a ten-dollar bill for a foot-high plastic cup of quarters. She’s changed her clothes, too. It must be Act 2. She’s wearing a maroon caftan encrusted with tiny beads that sparkle and gold high heels. She has a canary yellow sash around her waist, bangles on both wrists and oversized sunglasses with gold frames. Two old men stare at her.

Amy hasn’t had the right accessories for any of the towns or situations of her life. In the lobby of the River’s End in Laughlin, Amy regrets the silver she didn’t buy in Aspen. And the squash blossom in Taos. She should have taken the birthday beads she was offered by a laughing woman on peyote. Or even a turquoise bracelet from a pawnshop in Flagstaff where she saw thousands in rows in display cases. The Navajo nation was divesting itself of its semi-precious stones for beer and crack and it was horrifying. She didn’t want any of it, not even for free.

Neon drifts like party streams and bolts of crepe paper. Or spun glass in the crimson of the plumes of jungle birds thought to be extinct. They didn’t disappear. They’re here, at the River’s End, in their giant electric aviary.

She should have acquired a silk shawl somewhere, brass hoop earrings, a skirt in a floral print or a chiffon dress, fall leaf colored and embroidered with flowers, iris and pansies and violets, perhaps. And a straw hat with a flagrant yellow silk flower. She could have made herself into a garden. But she was a professor of no. Maybe she was born this way.

The tinny bells don’t come from cathedrals or ships. They’re machine proclamations of impending money. And it occurs to her that no accessories could possibly be right for this occasion.

“Let’s check out the river,” Raven suggests. She’s put on mauve lipstick and a citrus perfume.

Outside the casino, air cracks against her face. It must be 110, Amy thinks. 115. Heat rolls across her flesh, laminating it. This is how time takes photographs.

It’s how you get into the eternal line-up. It has nothing to do with Homeland Security or INTERPOL.

They walk into liquid heat. Huge insects perch on the ground. Clusters of scorpions. And nests of roaches and maggots.

“Crickets and grasshoppers,” Raven explains. Her skirt is a compendium of all possible shades of purple. Her skirt is wind across dusk mesas. Raven brings her climate with her. She wears sunset around her hips and asks, “Are you OK?”

OK? Is that a state with borders? Or an emotional concept? Can you drive there, get a suite, break a 20 for buckets of dimes? Should she reply with a flag or a drum? And what is in the arc of light on the side of the parking lot? It’s a confederation of hallucinatory swooping forms, too thin to be birds. They’re creatures from myth. They’ve broken through the fabric, tearing through time with their teeth.

“Bats,” Raven says. “Can’t you hear them?”

Everything is humming. It’s a corrupted partial darkness, too over-heated and streaked with arrows of red neon to be real night. It’s grazing above the surprisingly cold river. Amy touches it with her hand. The riverbank is studded with abandoned construction sites, iron grids with no walls, roofs or windows. It’s a ghost town.

They stand on a sort of loading dock. The terrain is increasingly difficult to decode. What is that coming toward them? A sea vessel? Yes, a mock riverboat calling itself a water taxi.

Raven reaches out her tanned arms, and helps her climb down the stairs. “You’re going to vomit,” her mother whispers. “You’re drinking too much. You could never maintain.”

The boat motion is nauseating. The water taxi crosses one thin strand of river, disgorges silent passengers who seem already defeated, and takes new ones to the other bank. The water taxi rides back and forth, back and forth, ferrying gamblers from Arizona across the river to Nevada where it is legal. Everyone is somber.

Amy Gold closes her eyes and counts the rivers she’s been on or in with her mother. The Snake, Arkansas, Rio Grande, Mississippi, Columbia, Missouri and Wailua, and now this ghastly Colorado in July where she doesn’t have the right accessories, not a scarf, bracelet or shawl. And what do they call this? The Styx?

“You’re not smoking,” Amy realizes.

“Even bank robbers quit,” Raven replies. “Even guys in the can quit.”

It’s the last ride of the night. The driver repeats this twice. He’s accustomed to passengers with Alzheimer’s and hearing aids, canes and walkers. And she’s been in the boat for hours, her head in her mother’s lap. She’s finished her emergency pint of vodka. She manages to stand, and pauses on the dock.

There’s an anomalous movement in the river. Some rustling denting the water the way tuna do in shallow bays. Then the water looks like submerged dogs are running just beneath the surface. Two boys are doing something with white flowers. They toss bouquets into the muddy river and the flowers are instantly, savagely ripped apart.

Amy is startled by an agitation beneath the surface. Enormous fish circle around the wood planks. They must be four feet long. There are severed palms in the water. People have removed their hands and these grotesque fish are eating them. The hideous dark gray fish. It’s a ritual. They must supplicate themselves.

“My God,” Amy says, wondering if she should jump in. She’s an excellent swimmer. She learned CPR. She takes a breath.

“Just carp.” Raven is tired. “Hundreds of large carp.”

“But what are they eating?” Amy has a pulsing ache that begins in her jaw and runs through the individual nerves of her face. Fine wires are being pulled through her eyes. Perhaps they’re going to use her for bait.

“Bread,” her mother says. “Look. Pieces of bread.”

Yes, of course. Slices of white bread. It is not the amputated hands of virgins. It’s not the orchids the Buddha promised. It’s bread from plastic bags. And we are released. We are reprieved. Enlightenment does not announce itself on the map. It is random, always.

“Where are you going?” Raven demands. “You’re sick. Let me help you.”

She is frightened.

“I’ll come back,” Amy says.

“You haven’t been back in since San Diego,” Raven says. “You left too soon, Amethyst. Fifteen was too early, baby. And you’re not going anywhere now.”

Amy Gold is moving through the lobby; she’s running, and she’s way ahead of her mother. She’s been way ahead from the beginning. That’s why her attention wanders. It’s always been too easy, she remembers, finding a path between islands of machines with glittering gutted heads. She possesses the secret of this age. It’s about the geometry of cheap metal. And she knows where the parking lot is and she has the car keys.

Amy Gold stops, paralyzed. She understands this moment with astounding clarity. No. She’s not going to pack her office at the university. She’s not going to carry books through corridors, one cardboard box, one square casket at a time. We decide the components of our necessities. We design our own ceremonies of loyalty and propitiation. And history fails to explain the significance of accessories. The silk sash around your waist can be a fishing line. Or a noose to hang a man with. Why isn’t this even a footnote?

Raven is reaching through the garish neon, her palms open, waiting to receive something. Pages from the original Bagavaid Gita? The UFO invasion plan? An Anasazi document inscribed in glyphs on bark in a lime ink unknown for a thousand years?

“Give me the keys. Give me the booze and cigarettes,” Raven commands. “I’m taking you home.”

Her mother is a sly predator bird who avoided capture. She’s infertile, arthritic, and she’s lost her claws. Her liver is diseased and her nest is lit by kerosene and candles. She’ll be safe there. She will receive the correct instructions and this time she will listen. When they drive through the Four Corners, through the region of the Harmonic Convergence, this time she will hear.

Her mother is driving, white and stiff in the darkness, a woman with lines like dried tributaries gouged into her face. She gave birth to a daughter she named for the distillation of all strata of purple. Raven wraps a shawl gold as a concubine’s solstice festival vestment around her shoulders. This woman will give her tenure. Amy leans against her mother; her eyes close and she is completely certain.

The architectural drawings can be salvaged and revised. They can build with hay bales now; it’s cheaper. They can do it themselves. After the adobe walls and kiva beams, they’ll tile the floors. Later they’ll plant chilies. Then half an acre of lilies, Calla Lilies. They can have a roadside stand in April at Easter. They’ll be known throughout the northern plateaus as the women of the lilies. Some will call them the women who sell communion.

They’ll be known only by rumor. It will be said that the solitary raven of the mesa received a miracle. There was a brutal severing and a long season of mourning. Then, inexplicably, since this is the nature of all things, the unexpected occurred. Hierarchies are irrelevant because they do not examine central and recurring events. There’s the unknowable trajectory of inspirations that prove to be barricaded cul-de-sacs. Or a king has an aneurism, issues a final edict, and families collapse, and villages vanish.

As there is lightning and cataclysm, droughts and wildfires, so too exists the revelatory accident. Are we not reconfigured as we cross rooms, strike matches, and catch moonlight on our skin?

On a mesa above Espanola, where the Rio Grande is a muddy creek you can’t even see from the highway, it is said that one day a lost daughter bearing the name of a sacred stone was somehow returned.