Gold Fame Citrus

BOOK TWO

From space it seems a canyon. Unhealed yet scar-tissue white, a wound yawning latitudinal between the sluice grafts of Los Angeles and the flaking, friable, half-buried hull of Las Vegas. A sutureless gash where the Mojave Desert used to be. In the pixel promises of satellites it could be the Grand Canyon, its awesome chasms and spires, its photogenic strata, our great empty, where so many of us once stood feeling so compressed against all that vastness, so dense, wondering if there wasn’t a way to breathe some room between the bits of us, where we once stood feeling the expected smallness a little, but also a headache where our eyeballs scraped against the limits of our vision, or rather of our imagination, because it was a painting we were seeing though we stood at the sanctioned rim of the real deal. Instead we saw a photograph, blue mist hanging in the foreground, snow collars around the thick rusty trestles. Motel art, and it made us wonder finally how we could have been so cavalier with photography, how we managed a scoff when warned that the cloaked box would swallow a part of the soul. Although in this instance the trouble was not, strictly speaking, the filching of the subject’s soul, for while our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism’s subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole.

But scale is a fearsome thing. Scale is analogy. When understood correctly, scale expresses itself mostly in the bowels. See to the east there? See that red thread flagellum? That hair on the lens, that mote in the vision, that teensy capillary is the suicidal region’s dry vein, opened. That is the Grand Canyon, where the silty jade Colorado once ran.

Returning our gaze westward, the mind lurches vertiginous. The vast bleached gash we once took for chasm protrudes; the formation pops from canyon to mountain. Another optical lurch as strata go shadows, as mountain goes mountains.

Closer and the eyebrain swoons again: these mountains move as if alive, pulsing, ebbing, throbbing, their summits squirming, their valleys filling and emptying of themselves. Mountains not mountains. Not rock, or no longer. Once rock. Dead rock. The sloughed-off skin of the Sierra, the Rockies, so on. Sand dunes. Dunes upon dunes. A vast tooth-colored superdune in the forgotten crook of the wasted West.

—

Buried beneath:

The world’s tallest thermometer.

An iconic cohort of roadside fiberglass dinos.

Goldstone Deep Space National Laboratory.

The Calico Early Man Site, first, last and only dig of the National Geographic Society’s New World archaeology project, its excavation led by the world-class archaeopaleontologist Dr. Buzz Leonard, Ph.D., who dated Calico’s bountiful stone tool cache of obsidian flakes, chert blades, flint scrapers, hammerstones, handstones, and knobbed querns earlier than Lucy by fifty thousand years, the new oldest evidence of Homo sapiens sapiens’s habitation in the world and thus shifting the origin of man from Africa to the Americas, relocating the cradle of humanity to Southern California, thereby upending the scientific consensus while confirming the hypothesis long-held by all southern Californians.

Buried beneath:

The Rio Tinto borax mine, birthplace of the twenty-mule team.

The Rainbow Ridge Opal Mine, from which was pulled “Black Beauty,” the largest, purest, most expensive opal in the world, whose 3,562 carats overburdened every gemological scale at the Golden State Gemological Society and Rockhounding Club in Sacramento and had to be weighed on a butcher’s scale down the street, the opal that Leland Stanford purchased, had carved into the shape of a sea lion, and presented to his wife, Jane, as a push gift upon the birth of their only son, Leland Junior, namesake of Leland Stanford Junior University.

The Potosi mine, which made the lead that made the bullets that made such quantities of blood bloom in the Mountain Meadows massacre that Brigham Young was forced to revise his grand plan for Deseret.

Buried beneath: Quartz country. Talc country. Arrowhead country. Petroglyph country. Rain shadow country. Underground river country. Ephemeral lake country. Creosote forest country. Joshua tree country. Alfalfa field country. Solar array country. Air Force base country. UFO country.

I–15, I–40, I–10 and all the unincorporated pit stops astride them: Zzyzx, Ludlow, Essex, Needles, Victorville, Barstow and Baker.

The date groves and pastel tract houses of Indio.

Snow Creek Village, a lifestyle community designed for miniature-size adults.

The movie-set city of Pioneertown, including Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace and the Pioneer Bowl, the oldest continually used bowling alley in America, where retired movie chimps worked as pinsetters until the evacuations, when, forgotten in the chaos, they were left behind, perhaps bowled a few frames of their own before flight or entombment.

The low, gravel-roofed, rectilinear Neutra imitations of Twentynine Palms, their cracked clay tennis courts, their empty stables.

The eerie auroral throb of Palm Springs swimming pools, dry, but with solar lights charged to bursting and ablaze. Each of that city’s 2,250 holes of golf a tinderbox begging for flame.

—

Naturally, there were efforts. The Essex town board planted the wild grasses they were told would deter the steady intrusion of sand. With seeds donated by the Sierra Club, FEMA funding, and meltwater from glaciers tugged down from Alaska, the town surrounded itself with thousands of acres of hearty, supposedly indigenous grassland. Still came the dune, rolling over the grasses like so many swaths of peachfuzz, the world’s most invasive species no species at all.

Baker and Ludlow erected fifty-foot retaining walls, Baker’s made of high-tech perforated flexfoam developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Ludlow’s old-fashioned concrete and rebar. The dune buckled both.

Windbreaks were constructed, tree lines were sowed, thousands of truckloads of gravel were dumped. Scrappy Needles — a town of three hundred truck drivers and rock hounds and recovering alcoholics — offered the mightiest fight, or at least the best-documented, stationing Caltrans trucks and the tanker from the county volunteer fire department at the edge of town and continually spraying the advancing sand wall with oil. Still came the dune.

Still came sand in sheets, sand erasing the sun for hours then days, sand softening the corners of stucco strip malls, sand whistling through the holes bored in the ancient adobe of mission churches. Still came the wind. Still came ceaseless badland bluster funneled by the Sierra Nevada. Still came all the wanderlusting topsoil of Brigham Young’s aerated Southwest free at last, the billowing left behind of tilled scrub, the aloft fertilizer crust of manifest destiny. Ashes in the plow’s wake, Mulholland’s America.

Still came the scientists: climatologists, geologists, volcanologists, soil experts, agriculturists, horticulturists, conservationists. In fluxed new-booted, khaki-capped men and women from the Northeast, stalking tenure in L.L.Bean. Still came journalists, deadline-hungry, sense of subtlety atrophied. Still came BLM and EPA and NWS and USGS, all assigned to determine why a process that ought to have taken five hundred thousand years had happened in fifty. All tasked with determining how to stop the mountain’s unrelenting march. All of them failed.

Or half failed. How it happened they could explain, a micro-chronicle even the layest Mojav might recite: drought of droughts, wind of winds.

Unceasing drought indifferent to prayer, and thanks to it rivers, lakes, reservoirs and aquifers drained, crops and ranches succumbed, vegetation withered, leaving behind deep, dry beds of loose alkali evaporate.

Scraping wind, five-hundred-year wind, the desert’s primal inhale raking the expired floodplain, making a wind tunnel of California’s Central Valley. In came particulate, swelling simultaneously Dumont Dunes and their southerly cousins, Kelso Dunes. In barely a blink of desertification’s encrusted eye, the two conjoined across the eighty miles that had long separated them, creating a vast dune field over one hundred miles wide, instantly the longest dune in North America.

But knowing how it came would not stop it from coming. Still came the wind, hoarding sand and superlatives: widest dune in North America, tallest dune in North America, largest dune in the Western Hemisphere. The dune field overtook I–15 in a weekend, reaching a corpulent four hundred square miles, insisting upon its reclassification from dune field to dune sea.

Still rose the dune sea, and like a sea now making its own weather. Sparkling white slopes superheated the skies above, setting the air achurn with funnels, drawing hurricanes of dust from as far away as Saskatchewan. Self-perpetuating then, the sand a magnet for its own mixture of clay, sulfates and carbonate particles from the pulverized bodies of ancient marine creatures, so high in saline that a sample taken from anywhere on the dune will be salty on the tongue.

So came the name, amargo being the Spanish word for bitter; Amargosa being the name of the first mountain range the dune sea interred.

—

In the blurred background of the Pulitzer Prize — winning photograph, the remaining citizens of Needles, nine men and three women — the Needles Dozen, as they will be briefly known — are frosty with sand mortared to their oil-slickened bodies, white specters with dark holes demarking gas masks or goggles, handkerchiefs pulled over mouths, a dish sponge tied to a face with a shoelace. They look to the dune, perhaps rather than acknowledge each other stepping backward across the besieged playground they’ve vowed to protect. In the foreground a toddler — the caption called him “the forgotten child of the Mojave”—squats naked in a sandbox. A plastic bulldozer lies on its side at his feet, rumored the photographer’s salt. The child’s crusted face is tilted skyward, to the ration jug he holds inverted over his head. His tongue is a violent belt of glistening red, the last drop of water dangling from the lip of the jug. A wink of light in the droplet, too pure to be digital.

Still those once of Needles lingered, stationing themselves at the foot of the dune for three weeks after the town was buried, accepting only rations from Red Cross, wanting perhaps to stay as close as they could to their interred lives. They looked to the hot white whale glittering in the sun and saw their homes, shops, their football field entombed in sand. Preserved. Like those quaint towns they’d read about, long ago drowned by dams but reemerged, mud-logged and algaed and alien-looking, as the reservoirs drained.

But the base of the dune was not sand, reporters reminded the Needles Dozen at a press conference held in a tent with generators shuddering behind it, and had not been sand for some time. Question: Did they realize that the dune now behaved more like a glacier, albeit a vastly accelerated glacier? Question: Were they aware that geologists had ascertained that the base of the dune — the foot, they called it — was rock? That it carved the land more than covered it? Question: Did they wish to comment on the fact that the buildings they envisioned, in which they had spent the entirety of their short lives — their homes, say, or their twelve-step club — had already been crushed, were now but fossil flecks in banded sandstone?

And so retreated even the hard-nosed dreamers of Needles, California. So dispersed the last of the true Mojavs, though the term had already outgrown them. They were reabsorbed by New England, the Midwest, the South, all those moist and rich-soiled places their wild-eyed forefathers once fled. Some were granted temporary asylum in the petite verdant kidney of the Pacific Northwest. In retreat, the stalwarts of Needles comforted themselves by categorizing the dune as a natural disaster, though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind.

But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast’s rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior.

Metaphors were unavoidable. The Amargosa was a disease: a cancer, a malignancy, a tumor. A steamroller, a plow. A hungry beast, a self-spawning corpulence, a bloated blob gobbling land, various images of appetite, projections of our ugly, innermost selves.

The Amargosa was angry, cruel, or uncaring — personification inevitable and forgivable too, for at times the mass did seem to move with discernment. Witnesses describe occasions when it seemed to pause its march, or reach its steady foot around a town rather than atop it, as though in embrace, allowing the citizens time to hitch their trailers to their trucks and haul them from harm. Its storms once lifted a child playing jacks in his yard and deposited him unscathed atop the dumpster behind the Terrible’s gas station where his mother worked. But just as effortlessly, a sandalanche humming ten miles away veered to take an entire town in minutes. It has been called the devil incarnate, but also the wide, open eye of God.

With the Needles Dozen, the last of the newspapermen, the lingering specialists from this institute and that withdrew. Civilization retreated; the frontier reasserted itself. Their staff and charges evacuated, local sheriffs’ offices disbanded de facto. Sinkholes gulped the interstate, rendering highway patrol moot. State troopers ceded jurisdiction to the Department of the Interior, whose last vestige of authority is a fee booth at the northwest entrance to Death Valley National Park, a shack with a busted mechanical arm flopping out front, a bulletin board tacked with maps bleached blank and disintegrating.

USGS concluded its modest survey efforts when an SUV with government plates was ransacked, stripped, and set on fire, the assessors found four days later, wandering the edge of the dune naked and nearly insane. As the New York Times put it, AMARGOSA DUNE SEA INTERNATIONAL WATERS.

No complete map of the Amargosa Dune Sea exists. Partial maps of one face or another are etched almost immediately to obsolescence by the ever-shifting sands. The most informed estimate of the terrain describes “nearly exponential exaggeration of features,” wherein each chain of dunes gives way to another taller, wider, hotter, until these crescendo at the Six Sisters, a chain of crestcentric dunes whose sandstone feet are estimated to be as wide as they are tall. Any one of the Sisters would easily be the tallest sand dune in the world. Atop these, the hypothesis goes, reclines the summit: a nameless five-crested star dune, entirely unmapped and ever shawled in rainless clouds. Though never scaled, the summit is suspected to be the second tallest mountain in North America. At last count, geologists estimate seven thousand individual peaks and crestlines accumulated to form the dune sea, though sandalanches and extremely hostile environs make an accurate count impossible. And anyway, funding’s dried up.

No one has circumnavigated the Amargosa, no one has ventured into its interior, and no one has crossed it. Unmanned IMQ-18A Hummingbird drones sent on scouting patterns inevitably encountered a “severe electromagnetic anomaly,” transmitting back only an eerie white throb. Satellite-imaging attempts were similarly frustrated, yielding only ghostly blurs.

BLM’s Survey of the Area Surrounding and Encompassing the Amargosa Dune Sea reports a population of zero. The one-page document — the Bureau’s shortest survey to date — is itself salted with words like inhospitable, barren, bleak, and empty.

A desert deserted, the official line.

—

Yet stories circulated the stuffed cities, rumors whipped around the social networks, urban legends rippled through the besieged green East: amassed at the foot of the dune was perhaps a colony.

Some versions people the colony with stubborn Mojavs, the calculation being that for every thousand fleeing the Amargosa, one stayed. A welder from Needles with fifteen years of sobriety refused to board the National Guard lorry with his wife and twin daughters. A high school geography teacher, supposedly a descendant of Meriwether Lewis, insisted on staying to finish the new maps. The ranger who once manned the fee booth at Death Valley National Park built himself a yurt and lived there with three teenage girls he called his wives-in-Christ.

The versions circling amongst the professional set populate the colony with refugees of the bourgeoisie. A spinster assistant professor failed to submit her tenure box in the fall. The environment desk lost contact with its Ivy League greenhorn. The anal-retentive manager of the illustrious lab failed to renew his grant application. A brilliant but antisocial postdoc did not return to his carrel at the Institute.

Underclass iterations have the colony an assemblage of shrewd swindlers, charlatans, and snake oil salesmen, hearts inherited from the forty-niners, awaiting the oil bonanza when the tremendous sand mass squeezes out its inevitable pods of petro, or the adventure bonanza when the summit outgrows Denali and helicopter rides to base camp go to the highest bidder, when brightly clothed cadres of the stubbled wealthy stand atop their piles of money to be the first to summit.

On the left it is a survivalist outpost, vindicated doomsayers with homes of abandoned freight cars of rusty oranges and reds and clear crisp blues and stockpiled with guns and canned goods and bottled water and military rations. Home to Libertarian drifters and vagabonds, tramps, wanderers preferring not to have an address, a garrison for the familiar cast of trigger-happy vigilantes scowling and squirting tobacco juice across the New Old West.

On the right it is ground zero of the eco-revolution, vital utopia where the beatniks of the Enchanted Circle have relocated from Big Sur — or the aging acidheads of Atlas City from Tucson, or the free rangers of No Where Ranch from Santa Fe, or the wispy vegans of Gaia Village from Taos, or the kinky paramours of Agape from Sebastopol, or the anarchist pinkos of Ant Hill Collective from Oakland, or the burnouts of Alpha Farm from Grass Valley, or the lesbo Amazons of Girlhouse from Portland, or the junkies of the Compound from Santa Monica, or the burners of New Black Rock City from Minden, or the shorn monks of the Shamanic Living Center from Ojai, or the jam band Technicolor Tree Tribe from Santa Cruz — all with their wheeled zero-footprint Earthships made of tires and bottles and clay.

Rumors of a colony are nourished by the many who saw the dune sea firsthand and thereafter ascribed to it a curious energy. While it’s a fact that certain places woo, the Amargosa’s pull was said to be far beyond topographic charm. It was chemical, pheromonal, elemental, a tingle in the ions of the brain, a tug in the iron of the blood. The dune beckoned the chosen, they said. “I was overcome with this very powerful feeling,” one Mojav refugee told CNN of the first time she saw the dune sea. “A feeling of, well, belonging.”

Another refugee said, “I miss it. Sounds strange, I realize. But I do. I truly do.”

Another described the Amargosa as “a feeling, like that swelling inside you when you hear a song perfectly sung.”

“I saw it from the air, from very far off, back when there were flights out West,” wrote a mirage-chasing New York stockbroker on his blog.

The PWI [Palisades Water Index] had been banging against the ceiling for weeks, so of course I’m flying to pitch water derivatives in Silicon Valley, or what was left of it. A lot of my guys had gone back to Boston when Stanford closed, but there were still some whales floating around. I was polishing my presentation when the captain came on the intercom and said if we looked out our windows we could see the Amargosa. I thought, Bullshit. We were hundreds of miles north. But I looked out my window real quick and there it was, glowing. It was so bright, like a light I’d never seen before. I felt very full then, and couldn’t take my eyes off it. When we passed out of sight I felt just bereft, like someone I loved was dead. I’ve come to realize I need that full feeling. Very full but also incredibly calm, like heaven, or the rush of warmth before you freeze to death.

This last simile, those parting words of the stockbroker’s final post before he disappeared, was perhaps especially apt, for among the called the Amargosa is both siren and jagged reef, its good vibes a blessing, its curse just as likely. Fickle, it is said to be, false and traitorous. Others, wounds less fresh, describe it simply as an arbiter, allude only vaguely to its methods of exiting the unwelcome. You might have heard it on the eastbound evac lorry: The dune is rejecting me. Or later, among the jilted devotees in the Mojav camps: The mountain has turned its back on me.

—

See now from our imagined sky-perch. See through blurs of sand and waterless cloud and obfuscating energy. See the stoss-side base of the dune sea, glittering. It is colloidal, this light, the sun wiggling as if across a braided river from above. A mirage, for the water’s run out. This is the sun reflected by aluminum, glass, the roofs of vans sandblasted smooth, mobile geodesic domes, shanties of salvaged metal. Nomads and neo-Bedouins belonging to no district, aligned with no representation, knowing no laws save their own.

The colony.

And beyond that, in terrain not yet subsumed by the dune, an anorexic wannabe orphan languishes in a vintage car on the shore of a sulfur lake, abandoned with the nameless child she took. Through playing house, dying of thirst.

When Luz came back it was her body that came first, tugging her behind it. Her skin was screaming. Her lips split, clefts puttied with scabs. The flesh around her nose was raw to cracking, like the plates along the bottom of a dry ancient sea, no moisture left to yield. The insides too, surely, for the simple, vital intake of air stung. Her fingers were swollen beyond bending, waxy and violet-tinged. Crimps of black vein ventured near the surface. Her windpipe was evidently collapsed, for she could not breathe, not exactly. Her tongue surged unavailingly against her palate, her airway clamped shut by her own forgetting how to talk to the different parts of herself.

She breathed, finally, though what passed through the flattened airway was altitude-thin and hot; it dissipated before making it all the way to the bottom of her lungs. Eventually, she did breathe deeply, and then the woozy smell of diesel came to her.

She was lying in a nest of dust-crusted pillows in a long dim narrow room. Its gently domed ceiling was low, and colored the last pale shade available to green before green becomes taupe, a shade insisting so obstinately on tranquility that it was surely blended for asylums, an interior decorator’s attempt to divorce the mad from their madness. Below the domed ceiling, the walls of the long room — it was more a hallway — were lined with blankets, swelling and slackening like sails. Behind the blankets was surely a row of high windows encircling the room, for these backlit the blankets, which were two-tone and faded, depicting scenes of vanished nature: wolves howling, a mustang and foal rearing, a mountain range foregrounded by evergreens.

Luz shivered. The shadow of the starlet’s slip was writ onto her by sunburn, but the dress itself was gone and she was naked save for a quilt laid over her, its batting leaking from the eroded cloth. She was chilly, though it took her a long time to recognize the sensation and to understand what to do about it. She pulled the quilt around her. The pillows beneath and about her were in fact couch cushions, filmed with a silky white dust that rose from them when she shifted.

She thought: Ig.

She rolled to prop herself up and cracked her elbow instead on some hard surface that gave a hollow clang at the blow. She burrowed one fat, blood-glutted hand into the cushion nest and felt a floor of rubber and a neat row of rivets.

Luz concentrated on breathing. Behind the blankets the open windows rattled gently. At the far end of the room, above a patchwork of more hanging blankets, was painted a silhouette of a dove — no, not a dove, a bluebird, for there were the words astride it, BLUE and BIRD. And beside that a placard with two hands reaching for each other and scripted beneath them, BE SAFE. On the ceiling was a skylight hatch made from ancient yellowed plastic and on the floor a black rubber strip ran from beneath the bluebird and back to her, and as it ran the room was not a room but a bus, a school bus with the seats ripped out: the accordion door, closed, the long metal arm attached to it with its lever mechanism, the first aid kit mounted on the wall, the elevated driver’s seat upholstered in olive green and flanked by many mirrors. In one mirror Luz caught a glimpse of her own face. It made her a little unsteady, her reflection, because the angle was all wrong and so were the eyes: small and lashless, bolstered by plump cheeks where Luz’s cheeks were pointy and hollow. The plump cheeks lifted a little now, and Luz touched her own face. She was not smiling.

The driver’s seat creaked, and down on the long, slanting gas pedal, the toes of a bare foot curled then relaxed. The eyes in the mirror watched, still.

When Luz opened her mouth, her lips crackled. “Hello?”

A rusty scrape came from inside the apparatus of the driver’s seat.

“Where’s my girl?” Luz’s voice was not her own. “I had a girl with me.”

“Shh,” went the eyes in the mirror.

“A toddler. Where is she?”

The figure — a woman — turned in the seat now. She slowly extended both her bare feet — fat, pink bottoms black, grazed by the soiled hem of a flowing, wrinkled white skirt — into the aisle. She was topless, with wide hips crowned by rolls and a soft paunch resting on her waistband.

She clutched a bundle of cloth to her chest. “Easy,” the woman said.

Luz caught her tone. “Oh, God.”

The woman stood. She was massive, her head threatening the ceiling of the bus. Her hair hung lank and greasy and gold-flecked from beneath a filthy bandanna. Another was cinched around her neck. The woman came toward Luz. Her gait was tender, but not tentative. From the bundle hung a pale spindle leg. Long toes. Hard bulb of knee.

“No,” Luz said. “No.”

The giantess came at her still.

“Get away,” said Luz, loud.

“Shh,” said the woman again, kneeling with some difficulty beside Luz. “She’s eating.” She leaned close — Luz smelled a sourness rising from her — and there, in the wad of cloth was Ig, suckling the giantess’s left breast.

Luz felt her breath come back to her, and other things with it: relief, joy, the weight of responsibility, a seasick sensation born of both having and having not failed the baby. Ig caught her with one gray eye but continued suckling, her mouth twitching rabbity and the breast plumb against it. Luz touched her head but pulled back when she saw the scabs along Ig’s hairline. “Is she okay?”

“Hungry. Goes to town whenever she gets the chance.”

They watched the child in silence awhile. “I’m Dallas,” whispered the big woman.

“Luz,” said Luz. “That’s Ig.”

“Ig,” said Dallas, fondly.

“There was a man with us,” said Luz. “Did you find him?”

Dallas shook her head no. “Drink this.” She passed Luz a green glass bottle filled with cloudy liquid.

Luz smelled it.

“It’s water,” said Dallas, “mostly. You need vitamins, too. Drink it.”

Luz did, wiping her mouth after. “How long have we been here?”

“More there.”

Luz hesitated at the plastic blue barrel, its water low.

“Go on. They found you yesterday.”

“Who?”

“Levi. Out walking.” She gestured to Ig, who watched them still with her one eye like a squid’s, catching light. “You want her?”

“I don’t…” Luz looked at her own austere breasts, her dark nipples veering slightly away from each other. “We gave her formula.” Though she hadn’t. The can Rita gave her was somewhere in the Melon, still sealed.

Dallas said, “I see.”

“We had to.”

“That’s your decision.”

“Now she’s too old.”

Dallas shook her head and adjusted the blankets around Ig. “I hate to see young people eating that poisonous crud. My oldest was on the breast until she was four. Kid was the healthiest little nub in Mendocino. Happy, too.”

Luz nodded.

“She’s back East now,” said Dallas, by way of full disclosure, perhaps, a gesture to her own motherly imperfections. Luz appreciated it, but she fixed her gaze on the fresh magenta stretch marks radiating along the woman’s brown belly. The oldest was not the child about whose whereabouts Luz was curious.

Dallas winced. She detached Ig, turned her around, and put her other nipple in the child’s waiting mouth. “Learning with teeth does make a difference.”

Dallas reminded Luz of the water. Luz drank, grateful that the water was warm because she was still freezing. She hugged the quilt around herself, all the while cupping Ig’s foot in her hand. She could not stop touching the baby.

“That’s the heatstroke,” said Dallas, nodding to the quilt. “Mindfuck, isn’t it? Bet you haven’t been cold since you were a baby.”

Baby Dunn said, “Not even then.”

“Chemicals. You know you’re in a bad way — you know you’re close—when your brain starts thinking in terms of quality of life.”

“Where are we?”

A raised brow. “You don’t know?” Dallas reached up over her head, grasped a fistful of the mustang blanket and pulled. “You’ve heard of the dune sea? This is shoreline property!”

White sun screamed into the bus, stinging Luz’s eyes. She shielded them and saw Dallas do the same for Ig. Luz decided then that this woman could never leave them.

“Take a look,” said Dallas.

Luz gathered the quilt around her like a clergyman’s robes and stood, dizzy, the blood in her head suddenly at low tide. When her brain accepted color again it was blue: arresting matte pops of blue spattered along an encampment of dun, blue in slabs, one-dimensional — water, she thought, though it was water as Baby Dunn had drawn it, one flat plane. Oases going snap in the wind. Between the tarps, like boulders to their lagoons, clustered camping tents, cars and bench seats from vans, structures of two-by-fours, plywood and chicken wire, a geodesic dome of PVC pipe. Large aluminum globules with windows also covered in aluminum winked beside corrugated white cuboids splashed with maroon or teal lettering: Wanderlodge, Born Free, Chieftain, Four Winds. The one called Holiday Rambler had a TV antenna swaying high overhead, a red brassiere wagging from it. Everything was covered in dust: plywood, canvas, tires, barrels and boxes and bicycles. The tip of a teepee in the middle distance. Beyond this, a wall of glittering white. Luz shivered again and pulled the quilt tighter. She looked for the top of the dune but could not find it.

“I’m going to need one of those bikes,” she said.

Dallas sighed. “Sit down, will you?”

“I have to find him.”

“We need to cool you off first,” said Dallas. “You’re sick. You’re weak.” She passed Luz a plastic spray bottle. “Keep moist,” she said. “Get your blood back where it belongs.”

“He’s out there.”

“Have a seat.”

“I won’t wait. It’s not possible.”

Dallas stood. “Sit on down now, would you please?”

“I have to find him.”

Dallas clutched Luz’s arm with her free hand. She held Luz steady with her gaze. “Listen,” she began. Then, after some fortification, “They already found him.”

“What? What are you—”

Dallas said, “I’m sorry.”

“You said… No.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again and meant.

Luz might have left anyway — might have charged off into the desert like a conqueror, like John Wesley Powell on his velvet armchair strapped atop his raft, directing, with the one arm the Minie balls at Shiloh allowed him, his expedition’s deadly slide down a mile-deep canyon. Might have, like Sacajawea, given Ig a wad of leaves to gum, slung the child into her papoose and set off for home, except when she tried to lift the baby from Dallas’s arms her own quivered and the thew straps along her midback seized and Ig, perhaps sensing Luz’s unfitness, let loose one of her agonized shrieks.

Dallas eased Ig down and urged Luz to sit beside her.

“Your muscles are essentially suffocating,” she told Luz, meticulously reattaching the mustang blanket across the exposed streak of windows. “You might walk now. You might run. You can get out there on adrenaline. But they’ll quit on you all at once. You won’t even have a little sports car to protect you. Dying in that bucket will start to look like heaven when the birds come for you. Vultures, grackles. Never mind the movies, they won’t wait for you to die. They’ll take that child piece by piece, baby.”

“Watch her for me then.”

“Afraid not. Plenty of hurt in this place without signing this girlie up for more.” Dallas let the blanket fall silently over the washed-out vista beyond. She fetched another bottle of hazy water and sat beside the cushion nest. “Come. Lie down.”

“Where is he?” asked Luz. “His body.”

Dallas patted the nest. “Come on.”

“Tell me.”

“Levi found it — him. You’ll have to ask Levi.”

“Where? When?”

“You’ll have to see Levi.” Dallas passed her the spray bottle. “Got to cool your blood. Got to give your heart a rest.”

Luz would not accept the spray bottle. To accept it would be to give time permission to go on. The gesture would be an after-gesture, as every gesture would now be, every gesture and glance, every meal, every milestone, every empty sob. “Did he suffer?”

“Levi can tell you that.”

Through tears Luz watched the light beat through the mustang blanket. It was afterlight, and though it was almost twin to forelight it was of a different quality entirely. “You keep saying that word.”

—

Luz went prone and stayed that way, trying to get a feel for the afterworld, the world without Ray in it. A long time passed like this. She would not remember the plates of food Dallas brought — clean leafy greens, supple strawberries and a golden smile of cantaloupe — nor would she think to ask where these came from. She would not remember the carnival of resurrection the fruits danced across her tongue, nor the paroxysmal shits they visited upon her later. She would not remember Dallas chattering to Ig, Dallas nursing Ig until she fell asleep, Dallas pointing to the child’s blisters and saying that though she was badly burned Ig was in better shape than Luz inside. She would not remember Dallas telling her to spray herself down and she would not remember Dallas misting up her left leg and down her right when Luz refused, Dallas misting from her left fingertips across her chest and neck, to her right fingertips and — because by then her left leg was dry, the skin having swallowed it, or the thirsty air — starting again. She would not remember Dallas spritzing the blankets or soaking torn segments of cloth in water and instructing Luz to lay these where the blood was closest: her neck, armpits, lower back and groin. She would not remember Dallas telling her to picture the tubes clustered near the surface, the blood coming in rusty and overhot, surging right up against the cool rags and turning beryl, turquoise, robin’s-egg. Do you feel it? Dallas hummed, those chilly vessels evangelizing out and back, the icy platelets taking that nip inward, refrigerating her baked organs, hydrating her withered inners. Do you feel it? Luz would not remember saying, Yes, yes.

—

Luz did rise, eventually, and together the two women bathed Ig in a blue plastic barrel filleted lengthwise into a trough. A new halo of freckles at her brow, Ig at first grunted her displeasure, then wailed it, and Luz had to lean over and let the baby scratch at her, let Ig clutch her about the throat while she held her close and cooed into her white head. But soon the child grew bold and wiggly, beaching herself on her taut belly, sitting and slapping the water while releasing high honks of joy. Strange, Luz thought, that such a sound was still possible.

“Easy,” said Luz. “We don’t want to spill.”

“Let her spill,” said Dallas, baldly charmed.

The grace of this was staggering, and Luz could barely manage. “She’s never had a bath before.”

Days passed, many of them. Barrels of water appeared and appeared again, full and clean. More fruit came, and vegetables too, and sometimes charred rounds of rustic yellow bread tasting of fire. They saw no one but Dallas, who went out sometimes, Ig whining after her. Luz never slid the blankets back after that first time, had no intention of leaving the Blue Bird bus whatsoever. Dallas said that was perfectly okay and returned with cloth, gifts, rations, once a sweet ruby grapefruit, which Ig returned to again and again despite the way it made her face collapse in pucker. The baby’s glottal moans went unremarked, her bulbed head and low heavy brow undescribed. Dallas fed them both salt crystals surely harvested from the badlands they had visited with Ray a lifetime ago.

Ig would have lived in the trough tub, but her lips went blue and quiversome after only a few minutes in even tepid water. “She’s so thin,” Luz said to no one, for Dallas would not feed Luz’s worries. Together they bathed Ig twice a day and as she built her tolerance, Ig’s rash receded and her blisters shrank. Once, Dallas was out fetching supplies and Luz left Ig quietly enthralled in her favorite bath-time game of watching a pair of stones Dallas had brought her sway to the blue bottom of the trough, then retrieving them. Suddenly, the baby shrieked behind her. Luz turned and dashed down the bus to Ig, who was squealing with delight and running circles around the trough, a puffy turd giving chase in her wake.

The first time Ig stayed tending to her sinking rocks long enough for her fingertips to wither, she stared at them, horrified, whispering, “What is?” until Luz kissed all ten of them and said, “It’s okay.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Ig repeated, petting her raisins against her own lips with the same sensuous intensity she’d had at the raindance.

“She’s always been like that,” Luz said, wanting Dallas to say either that something was wrong or that nothing was.

“She’s a feeling being, is all. Probably got that from mom and dad.”

“Dad, probably.”

“He was a feeler?”

“He used to have these nightmares. He’d thrash all night. Scream, sometimes.”

“What about?”

“He never remembered. That’s what he said.”

“You didn’t believe him.”

“I don’t now. He was always wanting to protect me.”

“Hm,” said Dallas.

“What?”

“Why did he leave you out there then?”

Luz took an affronted breath. “He didn’t leave us.”

“Then where was he going?” Dallas was obstinately frank, and this confirmed Luz’s assumption that she’d had a difficult life. People with hard lives don’t waste time on euphemisms or manners.

“To get help,” Luz said. How ridiculous that suddenly sounded.

Dallas again said, “Hm.”

“He was being a hero. I let him. Made him.”

“You didn’t make nothing.”

“I was always needing saving. That was our deal — damsel, woodsman.”

Dallas wiped Luz’s face. “Some people got to fix everything around them before they can get right with themselves.”

Ig splashed. Luz said, “It’s just. You spend your life thinking you’re an original. Then one day you realize you’ve been acting just like your parents.”

Dallas told her story then: her father one of the last holdouts against Big Pot, his the last family farm growing organic Mendo Purps, beautiful six-footers with plum-colored leaves thick as velour and buds frosty with resin. This was the heyday of the NorCal ganja boom and Dallas — named for the site of her conception — grew up bussing tables in her mother’s vegan restaurant, getting tipped with dime bags. “I was high for all my girlhood,” she said, combing her fingers through Ig’s fine hair. “Both my daughters’, too. I try to see my oldest as a baby and I can’t. I was numb and it took them killing my pop to get me sober. Pot wars was in full swing. He was missing for ten days… Found him at the bottom of a dry dam. Some Chinatown shit.”

“There was water.”

“What?”

“In Chinatown,” said Luz. “In the reservoir, remember? It’s a freshwater reservoir but later they find salt water in Mulwray’s lungs?”

“Well, no water in my pop, salt or fresh, but they did knock all his teeth out with a baseball bat. Closed casket. Wanted to send a message and I got it. Packed up my mom and my girls and went to San Francisco. Got there three days before the bridges went outbound only. Still, there was no place to live. We were broke. We slept in Dolores Park. My daughter wrote an essay about it and got into Carlisle University on one of those Mojav scholarships.”

“How did you end up here?”

“Same as everyone. I was summoned.”

“I need to see him,” Luz sometimes said.

“Who?” Dallas asked, though she knew.

—

One bright, milky morning, Luz lay naked on her nest, Ig asleep beside her. Dallas was out — where, Luz did not know and did not want to know. She had this Blue Bird world pinned down: trough, cushions, rocks, blankets. It was all she could manage. She sprayed the prickle of mist on her slowly mending skin, listening to Ig’s even breathing.

Then the back door of the bus — which Luz had not known about — swung open, swamping the place in unwelcome light. Dust billowed in, its glittering particles adhering immediately to Luz’s damp skin. She reached for the quilt to cover herself, setting Ig moaning. A figure stood in the light.

“Dallas said you wanted to speak to me.”

Like every hoodwinked dreamer assembling at the stoss-side colony, like every huckster and pioneer before him, Levi Zabriskie came to California chasing a mirage. He came via Albuquerque, where he’d been recruited to conduct research for an initiative to reanimate the Southwest’s sluggish tectonics, a project he never finished and perhaps never began.

For this project Levi was granted the highest clearance level available to civilians, Clearance Zed. To attain and maintain his clearance, Levi’s friends and family were asked to file personal reference questionnaires quarterly. The questionnaires went:

CLASS: ZED

89980-682-34409J

ZABRISKIE, LEVI H.

HCR BOX 89

SALEM, UT 84653

1. TO YOUR KNOWLEDGE DOES THE APPLICANT LISTED ABOVE EXIST?

YES

NO

I AM UNABLE TO SAY.

2. TO YOUR KNOWLEDGE IS THE PERSONAL INFORMATION OF THE APPLICANT ABOVE ACCURATE?

YES

NO

I AM UNABLE TO SAY.

3. HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN THE APPLICANT?

0–1 YEARS

1–2 YEARS

2–5 YEARS

5–10 YEARS

MORE THAN 10 YEARS

I AM UNABLE TO SAY.

4. IN WHAT CAPACITY DO YOU KNOW THE APPLICANT?

FRIEND

FAMILY

COLLEAGUE

INTIMATE

OTHER

IF OTHER PLEASE SPECIFY: _________________________________

5. ON AVERAGE, HOW OFTEN DO YOU INTERACT WITH THE APPLICANT?

DAILY

WEEKLY

MONTHLY

SEMIANNUALLY

ANNUALLY

BIANNUALLY

LESS THAN BIANNUALLY

6. DOES THE APPLICANT LACK IN ANY OF THE FOLLOWING WELLNESS ARENAS? MARK ALL THAT APPLY:

INTELLECT

DISCIPLINE

PERSONAL FINANCE

HYGIENE

MORAL COMPASS

PHYSICAL FITNESS

TIME MANAGEMENT

PRAGMATISM

NONE OF THE ABOVE

7. TO YOUR KNOWLEDGE DOES THE APPLICANT HAVE ANY ADDICTIONS? MARK ALL THAT APPLY:

ILLEGAL DRUGS

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

OVER-THE-COUNTER DRUGS

ALCOHOL

GAMBLING

INTERNET

PORNOGRAPHY

FANTASY SPORTS LEAGUES

MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES

SHOPPING

SEX

OTHER

IF OTHER PLEASE SPECIFY: _________________________________

8. HAVE YOU EVER HEARD THE APPLICANT CRITICIZE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FOR ANY OF THE FOLLOWING? MARK ALL THAT APPLY:

FISCAL RECKLESSNESS

DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

HUMAN RIGHTS — DOMESTIC [RACE]

HUMAN RIGHTS — DOMESTIC [CLASS]

HUMAN RIGHTS — DOMESTIC [GENDER]

HUMAN RIGHTS — DOMESTIC [DISABILITY]

HUMAN RIGHTS — DOMESTIC [SEXUALITY]

HUMAN RIGHTS — DOMESTIC [REGIONALISM]

HUMAN RIGHTS — DOMESTIC [OTHER]

HUMAN RIGHTS — FOREIGN [AFRICA]

HUMAN RIGHTS — FOREIGN [ASIA]

HUMAN RIGHTS — FOREIGN [EASTERN EUROPE]

HUMAN RIGHTS — FOREIGN [SOUTH AMERICA]

HUMAN RIGHTS — FOREIGN [CENTRAL AMERICA]

HUMAN RIGHTS — FOREIGN [UNACKNOWLEDGED NON-NATIONS]

HUMAN RIGHTS — FOREIGN [OTHER]

GENERAL “HEGEMONY”

FOOD SAFETY

FOOD SCARCITY

INDIAN AFFAIRS/“GENOCIDE”

“RAMPANT CONSUMERISM”

“POT WARS”

INFRINGEMENT OF STATES’ RIGHTS

CLANDESTINE GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO: ASSASSINATIONS, DOMESTIC USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS, COUPS D’ÉTAT, EXTRATERRESTRIALS, SUPPRESSION OF TECHNOLOGIES, BLACK OPS, GHOST DETAINEES, “THE PLAN”

ENVIRONMENT — EPA [IMPOTENCE OF]

ENVIRONMENT — EPA [OVERREACH OF]

ENVIRONMENT — WATER CRISIS [ALASKA PROJECT]

ENVIRONMENT — WATER CRISIS [GREAT BASIN ENHANCEMENT ACT]

ENVIRONMENT — WATER CRISIS [VERDANCY INITIATIVE]

ENVIRONMENT — WATER CRISIS [COLORADO RIVER RESCUE CORPS]

ENVIRONMENT — WATER CRISIS [RATIONING JUSTICE]

ENVIRONMENT — WATER CRISIS [SIERRA SNOWPACK CULTIVATION INITIATIVE]

ENVIRONMENT — WATER CRISIS [RELOCATION AND EVACUATION]

ENVIRONMENT — WATER CRISIS [OTHER, INCLUDING: DESERTIFICATION, CLOUD SEEDING, ARSENIC POISONING, DISMANTLING OF NATIONAL PARKS SYSTEM, MASS EXTINCTIONS 6 & 7]

FOREIGN POLICY—“FOREVER WAR”

FOREIGN POLICY — OTHER

GOLD STANDARD

INFLATION

ELECTORAL COLLEGE

9. DO YOU HARBOR ANY GENERAL MISGIVINGS ABOUT THE APPLICANT’S TRUSTWORTHINESS AND STABILITY?

NO

YES

I AM UNABLE TO SAY.

I WISH TO DISCUSS THE APPLICANT IN PERSON.

These surveys had, like all things, unintended effects reverberating outward from them. One such effect was to evoke in their authors a vestigial intimacy with the applicant: By sitting at their desks every three months to consider Levi Zabriskie’s superlative character, his family and friends developed the impression that they still knew the young man quite well, though they did not. For example, each of his recommenders indicated that they spoke with Levi “Weekly” or “Monthly,” though by the time he was discharged from the project he had not visited, phoned, written or otherwise interacted with anyone from home in many years.

And where was home, exactly? His first — an FLDS compound founded by his paternal great-great-grandfather, Clester Snow, a polygamist apostate — went to vapor the day his father deposited him in front of a shopping mall in Salt Lake City for getting an erection. Despite Levi’s being only twelve, he would, his father recognized, soon know what to do with it. Levi’s brutal second home, Pioneer Park, mercifully evaporated when he found his third, a ward, and in that ward his fourth and penultimate home: the sheep ranch above the Dream Mine, run by his adopted family, the Zabriskies. It was mainly the Zabriskies who filled out the questionnaires.

The Zabriskies were an old Mormon family. A young, mute Zabriskie had survived the Haun’s Mill massacre in Missouri and carried the news to Far West, scratching the slaughter on a sheaf of birch bark. Zabriskies had been among the founders of Nauvoo, that short-lived asylum on a spongy crescent of the Mississippi River. Erasmus Zabriskie served as scribe for the Zion-bound Vanguard Company of 1847, where he grew tired of counting the revolutions of a wagon wheel and, with the aid of mathematician and apostle Orson Pratt, fashioned the ancestor to the odometer. Two Zabriskies — ten-year-old Orrin and baby Cecil — died during the Westward Exodus, both of tick sickness, both along that pitiless stretch between Winter Quarters and Fort Laramie. Orrin was buried in Wyoming but Baby Cecil stayed pressed to his mother’s bosom beyond Fort Laramie, grief-stricken mother and lifeless son pulled into the Salt Lake Valley on a handcart, the baby buried in what would become Pioneer Park, where Levi Zabriskie would live the winter he became a teenager. Hyram Zabriskie founded the Elk Mountain Mission in 1855, but abandoned it soon thereafter under Paiute attacks. Hyram’s eldest, Leroy, led the charge to resettle Elk Mountain, later called Moab, later called the Uranium Capital of the World. It was state congressman Xan Zabriskie who banned this nickname, insisting instead on “Canyonlands Cathedral.” Xan’s nephew Travis consulted for Gaucho Energy, TEVX, and the Astrid Group, arranging for Moab to supply the Manhattan Project with its ore biscuits. Travis’s second cousin, Neal Zabriskie, became a dean at BYU, and afterward sat on the Utah Supreme Court where he cast the deciding vote in Utah v. Alaska, moving Utah to the tip of the Western phalanx marching toward tundra mining. The Zabriskies had a book with all of this written down.

Mrs. Zabriskie, whom Levi called Candice or later Mom, was the kind of woman who could not sit still while her family enjoyed the meals she’d made. With all her boys save Levi away on missions or at school, and Levi not disposed to facilitate her doting, she turned her feverish industry toward remodeling their big ranch house. Candy Zabriskie’s energy was so boundless that she often had two teams of contractors in the house at once, one upstairs and one down. She never hovered over the decisions that gave most housewives pause, though she was a slave to trend and her swift assuredness would sometimes conjoin with her need for chic so that by the time she worked one crew from the guest bath to the den to the sunroom to the gym to the library, the guest bath was no longer to her taste. She fawned over Levi when he let her, but her attention made an ornament of her adopted son, so more often Levi fled outdoors, folding himself into the rhythms and mechanisms of Zabriskie Farms.

Levi found salve in the operations of his adopted family’s ranch, its chores and puzzles and solitudes. He slaked himself with the enterprise, taking on essential projects like revamping the entire irrigation system, and also those unglamorous duties reserved for the migrants, shit-shoveling and posthole-digging. None of the Zabriskies’ other boys had displayed much interest in manual labor, and Mrs. Zabriskie feared their ward would think they’d adopted Levi to work him to death. Thus began her campaign to get him to join the youth group’s Wednesday night volleyball league. Levi became a devilish outside hitter, and by the fall of his senior year he was offered volleyball scholarships to Ohio State and USC. USC was, by then, the last university with athletics in California and, having absorbed those ropey beach boys who ten years prior might have donned the jerseys of now-shuttered UC Irvine, Pepperdine, Stanford, and Long Beach State, the Trojans were national champions nine times over and chomping for a tenth. But Levi was afraid to go too far from home, and his adopted mother even more afraid he would, and thus his early decision for Southern Utah University and the euthanasia of his Olympic aspirations.

Owing to a brief leave of absence for his mission in Toronto — its Soviet deprivations, often noted by his companions, were lost on Levi — he was among the final class at SUU. Levi wearied of that institution’s nostalgic handwringing, so much so that he disappointed his adoptive parents by not attending commencement. He disappointed too his housemates — two of them future fillers of government questionnaires — who had, in the spirit of celebration, driven across the Nevada border to fetch real beer. Disappointment or no, Levi would not submit to a group photo to be juxtaposed with SUU’s first class, thirteen blond boys in white hoods standing rigid in front of the Ward House on loan from the Church, a photo marked Cedar City, Iron County, Utah Territory. This was his first act of blatant rebellion, though the milestone would not make it into any questionnaires.

Instead of attending his graduation, Levi returned to the ranch, becoming the operations manager under the man who was by then his father. While farms across Utah collapsed, Zabriskie Farms hung aloft, thrived even, thanks to Levi’s impossibly innovative irrigation system, which brought him some notoriety in the field, though no one else truly understood it. He made a name for himself in Fish and Game, then Conservation, and at thirty-one, was recruited by the National Laboratory for the project they said would save the Southwest.

The project took him to Albuquerque, where he grew lonely and morose. Unused to scholarly solitude — a dreary, deadening brand of aloneness compared to the bracing and alive quiet of nature — Levi occupied himself with the team’s lead physicist, his first older woman (twelve years) and his first gentile. She was distant and literal and secretly doubted Levi’s inclusion on the project team. They did not live together — they each had their own pods on the National Lab campus — so pulling away from her ought to have been easy. But Levi doubted his own inclusion on the project team too, and each evening, as he thought of returning to his pod, to the bound technical manuals stacked on his only shelf, the generator shuddering in the corner, he veered toward hers instead. By day they sat side by side at lectures and roundtable discussions, where Levi was routinely presented with the choice between attending to her erotic disdain of him and the agony of paying attention to the sessions themselves — sessions that seemed to bore even those who had organized them, even those who were, at that very moment, participating. Again and again, he chose to occupy his mind with the proximity of his shoe to hers, the press of his thigh on hers, the brush of the back of his hand against her bare knee. In this way Levi was quite successful in diverting his attention from the topic at hand, be it evaluating the fricative qualities of two tunneling prototypes, modeling fault slippage, or the projected patterns of ash dispersal. Soon, he was almost entirely oblivious to the theory underlying the initiative’s endeavors: new faults would tap new aquifer.

Another diversion was offered by his mountain bike, which he’d brought to New Mexico, and which — when he could resist his grim, transfixing lover — he rode not in the mountains, but into the city, by then almost completely abandoned. Aside from Toronto, he’d not spent any time in a city since the year he spent on the streets of Salt Lake, panhandling at the Gateway mall, sleeping in dry drainage culverts where the coldest day of winter took two of his toes. In Albuquerque he rode through Old Town, the rounded brown backs of adobes huddled into squares, in their center always a bronze Catholic with excellent posture, always looking West, many of the placards blacked out with Sharpie where they’d once read SAVAGES or PRIMITIVES or GREAT CIVILIZER.

He rode until dark, and then past dark. As Christmas neared he rode along the fences of the wealthy subdivisions, looking for houses with luminarias lining their rooftops, real candles flickering in their bags. When he found one, as he occasionally did, he stopped pedaling and stood straddling his bike beside the tall iron fence protecting the rich, smelling their fire.

That winter wanted to snow but was unable, lacked the moisture, and gusted its frustrations. Levi often rode into the train trenches for shelter, and to admire the graffiti and, with luck, to see some movement, for a few trains did come through still. One day he descended into the trench and discovered a train stopped, which he had never before encountered. He walked his mountain bike along the narrow canal between the train and the trench wall, grazing his hand along the grated cars. Something asked him to stop and peer into one grated container. He put his face to what he realized too late was an airhole.

The container shuddered and a shape came at him: graceful, lethal, very much alive. It roared, charging the grate. Levi staggered back, pushing himself against his bicycle and the concrete wall of the trench. His eyes groped the darkness beyond the grating, where materialized the massive medicine-ball head of a tiger. It roared again from its container, a cavernous bellow more felt than heard.

Despite the animal’s closeness, Levi found himself queerly unafraid. The tiger went on roaring, his bellow traveling up and down the train trench. The naturalist within Levi noted the tiger’s long canines like stalactites streaked with rust, the very small, very worn teeth between them. He noted the beast’s gums, pink, splotched with continents of black. He looked deep into the creature’s mouth, its white-haired tongue, the brown pits where its molars once were. He looked, finally, into its yellow eyes, fearful gems. A warm stink hovered in the trench, drawing Levi’s gaze up and down the train to its many like containers. Levi heard something like a loon cry, then from another grated car a slow scraping of a creature massive and, somehow he knew, elderly. The train’s brakes hissed their release and the cars lurched forward, impounding the citizens of the Albuquerque Zoo east on the Santa Fe Railroad, the old line that brought all the trouble west.

As the train began to move, the tiger stumbled sideways, and as he vanished Levi knew his trembling fatigue. Cars flashed past and Levi somehow knew too the hippo’s thirst, the crocodile’s nausea, the mania of a pair of wombats trying to burrow into steel, the communal madness of a pack of Mexican gray wolves pacing ceaselessly, the aches of a mother giraffe with legs folded beneath her, long neck crimped to the confines of her container.

He recognized the sensation. Their voices were the voices of Zabriskie Farms, of the sheep and of the sandstone above the Dream Mine, and of the deep netting of aquifer he’d found there, which fed the ranch. They were the voices as he’d first heard them in the dry clay streaks along the Salt Lake culvert, which first woke him on the coldest day of the year. They were the voices of the matted lawn of Pioneer Park, which urged him to walk, stagger on feet gone clubs from what he did not yet know was frostbite, to the Temple lawn, which beckoned him inside, to the vestibule where the basin of holy water whispered, faintly and finally, Rest, whose voice he was heeding, nearly eternally, when Brother Zabriskie arrived very early and nervous, for he’d been invited to give, that morning, the Fourth Sunday Address.

In the Albuquerque train trench, Levi felt immense grief at the zoo creatures’ leaving. They called to him the same way the rock and dirt of Utah had, though their voices were not literal, the way some in his ward described the voice of God. The call was a sensation rather, a sudden seeping of their experience into his heart. Had anyone asked, he might have described it as a rapport with Creation, though in his mind he named it simply the call.

In the train trench and beyond, Levi yearned for the call. He ached for it. He’d not felt it in too long, and could no longer do without it. He ignored his lover, the minor flutters she sent up from his loins now insulting in comparison to this higher tug. Alone in his pod he remembered long-forgotten sermons by his grandfather, sermons that had always frightened him, telling of the Snows as a touched people. Stone seers, he called them. The records had been destroyed by the Quorum of Twelve, family lore insisted, but among other lesser miracles a Snow had looked to an egg-shaped agate in a white stovepipe hat and predicted Brigham Young’s impossible ascendancy.

His yearning urged him out again, his fearsome legacy transmuted now into desire. He shirked his duties, stalked the city on his bicycle, wrecked, intolerably aware of the vacancy opened up in him. One day, it took him to a bridge spanning the dry wash where the Rio Grande had been. He listened at its rail, futilely, then left his bike and climbed down to the waterless plain. He sat on a flat rock once submerged and listened. He stroked the hot stone. He dug his hands into the dry loam. He turned over and pressed his torso against the rock, feeling its warmth all through him. He felt, finally, a welling of harmony, a communion with the rock and the silt. He was a vessel, clutched fistfuls of gravel, moved as their covenant told him to move. His feet, touched by divine nature, tingled, and he shuddered against the stone.

The dry wash of the Rio Grande awakened something in him, and from that moment onward his ears were reattuned to the gift delivered him in Salt Lake City the day he nearly froze to death. He could hear the ancient murmurs of the sand in the basin, which ferried outward, to the Sandias and the mesas, the raspy voice of the escarpment, the gentle caress of the gully, the open arms of a canyon, the groans of the boulders along the foothills. He summited Sandia Peak along a trail weaving between the towers of the useless ski lift, in conversation along the way with the mountains themselves, nodding his gratitude to every secret burrow and tomb. He had purpose, then. He had meaning and a reason for being. Did she know what he meant?

Luz did.

—

Levi told her this while they rode in a pedicab chariot, its tugging tricycle rigged with huge tires off an ATV. He told her this while another man pedaled, while she watched the desert and the sweat spot at the man’s neck bleed down to his rump, until he — Cody, her host called him — finally removed the shirt. He told her as they heaved across the desert, making dust of scrub beneath them. He told her as they rode away from the colony, away from the dune sea, and then somehow, without turning, toward it again. All this after she’d said, “I need to see for myself.”

“I understand,” he’d said. “But I’m responsible for these people. It’s too dangerous to go alone.”

The chariot stopped, wedged in the sand, and Luz followed Levi into the dune.

“I have to see him,” Luz had said back in the Blue Bird world, wrapped in her dust-crusted quilt. Now she wished she hadn’t. Levi had gone silent. The knolls before them were bone white and sparkling. Dallas had Ig. Luz wanted to get back to her, suddenly, to make sure she was real. But she went onward, the dune sucking at her steps.

Levi walked slowly, his hands clasped together at his navel, the tips of his index fingers pressed together in a steeple. Luz watched as his hands began to tremble. Suddenly, his index fingers dipped toward the ground, and he halted.

“Here,” he said, but there was nothing.

“I don’t understand.”

He hesitated. “The dune, it’s always moving.”

“I know that.”

“He’s here.” Levi reached into his pocket and withdrew a cobalt scarf, balled up. He handed it to her. Inside, Ray’s ID and his Leatherman.

Luz said, “I don’t…”

“The dune has him.”

It came to her after some time. “You didn’t bury him?”

“He is buried.”

She unraveled the starlet’s scarf. A greasy stain dead-center. “Yes, but.”

“I apologize,” said Levi. “We should have. It’s just. We find a lot of bodies out here.”

There are three ways to learn about a character:

What he says.

What he does.

What other characters say about him.

This from an acting coach, a big woman who wore half a dozen bright resin bracelets on each wrist and whose hair might have been called ringlets except over the years the ringlets had lost most of their coil and now scattered across her back in long, static-plagued scribbles. Three ways and three ways only, and oughtn’t Luz have thought a little more about these?

1. WHAT HE SAYS

Hoosiers aren’t quitters.

California people are quitters. No offense.

You’ve got restlessness in your blood.

Your people came here looking for something better.

Gold, fame, citrus.

They were feckless, yeah? Schemers.

That’s why no one wants them now.

I want you.

Do you want me?

You look like I know you.

You came to bed smelling like him.

You’re all right, tell me.

I think it’s time we headed up into the canyon.

It’s important to have a project, no matter how frivolous.

The Santa Anas are coming, try to keep your hands busy.

Try not to sleep so much.

Keep your eyes peeled.

Looking good, babygirl.

You surf?

Shitfuck. Jesus. You better not look.

Ten million empty swimming pools in this city.

Drink this.

Be careful.

You’re drunk.

You’re paranoid.

You’re crazy.

You’re all right, tell me.

Babygirl, don’t get like this.

You just do your best.

Who leaves their kid with strangers?

Go, now.

We’re stick-it-out people.

Be careful.

Rocks. Rocks. Rocks. Rocks.

Roxicet, oxy, fentanyl lollipops.

Brainstem, brainstump.

Don’t make any sudden movements.

We couldn’t sleep, Luz.

We’re lost.

I love you?

You’ve heard that dissertation.

We could name her Estrella.

Be careful.

I’m going for a walk now.

Be careful.

Just a little walk down the road here.

Be careful.

If you want to make Luz do something you have to make her think it’s her idea.

2. WHAT HE DOES

Dig out the shitting hole. Siphon gasoline. Impale gophers and throw them into the ravine. Keep a notebook in his pocket with lists and secret poems.

— matches

— crackers

— L

— water

Or:

— shitting hole

— garage door

— L

— water

Or:

— candles

— alcohol

— peanuts

— L

— water

Or:

— axe

— gas

— shoes

— L

— water

Or:

— charcoal

— lighter fluid

— marshmallows for L

— water

Or:

— Sterno

— eyedrops

— calamine

— kitty litter

— L

— water

Or, often, only:

— L

— water

How did his poems go? She’d read them a few times, looking for herself, but quit when she was nowhere to be found. So Ray’d gone to figment now, his papyrus shredded. She remembered some words—resignation, pocket, kill switch, kitchen, spine, dispatch. She remembered hard Cs: cost and cunt, costume jewelry, custard, maybe. She remembered ampersands & mothers, or at least dowdy women making demands like press your doubt / under your tongue, or wait & wonder / at the window. She remembered desert words, arroyo & ocotillo, Rancho Cucamonga. But the poems looked east, she thought, or maybe backward. Either way, away from her. Then there was this couplet, chimey and risen in her now like a singular bubble from a tar pit: Let’s bless the first to go / it will be the other’s fault.

3. WHAT OTHERS SAID ABOUT HIM

He’s too good for you, you know.

So. The woodsman was a deserter, as obvious as a grammar lesson: one who deserts, and what a desert he’d made of Luz. She held Ig tight to her, kept the Leatherman and the ID on the window ledge. The scarf billowed in slo-mo. No sudden movements indeed.

Dallas had another theory. “The dune curates,” she said. “It knows who it wants to be here, brings us to it. Pushes others away. He wasn’t right for this place, though I know it hurts you to hear it. Trust me, I know. We’re all where we’re supposed to be, believe me.”

And Luz did! The space where Ray used to be was full of surprises like that. For example, there was the relief: with Ray gone he would never tell Ig her rotten origin story, as Luz had feared and known he one day would. Ray was dead and thus the secret dead inside Luz. Though she could not be said to have honored anything in her life to this point, she would, she knew, honor Ig’s first request: Don’t tell anyone, okay?

Another surprise came those times Dallas told Ig, “Leave Mama be. She’s not well.” Because Luz was well. She was waiting for the crack-up that never came. Though she did weep, of course, and her sobs puzzled Ig, drawing the baby to Luz where she’d crumpled, asking, “What is?”

“Sadness,” said Luz through a webbing of snot. “Grief.”

“Geef?” tried Ig, a new word for her. Other new ones, too: Ouchie. Daddy. Peas and Tank you. Uh-oh and Why.

Ig knew “more,” but Dallas taught her the sign for it anyway, taught her to kiss all ten fingertips together, and soon the sign ousted the word. Dallas taught her “milk,” a nautilus fist squelching a phantom teat, a sign Dallas always saw. But Ig’s pantomimed refrain was more, more, more. More, Ig said without saying, pinching her fingertips into each other. More, sighing as though it gave her some release just to say, with her hands, Mama, I’ve got so much want in me.

Mama—Dallas’s word in Ig’s mouth, though all three of them needed it. Dallas talked through Ig, offered counsel this way. She taught Luz how to tell when Ig needed to poop or pee, watch for her squirmy tells. Dallas trained Luz to train Ig to squat in the dirt and work it out. They made a game of burying their waste, of watching their water guzzled by the dry ground. We don’t need diapers, do we, Ig? We were never meant to shit our pants, right, Ig?

Through Ig, runty conduit, Dallas taught Luz the siesta schedule with which they slept away the brutal hours. Soon Ig and Luz had gone circadian, up before dawn into early morning, then rising again for sunset and the first, sane half of night. A bronzy girl Luz’s age came with outfits: muumuu for Luz, shroud and sling for Ig, all the same gauzy white Dallas wore.

Dallas taught them how the colony existed as a perpetual motion machine, how on their rippling day those whose encampments lay closest to the encroaching mountain pulled their stakes and resettled at the farthest edge of the camp, so the shantytown rippled just ahead of the dune’s march, like the endless children’s game of stacking hands wherein the bottommost hand is removed and laid atop the topmost hand, and then the bottommost hand is removed and laid atop the topmost hand, and then the bottommost hand is laid atop the topmost hand, and then the bottommost hand is laid atop the topmost hand…

When it came their day to ripple, other colonists appeared. They greeted Luz, grinned at Ig. Luz surveyed them as they worked and wondered whom she was seeing. Women mostly, all in white, white robes, white muumuus like Luz’s, billowy white skirts like Dallas’s. The men seemed young — boys, really — though one was very old, with a mangled face and an earned industry about him.

Luz assumed they were to push the Blue Bird. But Dallas said, “Solar,” and the bus rumbled to the outskirts. In this way, Luz discovered order in the colony, alleyways radiating from the dune like the spokes of a wheel, sunbeams between metal and PVC and tarp, which explained why when they moved the Blue Bird it had to be parked just so.

Dallas taught Luz which questions to ask:

Couldn’t the self exist in a single word? Meaning, water. Meaning, war. And what if that word was not allowed?

Could a person promise another his dreams? If he nightmared instead, who was at fault?

What ego must have throbbed within her to believe that she could pin Ray down?

Yes, the gall. But whose?

All that time he let her think she was the flimsy one.

At night, the dunes sang.

When its roll had accumulated enough flammable debris to host a bonfire, the colony came alive after sunset. One such night, Ig was stir-crazy and Luz coaxed her into her sling, then helped Dallas roll their empty keg toward the smell of something clean burning. They entered the circle of the bonfire and the pulse of hoots and chatter slowed. There was, for just an instant, stillness. For her, Luz realized, for the squirming baby and its young mother.

The commotion picked up again, mild and soothing — no raindance racket. Someone strummed a guitar, someone urged reedy notes from an elementary school recorder. Dallas excused herself to tend to the keg, leaving Luz to jounce Ig and watch.

Soon Ig was asleep in Luz’s arms. She had not spoken to anyone, and this seemed as it should be. Firelight ghosted brilliance on the colonists where they swayed, talking. They touched each other a lot, with an easy intimacy Luz envied. Tending the fire with affection, wrangling empty kegs, braiding each other’s dirty hair. Mojavs, undoubtedly, and Luz attempted to attach to each a Mojav story. But the word conjured hunched people scrabbling in the dirt, where these people were grimy but buoyant. Happy. They laughed. Hard to imagine them digging for brine or spraying the dune sea with tar. Hard to imagine them mourning anything.

Then, Luz saw him across the flames: Levi, his square head bare, his light hair shorn, his nearly translucent beard ablaze in the firelight. She had not seen him since he’d given her what was left of Ray. She considered going to him but felt very content where she was, watching.

He was a large man. She had somehow not noticed this in the dune or before. His skin glowed coppery behind his pale tangle of beard, as though the sun had evacuated all the pigment from his facial hair and relocated it to his face. Firelight gathered at his cheeks and his small teeth winked as he chewed something. He held a ration cola, though he was not drinking from it but gleeking into it discreetly as he received the other colonists.

Levi was their north. Their compass needles quivered in his direction. His stance was wide, as though he were readying himself to shoulder a great burden, a burden he would lug willingly and with grace, his little teeth winking all the while. Even Dallas, sturdy as a mountain, appeared at Levi’s side and leaned into him. As they embraced, another gust bolstered the fire, melting their two forms together.

Luz watched the fire, which was somehow blue at its core, flames licking green and black. Later she would ask Cody what they were burning, what made the strange color, and he would show her boxes and boxes of evac pamphlets. LEAVE OR DIE, the pamphlets said in bright bubble letters.

She rubbed Ig’s back, round as a beetle’s against her. What it might have been to carry her.

Levi noticed Luz then. His gaze would have been intense if it did not so soothe her. She did not look away. Natural, an instinct, and when was the last time she’d honored the tug of instinct? As if to answer, Ig shifted, then settled. A sense of calm was rising in Luz, and some heat descending, too. What was attraction if not a form of telepathy? The wild luck of two people feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. That word again: purpose.

Ig woke. Luz turned so the little one could see the fire. Ig watched the flames and Luz did too, the two transfixed as moths until Dallas came around, rolling the blue plastic keg, now full.

—

In the end, the damsel had no talent for acting, regardless of how often her coach waved her cottage-cheese arms above her head, setting her bracelets aclack and proclaiming, Dear, you’re positively made for the pictures!

But maybe it was only that she’d never found the right part. After the bonfire outing, Luz and Ig took to walking the spokes of the colony at dawn, before nap time, before the sun of suns took over, shrouded in the white that turned out to be cut from parachutes that had delivered pallets of evac pamphlets.

And as they walked, people watched, and Luz caught something novel in their gaze. It was a wondrous change from those she had, without knowing it, become accustomed to. At work: the exasperated looks of photographers mumbling from behind their massive cameras, the defeated gazes of editorial directors, for there was another girl — a Colombian — who looked just like Luz (spindle limbs, scapula like malformed wings, a fat and drooping bottom lip, even a gap between her teeth) except this girl’s ass was smaller and sat higher and her legs dangled from it like a puppet’s. The other girl was more expensive and had to be reserved very far in advance, so if Luz booked a shoot it was often because they were compromising, because the campaign had been scaled back or the editorial sliced in half and so they would have to settle for the poor man’s Colombian. “One good thing about Luz,” said her agent, “you never have to tell her not to smile.”

On the street, at parties and restaurants: those looks of preoccupied recognition, the brain nag that they had seen her somewhere, but where? (“You look like I know you,” the woodsman had said.) Not altogether terrible, except for the guesses, other lives that might have been, always painfully better than her own — the indie that swept the festivals, the cellist from the new band, this It girl or that. But she was professional wallpaper, her job to replicate a human being without the mess of one, and so they would scowl at her, a problem never to be solved. The woodsman had sometimes looked at her as though she were a tick clinging to a stalk of grass.

(He had another look, too, but she would not quite allow herself to remember it. Something that made his smile go lopsided, a cord bulge in his jaw, a look that meant all the ways and reasons he loved her were at that instant rising in him.)

But at the dune she was regarded in a way she had never been regarded. The girls thought her and Ig cute, and said so, but also seemed a little repelled. The men were harder to decipher. Since girlhood, the gazes of men and boys had been a kind of consumption, gulping her in not because she was beautiful — because with her bad skin and bad teeth she was not beautiful, not without the tricks, “certainly not street pretty,” her agent often barked into her earpiece — but because she was thin and her bones showed in places like a partridge on a plate. But at the dune, instead a glance to her face, then her feet, then to Ig slung around her. Pity? There was some. The story got around, she knew: a wife lost her husband, a widow with a baby. But something beneath the pity. A smile that, she realized in time, meant the child was triggering the saddest memories of their happiest moments. That old man called Jimmer, the heart side of his face purpled wurst, whose left hand moved without him, mumbled either “Mine’s grown” or “Mine’s gone.”

Usually, the men said nothing, giving her a wide psychic berth for reasons she did not understand and would not understand for some time.

No matter. Here, the damsel delivered her greatest role. She played long-suffering, she played pure. A mother.

Only — and her coach had said this would happen, the miraculous transmutation into character, a notion that Luz had always found a little frightening — she wasn’t playing. Another surprise. Here, she was a good woman.

Like a mother, Luz worried.

DALLAS

There’s nothing wrong with the child, nothing wrong on this Earth and surely not here. I believe that. Take her to Jimmer in the teepee if you don’t believe me. He’s our healer.

JIMMER

Was the little one baptized, and if so did she drink of the baptismal water? Did she cry when she was born? She’s not anything-handed — which arm did you first put through the sleeve when you put on her baptismal dress? Don’t worry, doll, no one ever remembers. Did she have much hair when she was born? Children born with too much hair cannot think straight, for the hair tugs on their brain and drains it. On the other hand, children born without any hair are dim, because the hair is still inside the head and it clogs the brain. Did you tickle her much? You mustn’t tickle a child before she speaks, it can cause a stammer or even muteness. Freckles come from drops of rain drying in the sun, though I assume that’s not the case here. Did you and the father speak much the day she was born? What day of the week was that? A Saturday baby will be stupid, but only for a bit, because Saturdays are lazy days. If we scrape the dirt from her nails and put it in her water she may be cured of that petting, but I advise against it. For the insomnia you need to get your jing flowing again. Yes, there’s a blockage above your kidneys. That Holiday Rambler there, with the brassiere flag. The girls live there. At the very least they’re up all night. Sew a salt crystal into your hem, for the heartache.

THE GIRLS

We come from all over. We’re here because we want to be, our contribution. We don’t use money, not in a five-senses form. We’ve never been this good at anything, never particularly good at sex, even. Speak for yourself! The Rambler is not a brothel. Think of it as a bathhouse. Think of it as a sanctuary. Think of it however you like, or not at all. We relax you, we do what comes to us and what comes to you. A haven from inhibitions and negativity. You don’t know how negative thoughts weigh you until you float free of them, then there’s no putting them on again. The Rambler is a medical tent. We knead the worry out of you! There’s no shame here. We embrace after each orgasm. Orgasm is God in the body. Before we got here, we were sensual atheists. Orgasm is a leap of faith. They call it a leap because you have to leave your body. We’re not shackling anyone with our expectations. But we are willing to receive seed when it seeks us. We have to be. There are no divisions here, no lines between the erotic, the sublime and the divine. No space for the worldly. There are clusters of nerves all over the body and each of these can be stimulated to heaven. We can coax an orgasm from the earlobe, the Achilles’ tendon, the tip of your nose. We can come by watching others come. Just sitting is fine. Sit as long as you like. It’s nice to have some company. Relax. Give us your burdens.

JIMMER

For arthritis wear the eyetooth of a pig. Chew newspaper to stop a nosebleed. A salt mackerel tied to the feet cures bunions. Cut off a head cold by tying a long stocking around your neck. Rub warts with pebbles, rub warts with chicken blood, rub warts with a slice of raw potato and stow it in the eaves, rub warts with thistle leaves and throw them into a grave, scratch a wart with a nail from a coffin until it bleeds. In the Army I carried the Ninety-First Psalm in my pocket and the bullets never touched me. Do not wear a man’s hat unless you intend to keep him. Did you whistle when you carried her? Pardon my French, but this will retard surefire. In what direction did you sleep while expecting? Feet to the north could tie the child’s tongue. Have you taken the short end of a wishbone lately? Bad things come in threes, miracles in pairs. Never point at lightning. If you kiss a man with the raw heart of a turtledove in your mouth he will fall in love with you and never out. The first to go to sleep after consummation will be the first to die. If a body of a drowned person cannot be found, toss a loaf of bread in after it. The loaf will hover above it. Some of this is not so useful these days.

THE GIRLS

It’s arsenic poisoning, Jimmer’s face. Have you never seen a case? You’d think he’d be more grateful, ugly as he is. Though that twitchy hand can do some tricks between your legs. Can it? Ig is not what you would call cute, is she? Cute is the worst way to be. Cute is an act of erasure. Cute is gynophobia writ large. We all have a snake or two in our hair. Even you. Especially you.

DALLAS

The girls were lost before they came here. Wanderers, like all of us. They have a very specific definition of ministry, let’s say. But who am I to tell another woman what counts as divination? For that matter, who are you?

JIMMER

Dallas has an ardent soul. Very awake. One of the few who truly grasp the mystery of the dune sea.

DALLAS

At the dune sea two cartographers can walk the same trail and draw different maps.

JIMMER

Two artists can sit side by side, sketching the same peaks, sharing the same tin of charcoal, and their drawings will emerge as though they were sketching two different ranges on two different continents.

DALLAS

That sound you hear at night, the singing, it’s a vibration. You’re hearing the dune move through you.

THE GIRLS

The food comes from the greenhouses. You’ve seen the Volkswagens? Rolled over a VW mechanic and gutted them for grow pods. Tomatoes, kale, strawberries. You’ve met Cody? Our grower savant?

CODY

Here you’ve got your snow peas, your watermelon, over there your cantaloupe, your leafy greens. Everything organic, everything heirloom. No tubers, no winter squash, no rice or wheat or trees, of course. Before this I was an urchin, you could say. I’d never belonged to anything. When the Amargosa rolled over my school it was the first time I was capable of considering the existence of a benevolent God. The Wide Rock School for Errant Boys. Basically a labor camp. One of those places where they use wilderness as a cage and see no irony in it. Blueberries? Sure. I think I can manage blueberries.

JIMMER

The dune sea does not exist, insomuch as we define existence. How is that little one? Put a nub of brute root under her pillow.

CODY

The root is Levi’s creation, I can’t take credit for it. Basically he spliced cannabis with cocoa. There’s some peyote in there too, or a cousin of it. No paranoia though, no freakery. A truly flawless hybrid. Inspired. Genius. Chew the root to clear your mind. Levi takes them on vision quests.

THE GIRLS

They go at night, while we sleep. Levi needs peace to dowse. He and Nico take the empty kegs and fill them at the ephemeral rivers. They distribute the full kegs at bonfire. He dowses with his hands, rather than a rod. The phallus would defile the process. Men have wagged their rods at the Earth plenty.

JIMMER

The kids call them vision quests. I call it listening. He uses his hands because he can’t find branches. When was the last time you saw a tree?

DALLAS

For Levi, using a tree branch to find a river would be like using a severed arm to find a shallow grave.

JIMMER

A gifted dowser can divine with anything for anything, so long as his desire is honest. He can dowse for oil or ore. He can tell whether something is safe to eat or drink. He can find lost objects or missing people. He can solve crimes. He can find anything buried: unmarked graves, mineral deposits, long-healed injuries, subconscious fantasies. He can feel sickness, he can feel lies. Intuition enters the mind in a way Western science has yet to explain. Moses was a dowser, probably Jesus too. Though they did not have the benefit of dune buggies.

CODY

Oh, no. We’d be fucked if we were still on gas. Nico rigged the buggies with solar and wind. Like sailing on land. He’s a genius with machinery. Don’t I know you from somewhere?

THE GIRLS

Nico was Tesla in another life. He was Tesla and he was Vlad the Impaler. You’ve got one of those déjà vu faces.

DALLAS

Nico is a savage. That’s his Chieftain there. Leave him be.

JIMMER

If you open your eyes to the sun at dawn and dusk, when its energy is purest, you will absorb all the day’s nutrients via the ocular ducts. It’s a mainline to the brain, nutrients converted directly to brainpower. Einstein did this. Bach, too. Picasso’s Paris studio faced east and he would stare out the window for an hour each morning to invigorate himself. He painted Guernica in three weeks.

So Luz began her sungazing, began pacing up and down the Blue Bird with Ig and letting the child pull a dusty blanket aside and ask, “What is?”

“Sunrise,” Luz said, staring. She wanted a better brain, wanted to make beguiling, impressive things, or at least to need less. She drank up the morning rays until her eyes stung, keeping Ig in shadow. So far she had not felt much resembling rejuvenation or genius. The only tangible effects of her sungazing shone when she closed her eyes and the sun remained there, both darkness and light. Then one day, pointed somethings beneath it too.

She opened her eyes and looked not at the sun, rising, but at the structures on the horizon below. A mirage, surely, but a queer one: dollhouse silhouettes, gingerbread houses all in a tidy row. She squinted harder against the sun, thinking she was maybe cracked up after all. NORTH POLE OUTLETS, a sign reassured her.

“Dal,” she said. “I think I found something.”

—

The colony swarmed, darted across the asphalt lanes, between the planters and decorative lampposts, beneath eaves dolloped with plaster snow, to shops with brown paper taped over their windows, chains across their glass doors. Luz went too, with a wet shroud over Ig to keep the heat away. Luz had spent a lot of time in malls, as a preteen and after. It was where the suave young handlers from the agency always took them when they traveled, if they had any downtime. She strolled the outlets as she might have were it not abandoned, Ig swaying in her sling.

Meanwhile, the others lifted forest-green trash cans and chucked them through the store windows, sending glass down like rain, making Ig clap. Through one such waterfall came Nico with left-behind batteries, phones, cameras, laptops, wires and plugs — contraptions Luz had not seen for a long time and had not missed. In another shop Dallas filled a duffel with puffy plastic packages of linens. From another shattered window Cody emerged cackling, with shoes on his hands.

“What size are you?” he called to Luz.

She could not remember, had to check the bottom of the starlet’s sandals.

Cody came back with boxes stacked big to little, a cardboard wedding cake. He gave Luz a pair of sensible mom tennies with yellowed gum soles, pink Velcro light-ups in every baby size for Ig. Though it was too bright out to see whether the light-up cells were dead, Ig liked Cody, perhaps saw that he needed her enthusiasm, and faked some.

Newly shod, Luz and Ig went exploring. The baby walked and walked. In one courtyard cul-de-sac they found Santa’s Village, maze of plastic presents, one nutcracker sentinel toppled. Ig was uninterested. They went on.

“What is?”

Luz followed Ig’s gaze to a carousel, its bulbs surely dead but its mirrors and gold trimmings gleaming. Luz lifted Ig over the wrought-iron fence and climbed after. They walked among a pearly menagerie: no horses but pairs of unicorns and zebras, two-humped camels, dignified giraffes. Luz said all their names, though Ig could not or would not repeat any:

“White tigers, Ig!”

“Look, jackrabbits!”

“Cheetahs!”

“Ostriches!” long-legged and confident.

“Eagles!” with wings splayed.

“Dragons!” tongues and tails forked.

“Dolphins!” sleek, lunging muscular through the air.

“Mermaids!” with iridescent tails.

All ahover on candy cane poles, waiting. A wide swan bench for lovers.

Ig stroked and inspected, and gradually the others joined them to marvel at the carousel. When Levi came he told everyone to hop on. Luz perched Ig in the saddle of a fat panda, cinched the dirt-crusted straps around the child’s tiny torso, and climbed on behind her. When everyone was on, Levi, Nico and a boy named Lyle from Cody’s school pushed. Jimmer helped with his good hand. It seemed impossible the wheel would ever turn, but it soon yielded, its insides groaning, the opalescent animals lurching up on their poles then gliding down, coaxing synchronized squeals from their passengers. Above those squeals came music, a warbled underwater tune from somewhere deep within the contraption. As they whirled, a breeze came to the riders, cool and awakening, bringing them lost sensations and forgotten memories.

A girl named Fern remembered her brothers’ launching her from a trampoline.

A girl named Cass remembered clinging to an indifferent beau on the back of his dirt bike.

Luz remembered luging down Canyon Drive on Ray’s longboard, his impossible laugh in her ear.

Cody remembered flinging himself down a ridge beyond Wide Rock, the once he tried to escape.

Dallas remembered floating on her back in the last warm dregs of the Yuba River.

Jimmer remembered his boy.

They laughed anyway.

In the gilt-framed mirror overhead, Luz watched Ig: startled but brave, then cautiously merry, clenching her mama and Mama clenching back. Luz wanted to feel this way forever.

Up ahead, Jimmer swung himself around the pole he’d been pushing and hopped on. Cody and Lyle soon did the same. Levi pushed and pushed, sweating, laughing, hollering for everyone to hold on. He finally jumped on too, shouting whee, and Ig said whee too. Luz wondered if he’d heard her, wanted to catch his eye and mouth thank you, but soon the carousel was succumbing to its old inertia, the tune above stretched slow and sorrowful.

After, Cody kept congratulating Luz.

“For what?” she said finally.

“You found this,” he said.

“The carousel?”

“The whole damn place!” said Cody, admiring his new loafers.

“Amazing eyes,” said Dallas, still aglow from the ride.

“Beautiful work, Luz,” confirmed Levi, watching Nico inventory his devices.

“You would have found it without me,” she said. “Anyone would have.”

“Not true,” said Dallas. “Things aren’t so reliable out here. The dune could take this place by sundown.”

“And we were out scouting last night,” said Levi. “Didn’t see it, didn’t hear it. This is a gift for the very attuned. Unequivocally so.”

In this way word of Luz’s offering spread through the giddy colony assembled in the shade of the carousel, assessing their haul. Many posited that Luz possessed such qualities as knack and grit and presence of mind. Luz watched Ig do bobbleheaded, bow-legged laps around the carousel in her light-ups and considered the possibility that she did. It was the first time she had ever been a good omen.

The colony reconvened that evening, when someone swung a girthy branch of mesquite into a bomb casing pilfered from Travis Air Force Base, sending a gong throughout the settlement, a solemn series of oms that summoned all to bonfire.

Cody was scurrying about, feeding mall debris into the fire. He passed near them and squeezed Ig’s knee.

“Watch,” said Luz, and set Ig on the ground. Free, Ig tottered, her light-ups’ pink carnival beacons flashing underfoot.

“Wild!” said Cody. “You’re tricked out, Ig.”

Ig seemed not to notice, concentrated instead on running.

Luz spent some time hunched, chasing after Ig and redirecting her away from the fire. Ig had by now become a kind of mascot at the colony, and people Luz had never spoken to tutted Ig, Ig, Ig as the baby chugged by, lighting their faces with red siren lights. Jimmer smiled at the child from where he sat on a bench seat from a gutted van, whittling a stick. “Psychedelic,” was his assessment.

Ig wanted up, so Luz lifted her. Ig wanted down, so Luz put her down. Ig pulsed her two curled fists skyward, asking for milk, so Luz found Dallas.

“Relax,” said Dallas, encouraging Ig to latch. “We’re not going anywhere.”

A pretty girl made room for Luz on a log near the fire, where smoke whipped into her face. Smoke follows beauty, said Billy Dunn, wherever he was. She blinked the ash from her eyes and saw Levi, or a mirage of him, watching her. Thick arms, sturdy trunk, still. Planted, or rooted. But those metaphors were expired here and the word that came instead was embedded. Suddenly, Luz arrived at a simple and perplexing fact: in the few siesta hours since the carousel, she had missed him.

A gust swelled the fire and brought Luz Mojav stories. They seemed ridiculous to her now. That the well-shaped girl beside her was a park ranger’s bride-in-Christ. That Nico, sitting cross-legged on a papasan in the bed of a truck, fiddling with some electronic he’d rigged to life, had a desk at an institute somewhere, unreturned term papers in a drawer, two yellowed strips of glue on the wall where someone had pried his nameplate free. That Jimmer was one of the Needles Twelve, his lost boy the forgotten child of the Mojave. That she might smell the oil on him still. That she might find black smirks still under his fingernails. That Levi had refused to board the National Guard lorry with his wife and twin daughters.

Beside Luz, the pretty girl spoke. “I want to admit that I’ve been doubting,” she said, and the others went quiet. “In the past. And recently, even. I’ve been unsure of why we’re here.” Her voice wobbled. “I’m ashamed to say it but it’s true.”

Someone said, “It’s okay, Cass.”

Cass said, “In a way it was easier when I first felt pulled. There was clarity there. It was stark, undeniable. Plus I had nowhere else to go.”

Many laughed.

“But being here is different, not so clear. I get a now-what feeling sometimes. I don’t know, maybe it’s easier to be lost than found. At least there’s energy in lostness. Something to be done. I know we’re supposed to trust the place, to embrace its mystery, to keep our eyes open, and I try to do that. I do. I try to be a vessel. It’s hard though, hard not to wonder what we’re supposed to be looking for. But today I knew. Today I was a vessel filled. It’s true — if we’re open and honest we will be consoled. I was.”

Nods all around.

“I want to offer my gratitude for that, and to tell anyone who’s feeling that now-what feeling to hang in there. To stay open, honest, willing. Like Levi says, we can’t force wonders. Can’t insist on signs. But they do come.” Here, she looked at Luz. “And when they do you can’t miss it.”

How lovely Cass looked, pliant and bare. Luz envied her. The Amargosa curates, Dallas had said. Spiritual was Lonnie’s word — the memory brought Luz old shame from new sources: how she’d scoffed at the very idea, the well-trod path her mind inevitably strolled, a straight line downhill to cynicism and disdain. She wished Ray were here, to buoy her with his capacity for belief. The world had been wider with him in it. She looked again to Levi, who could hear the earth. He seemed to want something from her.

“I’ve never really been a part of anything,” Luz said, without knowing why except it felt right. “Or, anything I could believe in. I guess what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that idea, belief.” Some nodded. “I haven’t ever had a believer’s disposition. But lately I’ve been getting comfortable with the idea of something bigger than myself — I don’t want to say ‘God.’ When I was growing up people around me used that word in all the wrong ways. It was a weapon, that word. ‘God’s love’ was this scrap everyone was fighting for, something you could win by dressing with modesty and having a clean face, by sitting quietly. But why should those people and their fucked-up nonsense have anything to do with my experience, is what I’ve been thinking lately. Can’t I decide who I am? I’ve never been a very good listener, but today I felt I could be.”

Many nods.

“I know what you mean,” Luz said to Cass. “About it being harder to be found. It’s like there’s been this momentum carrying me forward, this energy, and I wasn’t sure where it was taking me. Scary, that feeling.” Several moaned their assent, urging Luz on. “But freeing, too. In a way. And now… I don’t know. A lot of it hasn’t made any sense. Or maybe it makes too much sense? I don’t have a lot of experience with clarity or… significance, I guess you’d say. I’ve never been good at it…” Her voice went wet with emotion and Cass patted her shoulder.

She went on. “You can’t see that from the outside, how frightening it can be to believe. Believers always seem so serene. I’ve never felt serene a day in my life.” Some laughs. “But I think maybe it’s been taking me here, that energy. I don’t know if that makes sense. Does anyone else feel this way? Maybe it’s just me…”

“No,” said Levi. “We all feel all of that every day. You are supposed to be here, Luz.” He went on. His words had a way of making the complicated comforting, making the listeners’ abundant fears instead evidence of sensitivity and keenness. He somehow unearthed confidence and serenity from deep wells of fatigue, revealed the sublime subtext in the long list of civilization’s failures. He brought, as he spoke, a verdant world to them — transformed the colony from a place of isolation and hardship to a place of beauty and abundant blessings. He invited the yuccas to lift their tired heads, regrew the wild grasses, reran the rivers, cleansed them of their saline and fertilizer and choking algae, replenished aquifers and refilled swimming pools, plucked the woodworms and emerald ash borers from the trees, rid the forests of their malignant fungi, swelled the snowpack, resurrected the glaciers, refroze the tundra, returned the seas to their perfect levels. It seemed possible, as he spoke, that his words might summon thunderheads, that his voice might bring rain.

—

Levi was human again beneath the sun of suns, his head draped in cloth, though Luz saw that his eyes had the same electricity as she offered her hand to help him up through the open back door of the Blue Bird.

Inside, he nodded to Dallas. “Give us a minute, would you?”

Dallas plucked her nipple from Ig’s mouth and went without a word.

“I brought you these,” he said to Luz, and offered a plastic shopping tote gone matte with dust. Inside the bag, Sacajawea, John Muir, Lewis and Clark, Mulholland and John Wesley Powell.

Luz accepted the bag. “You had these?”

“I saved them. Only things of value, so far as I could tell. Car was completely useless. Stylish, but suicidal.”

Luz lowered her head. Strange to see her books here, as though people from her past were visiting her, assessing her new life. She did not want to open them; to open them would be to open herself to their scrutiny. She put them down on her cushion nest.

“This too.” Levi offered her the hatbox filled with money.

“I don’t want that,” she said.

He set it in the corner. “Dallas is taking good care of you?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re comfortable here.”

“Yes.” They were saying these things but meaning others, it seemed.

He said, “I wanted to thank you for sharing last night. And for finding the outlet mall, of course.”

Luz said, “Thank you. For the carousel.”

“I wasn’t sure if you—”

Ig interrupted. “What is?”

“Levi,” said Luz, lifting Ig and pointing.

“Eev-ai.”

“Lee-vi,” Luz corrected. But Ig was through with the elocution lesson and instead thrust herself into Levi’s arms. He caught her. He had held a baby before, apparently. “Ig, Ig, Ig,” she chugged, milling her pelvis on his forearm. They laughed. Ig moaned then as though hurt by their laughter — perhaps she was — and rubbed her bloated head against Levi’s chest. It was a new gesture for her.

“She’s never done that before,” said Luz. “That’s the first time. It’s wild how quickly she changes. The minute I know what to do with her she morphs.”

“A changeling.”

“It’s maddening. Sometimes I think it’s making me crazy.” Ig continued waxing Levi’s pectoral with her forehead. “She’s a feeler,” Luz added.

Levi rubbed her back. “I can relate.”

They watched her a little more — she gifted Levi one of her sinking stones and then cried for its return. “How old is she?” asked Levi.

“Two.”

“Small for two.”

“Almost two.”

They looked at the books where they lay on her bed, beneath the window, so Sacajawea and Little Pomp stared up at Ray’s Leatherman. Beneath them John Muir, who had comforted her the day Ray impaled the prairie dog, on the last day of what had passed for normal then. These artifacts from the mansion seemed to confirm Luz’s bonfire inkling: inevitable that a little creature would dart into the starlet’s foyer as Luz was playing dress-up. Impossible that Ray might do anything other than skewer it with the fireplace poker. They had to get to Ig, to the colony, through whatever maze of carnage and threat necessary, through gopher and raindance and daddy-o. Through the Nut; somehow she had not thought of him in a long time.

Luz took Ig from Levi and set her down. “Can I ask you something?”

Levi nodded. “Of course.”

Ig wanted up again, but Luz ignored her. “You said you find a lot of bodies out there.”

“Yes.”

Ig pinched her ten fingertips together, meaning more. But Luz went on. “How often do you find people alive?”

Without hesitation he said, “You’re the first. You two.”

“How? How did you find us?”

“You may not believe me if I tell you.”

“Try. Please.”

More, signed Ig.

Levi hesitated.

“How did you find us? Did you hear something? That… voice?”

His head tweaked up.

“You did.” More.

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

Levi said, “There was a bighorn. They’re supposedly extinct. I tracked it.”

“I saw. In the sulfur lake. It was dead.”

“Yes. I followed its death rattle, you might say.”

Luz lifted Ig finally and stroked her great head. “Last night you said you think we’re supposed to be here. Ig and me.”

Levi looked to her as though he’d just been resuscitated. “I do. You are.”

“Why?”

“I heard that voice. It wasn’t just the bighorn dying. An alarm of sorts. It said we needed you.”

“Me?”

“It was a sense that someone important was fading from this place.”

“Important how?”

He reached down for Sacajawea and moved her aside. He lifted John Muir and opened him. Luz wanted to reach out and stop him, to protect the Blue Bird from the starlet’s library, to keep this chimeric colony as far as possible from the laurelless canyon. But from John Muir Levi withdrew a manila envelope, and from the envelope, a piece of paper, creased and bluish. “I knew I knew you,” he said, handing her her own birth certificate.

She said nothing. Ig batted at the paper.

“I remember that photo of you, on the soccer field,” Levi said.

“‘Field’ is generous.”

“I remember the caption. ‘Baby Dunn at a California Soccer Clinic.’ The picture was all over the news when I was in college. We did a unit on you in my English class. ‘Visual Rhetoric in Politics.’” He laughed. “Can you believe it? That’s what we were doing then. Making posters. I wrote a paper about you. ‘Angelic Symbols in the Secular Media’ or something. I said the picture was persuasive because you looked like you were about to cry.”

“I wasn’t about to cry.”

“The way you were clutching the ball, confronting the camera.”

“My mom was yelling at the paparazzi. I was trying to stop her.”

“I got an A.”

“She was yelling in Spanish and I was embarrassed.”

Then, Dallas reentered the Blue Bird.

Levi took a barely perceptible step away from Luz. “Come see me sometime, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m in the dome.”

“I know.”

“Come soon.”

If she went, she would have to leave Ig, which she had not done since Levi had taken her to the place where Ray’s body was interred and which she did not want to do ever again. If she went she would have to ignore that instinct and ask Dallas to watch Ig. She would have to tell Dallas where she was going, which she did not want to do though she did not know why, exactly. If she went she would have to go after bonfire, when Ig was sleeping, but before Levi went out dowsing. If she went she would have to lie to Dallas, to say, I think I’ll take a walk, and she would have to endure Dallas’s mysterious disappointment anyway. If she went she could take Sacajawea and John Muir, to remind her who she was. If she went without them she might find out. If she went she would go as Baby Dunn, little changeling. If she went she would know what he knew, and would thereafter be a better listener, would perhaps look inward with his same sureness and serenity. If she went she would run her hands along the patchwork cloth of his geodesic dome, a place she had walked by many times before she realized the others did not walk by it, it was a place circumvented out of deference, a place whose entrance and exit were not immediately evident. If she went she would pause to look up at the night sky and see it blighted by stars, their glow radiating from the dune, their moon. If she went she would have to call out to him in the dunelight, but if she went it could not be a call but a whisper, which would be stolen by the wind. If she went she would whisper again, pressing her hands into the canvas coverings, run them along the spines of triangles upon which the whole structure rested. If she went she would feel something pressing back, like a child stretching in the womb, and she would recoil and feel for Ig where the baby did not hang from her. If she went she would marshal her courage and reach for that which was reaching for her. If she went she would feel a hand through the canvas, and pause there knowing it was his. If she went a geometry of darkness would open in the blankets and his voice, bodiless, soft as sand, would beckon her inside. If she went she would smell sleep must and dried sage. If she went they would stand together beneath the patchwork canopy of blankets. If she went there would be a small fire pit dug at the center, with faint coals like flotsam swaying in the bottom and all the colors of the blankets would be above them and feathers would be hanging from the rafters, feathers and little bones and bound clusters of herbs and pecks of a mottled golden root. If she went he would ask her to sit. If she went he would offer her some root to chew, and if she went she would take it and they would sit side by side on his bed, a Red Cross cot, and he would teach her how to knead the root in her molars, releasing its fusty juice, to swish the juice around in her mouth before sending it into a ration cola spittoon. If she went she would get used to the root’s fustiness and it would give way to an earthy oolong flavor and the softest sensation of floating. If she went he would say, I don’t use that word, dowser. It’s a gift I have. You’ve probably heard that the summit is permafrost year-round? It’s not. There’s a cycle of thaw and freeze, but it’s incredibly rapid. The rivers appear for a half an hour, often less. A pattern more felt than known is the best I can describe it. There are trends conventional methodology cannot reveal. Processes we have yet to catalog within our cosmology. Undocumented happenings beget themselves, if you follow me. Imagine a super-speed evolutionary time warp. It’s not unprecedented. You’ve heard of Calico? The Early Man site? Do you know what they found there? If she went he would list them — camel, horse, mammoth, saber-tooth cat, dire wolf, short-faced bear, coyote, flamingo, pelican, eagle, swan, goose, mallard duck, ruddy duck, canvasback duck, double-crested cormorant, grebe, crane, seagull, stork — and she would see each hovering above the coals. If she went he would say, Those are just the fossils. The Amargosa has been categorized as a wasteland. Inhospitable, they say, as though nature should offer you a cup of tea and a snack. Barren. Bleak. Empty — my favorite. Nearly every species that once inhabited the Mojave Desert has purportedly been erased from this area. It has been described as the deadest place on the planet. But these so-called surveys have been conducted over a mere fraction of the dune sea. The University of Michigan surveyed two percent, BLM only one. The Fish and Game study, the most widely cited paper on the Amargosa — the one that named it the Amargosa — looked at point-oh-oh-one percent of the total area. Studies have been conducted over shockingly short periods of time — a week, ten days. They don’t like to get dust in their eyes. The Harvard study spent more time describing the team’s dry skin than biodiversity. No serious rigorous survey of the flora and fauna of the Amargosa Dune Sea exists.

“But there is life here. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There is so much life.”

If she went she would leave with another book.