Gold Fame Citrus

NEO-FAUNA OF THE AMARGOSA DUNE SEA: A PRIMER

By Levi Zabriskie

BLUE CHUPACABRA

This hairless relative of the coyote is characterized by its bluish-gray skin. Pups are born covered in vibrant turquoise fuzz, which they quickly shed at weaning. Adults gather in a troubling to hunt.

Family: Canidae.

BURROWING DWARF OWL

The only known species of social owl, Burrowing Dwarf Owls live in parliaments of four to six. Diurnal rather than nocturnal, they spend twenty-two hours per day in micro-hibernation below ground. Classified as a micro-owl, the largest Burrowing Dwarf specimen to date measured 9 cm, about the size of an adult’s palm. Family: Strigidae.

CARNIVOROUS PLANTS (Appendix A)

The lack of conventional nutrients in the soil at the dune sea has forced several plant species to become carnivorous. Methods of capture include pitcher structure with highly acidic pools, jaw structures, strangling tentacles and poison webbery. Prey include gnats, moths, Scorpion Bees, micro-owls, and Albino Hummingbirds.

See also: Wandering Joshua.

COLOSSUS VINEGAROON

Very similar to the Heirloom Vinegaroon (Thelyphonus doriae hosei), relative of the scorpion, whose venom will cause its victim to taste only vinegar. Principle difference is the Colossus Vinegaroon can grow as large as a dachshund.

Family: Thelyphonidae.

DUMBO JACKRABBIT

Easily identifiable by its enormous ears, which grow four to five times larger than the rabbit’s body and serve as a cooling system in the extreme heat of the dune sea. Unlike its herbivore relatives, the Dumbo Jackrabbit is an insectivore.

Family: Leporidae.

GRAVEDIGGER ANT

The predation strategy of this ant species is its burrow, a steep-sided funnel constructed in the troughs of dunes. The burrow is dug at an angle that causes prey — Land Eels, Colossus Vinegaroons, Jelly Scorpions and Woolly Chuckwallas — to perceive it as a safe trough until they are inside. The ant uses its front pincers to “fluff” the sand on the sides of its burrow, so that efforts to dig out result in collapse, entombing the prey and preserving it for the ant’s return.

Family: Myrmeleontidae.

GREATEST ROADRUNNER

Descended from the greater roadrunner, the Greatest Roadrunner can reach speeds of up to 70 miles per hour for sustained distances, making it the fastest creature on land. Its tremendous speed is likely a result not of predation — as in the ostrich — but of the enormous distances it travels between its feeding grounds at sand reefs.

Family: Cuculidae.

HUMMINGBIRD, ALBINO

A symbiote of the Blue Chupacabra, the Albino Hummingbird harvests the gnats that gather in the chupacabra’s mucus glands — eyes, ears, nostrils and sphincter. As was the case in the Arctic, albinism is an evolutionary advantage on the Amargosa Dune Sea, for purposes of camouflage.

Family: Trochilidae.

INCANDESCENT BAT

This keystone species nests in decomposing yuccas. Their bioluminescent abdomen is thought to be a communication system, perhaps to aid in finding mates at long distances.

Family: Lampyridae.

JELLY SCORPION

Hermaphroditic and translucent, this arthropod likely dissolved its exoskeleton over time, the gummy body being better able to survive sandalanches.

Family: Thelyphonidae.

LAND EEL

This augmented asp is completely covered in spines, which both protect it and serve as camouflage from predators — Stiltwalker Tortoise, Blue Chupacabra — which often mistake the asp for ocotillo. Chief territory is the leeward face (formerly northern Arizona) where ocotillo once flourished.

Family: Atractaspididae, possibly Loxocemidae.

LILLIPUTIAN RATTLER

Long mistaken for a common earthworm, this is the rattlesnake cousin of the blind threadsnake. Growing to a maximum length of only two inches, its rattle is the size of a shelled sunflower seed.

Family: Unknown.

MOJAVE GHOST CRAB

Like the Jelly Scorpion, the Mojave Ghost Crab has rebuffed its hard carapace — which does not regrow after first molt — with the exception of its superclaws (chelipeds, propodus, semisoft carpus), which less resemble typical crab claws with pinching chelipeds than a trough like that of a backhoe, which it uses to dig down to ephemeral aquifers (the subterranean counterpart to ephemeral rivers) and to the egg caches of Stiltwalker Tortoises and Land Eels, on which they feed.

Family: Blepharipodidae.

OLYMPIAN KANGAROO RAT

Another superlative creature of the Amargosa, the Olympian Kangaroo Rat can jump up to fifty feet. A subterranean burrow snatcher, Olympians squat in vacant or abandoned warrens of Burrowing Dwarf Owls and Gravedigger Ants.

Family: Heteromyidae.

OUROBOROS RATTLER

Nearly indistinguishable from the Mojave sidewinder, except by its form of locomotion. Rather than sidewinding with its characteristic “J” track, the Ouroboros Rattler inserts its own tail into its mouth and locomotes via axial revolution.

Family: Elapidae.

PARASITES (Appendix B)

The parasitic population of the Amargosa Dune Sea is among the most resilient in nature. One example is the Common Bowel Worm, which, rather than attaching to intestine or stomach at a single fasten point, replaces the entire digestive tract, beginning at the esophagus and including rumen, omasum, abomasum, cecum, small intestine, large intestine, colon, rectum and anus. The Common Bowel Worm is just one of at least three dozen intestinal parasites of the dune sea that are capable of thriving within mammal, bird, reptile, rodent, insect or human.

RAINBOW CHUCKWALLA

A vegetarian relative of the Komodo dragon, this ectothermic basker is chromatophoric. Colors observed include black, pink, olive, yellow, turquoise, red and white. Notably, the Rainbow Chuckwalla’s color camouflage depends not on the environment but on its predators. For example, when encountering a troubling of Blue Chupacabras, the Rainbow Chuckwalla will turn golden yellow, a color the chupacabras cannot distinguish from the white of the dune sea.

Family: Iguanidae.

SAND CORAL

Composed primarily of zoanthids, polyps and feathery pinnules, Sand Coral feeds on microorganisms that consume saline and silica, though some larger formations do emit palytoxins, which they use to paralyze and decompose Sand Krill and Jelly Scorpions. Like sea coral, Sand Coral reproduce primarily through asexual gonads and secrete saline silicate underskeletons, which form reefs at particularly salty deposits, such as the Amargosa’s north-facing stoss slope, which is exposed to a megaconcentration of saline and fertilizer from California’s Central Valley. Vastly delicate, these sand reefs constitute the most diverse ecosystem in a dune and, after ephemeral rivers, sustain the most life.

Class: Anthozoa.

SAND KRILL

These shrimp-like creatures are actually members of the worm family. Found in large numbers on Sand Coral reefs, this keystone species not only feeds birds, lizards and rodents at the dune sea, but, most crucially, consumes sand that, upon excretion, provides sustenance for microorganisms.

Family: Lumbricidae.

SCORPION BEE

A stinging apiforme, likely crossed from Africanized honeybees and tarantula wasps; its most notable adaptation is its ability to regenerate its stinger after an attack. Extremely aggressive, and known to be fatal.

Family: Pompilidae.

STILTWALKER TORTOISE

The Stiltwalker Tortoise (also called the Dalí Tortoise) is named for its extremely long legs and neck, which grow six to ten times longer than those of a desert tortoise. These allow it to walk long distances without the dune baking its torso. The Stiltwalker’s adaptive behaviors are astounding. Due to the lack of conventional vegetation at the dune sea, it has become the only known species of tortoise that is a facultative carnivore. Because the Stiltwalker has yet to develop teeth conducive to the shredding of meat, it tucks carrion in its shell until decomposition renders it soft enough to eat. Stiltwalkers have been known to transport carrion for up to thirty days and hundreds of miles, depositing the bones and claws of their prey well beyond those species’ known range, a behavior that long baffled this researcher.

Family: Testudinidae.

TINE SHREW

A cousin of the pocket mouse, the Tine Shrew makes its home in the tines of cacti, where it suckles its large litters on tine glue.

Family: Soricidae.

VAMPIRE GRACKLE

It was initially believed that the Vampire Grackle’s sharp, proboscis-like beak was adapted to extricate the fruit of cacti. However, the bird — glossy red-black with a white bow tie — has been observed to use its beak, which can measure up to twice the length of its body, to extract the blood of mammals, chiefly the Dumbo Jackrabbit and the common coyote.

Family: Icteridae.

WANDERING JOSHUA

The myth of the wandering tree dates back to the Chemehuevi Indians and likely before. Botanists have widely dismissed the wandering tree as cultural legend. The “wandering” is made possible by the Joshua’s unique root system — a horizontal blazing star structure equipped with a double-thick taproot and a meristematic zone capable of sensing moisture. The taproot grows in the direction of water, while allowing roots growing in the opposite direction to atrophy, essentially dragging the plant toward water. Some wanderers can travel up to one hundred yards a day.

Family: Asparagaceae.

Luz carried this bestiary everywhere she went, showing no one but Ig. It felt secret, sacred, and she needed to be close to it. Ig was mad for the book, asked for more and more and more—drawn to and focused on Levi’s drawings as Luz had never seen her. Together they read and reread the primer in different places — alone in the Blue Bird, in Levi’s geodesic dome, in the Holiday Rambler while the girls were working, in secret at bonfire. Luz needed to meet the beasts in different lights, and with different people swirling about, to be sure that they were real.

Though she’d been warned by pretty much everyone against straying from the colony alone, she left Ig with Dallas and walked as far into the Amargosa as she ever had, clutching the primer to her. She walked until all she could see of the colony was the red bustier flapping from the antenna of the Holiday Rambler and then she stood, listening. On the wind she heard the dune she’d once thought barren flourish and thrive and teem, heard creatures great and small blazing new paths to abundance. The primer turned a world once shriveled into a locus of succor. One day, as she was leaving the colony, Luz watched a crackled blue tarp escape on a gust and soar off into the Amargosa. She watched idly until it disappeared, annoying Camille and Dot, the sisters whose shade was wriggling out of sight. By then the dune sea was inarguably alive. The tarp could be going anywhere. It could settle upon a tomb dug by a devious ant. It could be a queer surface rolled over by a forever snake. It could shade a parliament of miniature owls. The world was that expansive. Now there were tortoises out of Dalí and Technicolor lizards and wandering trees for Ig. Suddenly this was a land of could. Flamboyant, vibrant, polychrome and iridescent, there was turquoise, pink, olive, yellow and red. Glossy red-black with a white bow tie. The taste of blood and vinegar. Acid pools and poison webbery, egg-suckers and salt munchers, mucus slurpers and vampires, so many inspired ways to eat and be eaten. And what was vibrancy but being very, very alive? She and Ig were an example in her mind. It was soon very obvious that the world was made of unseen wonders, which we might call miracles.

—

And if she did not yet believe in miracles, one morning Levi returned from dowsing early and sent Nico to bed. Instead of going to bed himself he took Luz and Ig out for an expedition. As Luz climbed atop the buzzing solar dune buggy, Levi paused to wrap Ig’s bare head with the cloth from his. Do not wear a man’s hat unless you intend to keep him, Luz recalled.

They did not ascend into the dune but rode away from it, through the land of could to a patch of sky pasted on a sandblasted billboard. As they neared, the billboard went from sky to water, water with a wiggly veinery of white light.

Here, they turned onto a gravel road. Eventually a bubble rose from the earth, clay gray, snub-ended. Ig said, “What is?”

It took Luz a moment to find the word. “A… building.”

Its doors were waffled fiberglass, green, chained closed but curled up from the bottom by some vandal’s effort — Levi’s, Luz soon realized. He crawled through this space, then reached for Ig. She clung to Luz at first, but went with some urging. Luz crawled in after.

Inside, she had some trouble breathing. The air was viscous, resistant to inhale. Gas, was her morbid thought, an oven. She looked for Ig. But the cement beneath her was relatively cool. Moisture, she remembered. Humidity.

“What do you think?”

The ceiling glowed yellow, and there was movement on it. She looked for its source and saw a shimmering square of jade: fluid, liquid light ribboning. So much color it stung, soft turquoise streaked with evergreen algae and, above, gold. Grassy water plants grew at the cracks of the pool, and a pump burbled somewhere. Impossible.

“Solar,” said Levi, pointing to coils of black tubing. A towel hung petrified on the back of a plastic chair. Mounted opposite them was a long rod with a hook at the end. A sign beside a Styrofoam life preserver said, NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY. A municipal oasis, mineral water once drawn from a spring and now just circulating, was Levi’s theory. Indeed, a rime of salt had dried on the tiles ringing the edge: 3', 5', 9', 12', NO DIVING. A ring of buoys strung across the pool’s midpoint, the rope rotted black. Luz could not adjust to the languid green of it all. The parts of her eyes for processing green had perhaps atrophied. Another fragment from Ray’s notebook, something about chintzy rods & cones.

Luz closed her eyes. Being in the bubble was like being in an angel’s inner ear, echoes of their voices and also its own hum. A seashell sound.

“How did you find this?” she asked eventually.

“Something like this is an earbug for me.”

“Like a song?”

“A song the way the deaf hear it. Like music you feel.”

“How does it work? Your… dowsing.”

He laughed. “Have you ever felt the tension between a couple arguing in front of you? Or walked into a building and gotten a bad feeling? Met someone and known, instantly, that they could not be trusted?”

“Of course.”

“Voices are loudest when they’re negative, but there are others too. Think about the feeling of someone watching you. A lover admiring you from across a party. Or thinking of someone and at that moment they call. Or déjà vu. These energies are all around us, all the time. I happen to have an ear for the organic. But anyone can do it.”

“Jimmer says it’s a kind of listening.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’ve never been a very good listener.”

Levi shook his head. “That sounds like someone else’s idea of you.”

Ig squirmed and whinnied. “She loves the water,” Luz said.

“I know she does.” Levi pulled his shroud over his head, folded it once and laid it on a chair. “Let’s take her in.”

He waded in, naked, his trunk refracted at the water line. “So nice,” he said, then went under. Ig squealed. “It’s okay,” Luz said. “He’s swimming. You want to try?” She undressed Ig and passed her to Levi. At first she was still, then she began to cry, her face going red and warped. She grasped Levi savagely, her feet wanting bottom. She shrieked for Luz—Mama! she was all but saying. So Luz immediately pulled her own shroud off and slid in. The gentle mineral water held her — what it must have been like in the womb. Luz wondered, involuntarily, whether the same thought had occurred to her mother as she allowed herself pulled under. Death by drowning was warm, supposedly, but the Pacific had been cold every time Luz plunged in, cold and rough and loud. Luz took Ig from Levi and soothed her. Filth washed from them and floated away in shimmering floes. Ig settled and loosened her grip on Luz’s hair, which was disintegrating from clumps to strands again. In the water, they weighed less. Luz was not at all afraid, though she had always feared water.

“Come on,” said Levi, treading toward the rope.

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t swim.”

He pulled her deeper.

“Don’t,” she laughed.

Ig let Luz lay her prone, but ignored her and Levi when they said together, “Kick, kick, kick!” Her pale rump bobbed placid above the surface. The bottom of the pool was slime-slick, and when Luz tripped she took Ig under too. Luz came up with Levi’s arms around her waist, with Ig in her arms, laughing. Luz was startled for a moment but laughed too, at Ig’s clucking.

When Ig wore herself out laughing, Luz wrapped her in Levi’s robe and laid her on one of the plastic loungers with the fossilized straps. Luz retrieved Ig’s nini and Levi materialized a thin pad of brute root—“For you,” he clarified when she looked confused. Luz took the root and Ig took the nini and soon the child lay content and drowsy, the grown-ups moving soundlessly around the shallow end.

Levi’s erection was frank and elegant. With the child subtracted from the threesome Luz watched him unabashedly, and he her. “Is she asleep?” he whispered after some time.

She was, and as answer Luz backed onto the pool steps, reclined against them and opened her legs, slightly, the water like cool cotton against her. Levi approached, unhurried, and when he finally reached her he hooked one thick arm around her waist and lifted her from the water.

She liked the compression of his weight above her and the cool, ungiving concrete deck below. They moved together in silence, eyes closed, feeling everything. Across the bubble, Ig slept.

After, they washed each other. She felt all the parts of his body she’d been curious about: his broad and hairy shoulders, his plump butt and the scoop of sacrum above it. They clung together, weightless, and whispered to each other.

“I can’t stop reading the primer,” Luz said. “It’s… magic.”

“It’s science.”

“I can’t believe they’ve ignored all this.”

“Believe it.”

“Are they just incompetent?”

“I wish they were.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re told this is a wasteland because they need it to be a wasteland.”

“I don’t understand.”

On the lounger, Ig sighed, then settled.

“I’m going to be honest with you,” said Levi. “I feel I can and should be. Are you prepared for that?”

She was.

“What I’m about to tell you is big. Not the kind of thing you can unknow. I want you to be aware of that before you decide. I don’t want to force you into anything.”

“You’re not.”

He nodded. “We’re told we don’t exist because they need us not to exist. They need to take control of the Amargosa. ‘Stop it,’ everyone says. ‘The unrelenting march.’ That slogan. Of course, this is a natural process we’re talking about. This is the inevitable result of our own savagery. And we want to stop it because it reminds us of our tremendous neglect and of the violence we’ve done to this place. Your friend Powell knew that. The Amargosa reaches outward on all sides, toward Phoenix and Vegas, San Diego and Sacramento. To Mexico and Canada and New York and Washington, DC. Not good for national morale. Hard to sleep in the green East with a mountain of sand bearing down on you. Step one: establish that it’s barren. Step two: destroy it.”

“But they’ve tried that. They’ve tried everything.”

“Not everything.”

He took her back to Albuquerque, where he had taken to sleeping in the lab to avoid the woman whose spurning had slashed the thin membrane restraining her outright hatred of him. There, one night, he heard a new call, behind the voices from the sample cabinet, which were always gossiping, behind the murmurs of the biomass slivers pressed between slides. There was something urgent in the call, something that pulled him deep down into the subterranean bowels of the National Labs, swiping his Zed clearance badge along the way. Something was trapped in that bunker, he knew, something freest of free now caged in a coffin, a tomb, he could feel the confines against him even as he slid silently down the concrete stairs. The call engorged as he approached the bottommost level. The corridor was dark but the call urged him onward. Two MPs sat on stools. One nodded at his badge, the other leaned away from him, unnerved by the wildness in his eyes. The voice, Levi realized, was a Utah voice, a call from home, and he had not heard such a thing since he left. Things were aligning inside him, and yet there was chaos in him too. He had to act. He swiped again, pressed his thumb to an electronic pad for another guard without even realizing it.

In a room lit yellow the call became a chorus, a tabernacle choir stretching out a mournful note. A dozen warheads nested in pens, like livestock. From within the physics packages his ex-lover had designed came that Utah calling, his mineral brothers, his isotopic kinfolk, twenty-eight thousand pounds of Moab uranium-235 teetering on the cusp of fission, descendants of Trinity, Operation Crossroads, Operation Greenhouse, Ivy Mike, Castle Bravo, Operation Argus, Operation Dominic, Operation Storax, Operation Plowshare, all humming to be free.

“A nuclear bomb?” Luz asked.

“Bombs,” he said. “And not just any. What they call nonconforming design. I’d seen the plans. I’d listened. That woman, the one I was with, she thought I didn’t understand her work. She would leave schematics out to belittle me. ‘Careful,’ she’d say. ‘You’ll go cross-eyed.’ I let her think she was teaching me something; I asked her stupider and stupider questions until she couldn’t help but correct me. That package wasn’t designed to detonate underground. Not a burrower, like they said. The design was retro, clunky, humongous. Nothing that would fit in a suitcase. The kind they drop from the sky. The OGs: Fat Man, Little Boy. Operation Glassjaw, they call it.”

Strands of rot swayed from the black rope, the serene water suddenly choking with them, but Luz blinked these away. “I don’t…”

“I didn’t believe it either. Despite everything I’d seen. And then they sent me here, to survey. That’s what they said. An exhaustive survey to address lingering concerns from local environmental interests. But I knew what they meant: find nothing. They need this to be a dead place so they can kill it.”

“But why? Just to make people back East feel better? It doesn’t make sense.”

He tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear. “What do you know about nuclear waste?”

“It’s poisonous. Lasts forever.”

“Pretty much. Unequivocally lethal for longer than we’ve been upright. Two hundred fifty thousand years, then tapering. To compare, the pyramids aren’t even five thousand years old.”

“And there’s a lot of it.”

“Making more every day with the last of our water.”

“And they have nowhere to put it,” she said.

“Barnwell, Clive, Deaf Smith. All failed.” He nodded. “Even Yucca Mountain. About a hundred miles from here. Have you ever been? It’s finished now — the tunnels, trains, even the warning monument. Landscape of Thorns, they call it. All on hiatus until the timing’s right.”

“‘Not in my backyard,’” said Luz.

“Exactly.”

“But it has to go somewhere.”

Levi nodded again, perhaps a little disappointed. “Industry would be delighted to hear you say that. ‘It has to go somewhere’ is one of the most expensive, most effective covert jingles of our time. See, it only ‘has to go somewhere’ if it remains as deadly as it is. To establish a national repository is to promise we will use nuclear power forever and never hold the industry responsible for making its waste safe. It becomes the state’s problem. They make a product that is poisonous and they’ve managed to change the conversation so that we accept that as a given: it will always be poisonous, so ‘it has to go somewhere.’ The question is where? That’s not the question — it shouldn’t be. It’s a motherfucking shell game.”

He lowered his voice. “We should be spending money on technology to neutralize the waste — industry should have to fund that research. They should have been doing that from the beginning instead of ditching the shit in storage pools and saying it’s everyone’s problem. But the research is expensive, slow. Last bit of funding was diverted from neutrality to storage after Fukushima. Believe it or not, nuking the Amargosa is cheaper than holding the industry responsible for its waste. Not to mention infinitely more politically viable.”

“So they’ll put it here.”

“No one’s backyard anymore. It’s a wasteland, remember. All these years have been an elaborate performance, a theater of due diligence so they can conclude that there are no living things here.”

“But then what? How do they stop it?”

“Blast it to glass. That’s what the National Lab was really working on. They weren’t looking for aquifer. They were building a nuclear fireball.”

“Then pick up where they left off at Yucca Mountain?”

“Exactly. The Southwest is a dying limb. This is how they’ll amputate.”

“When will they do this?”

“The minute we leave.”

It was true, Luz knew. She should have been afraid, should have been disturbed, but the water was making its own mournful music and really it was just such a relief to finally see, such an effortless swoon. How long had she felt doom coming? Ruin, cataclysm, destiny, etc. It was nice to know how.

But she knew something else too, there in the silky green slickness of life. The white light of the dune sea shone into her heart, and she reached for him again. The air thick with impossible moisture and her chest heaving. Like this she could believe all things, the ghastly and impossible truth, plus the lie she needed badly, needed in order to put one foot in front of the other: the baby would never die.

Though it was the colony that moved across the desert, the reverse felt true. It wasn’t long before the swimming pool oasis left them — save for the water they drained from it, and the chairs, ropes, sheets of fiberglass, peels of tin and other salvageables they pried from it, and the algae, which Jimmer scraped from the bottom and dried for his concoctions. This was life at the colony: the solid, grounded, unyielding world getting up and walking away. Ravines, canyons, ranges, alluvial fans and gardens of boulders, all folded beneath them. They pilfered from abandoned Indian casinos and deserted truck stops. The sturdy was no longer something to hold on to.

Luz needed Levi more in the face of annihilation, though she would not have characterized it that way. She was drawn to him with such simple urgent magnetism that it was impossible to attribute her feelings to trauma, circumstance, or the context of emotional catatonia into which he entered. One seemed to have nothing to do with the other.

She began spending her nights in Levi’s herb-garlanded dome, where they shared a long finger of brute root and where he undid lies long knotted within her. She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we’ve murdered — the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in a vase, wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door — every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum.

She saw water fetishes everywhere — fountains and saunas and ski lodges. She saw the National Parks for the tokens they were. Everything she once knew of the natural world was revealed to be propaganda or at best publicity. There were interests everywhere. Meanwhile, all that seemed fantasy she hadn’t even the imagination to conjure throbbed in the primer, which she memorized.

The others knew some, Levi said, but not as much as she. Even she could not know everything, not yet. He had a plan, but could not yet tell her what it was. Yet everything was coming together and she would know as soon as he could possibly tell her, and then they would act instantly and grandly and finally. Meanwhile, at bonfire his talks sculpted the colony’s existence into a conical shape, rising in a taper and pointed, climax somewhere in the very near future. He spoke feverishly of culmination, of plans and meaning and our obligation to answer when called.

Privately Luz needed — she knew this without his saying it — to be beside him every possible minute. What mad ecstasy were these nights up late and early, talking, then touching each other to surrender, then talking some more. Levi had an unhurried way about him, sturdy and mellow, even when the enormity of his words brought him tears. His easy openness drew tears from Luz too, and also words, all words except her three secretmost—we took her—which would die within her, one day, and which she hardly recalled now, so lost was she in unloading the injuries of her lonely girlhood in the wasted West. When Levi spoke, all was weightlessness, even when he spoke of the horrors to come. When he left to dowse Luz did nothing much but succumb to her longing, an enjoyable ache.

At the Blue Bird, Dallas watched over Ig without being asked. Luz took the scarf and the Leatherman off the shelf. She should have thrown them away — should have let the wind take the scarf, should have let the dune bury the Leatherman as it had its owner. But instead she forced both into a cushion through a small tear in its seam.

One night after bonfire Dallas said, “To Levi again.”

“‘Again’?” Luz said.

“Baby, do what you want. But own it.”

“Is that how you really feel?”

“How should I feel, Luz?”

“Maybe you think I shouldn’t be moving on. Maybe you think I’m disloyal. Maybe you think I’m a whore.”

Dallas laughed. “I don’t believe in whores, Luz. My worldview does not accommodate the concept. Your process is your own.”

“Maybe you think I’m not good enough for Ig.”

“You’re her mother. Good enough doesn’t enter into it.” Dallas lifted Ig. “I’ll take her. I’ll always take her. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m doing anything for your sake. There’s a whole great goddamn world out there that has nothing to do with you.”

Luz should have gone then, should have kissed Ig and whirled away and onward, but some imp inside her whispered push. “Levi, then,” she said. “You’re doing it for Levi.”

Dallas said nothing, and the peculiar quality of her silence helped Luz put things together. “Oh Christ. That’s why your milk was in.”

Dallas pressed Ig to her and turned away.

Luz, quieter, asked, “What happened to it?”

Dallas said, “He came out dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

Dallas waved one hand in the air. “Not meant to be.” She was doing her best to believe it. “That’s what Levi said. The Amargosa had other plans for us. It curates, he said. Then you showed up.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Seems you’re the plan, now. Apparently the Amargosa requests I be your wet nurse.”

Luz wanted to go to her, but something about Dallas’s posture, the private way she held Ig to her, would not allow it. “I didn’t know, Dal.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not your pet.” She began to nurse Ig, rubbing one finger along the bridge of the child’s nose. The motion always soothed them both.

Then, “He may be a bastard, Luz, but he’s all we have. He grasps things we can’t. He has an incredible gift. I believe that.” She paused in her stroking to gaze upon Luz. “After everything, I do believe that.”

Levi continued to make his excursions — he rose while Luz still lay in his cot, dressed, kissed her good-bye and tugged on her earlobe, his reminder to listen. She rose after, to watch Levi and Nico disappear into the dune on the rumbling, shuddering lorry.

At his leaving, Luz returned to the Blue Bird, where Ig and Dallas slept curled side by side as if in a womb. These early mornings, as Luz watched Dallas sleep, she did listen, as Levi implored her, listened for rustling soft chomping life beyond. But she heard nothing, saw instead: Levi with his arms around Dallas, Levi taking Dallas’s heavy breasts in his hands or mouth. Nights after bonfire, Levi needed Luz. In the ember light they made love, rowdy and vital, and after he plummeted into sleep she extracted herself and pressed her palm to the dirty arch of his bare right foot, lopsided with its two smallest toes missing. A zone of vulnerability, according to Jimmer, with potential for thought transference. What she wanted to know was whom he dreamt of, and how.

Most times, she dreamed of the day she’d just had. Not dreaming so much as remembering. She wondered if a person could go insane this way.

One morning, as Levi was about to exit the tent, the lorry grumbling outside, a desperate question escaped from Luz where she sat on his cot.

“What happened between you and Dallas?”

Levi turned and let the tent flap fall closed behind him. “Dallas is a dear friend,” he said.

“You had a child together.”

“We did.” He took a root from where it hung on the ceiling. He sat beside her on the cot and cut himself a sliver.

“Tell me, please.”

He offered her some root.

She shook it away. “Don’t make me beg you.”

“What would you like to know?”

She watched the coals, expiring now to ash. “Were you in love with her?”

“We loved each other, yes. But that love existed only between us. It had no greater dimension. It was… of a measly scale. The baby’s death was a symptom of that. It was an intervention of sorts, a resetting of my path, though I didn’t see it at first. Not all doubt is spiritual doubt.”

The grumble of the lorry rose, then idled. Nico was waiting.

“Dallas and I buried the child together. We set him on an altar at the mountain. It had been completely still that day, but the moment we placed the body, the Amargosa took him. It lifted that trauma from us. I heard nothing then. I knew the mountain was comforting us, Dallas and me, by its actions, but I couldn’t hear anything. I was utterly alone. I could barely make my way back to camp. The mountain was shunning me. I wandered, hoping to hear, trying to reconnect. I went three days without it. Our water supply dwindled. Still, the mountain would not guide me. Such utter, encompassing loneliness. It was the darkest my life has ever been. I considered leaving. Can you imagine? Abandoning everything we have here. Rejecting the mountain and everyone who relies on me. But I was prepared to go. And then I heard the bighorn.”

Luz curled into herself, crossed her arms over her ugly knees. “You could have told me. You should have.”

“Listen to yourself. Come here.”

He pulled at her but she jerked away, saying, “I feel like a fucking idiot.”

“Luz,” he sighed. “These are the smallest concerns on this Earth. They’re too small for you. That’s what my relationship with Dallas was like, in the end… earthly”—as though the word had a foul aftertaste—“I wouldn’t even call it a bond. You and I have something larger. More expansive. Or I thought we did.”

She loosened her grip on herself, whispered, “We do.”

“I believe that. I think of the circumstances that brought you here, all the forces at work to bring you and me together, here.” His voice began to wobble. “I was lost without you. I had a gift and no one to give it to. I heard a voice but could not speak back. You and I, we have a voice together. Don’t you hear it? Don’t you?”

Luz listened. She heard the idle of the lorry and the faint fizz of the coals. She heard Levi, who had begun to cry beside her. She loved it when he cried.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

She drifted toward him, the old magnet. She stroked his back. “Yes,” she said.

“You do?” His eyes bright. “You do?”

“Yes,” she laughed. “I do.”

He reached for her. “Can I hold you? Please? I need you.”

He took her and they lay down and he held her from behind, both of them trembling. “You belong here,” he said. “Right here. Do you know that?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

He pressed his mouth to her neck. “Wherever you are I’ll be. Do you know that?”

Luz did.

It was around this time that Luz began having proper dreams again. In them, the places beneath the dune sea told their stories.

The binder does not say “mole men.” The mole men are a rumor, a legend. So the old, pinkened blind man with the puckered skin and long, translucent, prehensile whiskers we found in the desert near the repository is not a mole man.

The binder, given to us ages ago by a gentleman representing the US Department of Energy, says the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, just up the road from our tiny gamblers’ settlement in the desert, is unmanned. The binder — which we stored until now as directed: on the wall of the county commissioner’s office in a glass-faced case with a tiny hammer dangling from it — says the repository is unmanned, that the silent white bullet trains disappearing into the mountain and reappearing out the other side, empty, carry only casks (we read “caskets”) of spent fuel rods and pellets and are unloaded by a gleaming robotic arm. The binder has pictures.

The binder, whose protective glass face we have shattered with the tiny hammer, says the stainless steel caskets are unloaded by the robotic arm and transported by a fully automated conveyer system (FACS) deep into the hollow earth, down the trellis of tunnels that took one hundred years to dig, to their storage pods, where they will stay interred for one hundred thousand years. There are no people working inside Yucca Mountain, says the binder. The tunnels were dug by a state-of-the-art tunnel-boring machine (TBM).

We are soothed by the authoritative acronym-loaded binder delivered to us ages ago by the gentleman embodiment of the US Department of Energy and stored in its secure glass-faced case beside the MSDS and the old Terror Alert Color Wheel, for since there are no people who dug the dark tunnels of Yucca Mountain, nor people working as stewards of the nation’s nuclear waste deep inside, then it is only a rumor that there is a subterranean population at the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, only local lore that below us, in a town perhaps identical to ours, move once-human creatures whose genes the department tweaked over generations until their skin went translucent, until a scrim of skin grew over their useless eyes, until two thick, cord-like and translucent whiskers sprouted from their faces, sensitive as a catfish’s barbels, and their mouths gone a little catfish too, a side effect.

The not — mole man was discovered, sun-singed and unconscious, by a gang of teenagers at the Landscape of Thorns. Regarding the Landscape of Thorns, the binder quotes Expert Design of an Architecture of Peril to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain by Magnus S. Geister (Cornell University), Manuel Brink (Sandia National Laboratories), H. S. Traverse (University of Pennsylvania), Linda Gillis (Eastern Research Group, Inc.), Yuki Takashi (University of Washington), and R. C. Tung (Purdue University): “The marker is pan-cultural, pre-linguistic, post-linguistic, ominous and repellent […] It evinces the repository site as a non-place.”

The Landscape of Thorns was erected atop Yucca Mountain to frighten our distant and curious descendants on a primal level. It is an assembly of multilingual stone message kiosks and concrete spikes jutting from the mountain, skewering the sky. Our teenagers like to go up there to skateboard, rollerblade, bounce their tiny bicycles off its menacing concrete javelins. We’ve scolded them against this but we live in a dinky desert town with one paved road; our young people are fiends for concrete.

When they were in elementary school, our young people took field trips to the monument and made rubbings from the message kiosks there. Our children once had the patience for a project like that. Now, they dye their hair inky black without consulting us; they push safety pins through their eyebrows. Our refrigerators are still layered with curled etchings of star charts and the periodic table, of symbols that look like snow angels — triangles within circles — and rubbings of warnings in Old English, ancient Arabic, and something the placards at the kiosks call French. The rubbings say, This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!

They say, This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing of value is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.

They say, Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

Since he is not a mole man, we assume the blind man our teenagers found is a desert wanderer. We come from a long line of desert wanderers, so we intend to treat him well. We set out finding a cool, dark place for him. A gamblers’ outpost in the sun-blanched, sand-scraped Mojave — we have many such places. The brothel offered him his own swamp-cooled bungalow, but when he came to he seemed bashful somehow, with his humped posture and pinched nose and the way he stood so politely clacking his pale, brittle claws together. Instead, we looked to the casino, a stucco cube with a gravel parking lot. We put him up in a suite, comped. We enrolled him in the Players Club, with bonus play, express play and multi-play, all comped. We granted him unlimited access to the buffet, where with a bedraggled claw he points to shrimp cocktail, steak and eggs. He tests the doneness of his eggs by probing the yolks with one slow, slick, opalescent barbel.

Despite being a member of the Players Club at the platinum level, the not — mole man finds no joy in playing keno, for though we can see his eyes rolling lax behind the pale vellum of skin, he is blind as an oracle and can take no pleasure from the numbers bouncing around the television. He disdains video poker; his barbels recoil from the slots. When we gave him a bingo dauber he tried to eat it, smeared his lipless catfish gape with a shimmer of teal lipstick. He will throw the bones at the craps table, if you ask him, but only after standing for a long time with the dice cupped solemnly in one hand, running his index claw over their tiny dimples.

Though we suspected as much, the fact that he knows nothing of bingo proves the desert wanderer is no ordinary old man. And though it says nothing of mole men, the binder given to us by the freckled personification of the long arm of the US Department of Energy, which we have retrieved from its shattered glass case, says there may be “contaminants.” If a contaminant should enter the community, says the binder, you must quarantine it. Call this number, says the binder. If you cannot quarantine the contaminant, says the binder, kill it.

The danger is in a particular location, say the rubbings.

It increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.

Apparently, and according to the binder, we are the first line of defense against a threat that does not exist.

—

Quarantine can be tricky here. Ours is a town where tourists stop on their way somewhere else. Ours is a way station where visitors dock in the dark and then, in the hammering sun of morning, look around them at the burnt husks of muscle cars, at the dented trailers welded together, and say, Who lives here?

They move on to the national park, the sin city. We become a story they will tell, the freaks in the desert, the mutants at the mountain, the wasteland. Three times a day the bullet trains spirit into the earth and out again without a sound. Our teenagers ache to go with them, we know. This place is not a place of honor, say the rubbings. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing of value is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.

But it is autumn, peak season is sliding away from us, and the red brome is exploding across the alluvial fans. Yucca Mountain is magenta with them, the stalks bowing all around the Landscape of Thorns. And the mole man seems to like it here. The oracle stirs powdered creamer into his coffee with one dignified, prehensile barbel.

Someone wonders, What if he’s poisoning us? A good one, because we’ve long felt hard, lentil-sized nodes beneath our eyes, unshelled walnuts growing in our throats. Our water has tannins of uranium and we have sores that will not heal, dark motes floating in our fields of vision, yellowing sclera, blood in our stool. Our babies are born with webbed fingers and toes, or none.

This message is a warning about danger, says the negative space within our malformed children’s manic charcoal scribblings. The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

You are in no danger, says the binder.

Also: You are the only thing standing between the rest of the country and radiation poisoning.

The oracle haunts the casino floor, lightly clacking the milky keratin of his claws together. He lurks near the roulette table, listening to the dolly pop along the wheel. Peak season is over and the cocktail waitresses slip outside and cut spears from the aloe plants growing alongside the swimming pool. In the sportsbook, they sit him in a plush maroon chair and glide the slime over his burnt skin.

In the buffet, the mole man gums his flaccid steak with his downturned catfish maw. The teenagers sit with him, build creamer pyramids, jelly huts, stab gashes into the vinyl seats with butter knives. Sometimes they bring maps. Tenderly they trace the mole man’s barbels along the interstate. Blow this popsicle stand, they say.

Kill it, says the binder, but there is something of us in the mole man. Bonus play, express play and multi-play are lost on him, and truth be told they are lost on us, too.

The white bullet trains come in and out thrice daily, soundless, only a slight pressing and unpressing of the air. One day the repository will be filled and it will be sealed and it will stay that way for one hundred thousand years, says the binder. One day all the toxic pellets we fear will be stuffed safely inside the mountain. The mountain will be sealed and will remain sealed through flash floods and ceaseless corrosion and the itchy trigger finger of tectonics. The binder says this and we believe it, even though the trains that move through town so silently you cannot hear but only feel them — those beautiful, soundless white bullets — run on the throbbing rods they ferry.

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

—

We have questions the binder cannot answer:

Is a mole man not a man?

How many times did the US Department of Energy say “wasteland” before this became one?

How many times will they chant “unpopulated” before we disappear?

What utterance will emerge from history’s longest game of telephone?

Why, of all the rubbings curling on all the refrigerators, all the etchings in all the message kiosks in all the desert repositories of this nation, do none say, We’re sorry?

The oracle does not speak, and we are glad. We could not bear to hear what he might say.

Instead, we put our ears to the dirt at dawn. We can, maybe, hear a steady rock scrape a mile below. There are someones, somethings, moving through the trellis of tunnels under us, tending the pods of stainless steel caskets, inside the caskets rods, inside the rods pellets throbbing like glowworm larvae, though we’ve never seen the glow and never will, promises the binder. We take our iodine tablets. At night, if we lie still, we can feel the silent white bullet trains moving through us.

We have the number to call, but we have long been unable to discern the poisoned from the yet-to-be-poisoned. Peak season is over. Winter is coming to the desert and there are things we want to see: the ground crunchy with frost. The dog’s water bowl froze over. The Joshua trees along the highway decorated for Christmas. The red and green garlands winking in the sun, tinsel swaying in the breeze of the bullet train. Soon, the burros will eat the tinsel and for weeks the good-natured BLM boys will spot strands of it glinting in their dung, and we want to be here for that. We want to be here for the one day of snow, when our teenagers run outside in their pajamas to scrape the fine white dusting from the surfaces before it melts. Their flaxen roots grown out now, their eyebrows throbbing and infected, with their webbed fingers they press an entire car’s worth into one hard, divine, infinite snowball.

Luz felt the scar before she saw it, a ridge wall she mapped with her tongue. Below, Levi’s balls dark and tight as plums, and these too she took into her mouth, individually, adding his must to the taste of brute root in her mouth, wanting to impress him, wanting to please him, wanting him to go limp beneath her, an offering and apology. Hers were the efforts and industries of love, the same that once built glistening golden forts of honeycomb, the same mud and saliva and horsehair and caterpillar silk that once kept nests of swifts and swallows aloft. When Levi said, Stop, she smiled and said, No, wanting to build her monument, to summon their own private flood. But he abruptly jerked her up and atop him, saying without saying, Get to work. She did, hinging at the hips, her joints soon sore, her calves seizing, but pistoning with renewed energy each time he let loose an approving sigh. She was careful to accommodate the curve of him with her motion and her body. He asked her not to stop, and she promised she wouldn’t. He encouraged her by circling a finger around her anus, then inserting it inside, a surprise. She became suddenly very attentive. When he slid it out, there was a smell, and also a quiver.

After, she asked about the scar. He told her of an at-home circumcision, his first impossible memory, at the compound where his grandfather was Lord, where his sisters were siphoned off to other trailers when they were ready, which they never were.

Silent, Levi visited that compound for some time. Luz did not know how to bring him back; she wished she’d had a worse childhood so that she would know what to say. When Levi returned, he cut them each a new peel of root and said, “Do you believe in evil?”

“I–I’m not sure.”

“I do. Absolutely I do. We need to protect this place, Luz. They are trying to obliterate us. They send trucks in the night. Have you heard them?”

She hadn’t, but she was not so powerful a listener as he. “What do we do?”

Levi chewed his root thoughtfully.

She inhaled, excited by the sudden opportunity to be useful. “I have some money,” she offered.

He winced.

“I don’t even want it,” she said. “I haven’t even looked at it.” It was true. The hatbox sat in the corner of the Blue Bird, where Levi had first delivered it, an artifact. Inside, what was left of her modeling money, the bulk of it intended for Lonnie’s helper in St. George. “I don’t have any use for it,” she said. “You can have it all. Wouldn’t that move things along?”

Levi shook his head, gently.

“Take it,” she insisted. That money belonged to another person, a child doll weakling. Baby Dunn, a Mojav quitter. She would be glad to be rid of it.

Levi thanked her, kissed her and thanked her. “But that’s just not the paradigm we’re working with,” he said. “Money…” He batted the very notion away. “You’d get more from that money burning it for light.” He went on, about her bracing belief, how it nourished him. She chewed her root and watched his beautiful voice comet across the heaven of their dome. She lifted her hand before her face and made patient, shimmering contrails with her fingers. A little disappointed, for she wanted to give him all things there, in their tiny kaleidoscopic universe fixed in the center of the great big benevolent cartwheeling galaxy all around them. There was nothing she wouldn’t let go — the freedom of that — this was her thought when he asked for something else.

“Of course if they decide to evac us, really decide, there’s no stopping them, nothing even I can do. We will only win, ultimately, if we first conquer the rhetorical sphere. We must tell our story in the language spoken by the rest of the country. We can no longer let them decide whether we are human. You saw it with the Mojavs. They made people into non-people. We must do the reverse. Tell them what kind of a people we are. Prove that we are more human than any of them! It’s been done before. We make evac a cleanse, a genocide. Establish ourselves as a chosen people. The Amargosa our Zion. You follow?”

Luz did, though she was too rapt to say so.

“We position our removal not as an injustice — we’ve failed on that appeal, again and again. The Sierra Club, Save the Mojave, Mojav Rights Org — all peddling injustice porn. Injustice is mundane. No one gives a good goddamn about injustice.

“We need to offer atonement. Deliver them unambiguous righteousness. We change the scenario, get them off the guilt circuit. We can’t drink their guilt. We can’t bathe in it. We say, ‘It’s okay that you fucked half the country, killed rivers, depleted millennia of aquifer, fed arsenic to children and lied about it, forced citizens once again into internment camps, let people die in holding pens. It’s okay. It’s actually good—because look! You created this magical ecosystem. The way the Ukrainians call Chernobyl a national park. You meant to do that, right, America? Well done! Bravo!’”

“Yes,” she said. “How?”

He paused. “Baby Dunn’s baby. Imagine the attention when she surfaces, here in the wasteland, with you, happy — that’s the key—”

“What do you mean surfaces?”

“Nico has his devices. Thanks to you! You see how it all fits together?”

Luz, slow with root, did not.

“The Christmas Village you found. Your discovery. Some important equipment there, believe it or not. Nico’s been tinkering with his electronic stockpile ever since. The cloud and so on — not my area of expertise, but he’s confident he can get us access. Hack in at certain crucial junctions. He can get the word out.”

“What… word?”

“People remember Baby Dunn. They’ll see those old headlines — that photo of you playing soccer in the dirt. Do you have that? Never mind, it’ll turn up. We take them right back. And then: Ig. The fresh start.”

“I—”

“We need you both, and we need it to be big and wholesome and beautiful. Transcendent. Madonna and child.”

He saw her hesitancy, perhaps. “Think about it. You of all people were brought here. No one survives out there, but you did. Ig did. This is Zion, Deseret, the New World’s Holy Land. You see? Ig is our baby Moses.”

It was brilliant, it would work, and Luz could not agree to it. And yet she already had, in a way, was already swept into the current of his plan. He was the Colorado, raging sculptor. She was not John Wesley Powell but one of his supply barrels, lashed alongside the boat, bobbing.

“Can you see it?” Levi wanted to know.

“Yes,” she said, her voice shadows and shapes.

“Yes?” he said.

“Yes, yes, you’re right, yes!” She flung the words and watched them burst on the wall. Yes went to pieces against the dome, wet and shattersome and dazzling. Yes came from her like a column, a beam of yes prismed in the room, each yes a starburst, a sunbeam fractal tessellation into eternity. Each yes a glowing thunderstorm, cool jewels in the deep pit of the earth radiating with positive energy, and though Luz knew each was empty she stuffed their hollow hulls with straw and positivity and stacked these, and with yes she kept the bombs at bay.

—

Beyond this mortar of impossible promises rose a massive, alien mountain range. Though it was the dune that approached the sheer sawtooth mountains, and though the colonists were accustomed to their nomads’ vertigo, all at the colony felt the sinister peaks bearing down on them. At first no one spoke this unease, doubt being an unconscionable transgression. Though they knew these mountains were destined ultimately to be dwarfed by the dune sea, they knew too that the craggy range was gargantuan compared to the other mountains the colony had rippled over and through. And those had been clay and soft ash, long-dead volcanoes, while these mountains were of a malevolent shining rock, unyielding razors thrust up from the earth recently, it seemed. Some said they were the Sierras, identified this peak or that as Mount Whitney. Others said no, these were a new, unknown range, without names. Jimmer summarized their collective anxiety. “The dune will have no problem taking those,” he said. “But it may take us in the process.”

A symptom of some poison at the colony, was Dallas’s theory, some infiltrating toxin within. Jimmer conceded this could be the case. He wandered the colony with his smudge stick, deposited agates and crystals in strategic locales. Luz craved a whole cache of them beneath the Blue Bird, for she knew her lies had invited the range.

Luz was and was not Baby Dunn. She had been emancipated from that life, no longer used that name, though it was still hers — Levi had seen the state-issued proof of that, embossed with California’s great seal — extinct grizzly beside extinct river, Eureka! overhead. Even if Ig could play the role of Baby Dunn’s baby without exposing her foul providence, without drawing the Nut or the cops or her horrid people to them, Luz — urgently, desperately, painfully — did not want Ig to be Baby Dunn’s baby.

She did not allow herself to ask what Ray would think of her promise and instead her thoughts tramped unfamiliar paths. She found herself longing for Lonnie’s coins, his little pilfered notebook, his abstract and outdated prophesying, even sometimes for the man himself, who though repulsive and a poser would at least have a plan. How happy he would be here among the real holdouts, how giddy he’d go to find Luz in such trouble.

Levi refused even to acknowledge the nearing mountains, but that portentous range was always in the corner of Luz’s peeled eye nights she sat up nodding, nights Levi spent unfurling the fine points of his plan — the old contacts he would tap, the hordes of media that would descend. He lurched from catalyst to catalyst, groping obsessively in the firelight for the perfect way to set it all in motion. If started exactly right, the movement would create its own energy and feed itself perpetually. Like the dune, Luz did not say. It couldn’t come from them, of that Levi was certain. The nation needed to think of the colony as their discovery, its rescue their collective simultaneous atonement and absolution. He kept coming back to a video of the two of them, one they would make. A real mother-daughter moment. Nico apparently had the means for both video and upload, thanks to the Christmas Village haul. A gardening scene, maybe. Or giving Ig a bath.

“You give her lots of baths? She’s used to them?”

“Yeah,” said Luz, though Dallas had been doing it these days.

“That’s perfect, just perfect — you have the water right there, but it’s human, domestic, maternal, intimate. There’s skin and sound. Heaven lighting. Squalor, but resolve. Some Dorothea Lange shit. And Ig likes the water.”

“She loves it.”

“Of course she does! Brilliant.”

Luz bit her thumbnail. “I don’t know, Levi.”

“What don’t you know? It’s perfect.”

“What if I can’t?”

Levi eyed her, suspicious. “You can — you have to. If you don’t, we have nothing,” he said. “No recourse. No strategy. All these people here, all the animals, the entire ecosystem. They will blast it all to glass!”

“What about the primer?” she offered. “What if we sent it out places? If people knew about all those creatures, they’d do something. Designate the dune a protected wilderness area.”

“‘A protected wilderness area’!” He laughed in her face. “Luz, I’ve recited the primer to every agency and advocacy group you can imagine. Every journalist and academic. They call it a fantasy, if they say anything at all. No one in the scientific community hears me anymore.”

Levi grasped her hands in his and squeezed. “You’re all we have. This is why you’re here. You must have realized that.”

Somehow, Luz did.

Levi became distant after she voiced her doubts, though he assured her he was only under tremendous pressure. The string of insurmountable peaks loomed, and scouts returned from fruitless efforts to find a kind pass-through. Worse, they reported its shape to be not a rigid spine but a bowl, so that on one side swooped the dune sea, their talisman and companion, and on the other loomed the crescent upthrust range, the livable scrub between them ever diminishing.

The colony buzzed with distress, yet Levi declined to soothe them. He was quiet at bonfire, except to invite them to look up at the stars, to remind themselves of their infinite insignificance and the undeniable omnipotence therein. He seemed not to notice the ripple bringing them nearer the stony grip of that impossible range. One night, instead of speaking, he pulled Luz aside and asked her to meet him later at the Holiday Rambler.

When Luz stepped into the Rambler, the girls offered their cordial, laconic greeting. Levi came in behind her, sending them abuzz. Luz had never seen Levi visit the Rambler, had never seen the girls in this sudden choreography. Someone brought out a platter of brute roots, the largest Luz had ever seen. Levi fed them all, saving Luz for last. He selected a pretty girl called Aza and another, Cass. When they escorted him back, Levi said, “You too, Luz.” And Luz went back with them.

She was nervous, a little afraid. She had never seen the back room of the Rambler. It was cleaner than any place she’d seen in a long time. Levi dropped his shroud to the floor and told Luz to do the same. They stood naked, facing each other, and the girls began.

They started at their heads, wiping the dune from Luz’s and Levi’s brows with wet cloths. The girls circled their eyes, then ears, and scrubbed gently their limp mouths. Luz knew somehow that she was not to take her eyes from Levi and that she was not to speak. The girls went nymphs, quick and diaphanous in her periphery, wiping collarbones and shoulders, backs and chests. They held Luz’s breasts from behind and stroked them in circles. Luz reached for Levi then, but one of the girls pushed her hand away. Levi smirked.

Aza wiped Luz’s feet, lifting one gently and wiping it, rubbing roughly between her toes and buffing her calluses, then lifting the other. A moist rag went up her thigh, and a little warped cry escaped her. “Relax,” whispered Cass, wedging another skewer of root between Luz’s clenched teeth. “You’ll love it.”

When Luz was clean, they laid her on the bed. She looked to Levi but instead of joining her, he watched, amused, as the girls undressed. Aza was a languid creature, a gift. Cass had the hips and tits Luz had always wanted for herself.

Soon, wet clefts found Luz’s hands and worked against them. Then Levi took Cass by the hand. She smiled. They were sharing something, perhaps. Levi turned Cass, bent her at the waist, and Luz watched the twin hills of Cass’s haunches rise between them. Her chin was propped on Luz’s knee now and Luz might have liked to reach down and stroke her hair, but Aza had bent over and urged one soft breast into Luz’s mouth.

Levi took two handfuls of Cass. He whispered something and Cass heeded, kissing and licking Luz’s clit. It was something Levi never did, and Luz understood this as a gesture of reconciliation, perhaps forgiveness for her misgivings. Aza moved aside and combed her fingers through Luz’s knotty hair. Cass lapped at Luz as if she were a sweet. Luz lay her head back and closed her eyes.

“No,” Levi said. “Watch.”

Luz opened her eyes.

He spread Cass and pressed himself inside her. She moaned into Luz.

He seemed to be saying, Watch her, Luz. See what loyalty is.

Levi rocked into Cass, pressing Cass’s face hard into Luz. Luz felt the sharp jam of Cass’s broad jaw against herself and winced.

“Shh,” Aza said. But Levi thrust Cass into Luz again and Luz cried out.

He shared a look with Aza and the girl climbed atop Luz’s chest. Aza’s black bush was rough against Luz’s stomach, then breasts, and though Aza was petite, Luz had to pull hard for air. She looked up at Aza overhead and wanted to be up there, with the air. The girl walked her knees up to Luz’s shoulders and pinned them to the bed. She lowered herself. A tangy scent, the taste milder. Luz kept her eyes open, saw only the slope of the girl’s belly above her. Luz attempted to lick upward — she was not sure what she was doing — but the girl ground down on her, pressing herself to Luz’s jaw and torquing there. Someone laughed. Luz felt Levi through the force of Cass pressed against her own pubis, and in the heaving of the bed. He was everywhere; it was becoming difficult to breathe. She tried to open her mouth for air but Aza ground down hard. Luz wanted to breathe; even more, she wanted to see Levi, to see him pleased with her yielding and acquiescence. But she saw herself as he saw her now — a torso squirming beneath Cass’s loyal industry, tiny breasts atop ribs asking for air, two bony legs thrashing now on either side of a better girl. She was embarrassed. She was embarrassed and she was suffocating. I can’t breathe, she called out, though no sound was made. She wondered how many such calls for help were up inside each of the girls.

Levi had each in different ways. He showed Luz what they did right, showed her how unguarded they were, showed her what it meant to be truly selfless. This went on for a long time. The girls were very young, Luz thought, and very pretty.

After, the girls rose, wordless and synchronized. Professional. Luz hated them, but did not want them to go. Levi lay across the foot of the bed, glistening. He did not touch her — had not touched her once the entire time.

“I’m sorry—” she began, but he quieted her, gestured for her to lie at the other end of the bed. When he did reach for her, she flinched. He took her ankle and laid her leg across his wet chest. He rubbed his palm against the tender arch of her bare foot. “You’re a good girl, Luz,” he said finally. “But you’re not being honest with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re blocked. You don’t listen.”

“I do listen,” she said.

“You couldn’t hear anything we were saying today. Even the girls couldn’t open you up. You are completely closed off.”

She tried to laugh. “What are you talking about?”

“I used to be able to open you with my eyes. But you’re gone now. Something major is blocking you.”

She smiled and tried to pull her foot away, but he held it.

“I won’t be lied to,” he said.

She wished she weren’t naked. Wished for her shroud, her sling, her Ig, but each seemed equally and impossibly far. She wished for Ray, briefly, the easy lank of him sauntering into her mind, then she pushed him out.

Levi dug his palm into her arch. “Tell me about the baby,” he said.

She tried to expel Ig from her mind but in came her mustard beads of poop, and rocks, rocks, rocks and, Please can I have some water?

“What?” she managed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Tell me,” he said, tightening his grip on her ankle.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

“I’m not hurting you,” he spat. “You’re hurting me. Do you know what it’s like to know the person you love is keeping something from you?” He squeezed her ankle and began to cry.

“There’s nothing,” said Luz, “I swear.” But the Nut was pacing in her brain.

Levi began to scream. “Tell me, Luz! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! I need you. I need your voice.” He yanked her ankle to make her kick him in the face. “Goddamn it, Luz! I love you and you’re fucking killing me!”

“Stop!” she yelled. “Please!”

But he struck himself with her again and again. She tried to pull her leg back but he wrenched it and pain burst in her knee. She stopped resisting and he hit himself with her foot in the cheek, the jaw, the ears. She helped. She bashed her calloused heel into his raw ear, his nose and eye socket. He seemed delighted by this, manic and aroused.

“I’ll tell you,” she said finally, out of breath. “I’ll tell you everything.”

—

Luz calmed Levi, smoothed his hair, held his wet, blood-glutted face to her. They shared a nub of root and held each other. “Get out,” he called down the hall, and the girls did. “Take your time,” he told Luz.

She began: “We took her.”

Everything unfurled from there: gopher, raindance and daddy-o. Nut, Lonnie and Rita. Yuccas and Ray. When she was done, Levi thanked her with his body, finally. “I heard you,” she said afterward, and he said, “I know you did.”

—

By the time Luz and Levi emerged, the Rambler stood alone at the dune’s edge. The colony had rippled away without them and the group had gathered near the Rambler, waiting.

Now, with the colony gathered around, Levi stepped down from the Rambler and turned to take Luz’s hand. He had never reached for her in front of the others before. She could have floated down the two iron steps, so unburdened was she by what they’d shared, so airy with affection, but instead she took his hand.

When Luz reached the bottommost step, Levi lifted her by the waist and she wrapped her legs around him. They kissed like newlyweds, long and with their eyes closed. Slowly, the others turned to something at their backs.

Luz was euphoric, repaired, blissfully oblivious to their movement and to the movement high on the white slope of the Amargosa. She and Levi went on kissing. Whispers rippled through the colony: See there, a clot of blue, growing, descending, marching. It approached, and the crowd was silent. Luz opened her eyes, still grasping Levi with her entire body, and there, in the space of the opened crowd, wearing a brittle blue tarp around his shoulders, the starlet’s birkin, and a giant Stetson, stood Ray, her Ray.